by Gail Jones
Drops of fluid fell, and she wiped them from his body with her blouse.
It was only afterwards that Victoria noticed that they were both partially dressed: Jules still had his shirt on and she still had her skirt on.
They were like the two fitting halves of some mythical unphotographed creature.
And it was only afterwards she pondered his casual remark: ‘over-exposure and under-exposure are both forms of invisibility.’
4
In the waxy beige light of late afternoon Victoria is lying asleep with her mouth wide open; a fine thread of spittle shines on her chin. She appears to be dead, but her breathing is audible. Cécilia has left a purple-coloured cyclamen on the bed-table beside her; the intensity of its colour and its pretty liveliness accentuate Victoria’s pale emaciation. As Anna leans across the bed she catches a coil, as of incense, of the honeysuckle aroma of desert dust; or is it the similar scent of warm dried apricots? Old people begin to smell of all they have met, Anna thinks. They surrender to the permeability of elements. They capture time in these bodily and distillate ways.
When Victoria wakes up she believes, for a second or two, that there is a snail moving silently along the ridge of her cheek. Anna must pluck it away; she obligingly lifts the invisible creature and pretends to flick it out the window.
Is it gone? Victoria asks. Her tone is forlorn. She is still on the dreamy periphery of delusion.
Gone.
This range is difficult and Anna is still unused to it; she finds herself strung double-crossed between fussy old-womanliness and a capricious storyteller who is pleased to pronounce on the superiority of her knowledge and experience. Victoria discloses a life gaudily melodramatic and striped with punctuation marks; yet she sobs, she is depressed, she beads each narrative with ellipses.
Let me wipe your chin.
Piss off, Anaesthesia.
Anna wipes her anyway. For Victoria the hand moving the cloth at her face is her mother Lily-white, long ago. She sees a net of black fingers and gauze dabbing at a wound. It was a childhood fall, perhaps, or a scratch from a tree. Perhaps too there is a scar there, or a blemish, or a faint pearly mark. She props herself on her elbow, shaking herself awake, to feel the forgotten surface of her chin.
Fetch me a mirror, she calls. A mirror. Quicksmart.
Anna watches as half-awake Victoria, bent on confirmation, seeks herself in a face-sized circle of light. The old woman peers, disconsolate. Anna takes a broad comb and gathers her wispy thinning hair.
Tell me, demands Victoria, the plot of The Comedy of Errors.
It’s pretty ridiculous, answers Anna.
All the better. Tell me.
Well, the plot turns on two pairs of identical twins.
Two?
Silly, isn’t it? And both pairs of twins have exactly the same names. So there is Antipholus from Syracuse and Antipholus from Ephesus. Then there are identical slaves, Dromio from Syracuse and Dromio from Ephesus. Both sets of brothers have separated as infants, master with slave. They meet up again in Ephesus, together with their loving and long-parted parents, and all’s well that ends well; happy ever after.
So what are the errors?
A series of misrecognitions as the masters and slaves mix up, and a legal tussle over a gold chain, a carcanet.
A carcanet?
In the end everyone is reconciled; all misunderstandings resolve … Winston is studying the slaves, who are beaten throughout the play — they’re forever being struck around the head with comical violence — yet they are more witty, funny and intelligent than their masters. Methinks you are my glass, not my brother, one of them says, and finds himself handsome. In the end they head off together, hand in hand, since neither wants to be the senior brother.
Victoria is silent.
Carcanet, she repeats. You must bring Winston in to tell me properly. You’ve skipped too much. You can’t tell a story.
I always wanted a twin, says Anna wistfully. I thought it would be a kind of inevitable companionship. I wanted to see another me, to be reassured.
Infantile, snaps Victoria. Infantile fantasy. Anyway, truly identical twins are not identical at all. They are mirror images of each other. I knew two girls once who were alike in everything, but their insides. One of the girls had her heart on the right side of her body, and every other organ the wrong way round. Vera, I think her name was, let me hear her right-sided heart. I put my ear at her chest and said yes, it is true.
True, Anna is thinking. Vera. She suspects that Victoria confabulates. Yet it is true that inside of things is incommensurate with surfaces. She adores the deep-bluish tone of Winston’s skin; but more than that she adores the Winston-child, resting his head silently in his mother’s lap, overcome by a shy and irremediable sadness. Images, outsides, do not suffice. Images do not tell their love-making propinquity or the intimate hallowing of their mutual time. Every artist knows this: the mendacity of images.
