by Carmel Bird
When Diana speaks it is to say, ‘Rosita. I think that was a strange thing to do, wasn’t it? Perhaps?’
‘No.’
Nothing more was said.
Chapter Seven
The Pond of Respectability and the Light of Truth
There was a table set out under the trees in the garden of the house where Roland’s parents lived. The scene behind the house, which is called Tipperary and resembles my great-aunt’s house in Sausalito, had an Edwardian air of elegance that has faded and almost departed – the old chestnut tree, the gleaming white cloth, fragile pink and lemon china, possibly Limoges, small triangular sandwiches, a tall round fruit cake topped with cherries, a silver tea service, soft white napkins folded in squares. Such rituals are still carried out in remote corners of the world. The tea was from China, brewed to a light perfection, the sugar in lumps and served with gleaming silver tongs. The flocks of servants who once polished the silver and placed the cherries on the cake have become extinct; in their place there are machines and wonderful new chemicals, and the institution of the lone housekeeper, an institution that will never die as long as there are Bruccolis with Edwardian houses and gardens.
The housekeeper vital to the smooth operation of Tipperary is Celestina Ogg, an impossibly tall, beautiful young woman from the Sudan. It seems to me to be obvious that before long Celestina will drift out of Callianthe’s kitchen, across the lawns and down the road and onto the catwalks of Paris and Milan. But for the time being she is cheerfully cleaning and polishing the silver sugar tongs. I may be imagining this, but it seems to me that if anybody can see through to the truth of why Cora Mean is here in the garden, is staying in the Bruccoli house, it’s Celestina. She is not only incredibly beautiful but exceptionally intelligent. But of course she scarcely speaks, and will keep her counsel.
In the garden, Callianthe is presiding – soft pastel chiffon frock, soft iris-blue Ferragamo sandals. Bernard is bustling tall and lithe across the lawn – white silk shirt, black Versace jeans. Callianthe is renowned as a wonderful cook. No sickbed, baptism, fête or wake, but a basket of goodies from Callianthe’s kitchen will appear. Callianthe is a woman on a mission to find and to present and to demonstrate all that is good and beautiful in the world, to bring people together in happy groups. In order to do this she often finds it necessary to ignore pain and sorrow, for the perfect surface must be discovered and preserved and displayed. In the watches of the night Callianthe sometimes encounters the darkness, the horror, the violence that pulse relentlessly on behind the scenes, but she has over a lifetime of practice learned to lift herself out of the vortex by self-taught techniques of meditation and visualisation and prayer. Not much happens in the world, near or far, but Callianthe is onto it with a prayer.
By morning she is always bright and light and ready to help, prepared to go on, directing Celestina and planning cakes and casseroles and visits to the zoo. Visits also, it must be said, to shrines of a religious nature, for the miracles and the rituals of her faith are central to her being and to her life’s project. Her unlined brow and clear eyes have the appearance of knowledge and innocence all at the one time. She is thought by many to be some kind of saint. I observe that she is very powerful, and is serenely confident in her power and agency.
Host and hostess gathered about them their son Roland, neighbour Rosita, Rosita’s guest Diana, and Diana’s sister Edith, and – pale, frail and beautiful – Cora. Corazón was the centre of the scene for it was she who brought the players to this place. Callianthe specialised in such exquisite moments. She possibly imagined herself as part of the set of a movie or at least a TV mini-series of that pretty English nostalgic kind. There were a few golden rose petals scattered across the tablecloth. It doesn’t matter what the guests were wearing; they were all in keeping with the occasion, if not as elaborately turned out as their host and hostess. Callianthe is proud of her handsome priest/son who relaxes – or appears to relax – into the gold cushions of his generous white wicker armchair. He too wears designer jeans and a white shirt, although in the recesses of his mother’s imagination – which are, you might have discerned, vast, deep and creative – he sometimes materialises as a hurrying Franciscan friar from the rocky landscape of a fading fresco in Assisi, his brown hood drooping from his shoulders, a pair of doves paying rapt attention at his feet.
