The White Body of Evening

by A L McCann

  “Kulin nation, young fellas!” he shouted out after them as they stumbled out onto Lonsdale Street.

  “What about that old bloke, eh?” Paul said.

  “Suppose he has a point,” Hamish said. “A hundred years ago there was none of this. No city I mean. It’s like the whole place has been dreamt up almost overnight. It might vanish just as quickly.”

  They walked through a decrepit arcade, a dark, deserted cavern that sold a bit of old furniture and bric-a-brac, and then made their way through Little Bourke Street and the Eastern Market, which but for a few peepshows and a tattoo parlour was closed up for the day. The occasional forlorn figure skulked about in the drizzle or vanished through a door. Stray cats prowled about the rubbish and fought over the odd morsel of offal, disturbing the gloom with their hissing. Hamish thought about Albert’s poems, which had conjured the city as a place of cruel dreams and obscene fantasies written, he imagined, in blood and semen and shit. At the same time Paul remembered the day Albert had taken him to the Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities and the whore who’d stumbled down the Eastern Arcade.

  “So you’ll come Sunday week?” Paul asked again, wanting to be sure.

  “Yes, I’ll come.”

  At Swanston Street they climbed onto a tram and headed back to South Melbourne. It was already dark and as the tram rattled over Princes Bridge they both imagined, as they often did, a body in a train conductor’s uniform fading through the water.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The family was already seated for lunch, and Mrs Norris was on the point of serving, when the doorbell rang again. Ralph Matthews looked so sheepish sitting opposite her that Ondine nearly laughed into her serviette.

  “I forgot to mention,” Paul said apologetically, “that I asked Hamish along as well.”

  Winton twisted uncomfortably in his seat at the head of the table and frowned. He knew Anna still thought of Hamish fondly and so said nothing that might upset her. But Anna herself was annoyed at Paul for inviting him, and glanced searchingly at Winton. Hadn’t he understood that Ralph Matthews was a guest on whom they’d wanted to make a good impression? She looked at Paul as if he were conspiring to undo the plan she and Winton had stitched together.

  Winton had Mrs Norris hastily set another place as Hamish stood at the threshold of the dining room, looking a bit buffoonish in his crumpled checked jacket and mismatched beige trousers, and with his usually dishevelled red hair plastered down onto his skull with brilliantine. Anna was taken aback to see the boy she always remembered transformed into the heavy young man of twenty-two standing before her. He walked strangely, as if his feet were flat or his ankles inflexible. She noticed it as he approached the table. She felt sorry for the fact that he had made himself so ridiculous as a homage to the gulf that now existed between him and her own children. She tried to make him feel at home as he sat down, but the unusual sense of ceremony around the table, which focused itself on the stranger now sitting next to Hamish, clearly conveyed to him that his presence was inappropriate and, at least unofficially, unwanted.

  “Ralph, this is Hamish McDermott, an old friend of the family’s,” Anna said politely. “Ralph is …” she continued, turning to Hamish, fumbling after a way to finish the sentence. “Ralph is tossing up between the country and the city.”

  Ralph had barely looked at Hamish during this introduction. He was engrossed with Ondine, awed by her languid beauty and cultured distance. She had immediately put him on edge as he sensed that even the fortune he was set to inherit would be a meaningless bait to this girl who seemed animated by her own inexplicable, utterly alien needs. In the past, his good looks and the promise of his father’s wealth had made Ralph a favourite at the South Yarra Tennis Club, at the races or at city balls, where he never had any trouble attracting the attention of society matrons anxious to secure a connection for their daughters.

  Compared to Ondine, whose obscurity now revealed the obviousness of their designs, these women seemed vulgar. He fidgeted as he wondered how to begin a conversation that might redound to his credit, but before the calm, almost haughty silence of the girl he was at a loss for words.

  “How is your father, Ralph?” asked Winton, noticing the lad’s reluctance to venture forth.

  All eyes turned to poor Ralph, who knew how thoroughly he was being scrutinised.

  “He’s fine thank you, Doctor. Bored in the city, but fine nevertheless.”

