Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

The next morning he hid the keys to the car. Wouldn't give them to me. I was supposed to go to college
in Brisbane, an hour or so's drive. I badly wanted to go to my class, I begged, I pleaded, he finally gave
me the keys in disgust.
I think I still hadn't washed, thinking it would have been a giveaway. Went to my class: late, smelly,
hungover, defiant as any teenager. I was about 38 at the time.
I went down to Middleton a few days later, as arranged, to meet Beethoven but got the name of the pub
wrong and we both waited in different pubs for an hour or so until he turned up and found me by which
time I'd cooled right off. In the mundane light of a Middleton pub at lunchtime it was all different. The
town is in the heart of sugar-cane country and, even though this was at a time when hippiedom had
penetrated even this far, Nambour was one place you didn't feel right walking round in bare feet, for
example.
Beethoven was somewhere in between the extremes of longhaired hippie and square conservative. He'd
lost his remote and moody look, and chatted to me in a direct and friendly manner. He was an ordinary,
nice enough bloke, not exciting at all. I wasn't in fancy dress any more and as he told me about himself,
how he was an electrician, had a block of land somewhere down a valley where he wanted to build and
would I like to come and look at it, it all became too normal and I didn't see him again.
I think if my husband had been able to talk to me, engage my interest, things might have been different.
Maybe if I'd taken more interest in him ¼ but my mother didn't raise me to look after a man: she taught
me to see my father, her husband, as the enemy. I was still, at that stage, comfortable in her mould. I
married because she encouraged me to, and because he asked me to, and because we got on well in bed.
The photo taken of my husband and myself that night at the pub shows a couple not really connected:
there is no animated spark between them. People admired them; they made a nice pair, physically, with
names similar enough to be charming; they had a nice property; they had other nice couples to dinner,
whose children made friends with their two, a boy and a girl; they seemed ideal.
It was later that same year that I left him, left my comfortable and boring life to go and live in the
rainforest with a penniless poet, on the dole. They'd said to me, when I started college, that study put a
strain on the marriage. Could I cope? Of course, I said airily, and never gave it another thought. What
they didn't talk about was the high of using your mind for something other than meals, and the danger
of this to housewives. And when I left it was a matter of days before another of those nice couples split
up, a couple who had been close friends of ours, and she went to live with my husband, until he kicked
her out. He got her back soon after, it turned out, so he had someone to mind the kids who hadn't come
with me (I couldn't afford a decent place) and he kicked her out again when it suited him; she went
down to six stone with the humiliation of it. She came to see me a few times, when I was living with
the poet in the house I'd bought with the settlement, and she kept saying; thanks for being so nice to
me.
I guess I did old Beethoven a favour really, dumping him so quickly; the poet and I had a much harder
time of it as we struggled to fulfil the ideal of happilyeverafter. We had about three years of putting our
very differing expectations onto each other before I eventually kicked him out. That was back when I
still had a house, before another man encouraged me, very subtly, to sell my house and go off sailing
with him. And I did, and we got shipwrecked, and I lost money, and so it goes.
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