When the World Was Steady Read Free Page B

around her and weep with that woman, these tough Australian labouring mothers and bright-eyed, primly English Emmy.
    During this trip, Emmy felt more blessed and good than she had imagined possible: her luck was at a pinnacle, she was needed and envied and loved. She clung to the memory always, and disregarded the fact that, back in Sydney and hurled into a whirlwindof social and wifely obligation, she had somehow neglected the lists of books, of luxuries, then lost them, then forgotten them altogether. When she did recall this, with a quickly stifled pang of shame, she would remind herself that she had been young.
    But that was just the first forgetting, and it seemed, somehow, when much later all the perfect luck had soured, that it had been only the first step in a mammoth self-deception. Thinking that her life was in her hands, Emmy had ordered her days with lunches and receptions and had eventually borne a child. She had launched a career writing about restaurants and society, gleeful impetuous pieces about places that delighted her, published in the papers and magazines of her husband’s family.
    ‘Be like me,’ she would tell Portia as her daughter grew older. ‘Be sure your life is your own, your happiness in your control.’
    And then, a year and a half ago, things started happening to her, pulling the pins out of her life, revealing … what? That she had been blind and a fool all along. William, whom she had barely considered a factor, more a presence, a part of herself that was at times irritating but was, above all, a part of herself, left her. He left her for her friend Dora, the wife of his friend Andrew. At Emmy’s outcry over the selfishness of two divorces (not one but
two
families ruined!) William replied, calmly, almost generously, as if explaining to an uncomprehending child, that he was merely taking control of his own life.
    Six months ago, Portia had informed Emmy that she was dropping out of university to study sculpture at art college. She had, at the same time, changed her Christian name to ‘Pod’, so that she truly was no longer the daughter whom Emmy had nurtured and created. And this mysterious Pod, who still hung clothes and ate food and slept in Emmy’s house, had recently brought home Pietro, a fellow sculptor, the son of an Italian labourer from the far western suburbs of the city, from the rows of little bungalows that stretched for ugly multicoloured miles andlooked, not very much but oh-so-slightly, like the drab terraced houses of south London that Emmy had so triumphantly abandoned many years before.
    Emmy was forced to concede that things did just happen. But still, she insisted to herself and to her one dear, remaining friend Janet, that if things did indeed just happen, it was only because you let them.
    She took on the full weight of responsibility for the changes in her life. She felt that perhaps the very adaptability she had considered a virtue had brought about her downfall. Shedding selves like skins, she had also shed their emotions—or rather, her own. This mutability had led to a loss of herself and, Emmy had to conclude, to a loss of her luck. And it had been so easy—until she was called upon to play ‘divorcee’. Divorcee wasn’t in her repertoire. It was not, to her mind, a lucky opportunity. Not an opportunity at all.
    She found the burden of her failure so great that she was suddenly, and for the first time in her almost fifty years, incapable of making any decisions at all, of taking any action. What if she were deceiving herself? Playing into the hands of the enemy? She had been so blind, William and Dora’s affair had gone on for years. She couldn’t see their old friends, she was a laughing-stock. She remembered that she was English, he Australian, their friends somehow thereby his. As for her work, she could not write for his magazines, it was too great a blow to her pride; she could not write for the opposition, it would be too public a