The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

  Miss Caroline from Honeytown

  By Anna Murray if you want to buy this book you have to put a cross on it

  Once upon a time miss caroline woke up in honeytown and when she walked down the street her shoos got stuck in the honey and then she cood hardly walk and there was honey trees and honey houses and honey money and miss caroline’s Mummy was cross with miss caroline and she shouted at her get your shoos out of there now and miss caroline cryed and cryed and she cood not get her shoos out of the honey

  The End

  By Anna Murray

  The Island, Greece, 1963

  A famous lady English novelist has appeared in our slovenly midst. Antonia Godwin is the celebrated recipient of some bountiful prize for a first novel, which sold trillions of copies and is now being made into a sumptuous film. She is among us like royalty among commoners; apparently the fame of our little artistic community has spread and the word is out in London that our humble island is the perfect place to come to finish a book or a play with absolutely no distractions. No cars. Only the soft music of donkeys’ feet. What rustic charm!

  She arrived at our table last week, on Friday, with a little entourage of hangers-on. ‘What bliss it must be to live here day in and day out,’ she announced in an actressy toff’s voice. (Let her come naked in winter, when the sea is like an oil slick and every taverna along the waterfront is closed, forcing us to huddle in the back of shops among the sacks of lentils and scavenging cats with pus-filled eyes.)

  David was being his most winning, affable self, drinking glass after glass, disarming her by asking after a well-known poet whom they both knew. ‘Oh, we must know many people in common!’ she said, obviously surprised that such scruffy would-be artists as ourselves had once mixed in such exalted circles. ‘You write too?’ she asked David, assuming, I suppose, that I must therefore be the writer’s wife. She is tall, haughtily beautiful with an aquiline nose, long legs, large breasts. I was looking closely at her Italian sandals, the cut of her dress, the careful way she had swept up her hair. She is here to write her ‘Greek novel’.

  David was soon entertaining the whole table—the distinguished lady writer; her entourage; the French pianist and composer, Stephanie, who has been living here almost as long as us; and all the other expatriates with whom we share this island. The painter from Seattle (very good, have no doubt that he will one day make his name). The painter from Sydney (very bad). The folk singer and poet from Canada via New York, Jerry Rothschild, whom everyone believes to be ‘the real thing’. And me, of course, the one who always meant to write the best book I could.

  David was telling war stories (the lady novelist and David were both in America for the same part of the war) and then the conversation turned, as it always does, to life and art. David was being his best, most eloquent self; his drunkenness had not yet tipped over into something more malicious. How embittered he has become since he came back empty-handed from London—these past few months have been the worst I can recall. We no longer go out together happily as a couple—that is, unselfconsciously, without some kind of strain. If we don’t brawl shamelessly during the time we are in public then it happens afterwards, when he presents me with a long, disgruntled list of what I said or did wrong.

  Last Friday was no exception. The night was brilliantly clear, the first warm night of spring: every star was blisteringly lustrous, the sea one black slice of shine. The water in the harbour looked glowingly luminous, a lapping, glossy dark thing at our feet. I suddenly found I desperately wanted the visiting English lady novelist to know that I was a writer too, the author of two slim, out-of-print novels once published in London. I heard myself putting my oar in, so to speak, my voice sounding ridiculously posh, not a rogue Australian vowel to be heard. For some reason now lost to me I started telling a joke about one of the Queen’s courtiers coming through customs at Sydney airport, how the customs official took his passport and said, ‘There’s no “t” in courier, mate.’ Everyone laughed politely and David shot me a contemptuous look. I sat back in my chair and shut up.

  I know all about life and art, mate, I wanted to shout, I know every last piece that makes up art’s whole, the way my husband and I fight night after night, causing tears to roll down each side of my face and meet as if in a bow under my chin. A ribbon of tears tied prettily around! What life! What art is this?

