old photos

‘You can’t go back and change the beginning,

but you can start where you are and change the ending.’

C.S. Lewis

One night last week, after friends had to cancel dinner, I sat at the kitchen table, reveling in not having to cook. When that feeling passed, I brought up the photos on my computer, to create a file for a project I’m working on. For some reason, my photo library opened at our house renovations twelve years ago. The images before me showed no signs of age; bar the fact of the intervening years, they could have been taken yesterday.

A number of photos were of the side garden, which I’m currently corralling into some kind of order. In the 2010 photos, the garden beds looked virginal, covered in an even layer of compost. There was no sign of the tangle of salvias, ivy, rabbits ears, weeds, maiden hair, westringias and hellebores that lately I’ve been doing battle with. Even the façade of the house looked pristine, as if just painted – which it hadn’t been. How, I wondered, can the camera do that?

Forgetting my project, I fell into a search for something that had disappeared from my life yet was present, in hallucinatory form, on the screen in front of me. I was searching for a promise that I seemed to have mislaid, so taken up have I been with making it from one day to the next.

These old photos were innocent of my projections on to them. Like the younger version of me, captured in some of them, they had no inkling of what lay in store. There were photographs of the back courtyard, with my son pulling his hair out as he swotted for exams, watched over by our rescue dog who, despite her beautiful soul, would later be put down by the vet for biting a stranger. There were photos of my ex-husband, smiling at the camera, caught on his well-worn path from his writing hut at the bottom of the garden to the back door, his laptop tucked under an arm. There was a photo of my daughter testing out a new sailing jacket in a burst of summer rain. And there were photos of me, an unwrinkled smiling woman, snapped by one of my kids, wearing clothes that are no longer part of my wardrobe.

These, I realised with a silent gasp, were pictures of my family life working; in a way, they were proof of it. There was a shot of James helping my daughter carry her first boat from the back garden to the street, following minor repairs. Another of my son gluing together his umpteenth model plane, head bowed, on the outside table. There were numerous shots of James kicking a ball to our old soccer-mad dog. And there were many more of renovated rooms, taken by me in just the right light.

When I looked up from the laptop, the light was fading and I was hungry for the dinner that I hadn’t cooked. I glanced out the window at the side garden, at the survival-of-the-fittest bean fest that had once been thoughtfully planned, and felt a small body blow; even though I knew that the even layer of compost that I’d caught on camera, a decade ago, was only centimetres thick, and that beneath the chocolatey veneer was rocky earth no weekend gardener could enjoy digging into, and that there was some credit in my willingness to work with rather than against the soil I’d been given.

I flipped shut my laptop, sensing that, even more than food, I needed perspective. Only when I was halfway along our local beach did it come to me why looking at the old photos had felt so jarring. My life, the one that I’d lived in my head and my heart, was missing from the images I’d been lost in. There had been no setting on the camera for my feelings, only for how things looked; which meant that half of my experience of those early years simply wasn’t there. The photos had the clarity they did precisely because they lacked the messy richness of the life that I’d actually lived.  

I threw a treat on the sand for my dog and swallowed tears for the life that these photos had dropped me back into. It seemed unacceptable to me – a kind of existential error – that this life was gone for good. It was also galling to be vividly reminded that the demands of the house and garden that I’d lived in all this time had always been greater than my capacity to meet them.

Still, there was something about these old photos that didn’t add up. There was an innocence about them that had never been part of my experience. Because even as I’d stood wondering how to fill those virgin garden beds, I was also rushing to hang up the washing and reminding myself to pick up dog food on the way to school pickup. I never stood by, coolly calculating how I might bring out the best in the beds; instead, I’d asked myself what I could get away with planting that wouldn’t involve employing a gardener or installing a watering system.

Even so, the old photos did capture something that, in the maelstrom of my kids’ teenage years, and the so-incremental-I-didn’t-notice-it unraveling of my marriage, I’d lost touch with. What these photos conveyed, with silent dignity, was the beauty of the house that we’d taken on and the honesty of our efforts to live up to it. This beauty, this effort, was something I’m still living with, still living up to. ‘We shape our buildings’, Winston Churchill once said, ‘thereafter they shape us’.

