Theory & Practice

My mind kept returning to Leo’s, and I’d be sitting opposite Olivia, watching her stir her tea. I wondered if Kit knew that we’d seen each other. I didn’t tell him, because mentioning her felt awkward. Late one Sunday he arrived at my flat, smelling of mud and cold air. He’d come straight to me from a weekend spent with his folk in the country, he said. ‘All I could think about, the whole weekend, was studying with you.’

Watching him get dressed the next morning, I silently practised, Does Olivia know about us? Finally I said it. It came out overloud.

Kit went on tying his shoelace. ‘We have a deconstructed relationship,’ he said.

The calculated way he said ‘deconstructed’ amused me—he was producing the price of admission to the palace of cool. I remembered him saying ‘bohemian’ with the same self-conscious air. Once he’d breezily claimed that he’d had the marks to get into medicine at Melbourne Uni but ‘it didn’t appeal’. He hadn’t explained why he wound up doing engineering at RMIT, but he was prickly about it. The Arts crowd he hung out with looked on engineering students as the antithesis of cool. As for RMIT, it wasn’t Melbourne Uni and that was that.

‘Does that mean Olivia has another lover, too?’ I asked, suppressing a smile.

‘There’s no need to bring her into this.’ Moments passed. He said, ‘I love her.’ He sounded angry and startled, as if unwelcome news had caught him off guard.

His declaration infuriated me. Olivia was welcome to his deconstructed love! I was a modern woman, perfectly content with his body’s undeconstructed need of mine. Each time we met confirmed that need. He said, ‘When we’re studying, the pieces of my life slot into place.’ He said that seeing me on Lenny’s balcony, the first time we’d met, he’d had to turn away to hide his erection. ‘I wanted to grab your arm and tell you, “What do these people matter? Why are we still here?”’

*

We didn’t have meals—proper meals—together. If we felt hungry, we ate Vegemite toast. Sometimes Kit had an apple. Apples were his favourite fruit, so although I didn’t like them, I’d started buying a couple for him each week.

He turned up early one evening with a big foil-covered dish. He’d made lasagne. ‘My speciality. Lenny’s mum’s, actually. She showed us both how, and we had to take turns cooking it until we got it right.’

The lasagne went into the oven, and we ate it with what formality we could muster. I’d put jars in the fireplace and set a lighted candle in each one, and we had squares of kitchen towel for serviettes. At one point, as we talked, Kit mentioned that his bike had skidded on tram tracks, and he’d been lucky not to come off. I said that I’d always wanted to ride a bike. When I was small, our neighbour had a bike accident that left him with a permanent limp, so my mother hadn’t let me learn. ‘Who is always to blame?’ I ended dramatically, and answered myself: ‘Mother!’

Kit offered to teach me to ride. He said, ‘I’ll bring my bike, and we’ll go up to the park.’ The strangeness of that picture, the two of us side by side in the open, bright world, strolling through autumn, struck us at the same moment. Softened by wine, we began to laugh. Our hours together were inseparable from lamplight, from crusts on a plate beside my futon, from the dusty smell of the blow heater. I put the leftover lasagne in the fridge and the dish to soak in the sink. On the radio, a woman sang, ‘You and me, you and me, you and me, baby . . .’

In the morning I tried to return Kit’s dish, but he insisted on giving it to me. He said he only made lasagne when he was procrastinating, which he couldn’t afford to do. ‘It’s a nice dish, isn’t it,’ he went on. ‘It goes with your plates.’ The plates were willow-patterned china from the Sacred Heart charity shop, and I was touched that he’d noticed them. It was indeed a nice dish, white enamel with a dark blue rim.

*

The rumours that had been circulating of a major nuclear accident in the Soviet Union were confirmed that day. I was about to run out of clean knickers, so I went to the laundromat. The phone was ringing when I got back. My mother wanted to know if Australia was safe from the fallout. ‘Of course,’ I said, thinking, Who knows? She asked if Sydney was more at risk than Melbourne, given that it was further north. What she was telling me was that I’d abandoned her to nuclear contamination when I moved south. I passed on advice I’d heard on the radio: stick with root vegetables for a while and avoid leafy greens. Obviously she would carry on eating as she pleased, because who is the woman who does as her mother advises? We’d rather be independent and dead.

I realised how absurd it would be for Kit and me to die alone when all that separated us was a few suburban blocks. For the first time I dialled his number. Almost at once, I regretted my impulse. As I was hanging up, I thought he answered. But the connection was broken, and it felt silly to call back.

*

The May holidays began. Kit told me he’d be going to Western Australia for a week. He asked if I was going     anywhere, and I said, ‘To the library.’ But I didn’t leave my flat. I’d get up in the morning, make coffee and porridge, refill my hot water bottle, and return to bed. I sat up against my pillows wrapped in a huge, pilled woollen shawl, and began reading Virginia Woolf’s diary for the first time, stopping to shove my hands under the covers when they grew too cold to hold the book.

I had a five-volume paperback edition of the diary. The cover of each volume showed various personal items laid out on Woolf ’s desk. Now and then I’d interrupt my reading to gaze at them. Notebooks lying open provided glimpses of her handwriting. It occurred to me that those notebooks were probably the very diaries I was reading, and the realisation was thrilling. Woolf ’s spectacles were part of the array—the roundness of their lenses was especially touching. There was also a necklace made of shining, greeny-blue shells that looked as if they might have come from the Pacific. These intimate objects that Woolf had handled so often made a vibration in time, bringing her close.

I skipped the first two volumes of the diary because they weren’t relevant to the novels I was writing about. Rather than reading the later volumes cover to cover, I used the index to locate entries pertinent to my work. I filled cards with useful notes. When I’d finished with Volume Five, I intended to read the whole diary through systematically, and so, one afternoon, having made myself a plate of Marie biscuits slathered with butter and Vegemite, I picked up Volume One.

I got to October 1917.

The air felt different after that.