Burr spoke softly at first, turning a plastic salt-shaker around in his fingers. ‘Slade’s giving us everything,’ he said. ‘You do understand that, don’t you? And you’re trying to take it away. Why are you doing this, Dick?’
‘I’m taking nothing away,’ I said. ‘And we’re wasting our time talking about it, Darcy. Katrin makes up her own mind about going; I’m staying. It’s as simple as that.’
‘No,’ Burr said. ‘No.’ He was speaking half under his breath again, as he’d done on the phone, with a sort of leashed violence. He still held the salt-shaker between finger and thumb: delicately, as though it might detonate. Now he put it down on the laminex table-top with a sharp rap. ‘It’s not as simple as that, bugger you,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you really understand. And I’m going to bloody well make you understand.’
Pipsqueak sniggered. ‘Boss-man doesn’t understand anything,’ she said. Darcy ignored her, his amber eyes never leaving mine, and she began to eat the sugar from its plastic bowl, shovelling it in greedily with a teaspoon.
I wanted relief from Burr’s fixed gaze, and found myself staring at a feature high on the back wall: an illuminated box containing an animated toy band of 1940s vintage, powered by electricity. The bandleader in his tuxedo waved his baton; the musicians, with jerky movements, played their instruments in a ghastly aquarium light, their smiles fixed and inane, their eyes wide. With each new tune on the jukebox, they struck up again: tonight and every night; for ever.
‘You’d better listen, Miller,’ Darcy was saying, and I dragged my eyes back to him, startled at his unaccustomed use of my surname: I suppose it was a signal of his new hate. ‘Katrin says she won’t go if you don’t,’ he said. ‘And do you want to know what Roy Slade says about that? No Katrin, no group. You get it? It’s non-negotiable. He won’t look at the idea of another lead singer. So we lose everything if you don’t come. Everything.’
I’ve never heard such passion put into a single word as Burr put into that ‘everything’. He was seeing the human sea again, I suppose: receding; receding.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘She’s got her choices to make; I’ve got mine.’ I held his gaze long enough to let him know I meant it; then I glanced back at the toy band, taking a sip of the grey coffee the aged waitress had dumped in front of me.
When I looked at Darcy’s face again, I was astounded. Something was happening to it that I’d not seen in a human face before. Instead of the single nerve that had jerked in his cheek in Phil Brown’s office, there were three or four jumping at once, as though worms were under the skin — as though his face had been taken possession of by some alien life. And it was hard to see now whether his eyes gleamed simply with anger, or a helpless distress at what was happening to him. It was a novel and alarming phenomenon, and I believe it may have been the pity in my face that caused his anger to reach its climax.
‘You’ll come, Miller,’ he said. He leaned further forward, neck extending to bring his face close to mine in the old way. His big fists were clenched on the table, and he was visibly trembling; his frown was passionate, and the pupils of his eyes had become pin-points like Pipsqueak’s — but I felt sure he was on no drug. ‘You won’t wreck the Rymers, because they’re not yours to wreck,’ he said. ‘That’s over. They’re mine. And you can’t put us all in a box any more, you bastard. If you make Katrin choose between the Rymers and your shitty little marriage, she’ll choose the Rymers, and she’ll choose Brady.’
‘We’ll have to see about that,’ I said. I felt none of the confidence I presented; I knew what he said was probably true, and cold nausea and loneliness filled my body. I prepared to stand up, pushing my cup away.
‘Wait! ’ His voice had actually become a shriek; rage’s ecstasy gripped him totally, and his contorted face resembled a demented old woman’s. I found him frightening, now: not because of anything he might do but because of what he was becoming. But in the Hasty, no one noticed except Pipsqueak, who looked admiring, and the derelict, who stopped drumming to stare blearily. The shriek was lost among the Hasty’s other noises, and the cracked shout in which he now addressed me went unnoticed too. He pointed a shaking finger. ‘Tell her you’ll come,’ he said, ‘or I tell her about Deirdre. You hear?’
‘That hare won’t run, Darcy,’ I said, and climbed out of the booth. ‘Leave Deirdre alone.’