Only in the watches of the night does Roland’s sister Eleena, the lost beloved Eleena, rise and float in all her shiny dandelion beauty across the heavens of her mother’s eternally sorrowing mind. No image of Eleena is to be found in the house. If you didn’t know she had existed, you would never guess, never get the chance to ask: ‘Who is the little girl?’ It is as you can see quite a busy, fertile, agile, creative mind in there behind Callianthe’s unwrinkled brow, behind her sunny and untroubled smile.
Nearby a pond, the surface a mosaic of waterlily leaves; beneath in busy opulence thick orange goldfish are feeding and breeding and parting the dark waters. They are blowing their bubbles, swallowing the eggs of any passing mosquitoes. They are relatives, close or distant, of my own many dear fish at home in Holmby Hills.
Edith and Corazón are guests in the Bruccoli house. It is a house bright with light spilling through windows inspired in the imagination of the builder by houses in southern Italy and France. Spacious houses, pretty houses, houses where people such as Callianthe can reside in their perfect setting. I even fancy that a great-aunt of mine (no relation really, as you must never forget I have no relatives) bears a resemblance to Callianthe, but that is probably just my over-active imagination and a certain amount of wishful thinking.
This visit of the Mean mother and daughter is for the duration of Cora’s – Cora’s what – indisposition? Until she is considered well enough to return to boarding school. Until her body has readjusted to the removal of her appendix and the interruption to her reproductive project. This is Corazón the Fertile, so she must rest up in order to proceed with her enterprise.
Everybody: ‘How are you feeling now, Cora?’
Cora appears to be almost completely well again, two weeks after her ordeal. She is wearing Levi’s, topped with a slightly grubby Hello Kitty T-shirt, and she has rows of little coloured bangles cluttering each wrist.
‘I think I won’t go back to school. For a while. Probably.’ Her voice is soft and her eyes are distant.
Rosita in particular is shocked and troubled. This is her best art student, the bright hope.
Edith says, ‘Diana is thinking of taking Cora overseas for a little holiday.’
Edith, and to a certain degree Roland, is the only member of the group around the afternoon-tea table who is in possession of the facts regarding Cora’s illness, facts which I think have leapt like fleas into the consciousness of Celestina who drifts silently between house and garden table. Edith would like to see Cora well away from the handsome wild bright virile boys of Loyola College. Cora is in fact daydreaming under the dappling shadows of the leaves overhead, daydreaming about just one of those boys. What makes Edith imagine there will be no such boys in Rome and Paris and Madrid remains a mystery. I suppose it’s called denial.
‘She can repeat the year, perhaps,’ says Diana. ‘Imagine how much more she will know after a nice little holiday in Spain. And also in Italy and in France. We shall be going to the Uffizi, the Prado, the Louvre, the Vatican, the Eiffel Tower.’
Rosita is silenced in the presence of such a litany of sacred places of the art world.
Cora feels the powerful machinery of her family moving into gear. She feels the agency and dominance of Diana the Manipulator swinging into force. There is something beautiful about it all, like the machinery of a fantastic clock. The only time Cora went to such places was when she was seven. She remembers Euro Disney, she remembers eating chocolate in a gondola in Venice and throwing up in an airport cafeteria.
And then Diana’s machinery turns another cog, she has a brain wave.
‘Rosita!’ she cries. ‘Why
, my dear Rosita, you shall accompany us! Yes, yes, you must come with us to the Louvre. You have never never seen the true faces of your beloved art, Rosita. All you know are books and travelling exhibitions. Rosita is coming with us to see the world!’
And so it is decided. Rosita will accompany them for part of the time, during her school vacation. Diana rushes on as her plans become realities in her own mind and in the minds of all concerned. Rosita offers no resistance, in fact she feels she has entered a beautiful dream in which Diana whisks her to the places she has longed to go, on a journey she has been too timid to take alone.
Callianthe sees all this as the answer to a prayer she has been saying for Rosita for many years. Of course Rosita should travel to the galleries of Europe. It makes sense. Oh, Callianthe is warm with pleasure in this response of heaven after so many years. It is clear to her that God has been waiting for this very opportunity. It is perfect.