  ‘You,’ my husband shouted when we got home, ‘you have only two modes of being—the pompous I-am-a-neglected-genius mode or the unconfident I-am-a-defenceless-victim mode. Which is it now? Are you the unsung genius? Or the put-upon victim of men?’

  I forget why he was shouting this. Oh, yes, it started when I lost my temper because he was late meeting us at Pan’s restaurant earlier in the night. It was the first time in months Anna had agreed to come to dinner with us—and he had to go and muck it up by being late. How can you be late getting to a restaurant which is five hundred yards from your front door? He was working, he said, and had arrived at an important scene in the book and couldn’t stop; he’d told me three times already to expect him any time between quarter past and half past. ‘What? Eight or nine?’ I said, knowing I was making a mistake by going on about it but I could not stop. Within minutes the whole thing was a mess. ‘Do you want to bloody eat dinner tonight or shall we just go home?’ he shouted, slamming his glass down and shattering it, at which point Lil started to cry. I tried to redeem things as best I could, cleaning the glass up, trying to calm everybody down by making a few desultory stabs at conversation, but the evening was wrecked. The four of us sat there, eating in miserable silence, Pan’s awful food sticking in our throats.

  What shameless people we have become. I am as thoughtless and lacking in self-discipline as my father—how I used to hate the way he let his emotions run loose without a thought for anyone but himself—and yet here I am, forty years old, as shameless as him. I’m sorry, Anna, I’m sorry Lil, I’m sorry. No money, no love, no way out. Just more and more of this.

  What is the process by which two people become less themselves over time, reducing bit by bit that which they are able to reveal to each other? What is the butcher’s dark art which makes couples take so stealthily to hacking? When does the particular moment come when each feels himself to be wronged and embarks upon a deep and hidden course of retribution?

  Sometimes I think that I have never truly known my husband. Sometimes I think that the veil which exists between ourselves and other people is never rent, no matter how intimate the connection. I wonder, too, if love itself is nothing but a form of self-hypnosis by which we invent the people with whom we fall in love through some greedy private act of self-gratification. I know my husband was once a dreaming boy in St Kilda, Melbourne, a skinny boy who was no good at football and wrote poems about the moon long after he should have been asleep. I know his father came back from the Great War full of fear and anger, that he badly beat David and his brother, his mother too, until the day David turned sixteen and broke his father’s nose. I know that like myself David feels as if he built himself, that he arose, sourceless, as if from air. But what do I know of my husband’s veiled interior, of the infinite mysteries which make him, still dark to me after so many years? Sometimes I think I know him best from his fiction, which allows the illusion that the veil has been lifted to reveal the working consciousness within. Surely I cannot have mistaken fiction’s art for human truth? Could it really be that David’s truest story is one I will never read because it was never written down?

  Once I could tell David everything. Once he held me while I cried for everything lost to me, while I released to him every last secret. Once he took great pains to remind me of everything I still contained, of everything I could find within.

  Once he loved my vitality, my ability to talk to anyone, my spirit of invitation to the world. Now he hates my vitality, my ability to talk to anyone, my spirit of invitation to the world.

  Let me count the ways in which I have failed him. Let me count the ways i
n which we have failed each other.

  Today

  A moment’s peace, a moment’s reprieve. David came down from the studio (we finally cut a hole in the ceiling and have run a ladder up—effectively attaching him to the main body of the house).‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ he asked, surprising me. I was peeling potatoes for dinner but wiped my hands straightaway. How humiliating my belief in the possibility of redemption, how poignant my battered heart’s ability to hope: what is this human facility to be punched again and again but still long for the bruise to be kissed?

  In the street we walked side by side like two exhausted soldiers. Gone, gone, the days of holding hands, of conversation that is arbitrary, trailing, running off in unexpected directions. We are all plod and effort now, all manufactured speech, both of us have memorised the list of all those things we cannot speak about. I thought of mentioning the lady novelist but I imagined there was danger there, an undercurrent below the line of sight. I ran through other topics in my head but every single thing was suddenly perilous.