He frowned at me in terrible silence as he’d done in my dreams. Then, walking away, I heard him shriek again over the noise of the jukebox. ‘You’ve lost your wife, you crippled bastard! You won’t find her at home — she’s with Brady. And she’ll stay with Brady!’
Darlinghurst Road was as crowded as usual: I was jostled by visitors from the suburbs whose faces searched daringly for vice. The Duke of Darlinghurst Road passed me by, in his grey tent-coat and many waistcoats, trudging along the gutter; he glanced at me sharply, as though he saw my state.
And my state was despair, since I didn’t doubt that Burr was right. I harboured that simple and trite knowledge which fills the veins with lead: the beloved is lost; she was life; and life is no longer supportable.
I looked back once at the jumbled line of terraces on the junction, one of which housed the Hasty Tasty. The sherry bottle poured its green neon liquor, and the terraces and all the other buildings of the Cross came closer, as though to ingest me: private hotels, brothels, chemists, strip-shows, real-estate agents, patisseries — most of them housed in quaint Edwardian confections with cosy bay windows and little first floor balconies. They pressed in and receded, distinct yet without perspective, and I grasped my position.
This had been a place of refuge for Katrin: a surrogate Europe in the south of the world where life had forced her to stay. Why had I assumed she’d stay for ever? The lost north had always been waiting, and I’d scarcely been married to her at all. She’d merely been a visitor in my life, a refugee from that hemisphere to which talent would now take her back: a hemisphere which was reality for her, but only dream for me.
I ran up the stairs.
She and Brian were sitting at a table in the living-room, a bottle of red wine and some cheese and biscuits between them. Their greetings and smiles were quiet, almost meditative, as though offered to an invalid; they sat in big-boned solemnity, and the sentences they spoke were like talk around a sickbed. One imagines hope is gone at some earlier stage, in such a process; but a small defiance of events has been nursed unconsciously: a last spark.
I sat down at the table, and Brian carefully poured out a glass of red, the clink of the bottle distinct; it was quiet in the flat, with Jaan and old Vilde in bed. He passed me the glass. ‘Get this into you, Dick.’ His voice had changed tonight; there was a new formality about him which belonged to that future delivered by Roy Slade. He took out the makings, and began to roll a cigarette. ‘So you talked to Darcy,’ he said, and shot me a quick glance.
‘Yes.’
‘And what did you two fellers decide?’ He lit up, squinting at me sideways.
‘I understand you’ll all be going indefinitely. As I said, I won’t be coming with you.’
‘Richard.’ Katrin had spoken on a note of maternal reproof; but when I looked at her, she bent her head as though to hide tears, clutching her wineglass. Perhaps she believed that when she raised her head again, all this would be solved.
Brady was looking at me as he’d sometimes done in the remote past: with a mixture of bafflement and contempt. Head back, eyes half closed, he drew on his cigarette, released a long stream of smoke, and then turned to Katrin, speaking as though I weren’t present.
‘You can see how it is, Kat. He wants to stop us.’
‘Please. Don’t talk like this.’ Her voice pleaded with him, and pleaded with me; but her head remained bent. She wouldn’t look at either of us.
And suddenly I saw that Brian had keyed himself up for this moment. Any emotion in him was surprising, and his intensity almost checked my own anger: he was white about the nostrils, and his mouth was t
ight. His light eyes had always been hungry; now they had a starved look.
‘Katrin and I need to do this,’ he said. ‘We’re meant to work together and to be together. I reckon you ought to face that, Dick.’
Now Katrin raised her head; her eyes were red-rimmed, but her expression wasn’t what I’d expected. She looked at Brian with sad prohibition, her mouth set. ‘Brian — you’d better not say any more. You’d better go.’
He began to speak, but she said quickly: ‘Please. You have to go. I can’t bear any more. Just go.’
He paused at the door and looked back at her, lower lip out-thrust. He ignored me; I’d become invisible, just as I’d feared.
‘We leave for Melbourne at eight in the morning,’ he told Katrin. ‘Darcy and I will bring the bus around. You still coming?’
