The Fog Garden Read online

  Praise for The Fog Garden

  ‘The Fog Garden is a deeply moving, highly original and beautifully written portrait of a writer as a young widow in her fifties. It is a love letter, full of the subtle joy, pain and poetry of enduring marriage. It is a self-conscious, at times painfully honest, exploration of how a woman deals with the erotic side of grief. . . . a brave and brilliant display, stolen from death and grief, which transforms the shreds of everyday life into art.’ Sally Blakeney, The Bulletin

  ‘You don’t expect to be played, even flirted with in a book about loss and grief. . . .What is amazing about this book is its gusto, its libidinous energy, its gluttony for experience no matter how tough or bitter the experience.’ Dorothy Porter

  ‘. . . a rich, dynamic book that constantly delights and surprises. . . . Ultimately, what we call a book – fiction, history, memoir – is less important than what it has to say. This is a brave and honest account of a deeply felt loss, and a beautiful tribute to a marriage which offers nourishment and hope.’ Liam Davison, The Weekend Australian

  ‘The Fog Garden is an elegy for a dead husband – a celebration of a marriage now gone, of solitude, of life re-emerging. Like her previous works, it is a triumph. . . . Full of literary allusions, of provocative, earthy descriptions, mixing reveries and imagined characters (aren’t they all?), the novel seems an exemplar of a kind of writing – Robert Dessaix’s Night Letters comes to mind – that Australians seem especially good at.’ Gillian Fulcher, The Canberra Times

  ‘. . . the book has almost as much in it as a rich life. The novel brims’ Lorien Kaye, Australian Bookseller & Publisher

  ‘courageous and disarmingly honest’ Christopher Bantick, West Australian

  the fog garden

  Other Books by Marion Halligan

  The Golden Dress (1998)

  Collected Short Stories (1997)

  Those Women Who Go to Hotels (with Lucy Frost, 1997)

  Out of the Picture (1996)

  Cockles of the Heart (1996)

  Wishbone (1994)

  The Worry Box (1993)

  Lovers’ Knots (1992)

  Eat My Words (1990)

  Spider Cup (1990)

  The Hanged Man in the Garden (1989)

  The Living Hothouse (1988)

  Self Possession (1987)

  the fog garden

  marion halligan

  a novel

  A SUE HINES BOOK

  ALLEN & UNWIN

  First published in 2001

  This paperback edition published in 2002

  Copyright © Marion Halligan 2001

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  All efforts have been made to source the owners of copyright material which appears in this book. The publishers would be pleased to hear from any other copyright holders.

  A Sue Hines Book, Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest NSW 2065, Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Halligan, Marion.

  The fog garden.

  ISBN 1 86508 769 6

  eISBN 978 1 74269 987 5

  1. Title.

  A823.3

  Text design by Mary Callahan

  Typeset by Pauline Haas

  For Lucy and James

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my friends and family for their love and kindness and comfort. And to my agent Margaret Connolly, for being a friend as well as an agent. My thanks also to the Literature Fund of the Australia Council, the Commonwealth Government’s arts funding and advisory body, whose support over the years has given me time to write, and particularly for the Senior Fellowship which made this book possible.

  Extracts from Dante’s Divine Comedy are from the translation by Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin, 1974); ‘The Unquiet Grave’ is published in the Norton Anthology of Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1983); ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’ is from a collection of Four Indian Love Lyrics by Laurence Hope; the poem discussed on pp. 260–1 is ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Dream’ by A. D. Hope, in Selected Poems (Angus and Robertson, 1992); references to my other books appear on the following pages: Lovers’ Knots pp. 74, 97, 237, Spider Cup pp. 160, 200, 291, Wishbone pp. 98, 160, The Golden Dress pp. 128–9, 208 and ‘Here Be Unicorns’ (Collected Stories) p. 128.

  lapping

  introduction

  the lineaments of gratified desire

  at concerts

  vermilion: a short story

  the sins of the leopard

  old happy times

  the boat

  the moral ground

  the thirsty cat

  not like a loser

  a good death

  referential friends

  a measure of kindness

  the unquiet grave

  life is dangerous

  flights of pigeons

  love potion

  her silken layer

  the weirdo’s kitchen

  a year and a day

  remarrying

  listening to herself living

  her own mistress

  the sons of heaven

  lapping

  LOWER SNUG, TASMANIA

  11.12.98

  For Graham, who died, 18.11.98

  I DO NOT CRACK. I do not crack. Though it could be thought that I might. For instance at the moment when the man nestles his hand in the hollow of his wife’s neck, and leaves it there, comfortable, habitual. Or when she gives him his formal greeting kiss when he comes home at the end of the day, a kiss almost never highly enough prized. Sometimes even regarded with scorn.

  No. I do not crack. These are gestures too small to measure the immensity of loss. Even as emblems. It would be sentimental to collapse under them. My edifice of grief is much weightier. My grief is a great cathedral and the hand nestling in the neck is a small bird perched on the corbel of one of its arches.

