Also by Michelle de Kretser
The Rose GrowerThe Hamilton CaseThe Lost DogQuestions of Travel
Published by Catapult
Copyright © 2014 by Michelle de Kretser
All rights reserved
First published in Australia and the UK by Allen & Unwin
Illustrations by Oliver Winward
ISBN: 978-1-936787-44-9
Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by
Publishers Group West, a division of Perseus Book Group
Phone: 800-788-3123
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015951164
Printed in the United States of America
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To Sara White
THAT SPRING, FRANCES walked along the river every morning with her dog, Rod. One of the things that had been said in Melbourne when she announced that she was moving to Sydney was, You’ll miss the parks. Other things included: There are no good bookshops there. And, What will you do for food?
Rod and Frances would cross the Wardell Road bridge and veer off onto the path that took them past the river through sports fields and parks. There were joggers and cyclists, and a girl skipping near the public barbecues. Faces grew familiar. A woman with weights attached to her wrists would say good morning, as did the Greek tailor who kept a poster of the hammer and sickle in his shop in Dulwich Hill. Frances kept an eye out for other dogs. If she saw one approaching, she swerved off the path because of Rod.
She would have said that she was heading east, but sometimes found the sun skulking behind her left shoulder. Her sense of direction, molded to Melbourne’s grid, functioned by the straight line and the square. In Sydney the streets ran everywhere like something spilled. The river curved, and the sun dodged about. On a stretch of the path where there were no trees, the sun bounced off the water to punch under the brim of Frances’s hat. It was a relief to arrive at the apartment block that could be seen on the escarpment, rising behind trees. Charlie’s colleague Joseph lived there. He had a long terrace for the view and a tucked-away second balcony no larger than an armchair: shady all through summer, in winter it floated in light. Every day, whatever the weather, Joseph sat there for ten minutes, wind-bathing without his shirt.
His apartment block, sixties brown brick with a sand-colored trim, signaled the start of Frances’s favorite section of the walk. It was shaded by she oaks, and she could look into the gardens that ran down to the path. She was still getting used to the explosive Sydney spring. It produced hip-high azaleas with blooms as big as fists. Like the shifty sun, these distortions of scale disturbed. Frances stared into a green-centered white flower, thinking, I’m not young anymore. How had that happened? She was twenty-eight.
For as long as she could remember, the weekend supplements of newspapers had informed her that her generation was narcissistic, spoiled, hyperconscious of brands. It was like reading about a different species. She was a solitary, studious girl, whose life had taken place in books; at least four years of it had passed in the eighteenth century. Her young parents had always treated her, their only child, as if she were more or less grown up. Her mother was French. Frances was taken to restaurants at an early age, expected to sit quietly and eat her food in a mannerly way while adults talked over her head. As a teenager, she devised a game in which she identified the sentence this or that person was least likely to utter. Her mother’s was: I’m not interested in what you think, tell me what you feel.
The previous year, at a party to which Frances almost didn’t go, she had met Charlie. His mother, too, was French. Charlie and Frances discovered that as children they had both called a fart a prout. Frances told her friends that Charlie had been unlucky in his women. After his parents divorced, his mother, a drunk, had gone home to live in a tower block in Nice. When her son visited her, she stole from his wallet and made him massage her feet. Now she was dead. That meant Charlie was free of her, Frances believed.
THE HOUSES BESIDE the path faced away from the river. Back gardens, lying open to the eye, hinted at private lives. At that hour of the morning, curtains were shut and decks deserted, but the aura of revelation remained. Flowers yawned, bronze-leaved cannas, lilies striped cream and red. Nasturtiums swarmed over palings. A heavy-headed datura flaunted pale orange trumpets that darkened at the rim. In September a tall, spreading tree was hung with clustered pink. A man taking a photo of it with his phone said the tree was a Queensland hardwood. Frances would have liked to photograph it too, but she didn’t linger here, not even when passing the ramshackle house with a flight of stone steps that reminded her of holidays in provincial France.
On this stretch of the path, hemmed in by fences and water, the difficulty was Rod. A hefty, muscled bruiser from the RSPCA, he was frightened of other dogs. Toy poodles were particularly unnerving. Coming upon a pair of them one morning, Rod tried to make a dash for the brown sludge under the mangroves. Surprised and heartened, the poodles seized the day. Telling Charlie about it, Frances said, “Wouldn’t you be frightened if tiny, angry people rushed at you shouting?” But at the time, with Rod wrenching Frances’s arm and the she-oak needles slippery underfoot, no one was amused. The poodles’ owner marched them on, saying, “Come along, boys, not everyone’s friendly.” Rod hung his head, screwed his paws into the ground, and wouldn’t budge. In the end, Frances had to pick him up and stagger past the malevolent spot recently occupied by poodle. Frances did Body Pump at the gym, but Rod weighed sixty-six pounds. In the shower, she saw red welts across her stomach where he had clawed her in fear.
The poodles had never returned. But sometimes there would be a dog in a garden—like the white bull terrier alert behind a fence. Rod’s tail drooped, and his ears. Picking up her pace, Frances saw a woman in the shadowy depths of the garden. She wore a wide hat and a trailing pink dress; a white hand emerged from her sleeve. There came upon Frances a sensation that sometimes overtook her when she was looking at a painting: space was foreshortened, time stilled.
For the rest of that week, Frances kept an eye out for the bull terrier. A white stripe: danger, the surf that marks a hidden reef. But where had she seen him? Not at the French house, not at the one with the spreading tree. Had there been oleanders near the fence or a clump of banana palms? She remembered dense plantings, green gloom. The fence wasn’t solid—Frances and the bull terrier had inspected each other through it—but plenty of gardens ended in railings or mesh.
Frances had pretty much forgotten the bull terrier when she saw him again. He was sniffing around a tree, but lifted his head as she passed. A few days later, Rod began to whimper—the bull terrier was at his fence. Some distance behind him, the woman in the old-fashioned dress stood beside a flowering shrub. She was a sidelong glimpse through sunglasses and a coarse veil of latticework, there and gone again at once.
These partial visions, half-encounters, were repeated at intervals over weeks. One day, striding past the woman and her dog, Frances realized that whenever she saw those two she was the only person on the path. The morning swayed, as duplicitous as déjà vu. When a cyclist appeared around a bend, Frances considered hailing him—but what would she say? “Can you see a woman in that garden?” She heard him answer, “There’s no one there.”
FRANCES AND CHARLIE had left Melbourne so that Frances could take up a research fellowship at a university in Sydney. She was