‘Of course.’ She sat stiff-backed at the table, looking straight ahead, squinting as though from a migraine.
When he went out, she turned and faced me, both fists clenched on the table. Her eyes filled with tears again, but she didn’t blink.
‘When you sing with someone,’ she said, ‘it’s almost impossible not to love them.’
I didn’t touch her, in bed that night; our bodies were turned to stone. When she slept, I lay awake.
For the moment, she’d chosen me; but only for the moment. Nothing she’d said to me before she slept had convinced me otherwise. Brady wasn’t reliable; she’d said so once herself. There had been enough risk in her life, and Brady presented risk, unpredictability; this was the real reason she’d drawn back from the brink, I thought. I was reliable, and Brian wasn’t.
She wouldn’t go to Britain; but she was still going to Melbourne for the concerts: they couldn’t cancel them, she’d said. In the morning, she’d be gone; she was gone already, and I listened to her breathing. Was I really to believe that he wouldn’t be able to change her mind in the next three days — alone with her, five hundred miles away?
I studied her face in the dark to memorise it: the over-emphatic lips and smooth Estonian cheekbones. I wasn’t just losing Katrin, I was losing those memories that had now become my own: short Baltic summers; birch woods; Dillingen and the Camp. I was losing the substance of my life, whose flavour was one with the heavy Estonian rye bread she’d never let the house be without.
I wanted to kill Brady, but I couldn’t even hate him; it was futile, somehow; like hating a part of myself. Paralysis had set in.
8
They were due back on Sunday.
Thursday and Friday passed without a call from Katrin; once I phoned her hotel, but she was out, and I left no message.
On the Friday evening, old Vilde and I made dinner together, moving about the kitchen-verandah while Jaan worked on his homework in the living-room.
‘I have forgotten to buy the salt you asked me,’ Vilde said.
He stood by the stove looking at me through his tinted glasses with the vague, bewildered humbleness of the old; he’d aged a lot in the last year, although his thatch of white hair was thick as ever. His striped shirts were still always clean, his trousers well-pressed, his shoes made gleaming each day as though for business, and I admired him for it. ‘Very bad, to forget salt,’ he said. ‘Two things we used to say a house should never be without: salt, and bread.’
After dinner, when Jaan had been helped into bed, Vilde and I sat in the living-room, drinking our evening vodkas. He had a rug over his knees; he seemed to feel the cold more, lately, even that of the mild Sydney autumn, which had only just begun. His books lay on a small table at his elbow; he now drew one of these from the pile, and passed it across to me.
It proved to be a photograph album I’d not seen before, and I found myself looking at old black-and-white pictures of the Vilde family. Himself when young, handsome and archaic-looking in a stiff, historic suit: a gentleman from the time of Russia of the Czars, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His wife, in traditional dress. Their formally dressed children, in a garden with larches and fir trees. And here were pictures of friends: cheerful, big-boned Estonian faces from a past that had once been happy, but which now was stained with the terrible yellow of history. Nearly all of them were lost, he said. His big finger pointed, trembling slightly; this one had died in the war; that one had been taken to Siberia.
He pointed again. ‘Katrin,’ he said, and looked at me carefully, with age’s deep enquiry.
She stood with her mother on a pathway in Tallinn, in front of a clump of birches: eight years old, happy, wearing the national costume, with its full skirt, long-sleeved blouse, little waistcoat and head-dress.
‘She liked to wear her national dress,’ Vilde said. ‘Always a little vain, as all artists are. Prosit.’ He raised his glass and smiled with indulgent irony.
I felt briefly suspicious and resentful — how much did he know? He’d been told of the possibility of a brief visit to Britain by the group, but that was all; and I wondered now if he’d guessed more.
He leaned forward. ‘You will go to England with the others? Or wait here?’ The sudden question was uncanny.
‘That’d depend on how long they went for. There’s nothing definite.’
‘I could not come,’ he said flatly, and wiped vodka from his moustache.
‘Wouldn’t you like to see Europe again, Vanaisa?’