So it has been for me. The house that we took on, bravely and naively, has played a big role in making us the family that we went on to become: the ex-husband who ultimately had to leave in order to find himself; the daughter who lives elsewhere but insists her bedroom stays unchanged; the son who stores boat stuff in the front hall as if it were a garage; the dog who holds us all together emotionally; and me, who oversees everything and who pulls on overalls at the weekend to repaint well-scuffed stairs.

I could be plain sad about the passing of time, and about a phase of family life that has come to an end. And I am; of course I am. But I also realise that when we took on our big old house, I wildly underestimated how much time, energy and imagination it would require from me, and that this demand would clash with heading up a growing family. So that once we’d taken on the house, I would rarely be idle; and I would never have nothing to do.

The two biggest risks that I’ve taken in my life so far have been my marriage and the house I now live in. These gambles have made me into the woman I am. I’m still myself without them; obviously this is true. Even so, there’s a way in which, as my kids grew up and away and, simultaneously, James uncoupled from me – driven by internal pressures I was too busy to grasp – our big old house, like the dog that trots by my side, became part of my own fabric. Without anything being said, what for so long was our house, our dog, became my house, my dog. Surely, I thought to myself, as the dog jumped into the back of the car and I wiped sand from my feet, there’s some magic in that.

what do I really like?

Before I started my on-line design course, bed sheets were just sheets. But then, encouraged by the course, I joined Instagram and, quick smart, my feed filled with images of bedlinen. These linens weren’t just sheets. They were a feature, a statement, even a playlist.

Occasionally, during my latter years in London, when I wasn’t wasting time flicking through the Boden clothing catalogue – and wondering why none of their models were over the age of 25, I was studying the The White Company brochure, waiting for the yearly sale which made their high-end bedlinen temporarily affordable. Even then, I didn’t buy real linen sheets, but white cotton ones. On moving to Melbourne, I switched my loyalty to IKEA, whose cotton/linen blends saw me through the next fifteen years of family life. My kids had coloured duvet covers on their beds, but otherwise our laundry consisted of whites and neutrals.

Within weeks of starting my design course, I lost my innocence in relation to bedlinen. Why choose white sheets, we were schooled to think, when they’re hard to keep bright without resorting to bleach? More importantly, why choose boring old white sheets when niche companies offered an explosion of coloured linens?

Recently, I invited friends to stay. When they accepted, I promptly bought a double bed from Marketplace. That same week, I fell down the bedlinen burrow on the Internet. Within half an hour, a simple search for ‘linen sheets on sale’ found me in an existential morass – not helped by the fact that I hit the search button when I should have been cleaning up the kitchen before bed. There is, I discovered, no such thing as cheap linen sheets. Linen flax – like cashmere and truffles – is expensive to produce. It lasts longer – some say a lifetime – than do cashmere and truffles. However, unless they’ve fallen off the back of a truck, linen sheets just do cost.

‘Wait a minute’, I said to myself, rubbing my eyes and looking up from the computer screen. ‘Do I even want linen sheets?’ Realising that my search had left me feeling seasick, I gave it up and went to bed. After scrolling through pictures of countless beds, made up by ‘bed stylists’ and shot by accomplished photographers in just the right light, I’d started to feel anorexic about bedlinen. Never again, I thought, as I poured myself into bed, would I try to buy sheets on-line.

Last Sunday, after visiting the farmer’s market, I tied up my dog to a pole next to the bookshop and entered the homewares store next door. Inside, I made a beeline for a table of half-price bedlinens, and flicked through white, pink and grey sheets. Within ten minutes, I left the shop with a packet of white linen sheets under my arm. Even as I greeted my dog, I knew that my purchase had been driven by impulse. Still, I asked myself, what was wrong with that?

