A Wind from the East

Copyright © 2016 Wendy Dartnall.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

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Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com.au

1 (877) 407-4847

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Cover art by Doug Matthews

Author photo by Simon Cardwell

Interior photos by: Wendy Dartnall and Margy Rich

ISBN: 978-1-5043-0043-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-0044-5 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 01/20/2016

Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 Roses and Wine

Chapter 2 A School Bus and Jasmine Buds

Chapter 3 Beginnings and Endings

Chapter 4 Metamorphosis

Chapter 5 Acceptance

Chapter 6 Insomnia

Chapter 7 Waiting

Chapter 8 Parents

Chapter 9 Courage

Chapter 10 Homecomings

Chapter 11 Winter Dawns

Chapter 12 Letters to Terry

Chapter 13 Nepal

Chapter 14 Passing as Fluent

Chapter 15 Reunions

Chapter 16 Where Are You?

Chapter 17 Days

Chapter 18 Year Zero

Chapter 19 Finding Identity

Chapter 20 Moonlight and Shiraz

Chapter 21 The Unexpected

Chapter 22 New Dawns

To my beautiful children

Acknowledgements

This memoir owes its existence to many people. I am grateful to my editor Laurel Cohn, whose insights and sensitivity guided me through the murky waters of writing about the self and loved ones. I benefited from friend, neighbour and novelist Sue Gough, whose expertise was of great value. Many thanks go to the kindness, patience and integrity of the following people: My sister-in-law Linda, who read the first and last drafts, helped with family history, and always encouraged me. The Vineyard Writers, Mark, Paul, June, David, Les, and Dawn for their discernment and good wine. Friends and fellow writers and artists Chris, Jane, Debra, Kate, Maureen and Leanne, who took time to thoughtfully read and comment. I thank the highly skilled and perceptive Balboa Press editors for the final line edit.

I deeply appreciate my children Jeb, Abbie, and Adam for their love and brilliant humour. Their voices sang the book into being: Abbie gave me the idea of writing to Terry when he could no longer converse, Adam and his step-sister, Lisa, said my first journal notes were beautiful, and Jeb said ‘It could be a book, Mum’.

Finally, I love and appreciate my late husband Terry for his sense of adventure and playfulness, his poetry and wit, his vulnerability and strength, and his love. Without him I would not have found my way so well. This memoir is as much his work as mine.

Brookfield, Queensland

Australia

26 August

Terry, my dear reference point,

It’s been four months since we heard, yet it’s still hard to imagine life without you, my darling. It will be like losing part of myself. You have been my reference point for half my life.

Thank you for being my husband, my lover, and my larrikin blood brother. I miss the way your smooth fingertips feel on my skin. There’s a current of energy from them that’s like a charge. I will never feel it again. Ever.

Wendy

Chapter 1

Roses and Wine

Thirty years ago, Terry turned up in my life holding a bottle of cheap port. He looked around the door of a friend’s living room, apologising for his lateness, and I felt something happen to time. It momentarily slowed down, or speeded up – a shift in the space-time continuum. Yet he had merely appeared in the doorway and said hello.

We were both in our mid-thirties, survivors of failed long-term relationships, and parents of young children.

Liz Carr, a close but much older friend, introduced us to each other.

Earlier that afternoon Liz and I had seen Steppenwolf, the movie of Hermann Hesse’s novel. The film was confusingly dreamlike, and on the walk back to her house, we decided the book was better. Over coffee and cake, we fell to talking about other books, our families, and my new life as a single mother. There was always laughter between us. Liz had a dry wit, and the afternoon moved quickly towards sunset. When she took our empty dishes to the kitchen, I went to the bathroom. On my return, I picked up my bag to leave as she walked back into the room.

‘Hang about,’ she said. ‘That phone call was from someone you might like to meet.’

I had not heard the telephone ring; she must have made the call. I looked at her dubiously.

‘I’m not matchmaking, you understand.’

‘Of course not.’

My two young children, Jeb and Abbie, were at their father’s house for the weekend, and I was actually looking forward to a quiet night alone for a change, with a uni assignment and essential reading.

‘I would have introduced you before but thought I’d wait until you and Greg had really decided to break up. I didn’t want to confuse things for you,’ she said, adding, ‘I have enough food for a light supper.’

Out of politeness I sat down again.

My marriage had ended earlier in the year. The wrong notes in our relationship had finally become too loud, the loudest being my husband’s infidelity. I had trusted him for a long time, even though he had always stared amorously at women and flirted. Looking back, I am surprised at some of the things I did, or did not do, but I was partly responding to the zeitgeist of the 1970s as well as my upbringing. I was still waking from an era when children were taught that boys were the breadwinners and protectors, along with having a future potential to become fathers, whereas girls were expected to become mothers and housewives, with no expectation of a career or even equal pay. I had felt powerless but was unable to articulate it.

