The Children's Bach

by Helen Garner

  By the time Dexter splashed down the sideway with the pizza boxes on his fore-arms, Elizabeth was setting the table. He stopped to wipe his feet and saw the big, free, two-handed gesture with which she flung out the tablecloth, a movement which seemed to him so carelessly proprietary, so symbolic of serene domesticity, that performed by someone other than his mother or his wife, parodied indeed by this viper, it became a travesty of truth and beauty. And yet the face she turned to him when she heard his feet scraping the mat was softened by the flush of alcohol: in the inadequate light she looked younger, sorrier, more deferential, more as he preferred to remember her.

  Vicki was trying to find music on the radio. ‘I’ll turn it off, Dex,’ she said, ‘if you don’t feel up to it.’

  ‘No, leave it,’ he said. He held out the boxes to Elizabeth and sat down. ‘That’s Berlioz. Leave that on.’

  ‘Opera,’ said Elizabeth under her breath. She opened the cutlery drawer and scrabbled among the metal.

  The announcer, a young and bashful man whose tentative voice could have reached the airwaves only on an amateur station, began to read out a synopsis.

  ‘In the next act,’ he murmured, ‘Margaret waits for Faust. She waits and waits, but in vain: he does not come. He is in the depths of the forest, invoking Nature.’

  The sisters glanced at each other over Dexter’s head. Elizabeth laid one hand over her heart and raised the other in a gesture of tremendous romantic suffering. ‘Invoking nature!’ she mouthed. But Vicki would not laugh. She stood in the middle of the room, not knowing what to do with her hands, and looked uncertainly at Dexter. Her face was blurred. She’s drunk, thought Elizabeth. And so am I. She lowered her arm and set five places on the cloth. Dexter was sitting quite still between the children, looking down at the curl of steam that rose from the round hole in the pizza box. He was listening to the music.

  Elizabeth lifted the lid off the pizza. Everyone sat forward. They ate in their fingers. If there is a spectre at this feast, thought Elizabeth, I’m it. She saw that though she had been able to bring a momentary order to this room, putting things in piles and clearing a space for action, she had not cleaned it, or made it into what they were all waiting for. Its surfaces were dull with the absence of meaning. The house itself was waiting.

  She took a taxi to Philip’s house. Poppy was asleep against the cushions with the phone beside her and an exercise book still open on her knee. ‘It’s dark and smoky in the Paradise Cafe,’ she had written. ‘You order a coffee, and you get it straight away. You can’t eat croissants at the Paradise Cafe. But you get good coffee for the price you pay.’

  Elizabeth turned on the television and sat down. It was an old French movie, half over. She wondered if she could dress like one of those maids, and trot about in high-heeled shoes with a strap across the instep, in a little fitted black dress to the knee and white collar and cuffs. She would need thin French lips, eyebrows plucked to a fine line, black curls over her forehead, and a piercing voice, sharp as the tinkling of her mistress’s silver bell. A maid: but whom should she serve?

  When the film ended a Greek man explained in his native tongue the details of the government’s health scheme. It took him fully ten minutes, with diagrams, and then an Italian came on and repeated the performance in his language. Elizabeth watched and listened. She recognised a word here and there. It was soothing, this patient setting out of facts and services. She picked up Poppy’s legs and arranged them across her lap. The tendons behind the girl’s knees tightened like wires. ‘You smell nice,’ murmured Poppy. ‘This lovely smell.’ A choir of old people in blue robes sang to close down the station. It was a Jewish choir. ‘In joyful strains then let us sing, Advance Australia Fair!’

  *

  Vicki began to talk. She held her head in her two hands, but was in danger of dropping it among the pizza crusts: it swayed, her elbows were too pointy, the table was too wooden. She had a lot of things she needed to say to Dexter. She was not sure whether he was paying attention; from time to time he did not seem even to be in the room, but then she would swing her head round and find him still sitting opposite her, looking at her from a long way away. The boys had gone. Someone must have put them to bed.

  ‘I hated it when she came home for visits. They fought and fought, and Mum used to cry in the bathroom. After she died I used to think I would get sick too. Elizabeth said I was a hypochondriac, but I said at the doctor’s they just look on your card and if you’re a hypochondriac it shows. Let’s make another one of those drinks. Where’s Elizabeth.’