  “Bored in the city?” echoed Paul. “It might not be Paris or London, but I’d imagine Melbourne must make country New South Wales look pretty grim.”

  “Not if you’ve grown up in one and not the other,” Ralph answered.

  “What on earth is there to do out there?” Paul continued, a slight jeer in his voice.

  “Well, one works, principally. And then at night one sits by a fire or looks at the stars from the verandah.”

  Paul glanced at Ondine, as if to pass a preliminary judgement on the suitor in conjunction with his sister, who simply looked back blankly, giving little away.

  Mrs Norris placed a tureen of pumpkin soup on the table and poured out a bottle of claret, which Hamish immediately took to, thinking that he’d have to bolster himself if he were ever to insert himself into this awkward drama and make an impression on Ondine.

  “Doctor, may we put on the graphophone?” asked Ondine.

  “Certainly, dear.”

  Paul leapt out of his chair and moved to the oak cabinet in the corner of the room.

  “What would you like to hear, Ralph?” he asked. “Dr Winton has an up-to-date collection.” He passed a pile of disks back to Ralph who, much to Paul’s delight and Ondine’s more muted amusement, looked befuddled as he read the labels.

  The doctor glanced again at Anna, thinking that this trial would not end well for Ralph. Before he could intervene with an appropriate suggestion of his own, the guest, as if driven by nervous unease, began reading the labels under his breath.

  “Schubert, Verdi, Dv-or-ak.”

  Paul and Ondine giggled at Ralph’s ignorance. The young man flushed indignantly and handed the records back to Paul.

  “Why don’t we listen to Caruso?” the doctor said, unable to conceal his annoyance. “This machine is more trouble than it’s worth.”

  It occurred to Hamish for the first time, though he was amazed that he hadn’t thought of it earlier, that Paul himself loved Ondine, not simply as a brother loves a sister, but in a way that was profoundly threatened by Ralph’s presence. Paul’s carry-on around his sister was not mere affectation. It pointed to feelings too dangerous to own except in the disguise of the play-acting that had begun to sicken him. Hamish realised just how marginal he was to this battle for the girl’s attention and resigned himself to a gloomy afternoon in which the best he could do would be to get thoroughly inebriated at the expense of the doctor and his well-stocked cellar.

  Ralph was stung by his inability to pronounce Dvo?ák, and a moment later, realising his error, tried to compensate with a clumsy declaration of his preference for the Czech composer which also had Paul glancing slyly at his sister.

  Abruptly, Ralph changed the subject, resolving not to take this little humiliation lightly.

  “The doctor tells me that you are at the Gallery School studying painting,” he said to Paul.

  “Yes, the doctor tells you correctly.”

  “Personally, I’m not one to waste my time with art,” he said, “but I’m sure, if you cut the mustard, Mother would love to have you paint her portrait. She has a weak spot for that kind of flattery.”

  “There’s more to the art of painting than portraiture,” Hamish volunteered, thinking that he’d have to deflect attention from his friend, who looked as if he were on the verge of tossing his claret into Ralph’s face.

  “I’m sure there is,” Ralph continued,”but there’s not much of a living to be made from art unless one is prepared to flatter well-intentioned patrons into buying the odd picture, is there?”

  P
aul gulped his wine sullenly, refilling his glass and topping up Hamish’s.

  “You have a point there, Ralph,” said Winton, who was relieved to see him holding his own. “The question is how art can exist outside of these forms of patronage.”

  “In a benighted country like Australia, full of beer-guzzling cattle barons and bush nationalists, art is probably going to wither away altogether,” Paul said. “As soon as the memory of Europe fades there’ll be nothing except the dead images your mother sticks up on the walls to distract herself from the ugliness around her.”

  Again Ralph prickled and flushed at the arrogance of the little upstart beside him. I could wring your bloody neck, he thought to himself. Ondine looked at him, sensing the violence surging within. She was amused by the tussle unfolding in front of her, flattered that her brother and her potential suitor would be so willing to fight over her.

