The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  ‘I’ll tell you another thing about this country,’ said Keith. ‘I had tea at the Sofitel with Geoffrey Carlton the other day. You remember Geoff, don’t you? Ear, nose and throat. He’s been in Boston for—oh, it must be a good twenty years now. Anyway, there we were, offered those enormous menus, length of my arm, and Geoff waves his away and says, “I’ll have a Bushells, please.” Well, now, you see the waitress is barely sixteen and I would say Middle Eastern. Probably come into town from somewhere out west on a train.’ Keith pronounced ‘Middle Eastern’, ‘out west’ and ‘train’ with care, as if borrowing from a foreign language. ‘Well, this lass has absolutely no idea that Geoff wants a cup of tea. She starts to say that they’ve only got what’s on the menu, and I see poor old Geoffrey’s face. It’s just dawned on him that in this country today, you can’t count on everyone knowing what a Bushells means.’

  ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ said Eva. ‘Be careful, my darling. Soon you’ll be complaining that the peasants are wearing velvet trousers and playing accordions.’ She raised her voice and called ‘Bravo!’ in the direction of the music room, where the assault on Bach continued. ‘Bravo, chéri!’ The pianist’s brother appeared in the doorway: he had caught the admiration in his grandmother’s voice and knew that it had to be directed at him. He entered the room, smiling hugely and walking on his knees.

  Keith’s eyes snapped—he was delighted with himself. They were blue eyes, blameless as clocks. They looked very keenly; Pippa had the impression that they were inspecting her bones. Once a year, Keith spent two weeks in the hill country in Vietnam working for a medical aid organisation. In the teeth of Eva’s injunctions, he insisted on travelling around on a motorbike, and often said that he would spend half the year in Vietnam if he could. ‘Absolutely wonderful people. Straight as a die. Unspoiled.’

  ‘Dad, you come across like those brain-dead Pommy colonels who carry on about the good old days with the Mau Mau.’

  ‘The Mau Mau were the enemy, son. Sometimes it’s impossible not to wonder where all those school fees I paid went.’

  In summer, waxy frangipani always lay on the Elkinsons’ dining table and beside the basin in the powder room. ‘This is a city governed by flowers,’ said Eva. ‘When I first came here, I couldn’t believe it: beautiful, scented flowers just lying there on the pavement. People stepping on them! I used to pick up as many as I could and take them home.’ Now Eva had a tree that dropped frangipani in her garden, but she was still unable to pass the fallen blooms without gathering them up.

  ‘Eva likes rescuing things,’ said Matt, ‘don’t you, Eva?’ One of the things Pippa found creepy about her mother-in-law was that her children were required to call her by her first name. Eva had worked as a nurse before she married, but now went in for philanthropic boards, volunteering at the Art Gallery, attending talks on watercolour painting or the conservation of wildflowers—what Pippa thought of as ‘pastimes for ladies’. The chief pastime was causes. Easily the most annoying thing about Eva was that her politics couldn’t be faulted. She circulated petitions protesting against Indigenous deaths in custody, Australia’s treatment of asylum-seekers, the live export of sheep. She chivvied her children to attend rallies and visit detention centres. Once Pippa had spotted her in the television footage of a Palm Sunday rally: her hair girlishly down her back, her jaw square with virtue, her Jesuit beside her.

  For a while, the finger food at Elkinson parties was provided by a not-for-profit catering group that employed only asylum-seekers. Pippa ate Guatemalan empanadas, Burmese dumplings, Iraqi croquettes and Eritrean fritters that all had the same texture (paste), the same colour (mud), the same flavour (nothing) and came with the same tongue-stripping sauce. They were handed around by beautiful, spindly African women, who moved silently about the room like etiolated gods dropping in on the human race. Passing among her awestruck guests, Eva offered an authenticating purr: ‘They’re refugees.’ The citizen of conscience presided over these gatherings in garments stiffened with embroidery and beads. At throat and wrist she wore silver set with gems, some the colour of butter, others the colour of blood. These tribal ornaments lit Eva’s face, and proclaimed her solidarity with the wretched of the earth.