When Anna thinks about her mother, Maggie Griffin, she also conjectures inner life; she wonders what compulsion or rationalisation enabled her to leave, what drove her, years ago, from her small needy daughter.
Griffo met Maggie Winter during his annual vacation, when miners headed south for several weeks to little towns by the sea. They crossed three hundred miles of red dry desert just to see the white frill of a wave and gaze at the undulating bowl of the ocean. Groups of awkward quiet men, still carrying in their bodies the slightly bent posture of mine-work, would fish together on the jetty, or meet in hotels, to talk in huddled groups about their dark lives elsewhere. Any local could pick them: they drank too much, they swam in boyish clusters, they were always restless. If a man was spotted watching the sunset with impassioned attention, or if he commented on the glorious roar of the waves, or if he simply stopped in the street and looked up at the sky with the expression of one who has discovered the inside of a temple, then he was a dinkum miner on holiday, sure and certain.
There he was — that bloke Griffo — jagging skip-jack and herring and watching the fluke of a blue whale rise and plash heavily in the cold Southern Ocean.
Griffo met Maggie Winter on the very first day of his arrival. By accident he entered the wrong door of his small hotel, and she was busy at a table, sieving flour in a poky kitchen. She reached to brush away hair that had fallen in front of her eyes and left a deposit of flour dust, a pale cloudy shadow, along the rim of her forehead. Griffo stayed, making chit-chat, as the young woman continued making cakes. She had downy freckled arms and a rather childish face — she was only seventeen — and Griffo could not shift his gaze from the flour trace that so tenderly had marked her; it seemed to him a sign, a token, the luminous signature of their fate. He became assertive, confident, and ever more talkative. The couple were engaged almost immediately, and married five weeks later.
At their wedding Maggie pushed the stiff netted veil from her face, and Griffo was reminded again of the necessity of their union. He leant forward and kissed his bride as one kisses a child: lightly, ceremoniously, just above the eyes. The congregation snickered and Maggie was disappointed. And although she had liked the idea of being married to a miner — it seemed a pure, manly, almost heroic form of labour — when she saw the town with its tin houses and the insect-looking poppet heads, when she saw the pepper trees and the shaft holes and the borderless reach of dead dust, she knew immediately that she had made a terrible mistake.
Her new town was metallic, inimical, stunningly aglint in the sun, and her new home was unlovely. The new curtains were gaudy, the new lounge chairs uncomfortable, the spokes of their new electric fan, a desolate metal star, pierced her sad and transplanted heart. The Griffins lived in a new area built over old mine leases, and just one week after their arrival a neighbour’s front yard, only three doors away, subsided twenty feet into old shaft workings. The house stood teetering at the lip of a ghastly hollow. It terrified Maggie, these sudden holes. She could not laugh with the others when they described the
whoomph! and the comic-book puff of cloudy dust. The crater of a yard-disappeared stood as a sign of her own subsidence, the windy hollow she felt in the centre of her body.
Griffo doted upon Maggie, but Maggie doted upon film stars. She spent their housekeeping money on matinee trips to The Palace, and loved lustily the silver face of every actor she saw there. They spoke with unAustralian accents and had consequential lives. Violins and pianos endorsed their emotions. They moved in secure rectangles, invulnerably bordered, and experienced the pleasure of genuine conclusions.
It was an unusual form of loneliness, this loneliness of projections. Maggie had entered a secret and synthetic life. In the flicker of darkness she felt complete and verified, but as she emerged blinking and agog from matinee screenings she could not bear the blinding real that swept forward to claim her.
A year later, when her only daughter was born, Maggie’s life was cemented in the mode of unglamorous dismay. She looked into the eyes of her infant and saw there an image of herself, incredibly diminished. She wept for days and days before Griffo realised that she would need time away, in a hospital.
He looked back, past the swift-moving, uniformed nurse, to see his wife rigid, alone, gazing fixedly at nothing. Her face was turned to the wall. A shadow consumed her.
So what does this mean?
It means that Maggie Griffin had already left. Maggie had left the goldfields even before Anna was born. The handsome visitor, an itinerant worker with slicked back hair, a steady stare and a fetching scar tilted diagonal across his cheek, offered a wise-cracking movie-tone, narrative of escape. When he spoke of riding the railway right out of the desert, when he invoked aeroplanes and ferry tickets and panoramic travel, Maggie fell, like Ingrid Bergman in shadowy Casablanca, into his waiting arms.
