He sat upright in his seat, trying to arrange his legs. His eyes were closed. He had a number of books with him, but he never read when the plane was going up or coming down. He thought instead. When he’d told Pepita his father was dead she stood still and gazed at him. She said, Drowned . . . oh he is drowned . . . her voice plangent and tearful. Oh my dear, she said, holding his shoulders, the words quivering between them, then she put her arms around him and held him. He rested his cheek on her head. He could smell her perfume, something delicious out of a bottle but also herself, odour of Pepita. Now in the plane he could smell it again, its gentle memory in his nostrils; it had become the smell of comfort. Maybe that was how you knew you wanted to marry someone: you smelt her, and you thought, this is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. Like a secular odour of sanctity. Except of course that was dying and this was an odour of life. Pepita was sad for his father’s youth. It is not proper that one generation should bury a younger, she said. It is not part of the fitness of things.
Did you know my father well?
He came to see me when he was in England. A most charming man. He seemed fond of marrying. And no, not well.
Neither did I. Periods of living with him, and then it was Lynette, really. She was nice. He always seemed to be at work.
Work, said Pepita. Her tone was musing.
Don’t you think it was work?
Oh yes, it would have been work, and work it may have been that killed him. But work . . . it’s a word of such power, we all have to bow and worship, it’s so grand and noble and necessary, but does anyone peep through a finger and say, But—it’s got no clothes on!
Ferdie laughed. Not bad coming from a woman of ninety-four who hasn’t retired yet, he said.
Pepita said, Don’t get me wrong. I like work. I just don’t believe it’s the emperor of all.
She fell silent. There were a lot of silences in the conversation that afternoon, as though they could laugh and talk and tease as usual, but every now and then had to stop and think about mortality. Pepita sat with her hands in her lap, turning the half-hoop of diamonds. If it had been her grandmother’s it must have been his great-great-grandmother’s. It was loose on Pepita’s little spotted hand. He wondered if it had belonged to the grandmother as a young woman, had been slid on to a firm and fine-skinned finger with promises of love and a life together. Whatever had happened, whether or not the promises had been kept, here was the ring still, its unchanging self, while its first owner, and her children and all of their children except this one rather supernaturally old woman, were dust and ashes. Why don’t you give it to Berenice? she said. It’s the right period. He imagined Berenice’s granddaughter saying the same words to her great-nephew. A ring would be marriage and he wasn’t thinking of that; what he needed to know was if he was in love with her. Berenice. He couldn’t smell her any more, though he knew her perfume was an American one called White Linen which seemed curiously wholesome. If he went to a duty-free shop on the Singapore stopover and smelt it, would she be there? He was not even sure he could picture her; what he saw in his mind’s eye was that earlier recollection of her, her narrow white body on satin sheets the colour of extra virgin olive oil. Fluid and fruity. A memory of a memory, already distracted by irrelevant images of olive oil, how it would stain the satin sheets. He’d telephoned to say he had to fly back to Australia. Forever? she’d said, a note of fright in her voice. Oh no. Just for the funeral. I’m sorry, she said, so sorry, her voice sounding tearful. Come with me, he nearly said, come and meet my mother, but something that wasn’t just common sense stopped him.
My little man. My big man. His mother wouldn’t say that any more. But she wouldn’t be happy to give up her son’s arm, bent like a solid bar to hold her firm, to another woman. Ferdie knew he would have to get it right before he did that to her. It. What was it?
Suddenly he imagined Berenice as the protagonist of a novel by George Eliot. Beautiful, clever, with a useful job. What conversations would she have with destiny? What expectation, what hopes, what desires? What trouble, what mistakes? Would Ferdie be a monster in her life, ruining it? Or would he be the right thing to do, and thus destroy the story before it could get really under way?
His mother, like Dorothea, had married the wrong man. He could see that, though she wouldn’t; she believed she’d married the right man who had behaved wrongly. And that stymied the story, nothing more could happen, there was forever that pointless stalemate. The man betrayed her, and she suffered, frozen forever at that quivering moment. Whereas William; William had gone on, his narrative had continued to unfold.