  ‘She went hours ago. I’m going to put you to bed now. Come on. Can you stand up?’

  ‘Yes. I can.’ She could, and did, with skill. ‘I can put myself to bed.’ She walked to the door. ‘What about the washing up?’

  ‘Go to bed.’

  ‘Goodnight.’ She came slowly back to the table and held out her hand to shake his. ‘Goodnight, Dexter. I have enjoyed our conversation.’ He put out his hand and she pumped it vigorously. She laughed. ‘And now you’re supposed to say “What soft hands you have! All the better to touch you with!”’

  ‘Go to bed.’

  ‘They should be bloody soft, what with all the cream I put on them every day! They are soft, aren’t they?’

  ‘Very soft. Go to bed.’

  ‘I’m going, I’m going. Now you have to say ‘‘God bless you. Sleep tight. Sweet dreams.’’ That’s what my mother used to say. Did you ever see my mother?’

  ‘Yes. I danced with her at Morty’s twenty-first.’

  ‘Did you? I was only a baby then. You didn’t know me then, did you?’

  ‘I saw you. I was allowed to hold you.’

  ‘Did Athena?’

  ‘No. I didn’t know Athena then.’

  She let go his hand and backed away.

  ‘I’ll bring you a bucket,’ said Dexter.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘In case you chuck in the night.’

  She stared at him, and blundered out the door.

  The buckets in the bathroom all had underclothes soaking in them. He emptied one lot out into the basin and carried the dripping bucket into Vicki’s room. She had not taken off her clothes; she was lying on top of the sheet. Her eyes were open and the overhead light was on.

  ‘If I shut my eyes,’ she said, ‘I get the whirling pit so bad.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you drink a couple of glasses of water?’ he said. She made no response. He folded two pillows and wedged them under her neck, to keep her head upright. Her feet were bare, and the gap between her big toe and the next one was ingrained with grey dirt. He pulled up a blanket and spread it over her.

  ‘Night,’ she sang. ‘Ni-ight.’

  Damn braces; bless relaxes. Dexter could not utter the words God bless you. She had forgotten him, anyway. He stood with his hand on the light switch and looked at the small hump she made under the blanket. He did not know which of the two of them was the more pathetic. He tiptoed out of the room and turned off the light behind him.

  On his way through the kitchen he screwed up the pizza boxes and tried to force them into the stuffed bin, but they would not go so he left them standing in the corner. He shuffled the newspapers into a pile and his fingers slid across the cold surface of a photo. He picked it up and looked at it with dull eyes. Green. The boy, the young man was smiling in the garden, and the father was walking away.

  ‘The blushing apricot, and woolly peach,’ said Dexter, ‘Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.’

  Vicki’s eyes rolled up, and closed. The room lurched into motion, the bed tilted, there was a shallow rapid panting. Each pore squeezed out an icy droplet. She fell and fell, backwards through the universe, and the starry emptiness above her shrank to a circle the size of a plughole, and when that went out she would be dead. Her ears were full of a stellar drone, her jaws ran with spit. She flung herself sideways and the bucket edge dug into her cheek.

  Somebody stood in the doorway, somebody came i
n in the dark. Somebody weighed the bed down and put his arms round her, and held her head and wiped her mouth.

  ‘Don’t, don’t let me,’ she babbled.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t let me fall asleep. If I go to sleep I’ll die. I don’t want to, don’t let me.’

  *

  Athena woke at six o’clock in the morning. Philip was not there, nor had he been. The room was full of heavy, dark pieces of furniture. The impression that her presence made on the room was so slight that the turbulence of its former occupants, of a great line of passing strangers, swarmed and tumbled about her in its stuffy atmosphere: their boredom, their panic, their trembling fantasies: wire coathangers, shoes with worn-down heels, jumpers smelling of men’s sweat, trousers too long or too short for the fashion, bras with greying straps, skirts whose hems dipped at one side. She pulled back the curtains and expected them to fall apart in her hands.