Back then, the rising divorce rate was a new phenomenon, and neither of us wanted our children to become two more ‘troubled kids’ in the statistics. But there was something else.

I had unwittingly blended the idea that one could never own another person – which I had picked up from a psychology book in my teens – with a sense of not being good enough. As a young woman, I translated it as ‘You can do that to me; it’s your life. I don’t own you.’ It never occurred to me that I was worthy of better. It was years before I realised I had used this belief to justify other people’s negative treatment of me.

As I listened to Liz’s description of Terry and his imminent arrival, I realised it had been almost a decade since I’d dated anyone.

‘He’s my philosophy lecturer at uni – a PhD,’ she said. ‘He’s separated from his wife and child in Sydney.’

I said nothing, but I settled into the armchair.

‘He’ll be here soon,’ she continued. ‘He has a great sense of humour and is an honourable guy.’

It was a surprisingly old-fashioned remark, which I rather liked. However, after another fifty minutes of waiting for him to arrive, I wanted to go home more than ever. Then Terry walked in the door, smiling and apologising for his lateness. He said he had been covered in grease, lying under his old Rover 90, when Liz rang.

His presence lit the room, and his voice had a familiar timbre and accent, but there was something else. Was it harmonics? It was ineffable. Why did I feel I knew him? The first words I spoke were a stunned ‘Where are you from?’

He had been born in Kent, forty miles from where I was brought up in Berkshire. But that didn’t explain my astonishment. I’d met many people from Britain during my first decade in Australia. My feeling that we knew each other was strong, and it didn’t seem to relate entirely to his nationality.

Liz was a raconteur, used to holding everyone’s attention at social gatherings, but that night she took a back seat while Terry and I talked continuously. Perhaps she was content to quietly serve food and wine while observing her matchmaking success. When I left he left too, escorting me to my car. As I took the keys from my bag under the streetlight, he asked to see me again, and I heard myself agreeing to meet him the following week.

My not-matchmaking friend rang the next day. ‘What did you think of him, Wen? Good-looking, isn’t he?’

I flushed with embarrassment, glad she couldn’t see. I agreed that he was handsome, realising the fact as I spoke. It hadn’t seemed significant the night before, and in that moment on the telephone I wasn’t fully cognisant of his features. ‘Odd,’ I thought. ‘I’m usually good at remembering faces.’

‘He was very jolly,’ I said, aware that ‘jolly’ was not a word I had ever used to describe a potential date. But his wit and energy had been infectious.

I had not been expecting a man in my life so soon after the end of my marriage. Love at first sight was something I had only heard about until then. I must have been in a love-concussed state, because it took me twenty-four hours to realise how hard it was going to be to wait another five days before we met again. Terry had explained that he was in the middle of marking exam papers and would not be free until the following Thursday.

He came to my house long after the children had gone to bed. We drank wine and talked about our lives. I showed him around and watched him look with interest at the contents of my bookshelves, making judgements, no doubt. We all do it. He seemed to like my library – as well as me.

After that night, I was very clear about his engaging smile, blue eyes, and curly brown hair. He was slim and strong, having been a bushwalker and rock climber for most of his adult life. His shoulders were surprisingly broad. ‘Good farming stock,’ he told me. He played squash, tennis, and cricket, loved scuba diving, and had been a deep-sea diver in England when he was eighteen, working for a haulage company in the Weymouth docks. It had been tough work. The company had not been able to afford wetsuits, and the water had been icy, dirty, and dark.

There is a good deal of lust in love at first sight, but there are additional qualities: an extraordinary sense of recognition, feelings of ease and comfort, along with exhilaration, fascination, and the propensity for endless conversation and much laughter.

As the months progressed and our relationship blossomed, we realised the intensity was mutual. He often said we were extremely lucky to have found each other. The first time he declared how much he loved me, he was sitting on the floor of his bedroom in the house he rented. We had made love, and he was watching me doze afterwards. I opened my eyes, feeling his gaze. He told me he was deeply in love.

‘I don’t know if you realise,’ he said, ‘but this is a Cathy–Heathcliff thing.’

Until then, I hadn’t been sure he felt as strongly about me as I did about him. Self-doubt is never far away for lovers. I was thrilled to hear his analogy from Wuthering Heights. In the novel Cathy says, ‘Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.’

It was how I felt about him, and it was not long before I wanted him to move in, but we decided to take it slowly. It was clearly going to be a significant relationship, and there was no sense in rushing, when I had two children to consider and Terry had an ex-wife and a four-year-old daughter living interstate. There were other lives involved.