The plane had levelled out. His seat was at the beginning of some invisible queue, and there was a flight attendant offering champagne. Australian bubbly.
BARBARA WAITS
The mistress is waiting for her lover.
She was stretched out on a pale sofa with matching ottoman, in a tall bright room in what would otherwise have been a poky flat. She was dressed in a white satin nightgown with wide shoulder straps and a sash tied under her breasts. A nightgown Rita Hayworth might have worn. Perhaps even had worn; Barbara had bought it from St Vincent de Paul downstairs, it was of the right vintage, quite fragile now. She imagined it making a complicated journey from Hollywood to Canberra: why not?
The mistress is waiting for her lover.
An archaic sentence. An old-fashioned sentence. Women when they are their own person aren’t supposed to be mistresses. Mistress claims mastery but implies its opposite: submission, being owned. But Barbara was choosing this; he had offered, she had accepted the term. She wanted things to be turned around, upset. To subvert where she could. She thought it was accurate enough, in its antique ramifications. Except she wasn’t kept by her lover. And only occasionally was she a mistress—which is traditional. She had another life. Well, a job. Cecil liked to murmur variations of the term. You are an odalisque, he said. A houri. You are une grande horizontale.
A grand horizontal? she asked.
He laughed. Grand? Great. Like a great singer. A great dancer. A performer of genius.
Certainly with him she performs. As she had never thought or known to do with Greg.
Cecil does not pay her, but he always brings her a present. Sometimes a bottle of wine, for the cellar; the wine they drink she provides, though now and then a case is delivered from a distinguished merchant. Sometimes flowers, loose bunches of gorgeous blooms, a cyclamen in a pot, an orchid with great flowering spikes. Perfume. For her bath he brings unguents made for half a millennium by nuns in Tuscany. Imagine: Catherine de Medici could have used this bath oil. Though it hadn’t, by all accounts, made her beautiful.
One day she had cause to think: his presents were always ephemeral.
The mistress is waiting for her lover. Not: I am waiting for my love. She did love Cecil, in a way, a mild affectionate way, but he was not her love. Waiting was what she was doing. He was rarely very punctual, but tonight he seemed quite late. In a moment she would open the wine and pour herself a glass, though normally she waited for him. She lay back on the sofa, drowsy from her bath in Tuscan oils, warm in the well-heated flat whose double-storey north-facing windows had caught the winter sun all day.
It looked spacious because it had very little in it, and everything was pale, white stone floor, milky marble coffee table, the sofa and an armchair, the only colour a small yellow cedar table with two straight chairs. The bedroom was a mezzanine over the kitchen and spare room. Barbara had given up possessions. She didn’t want to own things. Even the satin nightdress would go back to St Vinnie’s when it had served its purpose.
She was sinking lower on the sofa. She’d had the nightgown dry-cleaned at a place in Kingston that took expensive care of delicate clothes. She did not want to crush it while she waited, she wanted it to fall in all the fluid viscid drapery of its rich fabric. When he came and stood and looked at her. Friday nights are play nights. On another evening he may call, perhaps for tea, alway
s by arrangement, she bathes and looks pretty, is charming and interesting. Fridays are a game, a ritual, a celebration. She dresses up. She is always herself, but one of many selves, none of which may possess her for too long. She likes to see his eyes gleam as he takes in the person she is tonight. He stays till nine o’clock, when the shops shut, he hates shops, and then takes his wife out to dinner.
After he goes she stays in bed. Finishes the wine. Maybe opens another bottle. Eats fruit. A piece of cheese. Watches a DVD. Old Fred Astaire movies are good. More dress-ups and games. The life in them is a dance less complicated than the routines that take up most of the film’s time. Ginger Rogers in gorgeous frocks. Once she’d said to Cecil, because she’d read it somewhere, Ginger did everything that Fred did, plus backwards in high heels. Ah, but she needed him to lead her, he said.
