Afterwards, in the car as Robyn and I drove down the mountains and through the suburbs of Sydney that now follow the railway line all the way to their base, I told her about the day Garry and I were cut off by the tide. We were down the coast, alone at the house on the bay with the rock. It was glorious autumnal weather, the water wasn’t yet too cold to swim, and after a few days of lazing, we felt adventurous and set out around the rocks beneath the headland with the lighthouse. It was a fine day, as I say, clear to the horizon, when we walked round the bay and climbed to the next cove, using a steep, well-worn path. Instead of stopping there, as we usually did, or going back to check the tides – it wasn’t as if we didn’t know how large the headland was, or how steep – we decided, just like that, on impulse, to see if we could get the whole way round. Two hours later and still nowhere near the point, we were in a small cove with a narrow shingle beach, wet from a wave that’d caught us on the rocky cliff we’d just clambered round. We sat on the shingle to dry, pleased with ourselves, not noticing that the tide was coming in until we had to jump out of the way, and saw that waves were breaking against the cliff we’d come from, and also against the one ahead. White foam against black rock in either direction. Behind us, what was left of the shingle ended against a sandstone cliff, not sheer or overhanging like the black cliffs, but steep, very, with some dark rock poking through, a few hardy wisps of trees hanging on. It was a long way up, but it was our only option: the shingly beach was fast vanishing, there’d be no shelter unless we climbed up above the tide line, which, now that   we looked, we could see quite clearly. There was nothing to stand on there, and the prospect of clinging on all day until the tide turned again was less promising than the prospect of climbing. We should be able to make it, Garry said, though I was doubtful, and he started to climb in a slightly zigzag way, reaching from protrusion of rock to spindly tree, finding the next foothold as I followed behind, until suddenly it was too steep; there wasnothing to hold onto, and the top wasn’t close. Chunks of crumbling sandstone were coming loose and tumbling down. I can’t, I said, as if there were a choice. You can, he said, climbing on, balancing himself and turning back to tell me where to put my  foot,  where  I  could safely hold on, testing the strength of a small, bent tree that was growing out of the cliff not far from the top. I got there. I don’t know how, but I did. He hauled himself up the last few feet to the grass at the top, lay on his stomach, and with one hand on another of those spindly trees, reached down an arm strong as rope. One last haul, and I was beside him, as alive as the grass we lay on, the trees above. The sky. A tremble started in my legs, a shaking, shuddering tremble that spread to my arms, my chest, everywhere, as I looked back down to the rocks, the little beach that had vanished and the water where we could well both be lying, dead and broken. No one would have known, it was back before mobile phones, and who would think we’d be stupid enough to have done what we did.

Lying there on the ground, alive and shaking, we wrapped our arms around each other, and when our legs returned to a state that would hold us upright, we walked slowly through the gnarled banksia trees to the lighthouse, which I always visit even if it is a modern lighthouse with no window or walkway, no keeper, nothing of character or romance, nothing like Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse: just a white smooth tower marking a line in the bush. We walked around it in superstitious thanksgiving, then back to the house, where we made huge toasted sandwiches and spent the rest of the day recovering on  a  blanket under the trees until the sun went over the hills behind and the cold crept in. A fire, fish on the grill, a bottle of wine. Was that not enough? In memory it is replete. So why, after something like that, did I want Garry to say that yes, he’d love me forever and make sure I never fell, and I needn’t give up anything, not my independence, not even Ben who arrived one of those years and whom I’m not yet ready to talk about. I could be just as I was and safe. Double standards? Yes. But double standards work in strange ways; for Garry, with all that Zen, no commitment beyond the moment worked just fine; but    for me, while it could, it didn’t always. It was, of course, when we enjoyed each other most that I wanted the words he wouldn’t give. As if the words could turn into a certificate I could hold in my hand, absolve me from my own infelicities, or an artwork I could walk around, or a fine pen that would know my thoughts even before they arrived on the page.