It was an exhilarating time as we discovered that we loved many of the same things: poetry, philosophy, bushwalking, and travelling. It appeared I’d hit the jackpot without even trying. He was an academic philosopher who wrote poetry, cooked, fixed cars, and was good in bed. The only one of these accomplishments to prove elusive was the cooking. He had twice impressed me with a tasty chicken paprika – but then lost the recipe.

When the Wind Blows from the East

When the wind blows from the east

And the sun is low in the sky,

Remember the roses and wine,

And the summer time,

And the long dance.

When the wind skirls at your feet

In dust-filled halls,

Remember the summer heat

And the long dance in the skies of dawn,

When the world was asleep

And the years stretched away over the fields.

Terry Dartnall

Summerfield

28 August

Terry,

I’m in bed with you, but I don’t know you now. We no longer hold each other as we fall into sleep. We haven’t spoken about this fundamental aspect of our lives, almost thirty years of sleeping like two spoons. I’m sitting beside you, writing in my journal while you lie sleeping the sleep of the dying. Our new separateness in bed lingers like something illicit. But no, maybe we’re being complicit, keeping a tacit silence about the enormity of love, death, and loss.

We used to discuss everything, but we have reached a place where discussion is too painful – or futile. Our love remains like a rock, unbroken beneath the rubble of a landslide. We have spoken our feelings, but as the months have progressed, we’ve stopped talking about endings. You hold your feelings closer now, unspoken. I don’t interfere. I’ve tried talking about this ever-worsening situation, but you gently ask me to stop. Your eyes show love, acceptance, and sorrow, telling me more than you want to put into words.

I’ve been reading your poetry again. You’ve always said you have no control over it, that you can never successfully rewrite poems. They arrive whole, and you’re unable to work on them afterwards. You say they come in the kind of inspiration D. H. Lawrence talked about, ‘a touch behind a curtain; trust it when it comes.’ I tease you and say you channel your poetry, which you neither confirm nor deny. The content is often metaphysical, with references to God, angels, and the unknowable, standing in contrast to your analytical writing. Being a sceptic, you say it’s impossible to know whether God exists without cogent reasons and evidence. You’ve taught the standard arguments to philosophy students for years at university, arguments both for and against the existence of God that are equally valid. Logically, then, we cannot know. Does that mean logic is the wrong tool to use when looking for God? Thank God for poetry. (Joke.)

When did you start writing poetry? I think you said it was in your twenties. Many of your poems speak of loss and death. You always said you would die before me, given your family’s history of heart disease. I would deny it, believing I could as easily die of a stroke after half a lifetime of migraines. I never could contemplate life without you and vaguely hoped we would die together in some kind of accident. We were ‘bookends’ from the start. Do you remember I used to say that in our first days together?

I love you beyond words.

W.

Chapter 2

A School Bus and Jasmine Buds

Towards the end of our first year as a couple but before we began living together, Terry found an old Austin school bus for sale. Eight weeks of summer holidays were approaching, and he thought it would be fun for us all to take a road trip from Adelaide. We drew a line on a map, leading from South Australia through New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, and back home to Adelaide, via Victoria. We would need clothes for all seasons, but mostly the days would be hot.

It’s not for nothing Australia is called Down Under. When you first arrive from the northern to the southern hemisphere, you adapt to seasons diametrically opposed to those of your birthplace. Hot weather at Christmas seems wrong, as do annual summer holidays through December and January. But by the time Terry and I met, we had both lived in Australia for years and were used to eating crayfish, ham, and salads for Christmas dinner instead of roast turkey and plum pudding. Our Antipodean children had grown up with cooling food on Christmas Day; a box of new-season cherries from the markets was mandatory fare.

The bus was its original sunflower yellow, but it had been converted into a caravan. A double bed was curtained off at the back, and the upholstered benches could sleep three children comfortably; there was a table, kitchen sink, stove, and fridge. We liked its simplicity and cosiness. Terry was mechanically savvy, having been brought up with his grandfather’s professional garage in England, where they had repaired cars and maintained coaches for hire.

‘I’ll be able to work on it myself,’ he said. ‘Old engines are much simpler to fix than modern cars.’

I was impressed and placed him even more firmly on his pedestal. He had already proven to be a worthy mechanic on my car, for which I had paid him with a bottle of Dom Pérignon. I should say half a bottle, since I had helped him drink it.

Terry had put me on a pedestal too, but I was unable to see it at the time. He once said he felt we were destined to do something together as a couple, perhaps a book or some creative endeavour. I was flattered but disbelieving.

‘With me?’ I thought. ‘He’ll discover I’m not clever enough. I’ll never sustain his interest – he’ll soon