Or Hitchcock movies. Black and white and infinite nuances of grey. She likes noir films, partly because although they are so dark they are also particularly luminous, you can see what you need to, as in Welles’ The Third Man. Sometimes the women in these films are mistresses. More often they are virgins, ready to become brides. Perhaps the charm of these is that they have no idea what will become of them, and everybody likes to go back to a time before the desperate outcomes of their narratives would be revealed. Cut, the end, and there you are, forever united with the lover.
Ah, Barbara, says Cecil, Barbara, this spiky name she’s never cared for, and in his mouth it is given the full lilting music of all its syllables. It fills his mouth as she does. Barbara, he says, like a spell, and she always falls under it. But only while he is there; after he has gone she thinks, well, that was fun.
She got off the sofa, feeling the smooth slide of the satin against her naked skin, remembering that Rita Hayworth did not have a happy life, that men adored her but were not in the end good to her. She wondered if creating a world on the screen where you achieved a marvellous happy life or at least managed to suffer grandly and tragically would compensate for a life of the usual stuff-ups. She opened a bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc and poured herself a glass; even only a third full it held quite a lot of wine. She walked across the warm stone floor, holding the glass by its long frail stem. The street outside was full of Friday after-work drinkers, happy hour going on being happy for a long time. Soon the restaurants would be full. The buzz came muted through the double-glazed windows.
When she and Greg split up the main lucky thing was the discovery that they’d bought their house cleverly. The old spacious, shabby, high-ceilinged, inner suburban, large-gardened renovator’s delight that they had renovated, if not always with delight at least lovingly, had improved in value quite enormously, obscenely even, so when they divided the money, even after paying the mortgage, she had enough to buy this apartment, right in the shops and a bike ride from work, teaching geography at a school ten minutes away along a path that followed what used to be a creek but now was a concrete drain.
She made Greg take the car. He said she was perverse. How could she live without a car? She’d need it. Since the split wasn’t very kind or amicable she suspected he wanted her to have the car so he could buy something more exciting. Midlife-crisis convertible. A snappy hatchback with go-faster stripes.
No, she said. I’m going to become a proper city dweller. No car.
You’re mad, he said.
Quite possibly, she replied. She meant it, she thought she might be mad, in her anger, her violent rejection of things that had mattered to her. Left to Greg they’d still be married. It was she who said no, it was over. She’d be even madder if they’d stayed together. Not having a car she was certainly more fit. And she liked not having to worry about it, parking it, maintaining it. When the bike didn’t work, if it was too far, or too dark, or very wet, she took buses, and sometimes taxis. That was useful: if she went out to dinner she could drink as much wine as she felt like. Not always a lot, but it didn’t matter.
Her mother couldn’t believe that she and Greg could stop being married at such a time. But Greg is such a nice man, she said. He’s kind. He’s suffering.
Barbara agreed. Yes, she said, he’s suffering. But he’s not nice, or kind.
Loss brings clarity, and truth. Things always known but never considered can now be said. After loss there is nothing to lose.
It’s so easy to say someone is nice, Barbara said. And they almost never are. They’re selfish and self-regarding. But we go along with the fictions. He’s nice. You’re nice. I’m nice.
Her mother said, I try to be a nice person.
Yes, said Barbara. I’ve given it up.
Where was Cecil? She’d been standing at the window staring out at the neon signs above the restaurant opposite. She’d had canvas blinds made to cover the windows in case she wanted to shut the outside out. But often she liked the scruffy high-coloured view of shops and commercial buildings, ugly and thoughtless or over-elaborate, as in the ersatz art deco of the bistro. They were like a framed picture on the wall, to be looked at but not needing any other attention, offering a contrast to the pale bare order inside the apartment. She poured some more wine into her glass and walked up and down, swishing her body so the cool satin caressed her limbs. Cecil was seriously late. He wasn’t nice, or kind, particularly; he was tough and ruthless. He was nice and kind to her but that was because they had made this small fragment of life together that gave them both pleasure, and they were mutually grateful. As well as punctiliously courteous about arrangements.
