By Anna Funder
Credit: Mark Conlan
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Recently, a dear friend spoke at her husband’s 60th birthday party. “Marriage is a crap shoot,” she said, and then went on to celebrate her spouse in a way that was all the more powerful and loving for being so clear-eyed about the chancy nature of their happiness.
Another friend, a single woman as wise as she is straightforward, approached me at a lunch gathering – I thought possibly to escape a deep-dive my husband and some others were having into the intricacies of urban planning challenges and affordable housing. But she said, “How did you find him?” She looked into my eyes. “I mean, how did you know?” She wasn’t talking about urban planning, but life – which can’t really be planned, no matter how much we try. I didn’t know what to say. How to take credit for a crap shoot?
But there was a moment I knew. It was New Year’s Eve, 1990. Craig had invited about 35 friends onto his family’s old wooden boat on Lake Eildon – an antipodean African Queen called Falcon, a boat he’d lovingly restored. I was just one of the crowd of university student friends, pinching myself at the beauty of the old cruiser on a silky black lake, wondering what the new decade might bring.
Lake Eildon is a man-made reservoir, where the water was flooded into valleys that had towns and trees in them, and now, ghost trees lurk dangerously under the surface at the edges. Stars were out, a whole hemisphere of them. The noise of our party carried across the water in every direction, the boat a blur of dancing bodies, held high on 50-year-old carvel-planked jarrah. We listened to Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, The The, Concrete Blonde – music that is now indelibly romantic for me. But romance, like a beautiful lake, holds its own dangers.
“How to take credit for a crap shoot?” asks Anna Funder.Credit: Tim Bauer
Not long before midnight, I went to rest down the end of the boat, where Craig was. I overheard him say softly to his brother-in-law, “We’re taking on water. I think we’re sinking.” I made myself invisible, kept listening. “Don’t say anything,” Craig said to his horrified brother-in-law. “I’ll go have a look.” He stripped down to his bathers and slipped quietly into the black water, full of the sharp, dead branches he imagined to have torn a hole in the hull.
On the top deck, dozens of people laughed, drank, danced. Craig disappeared into darkness, holding his breath, swimming blind under the hull from side to side, feeling it for holes. He came up gasping, again and again, each time a hand’s breadth further along. Forty-six feet, I imagined, never seemed so huge a span.
“Crap shoot” comes from a game called “craps”, which involves betting on the outcome of a roll of the dice; it’s something, Google says, “whose result could be good or bad but is impossible to predict or control because so much chance is involved”.
New Year’s Eve, 1990, on board the Falcon, where Anna Funder knew she’d found the one.Credit: Courtesy Craig Allchin
When I look back on the boat incident it reminds me that we live our lives going forward, taking blind chances in the dark at every turn. Will the boat sink? Or will the young man silently save everyone? Whatever happens, what will it do to the woman watching, her heart racing with terror, and with something else, too? It’s a crap shoot. We can only make sense of it afterwards, retrofitting a story to match its outcome.
Craig dived and rose, and dived and rose again. Then he clambered back on board: he could not find the hole. We were still taking water. The stern of the boat, where I sat, was listing down. Ella and the Duke sang on. Craig and his brother-in-law started quietly but frantically opening hatches to below the deck, the shower and toilet system, to where the engine was.
Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald sang on amid a New Year’s Eve drama on Lake Eildon.Credit: Getty
Eventually they found a hose meant to release water had come unstuck, and water was pouring through the aperture into the hull. They clamped it shut, started the pump and went back to the party. They didn’t say anything to anyone.
If I had to tell my friend at lunch, I’d say that’s when I knew. I didn’t know all the adventures in life and love we’d have – the travel, the children, the uncountable joys and occasional, blindsiding sadnesses – the sheer good fortune of being together through it all, and of having your world expanded by someone else’s perception of it.
But what I knew then in my gut was that I wanted to be with this man who would swim blindly through the dark to save people, and who would then go back to the party without a word. If I could credit myself with any thought at all, as I watched him dance, wet curls on his neck, it was, “I want to be on his boat”.
