The late afternoon sun bathes the sandstone cottage in a mellow golden hue, catching the glint of quartz in the stone and the rosiness of leadlight windows. The long terraced gardens flow down lush and verdant to the twinkling river. It is a place of benign loveliness, welcoming, warm. A woman sits on the veranda in a colonial wicker chair, a glass of merlot on the table beside her. Her demeanour is at odds with the scene for she is preternaturally still. It is not the stillness of relaxation or pleasurable indolence, but of a taunt holding together of self, as if she might shatter. When she reaches for the wine glass her movement has a brittle jerkiness. She lights her cigarette with a savage snapping of the lighter. She is an aberration in the setting of balmy tranquillity. She stares out across the width of the serene river taking in none of the visual tonic it offers. She sees no scenic beauty, feels no warmth of the day’s last rays. She is cold, rigid and her world is starkly empty.

‘This is the one I wanted to show you’ said Bill, turning to Tom and me in the back seat and pointing up the steep hill. I looked up and there it was, the loveliest cottage in the loveliest setting. A dream home. I desperately wanted a closer look. Bill phoned the number on the realtor sign but it was too late on a Sunday afternoon for any answer. ‘Look, there’s someone on the veranda up there, lets walk up and see if they’ll let us look around’ proposed Bill. My reticence at intruding upon the owner’s privacy was easily overcome by an eagerness and impatience I couldn’t control. As we approached the house the woman on the veranda remained obtusely oblivious to us, returning Bill’s greeting and enquiry with a chilly reluctance, yet she agreed to show us the house. I felt a twinge of embarrassment at our crass encroachment, but I was too thrilled to care much. I could barely contain my delight in the place, despite Tom’s hiss, ‘stop oohing and aahing – you’ll drive up the price!’ Bill’s wife Marian was no better, ‘this is a fabulous entertainment area, you’ll give wonderful dinner parties here!’ she enthused, gazing approvingly at the landscaped swimming pool. Even the barbecue was constructed from the honey coloured sandstone. The woman said, grudgingly, ‘yes, my husband built all this, those are our initials’, pointing to the letters chiselled into the sandstone at our feet. There was bleakness in her tone. I looked at her more closely for the first time and saw a face haggard with grief. Poor woman must be bereaved; she has to sell her home because she has been widowed, I thought.

I later learned that the woman was forced to sell the cottage in her divorce settlement and yes, my enthusiasm did drive up the price and protracted negotiations between our solicitors. She said to me one day on the phone, ‘my share of my home is all I have, I have never worked, I need every cent’. Her pitiful situation was a sharp contrast to mine and I didn’t begrudge her. The day we moved in to the sun-kissed cottage its shining perfection seemed symbolic of our new life in an exciting new country. We had a house-warming party and our guests were made up of Tom’s Sydney business associates including Bill, Tom’s right hand man. We basked in their admiration of our new home. Marian and I talked of summer pool parties and weekends on the river, it was all going to be wonderful! We were the golden couple in our golden cottage with a golden future ahead of us.

Tom’s new job kept him at long hours and took him interstate. The organization of our domestic life, unpacking crates from the UK and furnishing the cottage kept me contentedly occupied. Once settled I would be starting work myself and I was revelling in having this time to make the cottage our own. There were countless corporate functions to attend with Tom and much was made of us, he was a big man now and I was proud of him. There was a time early in our marriage when I had coached him in his first board presentations, public speaking and social etiquette, watching his polished performance now you would never know it. When he had received the Sydney job offer, he had sent me flowers with the message, ‘Thank you my Darling, I could never have done it without you’.

The challenges of Tom’s new role were demanding and I could understand a less than expected interest in our new home, which must have been pedestrian by comparison to the work pressures he faced. I appreciated that he was too tired and too busy to want to invite people home. His increasingly short-temper was explicable. But when my sister and then my mother were diagnosed with cancer I was shocked by Tom’s reaction: ‘Stop crying! That’s not going to help them!!’ he snapped. I travelled back to be with my family and when I returned, depleted and fearful for my loved ones, little had changed except now Tom had become accustomed to attending functions without me and to spending less time than ever at home. The golden cottage had become an empty place. I stood at the French doors one day, looking out on the immaculate expanse of perfectly paved, gracefully shrubbed, un-peopled area where no entertaining took place, as hail stones the size of golf balls slammed viciously into the sandstone, when half an hour earlier there had been brilliant sunshine. The rapidity of contrast from shining brightness to ominous storminess was bewildering. It was all so very strange, out of sync, alien. Like my husband’s behaviour.

Of course, it was an affair. Tom’s admission was arrogantly aggressive, as if my stupidity beggared belief. There was no one to turn to. My poor shattered family, thousands of miles away, could hardly cope with such news. The corporate ‘friends’ had been weaned to a sophisticated acceptance of another woman appearing at Tom’s side. Tom returned to the cottage periodically to replenish his wardrobe, expressing an exasperated frustration at finding me still there. Where did he think I could go? Days, sometimes weeks, passed with no conversation or sight of anyone. I vacillated between a disbelief of Tom’s brutality and an utter despair. It was surreal to me. There was shame in my abandonment, my pathetic state, my grief, my fears and my isolation.

As each day melted away I found myself on the veranda of the honey hewed house, yet I felt untouched by the sun’s ebbing warmth, blind to the iridescent gardens, the molten, meandering river. As I drank the wine untasted and smoked mindlessly, my senses were numbed. I was a blank. Like my life. Like the life of that other woman on the veranda. Was I her ghost or was she mine, perpetuating the haunting of this golden place with the spectre of our punishing pain?