  In Poland, Eva’s father had been a cameraman. He was employed on the official documentary when Stalin visited the new People’s Republic in 1952. Some months later he was arrested: in one frame of the film, a pillar cast a shadow across Stalin’s face. Eva never saw her father again. Her mother was arrested soon afterwards for failing to denounce her husband; she would die in prison the following year.

  Before that happened, a family friend stepped in and saved Eva from an orphanage. In time, Mateusz Holz emigrated to Australia, taking Eva with him. It was officially impossible to leave Poland, but Mateusz was an ethnic German: an ‘unwanted individual’, like the daughter of traitors. ‘We didn’t fit the template,’ said Eva. ‘In a totalitarian system, that means a bullet or a passport.’

  On hearing this story for the first time, Pippa had thought, I could use that. She saw Europe, momentous and world-historical, magnifying eventless Australia. Scenes from a backstory came ready-formed to mind: the midnight ring on the doorbell, a child’s wan face under a black hat, leafless trees along an avenue where it had never been spring. Out of consideration for Eva’s feelings, Pippa would substitute the Soviet Union for Poland. Her mother-in-law already seemed both larger than life and paper-flat: a character. While the sun beat down on her Sydney boarding house, this paper woman ate the food of her cold, dark homeland: pale dumplings, boiled meats, sour pickled vegetables drained of colour.

  Pippa asked Eva a tactful question or two, saying that she was working on a novel about a Russian woman who had grown up under Stalin. Eva said, ‘That is a story without interest.’

  ‘Eva!’ said Matt.

  ‘Everyone knows that story,’ went on Eva, buttering a slice of squishy bread. ‘It was summed up long ago. A novel should be new, it should bring us messages from the world. What we need to hear today is what is happening in China, in the Middle East. Those stories are formless: they haven’t already set into shapes.’

  When they were alone, Matt told Pippa, ‘Write whatever you want.’ His father had said much the same, only in a more roundabout way, while stacking the dishwasher with Pippa. ‘When you know Eva’s background,’ said Keith, ‘you understand why she wants everything out in the open. No shadows. Even if the light is blinding at times.’

  Handing Keith a smeared platter, Pippa was aware of the scab of shaving foam on his ear. She couldn’t conceive of life with Eva as anything other than a punishment—the woman was as heartless as a mirror. An image of the not-Eva waiting to be written arrived: she was looking at the silky Pacific, her arm raised to protect her eyes. In her other hand she carried a brown cardboard suitcase stamped ‘Old Hat’. When Pippa returned to her laptop, it was the same thing: every scene with the Russian woman was a stiff cutout. Pippa deleted them all. She had Australia. It was enough. She possessed the native genius for making do and easily concocted an aesthetic from a snub. Her mind drew a border, a magic line, between Australia and the world. Her books would be island continents: self-sufficient, self-enclosed. History, benignly neglectful, had handed her the small picture. Why seek to enlarge it with histrionic strangers? Long ago, George Meshaw had encouraged her to look inwards for material. He was smart, George. Pippa never forgot that he had set her on her path. She was his student at the time and she had gone up to him at the end of a tutorial to tell him how much she was enjoying the course. Over the scraping of chairs and the clatter of departing students, George told her, ‘You should write.’ He looked directly into her face as if issuing a command.

  Eva, connoisseur of Waugh and Greene, theorist of the novel, excused herself from reading Pippa’s books: ‘Only history and philosophy have meaning at my age.’ Keith wouldn’t accept presents of Pippa’s novels and bought his own copies, which he would ask her to sign. In time, a note would arrive: �
��Thank you for a most enjoyable book. The people struck me as very true to life. I was particularly impressed by—’ The note, printed on letterhead that listed Keith’s degrees, was always signed with his full name. That ‘true to life’ was a little disconcerting. Pippa always tried to twist whatever she borrowed out of recognition, and anyway, she only borrowed from people Keith didn’t know. Basically, she borrowed from less-than-real people: either they were no longer part of Pippa’s life or they weren’t on Facebook, which came to the same thing. Pippa told herself that Keith intended only to pay her a compliment. But sometimes she wondered about currents under his pondlike surface. Around the time he met Eva, Keith’s parents had made him a present of their Arts and Crafts house. Keith had it demolished, replacing it with modernist glass and stone designed by a disciple of Harry Seidler. The new house had a stepped concrete roof from which a panoramic harbour view could be admired and the dollars it added assessed. It was a lovely building, light-ridden, slick with mid-century cool, but Pippa hadn’t thought of Keith as someone who pulled down the past. As for Eva, she had visited the old house once and still mourned it. ‘You should have seen the fireplace tiles: De Morgans.’ The frangipani tree was all she had managed to save. She begged Keith to spare it, although the architect raged.