Half an hour later, in the grip of second thoughts about buying white sheets when coloured sheets might have been a more interesting option, I returned to the shop. First I stared at the grey sheets, wanting myself to like them. However, the inmate-grey shade did nothing for me. What about the baby pink ones? ‘We’re closing in five minutes’, called the manager from the till. I knew that pink sheets weren’t the best possible choice. Even so, they were half price, they were lovely and they were different. In that moment I felt a rush of confidence that I could make them work. With a short breath in, I picked up the pink sheets and exchanged them for my white ones at the till. On arriving home, I pulled the linen sheets from their turtle-strangling plastic and put them straight into the washing machine, wanting to make my purchase irreversible.

Later that day, before going inside after turning off a sprinkler, I visited the pink sheets that I’d pegged to the line. Perhaps because I’d never seen coloured sheets on my line before, they looked pink as pink, to the point of clashing with the garden behind. But, I reassured myself, the fabric was still wet; so perhaps it was hard to tell. Next morning, the sheets looked no less pink. In themselves, they were lovely. The quality of the linen was clear. They were the kind of sheets that you could tie together and climb down from a top-floor window during a house fire on. Still, no matter the quality of the linen, the sheets were too pink. I didn’t want to have to style a whole room around pink sheets. ‘Damn it’, I said to my dog, who looked at me unperturbed. I just wasn’t a pink sheets person. I’d fantasied that I might be, that I could be. But I wasn’t.

Standing at the clothes line, it struck me that I’d spent my whole life caring about the kind of things that, in the grand scheme, don’t really matter. And there was every chance that – short of a labotomy – I would spend the rest of my life caring about things like the colour and quality of bedlinen. I looked back at the dog and laughed, feeling sick in the pit of my stomach. Just as I’d painted my ex-husband’s study three different colours before working out the right colour for the room, I’d made another expensive error in relation to what I really liked. Instead of listening to my inner voice, I’d overriden it in a quest to reinvent myself and to be modern. To be pink.

As I looked at the sheets billowing on the line, I knew that I wasn’t interested in things being different for their own sake. Besides, if I really did like coloured sheets, I’d have worked that out by now. I was too far into my life to change my preference from neutrals to pastels. My son, who’d raised his eyebrows in surprise when I’d mentioned buying pink sheets, had been right. Damn it!

What to do? Pretend I like pink sheets? Sell the sheets on Marketplace? Dye them? Or push them to the back of the cupboard and regret at leisure?

After my next yoga class, I searched ‘textile dyes’ on my phone. I wanted to know if the process of home dyeing had improved since I last failed to dye something in my washing machine. Half an hour later, I stood with my back to the sewing patterns in a vast homes store, staring at a rack of dye colours. Trying not to think too hard, I picked up a washing-machine pod of ‘flint grey’ dye and took it to the till. Two hot washes later, my pink linen sheets were back on the line. They weren’t perfectly dyed; there were spots where the dye was a bit darker. But they definitely weren’t pink, and nor were they inmate grey.

When I returned to the clothes line at dusk, I did a double take. Now that the sheets were dry, they’d turned a beautiful flint grey that I loved all the more because of everything that had gone into creating them. Phew.

the way things were

Last week a neighbour sent through a text, offering to buy my house. For ten minutes, as I cleaned up the kitchen, I contemplated selling it to him. Then I declined the offer, explaining that I felt I hadn’t finished my life in the house.

My ex-husband, who gets a share of the house price if I sell, would probably like it if I sold sooner rather than later. My kids’ path into a crucifying property market would definitely be eased if I sold. But I promised myself to make no big decisions for a year after James left, so it felt simple to decline. So simple that I felt unsettled for days after.

Last weekend, catching myself ruminate at the end of a paint-roller, I called an older friend who recently returned to live interstate. I knew that I needed to talk to someone like Kate. Not about the house offer, which was still on my mind, but about the arrival of another friend who’d just flown in from Europe to work for six months.

