It seemed that Sophie had been both greedy and wasteful. Greedy for wanting something more than a perfectly nice, intelligent, good-looking man when she was in her mid-thirties and lived in Sydney, gay capital of the world. Wasteful of a perfectly lovely, expensive, carefully planned marriage proposal.
Of course, she’d got her comeuppance.
Thomas had been ‘snapped up’, just like his mother had cheerfully told Sophie he would be. ‘Don’t worry, Sophie. Some other nice girl will snap him up!’ He got a refund for the Fiji holiday from a sympathetic travel agent–actually an excessively sympathetic travel agent called Deborah, who sensibly accepted his proposal just a few months later (remarkably similar in execution, except the location was Vanuatu and the string band was a string quartet).
Sophie, on the other hand, has been mortifyingly single ever since.
Over the last three years she has been on three first dates, two second dates and no third dates. She’s had a drunken one-night stand after a charity ball, a drunken kiss after a fancy-dress fortieth, and a very weird sober kiss with a fat man in the hallway at a christening. (Who never called! The humiliation!) She has now been celibate for two years and sex has begun to seem as unlikely a possibility as when it was first explained to her in a disturbingly graphic drawing by Ann-Marie Morton when they were in second grade.
In spite of conscientiously accepting every social invitation, going to parties where she knows no one except the host, joining clubs and taking part in sporty, unpleasant activities likely to appeal to available men, she hasn’t even come close to beginning a new relationship. It is laughable to think she’d been worried about being unfaithful to Thomas–just who did she think she’d be unfaithful with?
Last month, terrifyingly, she turned thirty-nine. It seems to make no difference that she still feels exactly the same person as when she was twenty-five, the birthdays just keep right on coming. She is actually going to turn forty–such a dry, grown-up-sounding age–and she’s still going to be Sophie.
Lately, her biological clock, which has never given her much trouble before, has begun to tick with an increasingly feverish ‘Umm, excuse me, don’t you think you’d better hurry up, hurry up, hurry up?’ She has caught herself staring at babies in strollers with the same resentful, lustful look that mid-life-crisis men give teenage girls. When she heard the news about Thomas having a baby, she said, ‘Oh that’s lovely’, and then hours later, in the bath, she burst into tears and said out loud, ‘You idiot.’
But by the next day her natural optimistic state had reasserted itself. She has a great career and a fabulous social life. She is hardly a lonely old spinster with a cat. She is out nearly every night of the week and she doesn’t even like cats. Everything will be fine. He is just around the corner. He will turn up when she least expects him.
In fact, perhaps Thomas wants to see her tonight so he can set her up with a tall, dark, handsome friend? Ha. Funny. At least if she never finds anyone she’ll always be able to laugh at her own hilarious wit while she eats baked beans on toast.
She wonders if Thomas will be smug. Surely even a man as sweet-natured as him would have to feel a bit pleased at the way things have turned out. Well, let him be smug, thinks Sophie as she goes back to typing her lively memo to the Morale Committee. (A fun idea from Fran! ) You tore his heart to shreds. Be generous. Let him be smug.
4
Scribbly Gum Island, 1932
When they said they were sending out a reporter, Connie had imagined someone much older: an intimidating type with jaded seen-it-all-before eyes and those awful dirty yellow-tipped fingers, who would say ‘good bickies, love’ and act impatient and patronising if she took too long answering his questions. She had decided her answers would be brisk, with no unnecessary detail, and that she would probably not offer him a second biscuit.
But there was nothing jaded about Jimmy Thrum. Even his name sounded energetic. He could only have been a couple of years older than her, twenty-one at the most, skinny and long-limbed, with little-boy freckles on his nose and unusual-coloured eyes that grinned and glittered at her from beneath the shade of his battered brown hat.
Yes, Jimmy Thrum thrummed with life.
When she met him at the railway station he bounded up the stairs three at a time to greet her like a big lovable labrador. He chivalrously insisted on taking the oars when they rowed out to the island, even though she doubted that he’d even stepped foot in a boat before. She stopped herself from confiscating the wildly flailing oars or complaining about the sudden splashes of icy-cold river water–he was having far too good a time, gulping deep breaths of air as if it was the first day of a holiday, tipping back his head so the winter sun was on his face. He made her want to giggle helplessly like a child. She had to turn her head and pretend to be fascinated by the flight of a pelican.
Now, Jimmy Thrum the reporter was sitting at the Doughty family’s kitchen table, gulping down his second cup of tea and munching into his third biscuit with a spray of crumbs, which he quickly tried to clean up by licking his finger and dabbing at them.
From the way he was listening to her, it seemed that he wasn’t just interested in her story, he was positively enthralled by it. I hope he’s not making fun of me, thought Connie with sudden suspicion. Shouldn’t a newspaper man be a little less excited?
If he was faking it, he was doing a very good job. A couple of times he’d even slapped his thigh.
She took the opportunity to covertly study him while he bent his head to scribble in his notepad. He had a knobbly neck. Unexpectedly hairy forearms. There were curls springing up one by one from his slicked-down hair. He was writing in a mixture of what Connie assumed were shorthand symbols and words. She could read ‘Scribbly Gum Island’ and her own name, carefully spelled out: ‘Constance (Connie) Doughty. Age: 19’.
‘This is a great story.’ He looked up at her. She still couldn’t work out the colour of his eyes.
‘That’s good,’ said Connie, and thought, Don’t make him think you’re flattered, for heaven’s sake.
It wasn’t surprising that she was feeling a bit, well, to be honest…charmed. It was just a refreshing change to have someone with a bit of verve in the house, what with Dad the way he was, and Rose the way she was becoming. They both had such dazed, doleful expressions on their faces all the time that Connie sometimes seriously considered grabbing them by the scruffs of their necks and banging their heads together. Of course, Dad had very good reasons. As Mum used to sigh, France clearly hadn’t been a walk in the park. Whereas Rose: well, she just needed to bloody well snap out of it. Especially now there was a new baby in the house. A poor, defenceless baby who hadn’t chosen to come into the world at this inconvenient time.
Jimmy finished writing in his notepad, shook his head in wonder and said, ‘So, you say the kettle was actually boiling?’
‘Yes, and the cake was still very warm. It could only have been out of the oven a few minutes.’
‘What sort of cake?’
‘A marble cake.’
‘That’s the one with all different coloured layers, right?’
He looked hungry as he said it. All the biscuits were gone and there was nothing else to give him. Connie wished she could feed him up with a big roast dinner like they used to have when Mum was alive. It would be so satisfying, almost wickedly satisfying, to feed a hungry, appreciative man like that, to keep on dishing out steaming helpings until he pressed one hand to his stomach and protested, ‘No, no, I can’t eat another thing.’ One day, Connie would live in a house with a pantry full of food. It was not right. Skinny (handsome!) boys like Jimmy Thrum shouldn’t be hungry.