  ‘What a magnificent day!’ I said. David grunted, as we were already climbing another hill.

  ‘Antonia is leaving in the morning,’ he offered. ‘Apparently she has had a change of plans.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I hope it was nothing I said?’ I offered this vapid remark as a kind of conversational tool, knowing it to be the most stupid of devices.

  He cast me a contemptuous glance. ‘I’m afraid that not everything in the world relates to you, my dear,’ he said. I thought this remark might just as easily describe himself.

  ‘She is very beautiful, isn’t she,’ he continued, ‘she obviously takes a lot of trouble over her appearance.’

  ‘Unlike me,’ I said.

  He gave a great burst of laughter. ‘You! You don’t give a damn about clothes or fashion or what you look like. You only care about being a genius. Have you looked in the mirror lately?’

  ‘Why?’

  He stopped climbing and looked hard at me. ‘I think the expression is, “You have let yourself go”.’

  My hands instinctively shielded my face and his mouth flickered into a kind of smile. ‘There’s nothing worse than a beautiful woman hanging around when the party’s over,’ he said.

  The air left my lungs. I heard the pulse of my blood.

  ‘Oh, don’t panic, darling,’ he said, turning around again and starting to climb. ‘You can live among the ruins of your beauty, like a Roman statue whose arms have fallen off.’

  I sat down on the stone steps, trying to breathe. ‘How can you be so cruel?’ I said, beginning to cry.

  ‘Oh, it’s that time again, is it? Drama 101!’

  I picked up a rock and would have thrown it at him except Antonia herself appeared from a side lane at that very moment.

  ‘Hello there! Isn’t it the most perfect day?’ she said. ‘I am tempted to write to my publisher to say I am never coming back.’

  My eyes were filmy with tears but I still managed a social smile. Where did that smile come from, with my heart so full of my own misery and disgrace? ‘We don’t have the choice,’ I said to her, ‘we’re stuck.’

  Her glance took us both in; she made some kind of appraisal of the situation, and smiled. ‘But what a place to be stuck,’ she said. ‘Lucky you.’

  Lucky me, still longing for the kiss upon the bruise, still hoping to be noticed and loved. Lucky me, offering up my ruined statue’s face in stupid, never-ending hope.

  Sunday

  In bed last night, feigning sleep, David came in, took off his clothes and crawled in beside me. Instead of lying stiff on his side of the bed, he snuggled into me. We lay, cradled like egg and cup, and a single tear slipped from my eye to the pillow.

  ‘I do love you, you know,’ he said, ‘still. Despite everything. Because of everything.’

  I did not want to say the wrong thing. ‘Even though I’m an ugly old hag?’ I tried to make this sound like a joke.

  ‘Oh, you’re not that bad. Angelo wouldn’t say no to you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘considering Angelo is about one hundred and three with one eye and no teeth.’

  He laughed. ‘You’d make a lovely couple!’

  I kicked him under the bedclothes. ‘I’m really not that ugly, am I? Are you still attracted to me?’

  He kissed my hair. ‘Of course, of course.’

  I did not want to bring up the fact that we hardly ever make love. I did not want to bring danger into the room, our other harder selves: I did not want to be the first to lift the knife.

  ‘David, are you attracted to Antonia? You must be—you know what men are like.’

  He laughed. ‘Do I? I don’t even know what I’m like.’ He kissed me softly on the nape of my neck. ‘Darling, if I had a drachma for every woman I’ve been attracted to, I’d be Aristotle Onassis.’

  I took a breath. ‘Would you ever have another affair?’

  He sighed.‘Oh, sure, I can really see me sneaking off without the whole island knowing.’

  I thought: it doesn’t matter now if he has another affair, the circle was broken when he took to his bed a pretty nineteen-year-old girl one summer in London. Whatever was safe inside the circle, whatever was whole and unblemished, was released. I lay quietly beside him.

  ‘Oh, the number of times I’ve fallen in love,’ David said dreamily, his voice soft in my ear.