  The water flows in, and slides back. It is cobbled with lozenges of light like those impasto strokes with which Impressionist painters rendered transparency. When you stand in it the lozenges make patterns on the sandy floor of the bay, like mullioned windows in reverse; the leads holding the clear panes together are yellow sunlight, moving, shifting, but not breaking up on the sandy bed. And with that shapely regular irregularity of leads.

  These are the hardest things to write down, the patterns of light on the sandy lake bed, I cannot quite get exactly how they are. Of course it is the pattern of the sunlight broken up by the ripples of the water, I know that, but that is not what it looks like.

  Last night, dark, but still there was a faint shadow of light defining the bay, we watched the yellow beam of a torch trudging back and forth across it. Someone out floundering, looking for the fish lying on the bay’s bed, to spear them. The person invisible. Our lights go out, it’s a failure of the electricity, but his torch beam trudges on, back and forth.

  In the hot afternoon, the cries of the children swimming off the jetty. Very close, very present, full of the pleasure of cold water on a hot day.

 
; A friend of mine said to me once: men adore me, but they do not stay with me. I’ve pondered this often. I do not know that I can say that you adored me, though maybe at moments you did. Certainly at moments, and probably more of them than were offered by those men who didn’t stay. But you did stay with me. Even when once you tried to leave, tried very hard, and couldn’t manage it, what was important was your unableness to go, not the thinking you might. On the third last day of your life you said, I am only happy when I can look at you.

  I remember when you used to drive the terrible old turquoise-coloured Holden, that you bought while I was still overseas, I would never have agreed to that colour, and whenever I used to turn the corner into our street and see it parked, my heart would lift. You are home, you will be there to greet me, it is the first thing that will happen. Perhaps with a kiss, more likely words.

  In the night gulls cry. One makes a sound like a tied-up whipped-down dog, yipping and grim, relentless. Another like a tin can being beaten by a stick. Another has that wail of a baby which squeezes parents’ hearts, that sound that isn’t hunger, or discomfort, or pain, which has no cause but fear, and who can be surprised that a baby should cry with fear. Don’t we all, if some of us noiselessly.

  A fourth gull sounds like the ring of a mobile telephone. People twitch at the sound: is it mine? No, not even someone else’s, it’s a bird.

  The cries die out in the night’s silence. And then I can hear it, the water lapping. The ripples sigh towards the shore like glimmering exhaled breaths, to spend themselves in waves small as sighs. But more rhythmic and more determined than human sighs will ever manage. The water laps, it soothes, and sleep may come.

  On the hottest day we go to the beach and picnic beside the water. There are a lot of young women with small children. The water is cold as gin and tonic against our middle-aged legs, but the half-naked little kids are deliriously happy. Two tiny girls have built a dam, a deep hole with a solid much-fortified wall, in a clever place where the waves will fill it with water but not wash it away. The only father makes sand castles, pressing the sand in a bucket, turning out perfect towers. Until he gets too ambitious, and piles one on top of another, and they all collapse. This is when his child shows interest.

  Four dolphins swim past, two pairs, gliding in and out of the water, slowly, luxuriously, keeping close in couples, but how quickly they cross the bay and out of sight.

  In town, the weather still hot, we sit at a cafe beside a fountain, a big pool of water with bronze clumps of mushrooms or clouds or whatever. It celebrates southern exploration, it seems. A child gets in and paddles, and tips over lengthwise, now he’s wet he may as well stay there, and suddenly the basin is full of children, all neatly dressed, swimming and crawling, under the metal clouds. Two little girls in party dresses with long skirts that dry billowed like spinnakers have seal heads and sodden draggle-tailed garments, their voices are hoarse, they whisper with horrified delight, it’s so enormously improper to be swimming in such party clothes. Two small boys white as chicken breasts have no clothes on at all. I have not felt so gladdened in a long time, the children are not just happy, they are full of awe, that they are getting away with this. Swimming in their clothes.

  A lot of deaths have happened here. Angry deaths, cruel, resisted, deaths that came too soon. I was going to say that were never welcome, but that would not be true, even wicked unnecessary deaths can sometimes be better than life. In the next bay was a convict station, and now it is a place claimed by aborigines. A lot of deaths. Of course that is true about everywhere, but this place has the reputation for it. There are dreams of innocence, and sagas of betrayal, and cruel ruins testifying to the wickedness of humanity made legal. The lucid water is smooth as a mirror, today the flagged and pebbled floor of the bay is covered with it as by a pane of glass; this water has no need to remember. Its lapping washes away memory.

  It is fanciful to talk about sighs and exhalations where the bay is concerned. And sick. The breather would be sick. The rhythm is too rapid, and the sound too liquid, it would be panic and drowning to breathe thus. But for the sea it is comfortable, and comfortingly inexorable; it will keep on. The ripple waves run in, with liquid frilling and popping sounds, they turn and plash on the rocks of the shore, and so it happens, over and over. A storm won’t stop them, nor will the huge burning weight of the summer’s heat. The lapping is always there, and it soothes like a stroking hand, even though there is no meaning in it. Except perhaps that you would have liked it too.