  The street was brightening. She heard the sharp clack of a woman’s heels, and looked down. The woman was wearing a shapeless dress and carried two plastic supermarket bags. She stopped in front of the closed grille of a shop. She had her back to Athena. She put down one bag, as if to get out a key. Athena did not want to be seen watching. She got back under the sheet. She heard the heels again: the woman was walking away.

  What do I know about him? He cleans his teeth standing upright and looking himself straight in the eye in the mirror. Oh, I’ve never seen him clean his teeth. I know this is how he does it because there is a splattering of drops of dried toothpaste all over the bottom half of the mirror. Now I come to think of it, this means he must do it in a slightly bent posture. He is tall. If he did it upright, he would spray the top of the mirror.

  She would wait, and see.

  At eight o’clock she passed quickly through the lobby, keeping her eyes straight ahead, but she thought the girl at the desk gave her a smart look. She stood in the street outside the hotel. A warm wind was sweeping the grit away: the pavements shone like bone.

  What do tourists do? They walk, they stand, they look, they buy. They fumble for money on buses, not knowing whether to pay the driver or the conductor. They visit famous monuments, fountains, old houses full of stone and shutters and anachronistic lace. They notice that the day without duty passes with the slowness of a dream. They know that their existence is without point. They envy those who go arm in arm, who have a home to go to.

  In the art gallery she saw a painting of a woman in a dress like molten metal. All she could bear to look at were head portraits and domestic still lives. She looked for pictures of rooms, of windows, of light coming in through windows, of tables on which sat utilitarian objects, of people sitting at tables, of people busy on humble matters. She stopped in front of a painting called Reading Woman: she sat in her bonnet inside a room, turning her book towards the window through the top panes of which (the bottom ones being shuttered) fell a splash of yellow light on to the floor at her feet. The floorboards were wide. Three oranges in a tin dish sat on a chair. In the foreground two big pink shoes lay at cast-off angles on the floor.

  She walked on and on, until she came to the railway station and bought herself a ticket home.

  In the afternoon she went out on the sparkling water to the zoo, and stood for half an hour watching gangs of very small monkeys as bald and as serious as businessmen marching about their rocky enclosure. From there she turned and looked back across the water at the bridge. On its summit wriggled a tiny flag. A man standing near her said to his daughter, ‘I bet when they finished building it they all sat round the table feeling excited, and someone said, ‘‘I know what. How about we stick a little flag right on the very top?’’ And the others said, ‘‘All right!” ’

  Just as the sky turned green she passed the conservatorium, white as an ocean liner, with its two high palm trees flying like flags. She stopped on the slope of the lawn and stared up at the lighted first-floor windows: they were open, and three students, each in a separate room, were practising: a piano, a violin, a clarinet. The threads of melody, never meant to combine, mingled and made a pleasant, meaningless discord.

  She walked down the neon streets, and up again, and found her way back to the hotel. It was dark.

  He was lying on the bed watching a band on television. A girl was sitting at the dressing table, also watching, a spiky girl in a black and white houndstooth dress. Athena spoke from the door.

  ‘I’m going home tonight.’

  He sat up with a jerk. ‘Come in,’ he said, as if she were a visitor. ‘Athena, this is . . . ummm . . . She’s been showing me a song she wrote.’

  ‘I was just going,’ said the girl. The music was very loud. All these songs, thought Athena, are about the end of love, or its wrong beginnings.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Philip. ‘Excuse me, Athena. Listen. I like your song. Look, I’ll give you a tip. Go home and write it again. Take out the clichés. Everybody knows ‘‘It always happens this way’’ or ‘‘I went in with my eyes wide open’’. Cut that stuff out. Just leave in the images. Know what I mean? You have to steer a line between what you understand and what you don’t. Between cliché and the other thing. Make gaps. Don’t chew on it. Don’t explain everything. Leave holes. The music will do the rest.’

  The girl nodded and nodded. She backed towards the door, keeping her eyes on his face. Athena stood aside for her and she ducked out into the passage and ran away.

  ‘Where have you been all day?’ said Philip. ‘I waited for you. Let’s go out and eat.’

  ‘I’m going on the train. Tonight.’

  ‘Wait another couple of days. We’ll fly back.’

  She shook her head. The music stopped and the screen was filled with the smiling face of a young man.