  Pippa was of the opinion that people disliked the kind of house in which they had grown up. That was why she couldn’t hack fibro, or louvres at which leggy hibiscus knocked, while Keith’s children had things to say about split levels and exposed bricks. But Keith claimed that his aversion to old buildings was impersonal: they were dark, expensive to maintain, unhygienic. ‘Who can say how many people have been there over the years, touching things with dirty hands?’

  There were mornings when Pippa woke as full of fear as a hospital. It was occasioned by the cold realisation that she had grit, longing, imagination, a capacity for hard work, a measure of selfishness, a shot of insanity—in short, everything needed for greatness except talent. Elsewhere in the house, Matt would be playing his violin. He rose at six and practised for half an hour: scales, followed by something testing like a Paganini caprice and ending always with Bach. He was preparing for an audition that would never take place. Eva was the judge—she looked away, bored. Her scorecard, prepared long in advance, said, ‘Disappointing.’

  On good days, Pippa believed that Matt was wrong—and worse still, wasteful—not to accept that art was also the near-miss and the flawed. When she told him so, he said, ‘Near enough is good enough—is that really what you think?’ What Pippa really thought was that he should have persisted with performance, auditioned for a third-tier music school, played with a municipal orchestra. Or why not an edgy sort of band? Look at the Dirty Three! Matt’s vision of music as nothing if not celestial was thin and high and useless. It was also second-hand: a crippling European ideal of purity and achievement that Eva had imprinted on her children.

  On bad days, Pippa was afraid that Eva was right: the worst humiliation was being not quite good enough. In Paris, under a grey felt sky with stones underfoot, her fear had reached its high-water mark—there were afternoons when its dark salt silted up her throat. Every Sunday, the church bells gave her a headache. A few weeks into her residency, the future to which Pippa had trusted assumed the form of a gentle downhill slope. This was the depressive effect of a city where the past—its monuments, its battles, its vintages—had a strut that the present couldn’t match. History could spring out there at any time like a mugger. In an endless, unmoving queue at the post office, the man waiting behind Pippa told her firmly, ‘We need a new Napoleon.’ For the rest of the day, Pippa couldn’t tell if she felt sorrier for herself or for France, where a young man’s idea of progress was a costume replay in a silly hat.

  She told a friend that no Australian would come out with crap like that. Her friend said, ‘That’s because Australians are ashamed of the past. You have no choice but to look forward.’

  Pippa, looking forward, saw a life that had drained away in the service of novels no one wanted to read. She came to a decision. When Matt joined her in France, she sat astride him, placed his hands on her breasts and told him that she had thrown away her diaphragm. It marked the end of a long, invisible, unbroken campaign conducted mostly without words. Like many a seasoned soldier, Matt went to pieces when victory was at hand. A tiny voice in Pippa’s head hoped that their child wouldn’t have his colouring: he had those cautious blue eyes that turn red at once with tears.

  He cried again, helplessly, soaking hankies, when Pippa miscarried. The hankies were another of the preposterous things about Eva: she hemmed them by hand and embroidered Matt’s initials in one corner. He received half a dozen every Christmas. As for Pippa, the first thing she did when she came home after the curette was to delete all her posts and close down her blog; she had announced the pregnancy there just a short month earlier. Her eyes were solid glass balls and remained that way, although over the following months she would dream repeatedly of having lost something ordinary and essential: a credit card, keys. Sorting through a box of oddments, she came across a photograph of their harbourside flat from that first summer. The bare colonnade looked prophetic, a missed warning about something that could have been fruitful but wasn’t. Pippa told Matt, ‘I can’t go through that again.’ She was conscious of a great strategic advantage: untold centuries of female suffering, casually inflicted by men and fate on women’s bodies, pressed up behind her and strengthened her case. The mild elation this caused made her voice kind: ‘It’s hopeless—I’m sorry. I think I’m just not meant to have kids.’