Cora abandons any thoughts of being able to influence the plans. Roland the Good listens with a certain fascination, and it seems to him to be quite a sound idea to whisk the girl away from temptation with two such excellent chaperones as her aunt Diana and her teacher Rosita. He also is an innocent in many ways. He thinks that Dr Silver will probably see it all as a solution to the perennial problem of how to keep the girls and boys apart, or at least one girl and one boy apart for a period of time. Dr Silver is not, however, as clever as she might be.
‘Would you like that, Cor?’ Edith says.
‘I suppose so.’ Cora’s voice is still soft and guarded. She doesn’t quite know where all this is really going.
‘I will need to discuss it with your father.’
Nobody really registers this remark, or if they do they realise that Cora’s father Michael will simply go along with the decisions Edith and Diana make.
‘What a very lucky girl,’ Callianthe says. ‘How you will love the Prado, Corazón. Goodness, Bernard, how long is it since we last went to the Prado?’
‘Quite recently, Cally. And Florence. And Venice. And all roads lead to Rome.’
He’s off then to a corner of the garden looking for a small red ball to throw for the dogs. He hurls it and two Jack Russells come flying up the gravel path and across the lawn where they squabble over the ball until one wins and rushes up to Bernard who roughs its ears with his open hand.
‘Bernard, darling, when exactly did we last go to the Prado?’ Callianthe persists.
‘Oh, last year, the year before. One time.’
‘He is so carefree about art. But he loves it too. I know he does, deep down.’
You could wonder why Callianthe doesn’t know when she was last in Madrid, but such is the conversational convention, she must ask Bernard. It is really only a way of bringing Bernard, who is bored by the afternoon-tea chatter and patter, back into the circle of talk.
Cora fiddles all the time with the edge of the tablecloth, rolling it between her fingers, unrolling it, rolling it up again. She is very bored, but unlike Bernard cannot leap around throwing things for dogs. She is meant to be fragile after being in hospital, and for another thing she is a well-mannered girl who knows she has to sit at the table and attempt to make small talk. Or at least look interested in what people are saying. She has her own plans and agendas, but she also knows that she will never bring them about by demonstrating dissent or rebellion.
Rosita smiles, all but lost in her own dream of happiness. She knows from experience that Bernard is a great art-lover. He and she have spent happy afternoons together in galleries in Melbourne, and often in galleries in country towns. Callianthe is also famous for her picnics – delightful baskets and boxes of things to eat while sitting on a picnic rug beside a distant river after wandering through the galleries. Always there is a box of Callianthe’s Spur of the Moment Celebration Vanilla Surprises, no matter what the occasion. The Bruccolis have quite an art collection hanging in the house, and this is not Callianthe’s doing, it is Bernard’s.
Rosita will hesitate for a long time, several days, before fully agreeing to accompany Diana on her return to Europe. After the wonder and euphoria of seeing her dreams within her reach, she becomes a confusion of anxieties and contradictory feelings. It is a sad fact that Rosita has never visited any other country at all, and all her knowledge of the great works of art comes from books and occasional exhibitions in Australia. This lack of appreciation of original works has sometimes worried her, but she has always retreated into the comfort of her small safe world – her house, her garden, her school – in particular the school which is in a way her family. Diana is part of that family. Rosita gets a passport and the whole grand exercise is in motion.
Incidentally, so far as knowing the real thing goes, Proust’s familiarity with all those paintings in Remembrance of Things Past was mostly derived from postcards. It didn’t seem to do him any harm, anyway.
Cora, unemotional, says yes, she supposes she will go. Edith hates this way of speaking – this ‘supposing’ – but says nothing. In the late afternoon she will call her husband, asking for advice, comfort, support, comment, both of them really knowing that the thing is a fait accompli. She will discuss the matter with Dr Silver. But for the time being Diana the Manipulator has worked her magic over the afternoon-tea table under the chestnut tree, and her eyes, like the eyes of a bright intelligent blackbird, are glittering with joy. If there is one thing Diana revels in, it is the chance to plan and organise expeditions to the places she loves with people she loves. It is a chance to give Cora and Rosita the gift of European places, the places that have lured Diana herself away forever from the country of her birth.