  ‘What do you mean “fallen in love”? What do you mean exactly?’

  I listened to him breathing. ‘Feeling lighter on my feet. A general sense of happiness because that person is alive in the world.’

  My heart started a little dance, from shock. ‘How many times have you felt that?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, dozens. Twenty, thirty, I don’t know, I’ve lost count.’

  ‘But you can’t have! You can’t have fallen in love thirty times. Surely you are describing a crush, or a fleeting feeling of attraction for someone. You are not describing falling in love.’

  He removed his arm. ‘Why not? Just because my experience is different to yours doesn’t mean it’s not real for me. Honestly, Katherine, you are the vainest creature alive.’

  ‘My vanity has nothing to do with it. You’re a writer, you know how to use the correct word. Falling in love is a life-changing experience, which most people are only lucky enough to experience once or twice in their whole lives.’

  He snorted. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said, ‘and how many times have you been in love?’

  ‘Twice,’ I said. ‘Exactly twice.’

  He lifted himself up and hissed into my ear. ‘What a lucky man I must be. The much-desired Katherine Elgin, choosing lowly me. May I ask if I am the first or the second?’

  He got out of bed and stalked to the door, slamming it on his way out.

  I think David began to leave me when my whole self was trained upon the girls. They took the milk from my breasts, the sleep from my eyes, the juice from my body. There was nothing left for him; I was too tired from holding them all day to hold him.

  It was in those early days before we left Sydney for London that David first began to go. The secretary merely met him at the door.

  He didn’t want a wife whose eyes were elsewhere, on small children, on her work but not on him. When we first met, David said he had always wanted to live with another artist. It was his dream to have a mate who, unlike his first wife, understood what it meant to speak of writing as a vocation.

  But he didn’t expect me to cling to work despite child-rearing, domestic burdens, the gift of love. Perhaps in his deepest self he does not believe a woman can be an artist.

  Now David thinks my compulsion to write is evidence only of neuroticism.

  I am beginning to think he is right.

  Monday

  I have to face the fact that this experiment of ours has failed. David knows it, which is undoubtedly why he is so continually bad-tempered, and I know it too, but neither of us dare yet say it out loud. Very bad sales for his last
book, his London agent suggesting his publishers might not be interested in his next one, our last remaining money running out. I dare not tell him I have just heard from Cape that they are not going to take my novel.

  This morning on the way to the market Lil spied a pair of cast-off tourist’s sandals outside Cassandra’s house.‘Ella, Mama, ella! Paputskha!’ she cried, rushing towards them like a starving girl to food. It wasn’t the fact of her running towards them which struck me to the quick, but that she worked out in a flash that the shoes were abandoned and she was in need of new ones. They are too big for her but she will not give them up and has been clomping around the house all afternoon. Here is the hard truth: we no longer have enough money to go to Athens to buy new shoes for our children.

  We will have to go back to Australia like whipped dogs, our tails hanging. We will have to go back and admit that the nay-sayers were right, you cannot slip out from under the net and survive. It’s true, the world makes you live by the rules or else it makes you pay and pay. It turns you into home owners and mortgage payers and pension savers and insurance holders, it makes you live near good schools for the children.

  The girls know something is fatally askew: yesterday Anna asked me who David was married to before he was married to me. ‘Why do you want to know?’ I asked, hearing an unfamiliar note of anxiety in her voice.

  She shrugged. ‘No reason.’ I explained that a long time ago David used to be married to a woman called Jean but that sometimes marriages did not work out and people decided to leave each other.

  ‘Is Dad going to leave you?’

  I crossed the room and took her in my arms: she stiffened.

  ‘I’m sorry if our fighting is upsetting you, darling. We’re going through a very difficult time,’ I said.

  ‘Is he going to leave?’

  I touched her hair. ‘No, sweetheart, he’s not going to leave.’

  She looked fierce. ‘I wish he would. I wish he’d go away and never come back.’