  They both heard the echo of something she had said a long time ago, soon after they married: ‘I’m not sure that I want children. I’m sorry.’

  On that previous occasion, Matt had said, ‘Sorry! That’s what someone says when they step on your foot.’ This time around, he said nothing. The conversation remained suspended. Like a blade, thought Pippa from time to time.

  Mateusz Holz was Matt’s godfather. When he died, he left his house to Matt. Pippa and Matt were living in St Peters at the time, in a renovated semi they had found through one of Caroline’s friends. The rent, paid in cash, was below market value, but Pippa had always disliked the house. The renovation was your classic bodgie job: the breakneck stairs violated every regulation, handles collapsed into hands. The rooms were cramped, draughty and full of dust. A long time ago there had been brick-works in St Peters, and Pippa believed that a ghostly brick dust still blew through its flat streets and found its way into houses, where it velveted everything with a fine, pinkish grit. The houses in Pippa and Matt’s street had been given names like Dunroamin and Bullecourt, although the people who lived in them now came from places where those jokes and battles meant nothing. One house, a stark, orange-brick Seventies rebuild, was called Stendhal. Matt said that it had been named for the antipodean version of Stendhal’s syndrome: ‘If you look at it too intently, you faint from the ugliness.’

  Traffic braceleted St Peters, and planes flew so low that Pippa wore noise-cancelling earphones when she was writing. In Glebe, in Mateusz’s street, commotion was the prerogative of birds. His house had been untouched in forty years, but it had big, airy rooms opening to right and left of a central hall. The doors were solid; they closed with an air of finality. Things were different at the rear of the house, where brick gave way to weatherboard: kitchen, dining area and laundry had been tacked on there. The corners of these back rooms stayed shadowy even when the light was on. Long ago, damp had colonised them unopposed.

  That part of the house was entered through an archway hung with a thick damson-pink curtain on a brass rod. The curtain concealed and revealed: its decadent, Venetian hue was a declaration in code. ‘It’s like visiting someone’s unconscious,’ said Matt, parting the heavy folds and going into the kitchen. The cooktop was rusty, and one of the burners didn’t work. They replaced the cooker, and when the plumber’s apprentice was wheeling the old one out, the back flew open, and oi
l lurched out to lay a rancid scarf across the vinyl. None of this mattered. There was an overgrown back yard with an orange tree and a pomegranate and a single, superb lemon gum—the orange tree was heavy with fruit. Pippa, seeing the zestful weeds, thought, Veggies! They debated the matter of chooks.

  The house stood on a hill, and the back door opened on to treetops and sky. Great clouds passed there. Pippa looked down on trees with clustered leaves, like flowers with huge green petals, and frondy ones with leaves like whips. Trees stood in gardens further down the slope, and in the park at its foot, and along streets everywhere—they were the glory of Glebe. They set light and shade moving on pavements, so that to walk there was to think of rivers. The suburb was moneyed, boho chic, although not when Mateusz had moved there in the Sixties. ‘Bloody lucky he bought up here,’ said Matt. His Elkinson instinct for stratification was at work: further down Glebe Point Road, the suburb began its social slide, its Victorian terraces given over to students and social housing. Not all the graffiti was licensed. Sizeable rats made merry in its cafes. This proximate squalor was prized: it added an authentic sheen while leaving house prices unharmed. Pippa understood this language now, and that it lay under everything, and understood also that it was not a language but a form of thuggery. On learning that he had inherited Mateusz’s house, Matt told Pippa, ‘We don’t have to save for our own place now, so I could go casual if that was ever necessary. Your writing wouldn’t be interrupted.’ He meant if they had a child. He was so supportive—it complicated everything. Children and money and work: these things triangulated her marriage. Each represented a different kind of power, a different kind of satisfaction and a different kind of jail.

  Matt had taken to reading out the real estate auction results listed every week in the local paper. Everything had a price, and the prices were amazing. Glebe was amazing! Even the dumps got amazing results! The trees remained aloofly benign throughout the suburb, calm jamborees enjoyed by creative directors and the long-term unemployed alike.