If Tsiolkas’s brazenness seems cartoonishly Australian and Cooper’s characters are unmistakenly American, this story wrongfoots assumptions. It is set in a leafy part of South London and, like the others in the collection, quietly told, but its author is American.
The sibling scenario plays out very differently here too, although no more happily. Owen and Hillary still live, unmarried in mid-life, in their parents’ house. Since they discovered their mother’s body as children after she had taken her own life, Hillary has felt keenly protective of Owen. He, meanwhile, has lost several of his friends in the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s/90s, and his connection to a (gay) life outside the house with it.
But many years previously, they both met and fell in love with the same man: Ben. After their shared object of desire went back to America, neither potential relationship having found the courage of its convictions, there were letters to Hillary that Owen has hidden from her, afraid that he would lose her. Now Ben – a married man with children – may be about to visit again. Owen and Hillary may each be convinced of the need to protect the other from life’s dangers and from emotional damage, but truths are revealed nonetheless.
The devotion of the story’s title is double-edged: they are guarding each other, but they do so both as protectors and gaolers.
First published in The Yale Review and collected in You Are Not a Stranger Here, Nan A. Talese, 2002
A Personal Anthology 