What I am looking at here is respectability and the power it has to float like those waterlily leaves on the surface of the Bruccoli pond. In the delicious cool gloom below the lily-pads, truth swims bright red and gold, truth in the shape of the union of Corazón the Fertile and Rufus the Virile, truth in the shape of the fruit of this union as it gets hopelessly caught on its merry dash for the uterus of Corazón the Fertile. And then the clinic and convent and family cover-ups. So that here sits Corazón longing to see Rufus and not knowing what has really happened between them, what has really happened to her, how her life has changed forever. It’s shocking, isn’t it? I am not accustomed to this level of respectability, leading as I have always done the life of some kind of all-informed equal with Avila/Barnaby. And they, dear things, are revered, respected, but not exactly respectable. Sure, Avila and Callianthe are sisters in their notions and beliefs, co-members of select but worldwide religious confraternities. Avila would fit right in here at the white table with the lemon and pink china and the pale pale tea, and she would also see right through Miss Cora.
I suppose the people round the table didn’t want to see – and the truth was sadly vivid in Edith’s eyes, slightly less so in the eyes of Roland the Good. Bernard who was not at all stupid sensed something, but didn’t give the thought the time of day. He rather hurled the red ball in a great and powerful and unnecessary overarm so that the dogs went crazy and the ball ended up way out in the stream that ran somewhere along the bottom of the garden. He went into the house and came out again with a green ball and off they went again, two brown and white dogs with legs like tough little pieces of perfect machinery. While the black and beautiful Celestina drifted back and forth in silent and elegant possession of many an understanding far beyond the grasp of anyone else on the scene.
Girls from Lisieux came to visit Cora. In a flurry of parrot chatter and laughter and perfect skin and teeth and dark red school dresses with huge white linen collars, they all disappeared into Cora’s room, where naturally enough plans were made for phone calls and a handwritten note to Rufus. Everybody except Diana knew that one of the girls was Rufus’s cousin. To tell you the truth the only person who was troubled was Edith, but of course she couldn’t say anything. To do so would be to open up the pond of respectability to the light of truth. The sight of the flock of dangerous giggling girls confirme
d Edith in her decision to send Corazón off to Europe with Diana and Rosita. One Lisieux girl, in those far-off days before the universal ownership of cell phones, had in her backpack a large early-model phone which she handed to Cora, who called Rufus.
Plans were made and the couple met that night on the bank of the stream that runs past the garden of the Bruccolis and also past that of Rosita. How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank. What a simple matter it was for Cora to hop into her jeans and sandals and slip out when everyone was asleep. I suppose the parents and guardians of teenage girls will never ever learn. Or perhaps the whole thing works the way it does simply because deep in their heart of hearts the parents desire the children to transgress, to cross over into secret adult sexual lives.
Don’t worry, Cora and Rufus did not have sex that night by the river, what with Cora being still post-operative and delicate. Oral sex of course does not count – that they did have, girl to boy and boy to girl. Cora, her teenage brain activity clouded by a milky way of hormones, was prepared to risk everything – popping open, bleeding to death all over the riverbank; it was Rufus who held back in a kind of bewildered distaste, a kind of fear. Peculiar that. He was maybe a not-so Roman Romeo after all. In any case they fell passionately into each other’s arms, and lay voluptuously on the riverbank in an ecstasy of bliss beneath the stars. And the moon of course. Where would young love be without the stars and the moon? The nurse who had prepared Cora for her surgery was a perfectionist, and now there was just a faint new delicate fuzz on Cora’s mound of Venus. This for Rufus was a bit of a revelation and a turn-on – he was only a boy after all. Discarded clothes were sprinkled with dead leaves and spiked with the sharp little brown seeds of grasses.