“Romance, like a beautiful lake, holds its own dangers,” writes Anna Funder of a New Year’s Eve party on Lake Eildon.Credit: Jason South
I told that story at our wedding, which was the first time I’d put those pieces of our past together to make some sense of it, which is to say, a story. We moved from Melbourne to Sydney, had our first child. Craig travelled to China, designing cities there, in the enormous effort to bring millions of people out of poverty. He was away so much that new friends thought he was a fiction, and I a single mother with a cover story (“Don’t tell Anna,” they joked, “but they already have cities in China”). I worked on my first book, Stasiland, and looked after our daughter.
Our lives expanded in a way that thrilled us.
But part of our little family was missing – Falcon. So, Craig arranged for the boat to be loaded by crane onto a custom-built cradle on a vast truck and driven, Fitzcarraldo-style, as he says, up the Hume Highway to Sydney.
Falcon lived on the harbour for a while, but we didn’t have the time or money to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed. While we thrived, she languished. Eventually we sold her to a farmer in South Australia, who dug a hull-sized hole in the ground to keep her in, and spent 10 years restoring her, before selling her on again.
We were blessed with two more children; our lives expanded in a way that thrilled us. Craig travelled to the cities he was working on and I travelled, too, on book tours. One time I was pregnant, another time breastfeeding the next baby, leaving the toddlers at home. We considered ourselves so lucky to be able to juggle two creative careers and three children: a big life.
Now, I’m finding midlife interesting creatively and in every way. I know the outcome of more stories, I can string together the pieces of life that got us, and people we know, where we are.
I wrote a book about women’s unseen, unpaid work in the home, looking at the life of George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, and how she has been made to disappear in history. I worked on it for six years, pretty much every day, every holiday. Part of it is about the couple’s time in the Spanish Civil War – to my shame it took me longer to write than the Orwells actually spent there. Craig would open the bedroom door of my studio, of a rented beach house in summer, a ski lodge in winter, offering coffee: “Still in Spain?” he’d grin.
While I was on a fellowship at Oxford, he had to sell our house. While I was in Scotland, tracing Orwell’s steps there, our son broke his arm. We smiled at the deep irony of a woman writing about invisible women’s work while her husband took care of work, life, children, holidays, house and her. We thought the book was important to write – for our children, for the historical record, for everyone. Still, some debts can probably never be repaid.
Midlife is a hingeing point, a change of perspective: I have the endings for stories begun years ago, and the future seems more precious for feeling its finitude in my bones. (This isn’t morbid; my mother died before she was my age, so in some deep sense I can’t shake I’m in “time on”, as the footballers would say.) I’m thrilled to watch our children as young people encountering the world, growing into themselves.
Some of my friends have experienced this preciousness as urgency and wanted to change their story, to start a new one. There has been a bit of relationship carnage around us; the illicit texts, the too-many calls, the odd, inappropriately intimate photo shared. People discovered things they’d rather not have seen on their partners’ phones. Still, I wasn’t prepared for it when it came. I was in the US judging a literary prize when I got Craig’s text, complete with a photo.
“Her name is Avanti,” he wrote; “32-footer.” And a picture of a lovely old Halvorsen.
This year I toured on and off for five months after Wifedom came out, and Craig held the fort again, with our almost grown children. They can be left now (“I’m not just surviving without you,” one of them told us recently, “I’m thriving”). So, sometimes we travel together.
Anna Funder with her husband Craig and the restored Falcon.Credit: Courtesy Craig Allchin
When I spoke in the Barossa, we had an ulterior motive – to visit Goolwa, at the mouth of the Murray River. Falcon, now out of the memory-hole and restored to glory, lives there, where she leads the sail-pasts at the boat club. Her new owner kindly took us for a cruise and let us stay the night on her, where it all began.
The boat felt newer than it ever had been and our past resurrected, afloat with us inside it. I thought of Craig’s deep-dive into the dark.
Some things you can never find adequate thanks for, especially all the times you were saved without knowing.
Wifedom is published by Hamish Hamilton.
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