The Age of Discretion Read online

  THE AGE OF

  DISCRETION

  Also by Virginia Duigan

  NOVELS

  Days Like These

  The Biographer

  The Precipice

  FILM

  The Leading Man

  VIRGINIA DUIGAN

  THE AGE OF

  DISCRETION

  First published in 2019 by Ventura Press

  PO Box 780, Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia

  www.venturapress.com.au

  Copyright © Virginia Duigan 2019

  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 other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  ISBN: 978–1–925384–66–6 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978–1–925384–74–1 (ebook)

  Cover design by Christabella Designs

  Internal design by Working Type

  To Anne and the friends she shared:

  Annie, Caroline, Catrine, Kathy and Mary.

  ‘There is nothing in the world that does not have its decisive moment, and the masterpiece of good management is to recognise and grasp this moment.’

  – Jean-François Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz 1717

  1

  THE SENTENCE

  Certain decisive moments, Vivien Quarry would say, are like being struck by lightning – and staying alive. And as a result, having a life-changing tale to tell. Such cataclysmic moments are rare, but she experienced one this morning when her husband of thirty-two years let slip an unguarded sentence.

  His delivery, typically, was almost offhand, but the remark didn’t come out of the blue. Viv had once again raised the subject of sex; the vexed subject of its absence from their lives for the past two years. The departure, too, of simple gestures of affection that might have done much to compensate.

  It had been a one-sided conversation like all its predecessors. These lopsided exchanges used to be quite frequent in the first year of their sex drought but they never got anywhere, and her husband's refusal to regard this as a problem or take it seriously – to discuss it at all, for that matter – has been an ongoing source of conflict. Today, however, he has come up with a double whammy: the ultimate conversation-stopper that also happens to be an unstoppable provocation.

  His sentence was: ‘Men are hard-wired to not find older women attractive.’ Viv’s husband Geoff Mayberry is not an insensitive man, on balance, nor is he given to extremes. He has never said anything like this before and it takes a moment before it sinks in. Not long, just a few seconds in which nothing further is said and the words hang between them. Invisible words, full of portent.

  Viv and Geoff are still lying in bed, side by side. When he clambers out without a backward glance and pads across to the bathroom, Viv realises she has not drawn breath since those words were uttered.

  When she does she feels a sharp spurt of rage, but by now he is safely in the shower. Later today this will be dismantled as the bathroom renovation begins. She imagines the hot water cascading over his balding head and lean white limbs. He’s in pretty good shape, she has always thought, give or take minor touches of wear and tear. Until now she has been kindly disposed to these, finding them endearing. Conscious of her own facial lines (fine, not overly intrusive) and bodily imperfections, she has rated the two of them as well matched in the visible-signs-of-ageing department.

  What Geoff has said doesn’t change this. But it changes everything else. Once Viv has digested his sentence, she sees this in an instant.

  They are officially retired now, although neither likes to use this word. Geoff used to be a boffin, a top scientist in a global pharmaceuticals company. Rewarding, but high-stress. Viv was a senior editor in a small publishing house where the stresses, mercifully, she told her friends, were less macho.

  After two of Geoff’s colleagues were felled by catastrophic cardiac events, Viv had talked up the golden handshake. Just think of all that leisure to do the things you never had time for. The decision was made, the handshake received – it may well be relevant – just over two years ago, when Geoff was sixty-seven. Think of all that time to do things together. Now she regrets it.

  In the immediate aftermath of his bolt from the blue, his harsh, sexist bombshell (out of character, she’d once have thought), Viv has an urgent desire to get out of the house. She is badly in need of counsel from a trusted non-professional. And providence has arranged for just such a one to be on hand.

  Three hours after hearing Geoff’s words, Viv feels them inhabiting her body like some malevolent growth. She imagines them seared on her forehead, visible to all the people she passes on this frigid October day. Yet nobody on the Tube flinches from her presence. No one even catches her eye. When she emerges from the Underground she flutters like a moth among the lunchtime crowds on the pavements. I don’t register on their radar, she thinks. Is this something to be grateful for, or to resent?

  This Monday in her diary is written and underlined: Bloomsbury 1-ish lunch J. The perfect distraction, and in the normal way the perfect confidante. J is for Jules, better known to the world as the great operatic soprano Julia Jefferies, who happens also to be Viv’s one famous friend. Viv is aware that Julia too may be facing a crisis, though of a markedly different nature. This may not be the normal way for either of them.

  It’s not that Julia is an out-and-out red carpet star – at least, not according to the gossip magazines that measure popular celebrity. Most of their readers couldn’t give a stuff about ageing sopranos. But in opera it’s another story. Here, in one of the most exacting and least merciful branches of the arts, she has achieved at the highest level. Her distinctive, soaring voice has brought audiences to tears. Over the course of her long career there are hundreds of thousands of people around the world on whom Julia Jefferies can truthfully be said to have had a profound emotional effect.