  Anna was surprised at how closely Paul’s rancour echoed that of her own mother, who always insisted that Australia was an ugly, barren country. Her constant complaining had dragged her father down. He, at least, was determined to scratch out a living for them. For a long time Anna also had felt as if she didn’t belong and imagined that she too saw the ugliness from which her mother shrank. But now, as she listened to her son launch into a diatribe that seemed to speak the legacy of some inherited animosity to the new world, she realised just how out of place it all was. Times had moved on and she pitied her son, with his mannered speech and pretensions to a Europe he had never seen. By contrast, she admired Ralph’s bluntness, but looking at her daughter she feared that Ondine was too much like her brother to see the virtue in this.

  “To tell you the truth, I’ve never felt less like a European and more like an Australian than I do now listening to you say that, Paul,”Anna said.

  Paul looked flabbergasted. For a moment he was speechless.

  “Still,” he insisted, “it’s hard to say that we, whatever we are, belong here in the way that the Kulin tribes do. Australia is all an illusion. A trick with smoke and mirrors, performed by demagogues and balladeers.”

  Winton looked at him uneasily.

  “What are you talking about?”Anna said.

  “The Kulin peoples were the original inhabitants of the bay area. If there’s an Australian Volk around here, they’re it, only they’ve been decimated. Killed off by disease, dispersed or murdered. The rest of us are interlopers.”

  Mrs Norris’s reappearance gave them all an excuse to fall silent. She cleared the first course, replacing it with a rack of roast lamb and a plate of vegetables, then refilled the empty wine decanter with another bottle of claret that had been breathing on the counter.

  Ondine, who up until this point hadn’t said much, decided that she’d better, at least for the sake of appearances, show some sort of engagement with Ralph.

  “Ralph, the doctor tells me you’re quite a horseman,” she said. “I’ve never been horse riding. We are such city-dwellers.”

  “Well there’s no shortage of horse riding to be done on a farm,” he said, still flustered by Paul’s animosity and his own belligerence.

  “Do you whip them?” she asked.

  “No,” he said with a laugh, “spurs will do the trick, but mostly they know we’re there to ride them. Horses are intelligent animals and don’t take much prompting.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. I’ve always thought whipping horses cruel. When I was a girl it used to scare me, looking at the cab drivers in the city, listening to them abuse those poor animals.”

  Ondine noticed Winton again glancing at her mother. For the duration of the luncheon they communicated like two mutes with a secret language of eye movements. Ondine was careful not to betray her animosity. A few weeks earlier Winton had called her into his study to discuss the question of her inheritance and his wish that she should “marry well”. She imagined that he was a procurer preparing to sell her off to the highest bidder. After that discussion, she and Paul took to referring to him as “Monsieur Souteneur”, the implication of which, they both knew, did not spare their mother any less than it spared him.

  Hamish listened to Ondine talking to Ralph with a mounting ire. He felt ostracised by good breeding. Again he wondered how he could insert himself into a conversation that meandered from horses to cattle runs, from country balls to a country boy’s first glimpse of the city. He listened for an opening, but none seemed to come and the whole thing was, after all, so interminably boring that he wondered how Ondine could have the patience for it. Finally his own patience gave way.

  “You know, I’ve had a poem accepted by the Bulletin,” he blurted out. It was a blatant lie.

  They all turned to him. At the centre of their attention, he felt foolish.

  “That’s wonderful, Hamish,” Anna said brightly. “I knew you were a poet when you asked me those tricky questions about the Lorelei. I even said so to your mother.”

  He sank away under the heavy shadow of his deceit, still hoping desperately for a word of praise or even acknowledgment from Ondine. But before she could say anything Paul, by this time quite drunk, remarked that Australians don’t care a fig for poetry.

  “I don’t think that’s quite true,” Ralph said.

  “Poets make a worse living than painters, don’t they?” Paul said. “And that must make them pretty damn pitiful.”

  “Not if they capture the mood of the land, like Lawson or Paterson.”

  “My God,” said Paul. “What on earth is the mood of the land? Since when has the Zeitgeist made it this far south?”