‘Have you a minute to talk?’ I asked Kate. ‘Yes’, she said, ‘fire away’. ‘Well’, I said, ‘it’s about Clara’. Clara, I explained to Kate, is a German friend who went to university in the UK with James. Clara is Catholic, a lawyer and mother to a little girl. She’s also godmother to our son. Then I described to Kate how, before Clara left Hobart, 18 months ago, she and I stole a day away from normal life and spent it on Bruny Island. Sitting on a beach, as waves rolled in, Clara schooled me in a sisterly way to do everything that I could to mend my marriage which, I’d just confessed to her, was showing signs of wear. Apart from the emotional pain of separation, which went without saying, Clara warned me of the financial stresses that had befallen all of her separated friends. If James and I broke up, she said plainly, I’d never be compensated for everything that I’d put into family life, and would have less money when I was old. Sitting on the beach, I felt shocked that Clara had taken the strain in my marriage a big step further than I, even in quiet moments, had taken myself. I got up off the sand, brushed myself off, and assured Clara that things were, even if not rosy between James and me, basically fine, and that I was confident that we were in our marriage for the long haul.

Clara, I explained to Kate, was a dear friend. But now I was worried about seeing her because I knew that she felt let down by my separation from James. And there was something else that was upsetting me. I was, I said to Kate, beginning to feel like I was moving on, finding a way forward. And I didn’t want to be dragged back into swirling eddies, to face down questions that I couldn’t answer.

‘Just tell Clara that you’re feeling vulnerable’, advised Kate, ‘and leave it at that’.

‘Yes’, I said, ‘that sounds right. Thank you.’ Then, curious, I asked Kate another question. ‘How long did it take you to get over the end of your first marriage?’

‘A couple of years’, she said. Then she paused. ‘Perhaps a lifetime’.

‘Oh God’, I said, ‘I hope you’re wrong about that’.

It’s not my experience that grief comes in stages. What I do know is that I can be ambling along, writing in the morning and renovating in the afternoon, teaching a bit of yoga, doing good things in the garden and inviting friends round for dinner, when ‘Boom’ – I hit something hard that sends me reeling. And all at once, any strides that I’ve made seem at risk of being swallowed up by the arrival of an old friend who I know only wants the best for me.

Earlier this week, when I finally met Clara and her daughter on the beach with my dog – after her husband recovered from Covid and her family was released from quarantine – she kept the conversation light. Right up until Annie, Clara’s daughter, handed back my dog’s lead at the top of the beach steps, I thought that I’d gotten away with it. During our walk up and down the beach, there had been no glitchy moments between Clara and me, no muddy pauses. Perhaps a studied glance, but no more.

However, when it came time to say goodbye, there was a lull in our chatter that even Clara couldn’t fill. Previously, we’d have filled this gap with a hug or a chatty farewell. But with Covid hanging in the air, a hug was out. And with the breakup of my marriage, neither of us knew what it would mean to meet ‘en famille’ – roast chicken is her favourite for me to cook – as we’d done so many times in the past.

‘See you soon’, I eventually said to Clara and Annie, as I turned and headed for my car. And as I did, glancing down at my sandy feet, I yanked at my dog who was licking fallen icecream off the pavement.

That night, I had a dream about James. I was walking back up the garden – just as I had earlier in the day, after picking up summer plums before my dog gorged on them – as James walked down to meet me, hugging whatever he’d come back to the house for, books perhaps, against his chest. Neither he nor I spoke in the dream, which was short. There seemed no need for words. I could see in James’ face that he was sorry. It wasn’t, ‘I’m so sorry and I want to come back’ that I read in his eyes. It was closer to tenderness than love – even if I know, and I’m not sure that I do, what love is right now.

Waking from the dream, I lay in bed until it was time to get up. I knew that I didn’t want James to come back if he didn’t love me. That made no sense. But it did make sense that I might want my old life back, and that I might want the lack of awkwardness that went with being in a ‘till death to us part’ marriage. Except, of course, I couldn’t have back something that was gone – neither my marriage nor the life I lived around it. Besides, I’d wanted James to be able to break free of me if that’s what he needed to do. And I definitely didn’t want to wait for death to part us if, in his heart, James had already parted ways.

Lying in bed, listening to cars start to pass under the window, I knew that waking up to the way things were before James left wasn’t the answer. ‘Probably just as well’, I thought, as I got out of bed and pulled up the blinds, ‘that life can’t be wound back’.