  And Viv counts herself lucky that her friend is even in the country; she has only just returned to London from Australia. A career at Julia’s level is lived largely in hotels and serviced apartments close to the great opera houses of the world. Those of Paris, Milan and Vienna, of New York and Buenos Aires, Sydney and St Petersburg. And whenever possible Viv has answered Julia’s call and flown in to visit her.

  Small publishers are not renowned for high salaries. Until Geoff’s earnings rose it was Jules, more often than not, who covered the shortfall. ‘Nothing to do with generosity, Viv, I promise you. It’s self-interest, pure and simple. I’m footloose and fancy-free, which translates as unmarried and childless and alone in a strange city.’

  Viv has seen enough of Julia’s life and at sufficiently close quarters to wish to qualify this, in certain respects. She has seen at first hand the glamour and luxury that come with diva status, together with its fair share (and more) of extravagant admiration. Obsequious fawning, I can take it or leave it, Jules has always declared – any amount of it. But the single life lived out of suitcases has its downsides. Especially, Viv knows, in the latter stages of a brilliant career.

  And even in the middle stages, when the consequences of decisions made much earlier in life begin to bite. Tough choices put in place in the first flush of an exceptional singer’s working life. Strategic decisions to let nothing get in the way of advancement; such major hindrances, for example, as marriage, and children. Viv has always assumed that her friend made these choices, and made them deliberately.

  Now, at a time when many of their friends (but not Viv herself) are involved grandparents, she feels a need to tread carefully aroun
d this subject. However well she thinks she knows Jules, there remains an area where she’s up against the proverbial brick wall.

  The area is love, the mysterious arena of relationships and sex, a subject on which Jules is not known either for reticence or squeamishness. I don’t have a prudish bone in my body, Viv, she says. As you might testify before a grand jury, if required.

  Viv would testify to that, and it explains why she will feel free to air her present problem, in due course. But over the years she has come to accept that Jules has an interior chamber to which she alone has access. She has contrived to keep it that way over the course of their long friendship. It is at odds with everything else in her personality, and Viv has concluded it must be linked to something innate and profound – a private sadness or regret, perhaps – that Jules could never bring herself to share.

  There have been passing hints of dalliances, plenty of them, but Julia’s name has never been publicly linked with anyone. Miss Jefferies was accompanied by—. The legendary singer was on the arm of—. This has been the extent of it. Never more than a paragraph or two, here and there.

  In her heyday, Julia’s diary would be filled with engagements three and four years ahead. Her heydays may be gone, Viv reflects, as she strides with the velocity of a much younger woman towards Julia’s flat, but she is far from being forgotten. She has just sung an acclaimed Dido at the Sydney Opera House. Sydney is her home town.

  Before this gig, though, there was a hiatus of several months when her calendar was empty and her agent had no offers to report. Does she have anything lined up after her small but starry turn? Viv suspects she may not. For the first time in her life Julia Jefferies may be without any forward engagements. It is just possible that she is staring down the barrel at the end of her career. The implications of this temporarily override Viv’s own pressing concerns.

  With Julia’s handsome red brick building looming in her sights, Viv pauses on the street corner to gather herself. There is no predicting quite what mood her friend will be in. She may not be best placed to assume a counselling role. Appearances are deceptive, and of the two of them it’s Jules, the international success story, who is the more vulnerable. Viv, who knows that she herself is at bottom a grounded and resilient woman, has no real doubt of that. Even though she is aware of fielding, right now, a body blow of monumental (and unpredictable) proportion.

  One thing, though, is sure. Whatever Julia’s state of mind and whatever the hour, she will answer the door in full fig and war paint. You show up tarted up, Jules says, because that is your brand. These unforgiving days you can’t rely on talent alone, however prodigious. You can’t afford to let yourself go. Or, she adds, to go off. To put on undue weight, to appear in public tired and emotional – anything like this would be artistic suicide in one’s profession, at one’s age.

  One’s official age, and today this is right at the forefront of Viv’s mind, is sixty-six. Personable, yes, and formidably well groomed, with clothes and demeanour exuding success, but sixty-six nonetheless. Which happens to be a year this side of Viv’s rather more raffish sixty-seven.

  It also happens, as Viv recalls with an attitude more complicated than before, to be three years this side of Julia’s real age. Her real age is sixty-nine, and Viv is one of the few people privy to this small but telling fact. She can keep secrets; not even Geoff is aware of this one. Not that it would cut much ice with him, she thinks. A few years here or there – you’re still an older woman. With all that this may (or may not) imply.

  In the recesses of her mind, concealed behind immediate concerns about Julia, Viv is studiously attending to what it may not imply. She is in the early stages of formulating an action plan which she may (or may not) disclose this afternoon, depending on the lie of the land.

  2

  AT BLOOMSBURY

  It’s starting to rain as Viv hurries down one side of the massive Edwardian block to the far end. She computes, soberly, that it’s nearly forty years since she arrived here for the first time to find her friend in a state of euphoria.