She’d gone to see him on the recommendation of a colleague to talk about suing. Cecil’s the man you want, said the colleague, and it was some time before she realised that was his surname. She kept on calling him that, as though it were his Christian name; it pleased her. Do you want money? Cecil had asked. She considered: I think . . . revenge. Ah, he said, what you need is Bacon.
She was puzzled by this; she thought, maybe I am crazy, or he is. She thought of breakfast, and then of Francis Bacon’s meaty carcass paintings. Cecil was standing up and going to the bookshelves that filled the walls of his office. Here, he said, do you know it? Bacon’s essay: Revenge is a kind of wild justice . . . Very succinct and beautiful. She thought, a wild justice; yes, that is what I want.
She never did know any of his references. He was full of other people’s words. These became part of their elegant erotic games. I am no longer much interested in sexual gymnastics, he said. He’d be delighted with the Rita Hayworth nightdress, when he arrived.
Of course the idea of being a mistress is part of the play. She’d not have thought of it herself. She’d have thought, an affair, perhaps, that they were lovers, though even that was rather a grand term for her. The first evening, when he’d come for a drink, that’s all it was, he’d looked at her over his glass and said, Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives, and she thought this was maybe how lawyers spoke, this was what law training did for you, made you hold forth like a character in an old play. Swinburne, he said, isn’t it fine? It was fashionable to sneer at Swinburne when I was at university. How stupid was that? He repeated the lines again, and added two more: And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives. Barbara had a good memory, the words he quoted stayed in her mind. Our loves into corpses or wives, she said to herself, and shivered at the truth of it. Wives being husbands too, the poem meant both spouses. Marriage and death and division. The bleakness of the poem, and its clarity, chimed with her own feelings, and made her look at Cecil as someone who could help her. Even if only in providing words to recite, words to parcel up her feelings and remove them to their own small distance.
She imagined he might bring her a copy of Swinburne’s poems, leather bound, with gilt, and a fond inscription, but he never did, never anything not ephemeral. There was never any paper with words on it, nothing ever written down. Just his voice, sonorous, persuasive, its cadences staying in her mind.
I am a melancholy person, he said. I think you are too. And she thought, ye
s, though it had not occurred to her before. Melancholy is making a form of pleasure out of pain, he went on; it is necessary if we are to bear it.
I don’t think I have got that far yet, she said.
No. But you are a quick learner.
She knew that was an important part of their relationship, his telling her things and her taking a grave interest in his words, listening with respect, giving them back to him sometimes, hearing them in new ways, asking questions so he could expand on them. She had been to university, she had an education, it was just that you did not come across a lot of poetry when you did geography.
O my America, my new-found-land, he said. There was always some poem. She had not imagined any man saying the things that were in that poem.
She was a quick learner when it came to the games too. Greg is a nice kind man, said her mother; he needs comfort, he needs to comfort you. But Barbara did not want that. Cecil had shown her she wanted this sensuous play, this elaborate erotic pleasure that coexisted with the melancholy that ravished the heart and together could sometimes offer hope for ecstasy. And yet could be put back in the cupboard of sweets and toys and taken out the next time. Not forgotten, but not pined for. Having their place.
Once when the kids at school had put on Antigone she had borrowed one of the costumes. The art class had dyed muslin in rich dark colours for the chorus—Antigone herself was pure white—and she’d borrowed a crimson one, pleated and falling like a classical column. She’d always had a statuesque figure (overweight, Greg could say, you should lose a few kilos), and now with all the cycling, not to mention the absence of family meals, she had fined down; she still had breasts and hips and now a small waist as well. The dress skimmed her body and floated about her legs. Cecil was charmed by this, he held out his hand and said, There are many wonderful things, and nothing is more wonderful than man. She widened her eyes and pouted her mouth, and he added, Sophocles of course meant women by that, as well. We’ve lost a lot by insisting on the exclusively male gender of man.
Goodbye Sweetheart Page 9