  ‘Course,’ said the man, the boy, ‘an album’s a major statement of where a band’s at creatively.’

  ‘Aren’t you being a bit iron-clad?’ said Philip. He swung his feet to the floor. ‘It’s because I didn’t come back last night, isn’t it.’

  ‘Dexter came looking for me.’

  ‘Here?’ He laughed, and turned off the television. ‘Bloody Elizabeth. Big-mouth.’

  ‘I sent him away. He was crying.’

  He bent his knees in front of the mirror and flicked his hair about. ‘I can’t help you with that one, Athena,’ he said. ‘Jealousy. You’ll have to handle that one on your own, I’m afraid.’

  He straightened up and faced her. They were like two ghosts, now that the blood had gone out of them, two empty sets of garments hung opposite each other in a cupboard.

  ‘Of course,’ said Athena. ‘Of course I know that. I only came back to get my bag.’

  Are there longer nights than those spent sitting up in a second-class seat between Sydney and Melbourne?

  At dawn her own reflection receded from the glass, the train groaned and halted, and she looked out at the basalt plain, the striding power lines, the nodding thistles. The landscape was sheep-coloured. Sheep thronged by dams and under trees. The sky was clear. Someone at the front of the carriage turned on a radio, and in the stillness of the sleeping train, before hoarse voices could cry to it to shutup, she heard the music begin again, the whine, the false drama, the seductive little whispering of despair.

  Dexter turned over in a muck sweat. There was somebody else in the bed. It was not Athena. But he had his arm around this person. She had her back against his stomach and his hand covered a small, hard breast. A whiff of vomit hung about her hair.

  He sprang away to the edge of the bed. She did not move. He crouched there with his feet on the bare boards and his elbows between his knees. The hugeness of what had happened, of what he had done, fell on him like a haystack: the light went orange, the air was full of stalks and dust, and then there was no more air. He got up and stumbled out to the kitchen.

  So he was as bad as the rest after all. He was just another exploiter. He was no better than that tattooed, guitar-playing turd who’d pushed her up a
gainst the fridge and then turned around and taken Athena away. The feminists were right. Men were bastards. He was a bastard, a low, rotten perv, a slimy seducer of children. He was practically in loco parentis. He had abused Morty’s trust. He had broken faith with Athena. He was like one of those men his father made old-fashioned jokes about: he had let a girl get drunk and then he had taken advantage of her. And what if she was pregnant? What if she had to have an abortion? What if that deadshit had given her the clap and now she’d passed it on to him? He felt this one act spinning out its consequences forever into infinity. He felt himself going off the deep end. He went to the sink and made himself drink off a couple of glasses of water.

  The boys must be awake. What if Arthur went into the bedroom and saw her lying there where his mother was supposed to be? He ran to their room to head them off.

  They were lying quietly in their bunks. Billy was singing in his high, vague voice, a sound more like whistling than singing, and Arthur was up on one elbow reading with such fierce intensity that he did not even notice his naked father in the doorway. The small room was full of sunshine: its window, closed, was too bright to be looked at, and the air was fuggy with the smell of children.

  ‘Dexter!’

  It was her. He crept away, back into the front room. She was sitting up in the tangled sheets.

  ‘I dreamed about you,’ she said. She was giggling. ‘I dreamed you died. And at the funeral I had on a black dress without a petticoat and everyone could see my pants.’

  ‘Vicki,’ he said. ‘I think you’d better get up. Straight away.’ Daylight changed everything. Her breasts grew so high on her ribcage that he could not help staring at them. ‘Quickly. Before the kids come in here.’

  ‘But I need more sleep,’ she said crossly.

  ‘Get up. Get up.’ He whipped the top sheet away.

  ‘I think I’m gonna be sick again.’

  She trotted away to the back door and he stripped the bed like a professional. He took the sheets down the back steps and thrust them into the old washing machine under the porch. He had no idea how to make it fill up. He tried to read the instructions on the scratched dial. He realised that he was standing in his back yard with no clothes on, and that a naked teenage girl who was vomiting in the lavatory would emerge at any minute on to the concrete path in full view of any neighbour who cared to stick his head over the fence.