  Jules had disinterred the most captivating abode, Viv, and was about to rescue it from the jaws of death. Irrelevant that it was murderously dark and the sunken baths were tiled with hieroglyphs and demonic figures – she could see the bones, and the bones were divine. Two bedrooms and two bathrooms and it faced south and west! Ultra-convenient, too; walking distance to the opera house as well as the theatre district, Soho and the British Museum. A zest for life, together with a sporadic tendency to plumb the depths, was typical of Jules then. It has not diminished in either respect.

  Viv always has a feeling of time travel when she comes to Bloomsbury, but rarely has it been so specific or whisked her so far back. Today she is twenty-eight and has recently met Geoffrey Mayberry (the problematic young man who is still her husband). She is entitled to put the letters PhD after her name now, and just getting used to it.

  Her friend Julia Jefferies has not yet put her age back and is therefore thirty-one. After several years of playing small parts to rave notices she is midway through a season at Covent Garden singing the plum role of Violetta in La Traviata. She is already used (it’s not hard) to being lionised.

  When she suggests they share this grim apartment Viv is hesitant, but only briefly. Jules is persuasive and strong-willed. She’s earning a lot of money for the first time in her life and itching to spend it. She has already worked out how to transform the interior; within weeks the transformation is achieved.

  Stripped and redecorated, the creamy high-ceilinged rooms maximise the London light, as she predicted. The tall sash windows are framed with silk and linen curtains in shades of ivory and parchment. On the polished floors are rugs in the ochre colours of the outback. On the walls are luminous Australian landscapes from early last century: gum trees, hazy blue hills and winding rivers, evocative of the wide open spaces Jules once roamed with her brother Max. The paintings may be out of fashion these days, but she is scathing of trends in just about everything.

  Viv will go on to share the flat with Jules for a mere six months before Geoff Mayberry moves in, for what becomes another year, or even two – exact times are blurred at this distance – until they can scrape together the down payment on their first house, a dismal terrace in Battersea.

  But that, as Viv is painfully aware today, was then. Way back then, in our youth. Who could have known we would still be together? Still an intact couple, and rather remarkably still in our first marriage (even if a little precariously, these days) unlike most of our contemporaries. Although I am officially now an older woman and therefore, according to my husband, men no longer find me attractive.

  Is Jules aware of this fact of nature? Does it extend to famous, high-achieving women for whom adulation is routine? Is it, indeed, even a fact? Should one include all men in this equation, as Geoff would have me believe, or is it merely the view of this particular man? Of this particular husband? Viv presses doorbell number twenty-four. Inside Julia’s apartment the intercom shows a blurry image of a woman of middling height and build with a mass of refractory, windblown hair. She is wearing a voluminous overcoat, and dancing a little jig on the spot. Her appealing, triangular face is upturned towards the security camera with visible anticipation, even on the fuzzy screen.

  The lift delivers her to the landing opposite the flat, where her old friend has flung the door wide, and she tumbles in, almost tripping over her maxi coat – a genuine relic, somewhat the worse for wear but more or less intact – from the swinging sixties. They hug closely and kiss, then hold each other with an appraising fondness at arm’s length.

  What Viv does notice right away, and it gives her pause, is that Julia’s hair is less immaculate than usual and she appears to be wearing no make-up. While she herself doesn’t always bother with it, this has never been Julia’s way. She usually wears a great deal, applied with professional skill. Viv suspects that Jules has never looked truly dishevelled in her life, but today her hair i
s nearly (but not quite) untidy. It has altered in colour many times over the years and is currently tawny with discreet highlights. She’s had variations on the same theme, a shoulder-length bob with the hair swept sensuously over the right temple, for decades.

  Her clothes, though, are as stylish and carefully put together as ever. A cream cashmere sweater over charcoal trousers with ironed creases, chunky silver bangles and sassy buckled ankle boots – which Viv immediately (but not too immoderately) covets – in pearly suede. And the customary scarf to protect the throat, a body part always capitalised in Viv’s mind. Most singers are neurotic about The Throat, and Jules is no exception.

  In her company Viv is accustomed to feeling unkempt and rather radically underdressed, but she never feels overwhelmed or inadequate, or propelled to make more of an effort than usual. From time to time she has wondered why. She has concluded that she is happy in her own skin, and that this is surely a good thing. That she is, overall, a confident woman.

  Confidence has come in part from a fulfilling career, a daughter she loves and a stable long-term marriage. In another it derives from having, without false modesty, a passably attractive personality. And being, furthermore, a passably attractive woman. Not a beauty like Jules, or anywhere near it, but a woman men have liked and responded to. Some of these long-term assumptions are suddenly under threat.

  As Jules assembles lunch, which can be a lengthy operation (it’s never thrown together here; she likes to do things well, and do them herself) Viv takes off her boots and sinks into a white, feather-filled sofa. As she plants her stockinged feet on the ottoman she experiences a strange sensation. The feeling is unprecedented; it’s almost as if she were someone else, an interloper, whose connection to the old Vivien Quarry (the original, younger model) is vaguely fraudulent.