  Today is four weeks. The longest time in thirty-five years in which I have not spoken to you. If we were apart we spoke on the telephone, every day, several, many times. Even at long distances we talked with extravagant frequency. I remember the soft intertwining of our voices, weaving our lives together. Our breaths knowing each other’s pattern, catching, slipping, quickening; sometimes I think our breaths mingling but not of course literally, but as our hearts beat at the opposite ends of these lines which are not even lines any more but pulses through space, these our voices slipping through the vast icy spaces of the universe, sliding off satellites, still I believe wandering through the cosmos inextricably woven together, I think those breaths were the most erotic of our acts. I think John Donne would have liked the ethereal unspoken sexiness of our idle phone calls. Once in that last year we watched the television together, me in our kitchen, you in hospital, and chuckled and sniffed and criticised, it was fun.

  Even that time apart you still rang up; I was amused by the pretexts you found. The children, remembering to pay the phone bill (you told me to use your credit card), was I watering the garden. I hardly spoke; I sat and breathed very stilly, and let you talk. You were courting again. It was exciting, your voice cutting through the pain of your absence. And I was angry, too; I knew this wasn’t right, for me or you, your not being here with me, so why were you doing it. And shortly you stopped. And we were not parted again.

  When, on the last day of your life, I rang you and you said you didn’t have enough breath to talk, I knew that was the end. I knew it was time for you to die.

  People ask me, Are you all right? Oh, I say, yes, I’m, all right. This means, No, of course I am not all right but what the hell is the point of saying so? What good will it do? And my friends understand this, that we are talking a sort of code, that I am not all right but then I am, as much as can be expected, that I am not cracking despite the hand like a bird nestling in the shoulder; who said that life is like a bird flying in one end of a great banqueting hall and out the other? The warriors are feasting, the feasting goes on, but the bird, it is a sparrow, flies in one door and quickly out another, back into the winter, the storm, the cold, and that small space is our human life and all the rest is the winter and unknown. Bede, it was, the Venerable Bede, and he meant all human life, I think, everybody’s, not just one person’s.

  But my bird perches there, in the cathedral of my grief, high up on one of the corbels of an arch. You knew all the vocabulary of cathedrals. Corbels and bosses, groins and squinches, you would point them out as we stood heads bent back looking at them, and now I can’t even remember the names, let alone the meanings, you it was who kept them for me.

  Summer holidays have begun; some children on the jetty whose pale red roof can be seen as Chinese or Venetian but not with much conviction, throw a dog into the water and cheer while he swims to shore. A small boat bobs, before and aft. In the garden a cicada winds itself up. The water is no longer lucid as a mirror; the tide is running in small ripples that fragment the light into facets but never break. Water washes away stone, like the great natural arch we saw yesterday, created by violent waves throwing themselves against the cliff face, scouring it out with sand and chips of rock, flinging compressed air against it so that it finally falls away and leaves an opening like a great door, a portal in the cliff. I read that in the guide book; it is surprising about the sea being full of compressed air when it is violent. And dripping wears rock away too, a constant
gentle dripping, though centuries are needed. Maybe millennia.

  I don’t know about my cathedral; it will need a lot of lapping to wear it away.

  Footnote

  14.6.99

  When I came up with—I was going to say chose, but I didn’t, it chose me—that cathedral as an image of my grief it was because of the enormous mass and weight of it, and its complication, its manifoldness and indeed manifestness, and I wanted to oppose this heavy edifice to the water lapping, and notice the piece is called Lapping, not The Cathedral of Grief, though that is partly so that the cathedral will be a surprise when it comes, and also because the water lapping will eventually wear it away, though not for a long time. The cathedral is an imaginative construct, the water a natural one, and I was supposing that the latter would endure for longer.

  But what I did not realise then was that my cathedral would be a place where I could sit and be happy, for moments, that it would be a place of comfort and solace and peace. And that it was a miraculous work of art, whose beauty is to be marvelled at, and whose contemplation will lift and hold the heart in a dark joy. And that dwelling in it will make happiness and sorrow and pain, love and sex, music and words and pictures and all the terrifying world to be felt so intensely that I will ache with the desire of them. And that the ache of that desire will be exquisite and addictive.

  My cathedral is a truly Gothic edifice, in that it is going to be a long time in the building. I am still constructing it. Not all the parts match, but they never do, that is part of a cathedral’s richness. And I am glad that the lapping water will not in my lifetime succeed in eroding it.

  introduction

  I WOULD LIKE YOU TO MEET Clare. She is a young woman in her fifties. A bit over a year before the end of this novel her husband died.

  Clare isn’t me. She’s like me. Some of her experiences, adventures, terrors, have been mine. Some haven’t. We have the same profession. Both of us have had to come to terms with being widowed, and sometimes we have made similar choices. Not always. Her voice is quite like mine. She enjoys a similar bowerbird cleverness, a kind of sly sharpness in the collection of matter. That understands the shred of blue plastic may be more valuable than the chunk of lapis lazuli.