  Again Anna felt pity for Paul. Winton was now amused rather than annoyed, but didn’t seem to have the energy to take a side.

  Hamish, feeling ignored, thought about the satchel he’d found under the derelict Brooke Street house and wondered if he should say something.

  “Where is the Zeitgeist if not in the new world?” he said finally. “Doesn’t history move west?”

  “Sure,” Paul waved off the question dismissively, “but that’s not what Ralph here means by mood, is it? Does he even know what the word Zeitgeist means? He’s thinking about the spirit of the land, isn’t he? And what the hell is that anyway? A drab wilderness drenched in Aboriginal blood. Is that the mood that hacks like Paterson are after?”

  “What are you on about, mate?” Ralph said.

  At this point, Winton calmly accepted that the afternoon could officially be described as a disaster. He felt suddenly tired and was content to watch the two young men tear each other apart out in the street if that was what it came to. Instead of worrying about it he simply took his wife’s hand, and kissed it.

  Anna, however, was eager to defuse the situation, if only for the sake of her daughter’s prospects.

  “I am from the Barossa, you know, Ralph, of German descent. Paul and Ondine have always seen themselves as not quite belonging here. It takes time to find one’s feet in a new country.”

  “My God!” said Paul again, outraged. “Who insisted that we speak German until it drove my father mad? Who taught us to read Goethe and Schiller, hoping that we’d be saved from the barbarity of Australia?”

  The outburst shook Anna to the core and for a second she was shocked that her son would accuse her in this way. Paul saw immediately that he had overstepped the boundary of propriety, and rather than continue at the table with the shame of having humiliated his mother, stood up manfully, apologised, and left the room.

  There was a moment of strained silence in which Winton and Anna both wondered if Paul were beginning to display the patterns of behaviour that undid Albert. Winton held Anna’s hand again.

  “Ralph, I’m sorry about all of this. We’ve behaved rather badly for you. You must think you’ve come to lunch at Yarra Bend.”

  Ondine, aware that this new sense of awkwardness accused her brother, directed her attention, finally, towards Hamish.

  “Could you recite your poem for us, Hamish?” she asked, her limpid blue eyes fixed on him.

&n
bsp; At that particular moment there was nothing he wanted to do less than recite a poem that imagined his final, impossible union with Ondine in some remote, hyperborean landscape of childish magic, secret signs and aberrant choral chanting.

  “I really don’t want to. It’s embarrassing.”

  “But we’ll read it anyway when it’s published. Or will you try to hide that from us as well?”

  “By then it will have the impersonality of print.”

  “Oh, all right. How are you going to be a poet if you never share your writing with your friends? We are practically family, aren’t we?”

  The candour of this convinced him that he truly loved her, but no sooner had she said it than she was again focusing on Ralph.

  “Maybe after lunch we could all go for a stroll through the gardens? It looks like quite a nice day.”

  “You could try to coax your brother into a better mood,” Winton said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I think I know just how to do that. He’s not always so horrible.”

  After lunch, with the party waiting for her on the verandah, Ondine rushed upstairs to talk to Paul. She opened his bedroom door to find him sitting on the edge of his bed, his head in his hands.

  “Hello there,” she said, red with the exertion of the staircase.

  “Has he gone?” Paul asked.

  Ondine went to him, took his hands and looked into his eyes.

  “Do you have any idea what it does to me to see you so hatefully jealous?” She had a girlish grin on her face. Before he could say anything she kissed him on the lips. “Now come down, walk with your mother, and be civil.”

  He did as his sister commanded.

  Later on Paul apologised to Hamish, whom he felt he had wronged more intensely than either Ralph Matthews or his mother. Paul knew that Hamish was insightful enough to realise that he had invited him as a way of conveying his disregard for Ralph’s presence, which Winton had clearly arranged with some sense of ceremony. He felt sorry for his friend who had come in good faith, only to be buffeted into the margins of the conversation, and systematically ignored by all of them. After Ralph left and the others had returned to the house, they walked together to the Montague, where they each had a beer and a cigarette.