He shook his head. ‘I am too old,’ he said. ‘And my Europe has gone. I would not like to see what is there now. Katrin is still in some ways a child; she imagines our old Europe is still there. She will have to stop being a child, soon. There is Jaan to think about; I cannot care for him as I did. And you should have children of your own.’ He smiled at me briefly. ‘Now I must go to bed.’
He pushed himself up from the armchair with both hands. ‘God keep you.’ He said this every night.
‘Good night, Vanaisa.’
More of his certainties were gone than he thought; but there was no use in saying so.
On Saturday afternoon, no longer having the office to keep me from my thoughts, I went out walking, prowling the grey streets of Darlinghurst until I grew tired. At six o’clock, coming home through the Cross, I found myself passing the Catholic church in Roslyn Gardens.
The same restlessness that had taken me in and out of the doors of shops, pubs and coffee lounges all afternoon led me in here.
Evening Mass was beginning; people shifted and coughed. I hadn’t been to Mass for years, but I knelt in a pew and murmured the responses. A mechanism inside me would always do this, no matter what opinions I might hold, and it gave me an empty sort of comfort, like the rediscovery of a cherished habit. The Latin liturgy was soothing: an aged music of reassurance, confirming that even the terrible needn’t mean despair; that the terrible could be dealt with. ‘In te Domine, speravi, non confundar in aeternum …’
The priest was in violet; violet cloths shrouded and entirely hid the statue of the Virgin and the figure on the Cross, making them like bodies in a morgue; the altar was stripped. We were well into Lent, and I hadn’t even known it; an irrational sense of shame at this took me aback. The strangers around me were familiar, resembling those other Irish-made faces of every Sunday Mass of boyhood, at Sacred Heart in Newtown. The old man next to me had a stern expression and a cough, both of which grew irritating. I told myself I’d go, soon; but I lingered, still half embarrassed to leave before the end.
My attention wandered as it always had, inside the Latin; then it was briefly brought back by the sound of the Gospel in English. The priest in the pulpit was thin, nondescript and spectacled: a serious clerk. ‘“Walk whilst you have the light, that the darkness overtake you not; and he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth … These things Jesus spoke, and He went away, and hid Himself from them.”’
Around the walls went the familiar, coloured bas-reliefs in their wooden frames: the Stations of the Cross, aesthetically primitive, resembling a comic strip. They marched as they’d marched through all the Sundays at Sacred Heart: a cartoon serial,
its hero the man who’d consented to play the clown’s role invented for Him, in the mock-royal robe and crown of thorns they’d forced on Him, bleeding and staggering between the ranks of malicious faces (Jesus meets Veronica; Jesus falls a Third Time), arriving finally at the climax He had clearly brought upon Himself, in the sunset of Golgotha. This was the time of the Sorrowful Mysteries; the time of His imminent entombment. He had freed us, and soon it would be Easter: then He would rise, and joy would be born.
A line shuffled to Communion which I wasn’t entitled to join; kneeling, I watched the faces come back down the aisle towards me, a transitory gleam of joy showing in all of them, a joy which was not quite fatuous, but which human beings can never sustain for long, and are perhaps not meant to. The old man who sat next to me was coming back too, his mouth munching frankly on the Host, large head bowed, bent frame encased in the pinstriped suit he plainly wore seldom; perhaps only here.
Christ inside him, he entered the pew and smiled at me, acknowledging the good fortune he thought we shared. Smiling back, I wondered why he’d ever annoyed me; I had an absurd desire to weep; a rush of tears; and I covered my face with my hands again, grateful for the pretence of prayer, staying that way until the final prayers of the Mass: the ghetto appeals to Mary and to the orders of angels, in which I joined.
“‘Hail, holy queen, mother of mercy; hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears …
‘‘‘… do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, cast Satan down to hell, and with him all the other wicked spirits who wander through the world to the ruin of souls.”’
The phone rang at nearly midnight, on its bamboo table by the door. I was still awake, reading in Vilde’s armchair, and I picked up the receiver with my pulses accelerating; a sensation that had been elicited by every call of the past three days. I usually expected Katrin; but sometimes I thought it might be Deirdre Dillon.
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