Years later her daughter Anna will fashion more complicated explanations, but this is simply a lonely woman, depleted and disappointed, who can no longer endure the realist insufficiencies of her life.
Anna is eavesdropping. From the corridor, out of sight, she can hear Winston reading Victoria the entire script of The Comedy of Errors. His voice is a theatre of dexterous impersonations: he manages different and particular voices for each character he performs. The slaves have East-Ender accents, vigorous and rude, and the two Antipholuses sound absurdly like old Etonians. Victoria laughs out loud and interjects comments and obscenities; occasionally she mimics Winston at the business of mimicking. They are frauds together, they are having a ball. At the end of the reading comes soft and modest clapping from the one-woman audience (Bravo! Anna hears), and some blurry muttered comments from Winston in response. Then he appears at the doorway, carrying the potted cyclamen.
Look what Victoria gave me. No one has ever given me flowers before.
Winston is delighted.
Classy lady, he says, nodding towards Victoria’s room. She asked me to marry her.
This is the moment — Anna knows it — of irrevocable feeling. Her swollen heart flies out to meet him. Anna sees the integrity of his smile and his fabulous complexity. She has fallen in love with a married man from Kingston, Jamaica. A man who will leave her. A man who probably does not and would not ever reciprocate.
She moves forward and brushes grains of dirt from the potplant that have settled on his sleeve. It is a modest gesture. It is the only gesture she can think of that allows her to approach and touch him, without betraying the Shakespearian extravagance of her feelings.
The petals of the flowers look startling and vivid; Anna glances away so that she will not fall into this new facticity of things, this spell-binding world remade by the force of romance.
They catch the Underground to Drummond Street, to share an early dinner in an Indian restaurant. Winston hugs his potted cyclamen as though it is a trophy. Strangers greet and smile at him. He jokes, and play-acts. In the darkness, under the streetlight, his face is a full moon; Winston is radiant, Winston emits light.
When other children slept Anna was awake, imagining. The desert around her was a forest of symbols. Sometimes, in the summer heat, Anna stayed out on the verandah to look up at the sky. Stars trembled in their millions and wind sang in the air. In the distance she could hear the mine batteries pounding and ore rumbling along a conveyer belt in linked metal trolleys. If her father was underground she tried to imagine his location; she selected the shape of a distant tree and thought yes, he is there, exactly there; the roots of the tree feather downwards towards his head. When she thought of the tunnels and the excavations, the subterranean blackness, she thought also of the moons the miners carried before them, their reversed outer-space, their night-shaded other-world. If he is dead, she reasoned, someone’s moon will find him. A splash of circular light will discover his face. The tree will then mark the place of his grave, and reach downwards, until it finds him, and feed and grow strong. She repeated her made-up prayer to protect her father:
Gentle Jesus kind and wise,
Let my father be alive.
But as the shadows gathered and the easterly wind rose in the darkness, she grew nightly more afraid.
Several times Griffo returned in the grey light of early morning to find his daughter sound asleep on the back steps, or on the verandah. She was always curled tightly in on herself, enclosed, moon-shaped. He would pick her up carefully, retaining the circle, and carry her inside.
When he woke her in the mornings, before he went to bed himself, Griffo had the dismal appearance of a corpse. His face bore a drawn and ashen quality, and Anna could smell the deep earth embedded in his skin. They moved to the kitchen where the wood stove had already been lit. Tea was brewing in its dented green enamel pot. Father and daughter ate porridge and said nothing to each other. This life, decreasing. Anna watched Griffo vacantly line up objects on the table, the teaspoons back to back, the teacups side to side. She longed for a chatterbox. She longed for something far-fetched, for something foreign, for anything at all that might awaken and enliven her.
Anna dear, let me tell you; I have just remembered.
Jules and I went once on a short holiday together. He had a large job — a wealthy family, whose wedding was spectacular — and with the payment bought rail tickets from Paris to Venice. It was low season, winter, and we booked a room somewhere in a backstreet, very near the centre, very near St Mark’s. I remember mist rising from the canals and the floating buildings. The quicksilver sky. The boats riding on reflections. I had never seen anything quite so beautiful. Jules took photos and developed them by borrowing a darkroom; he photographed doorways, church spires, the dark cave-shapes of alleyways. Bits and pieces of buildings; nothing whole or complete. I remember noticing at the time that he loved incompletion. Worn walls. Rooftops. A particular pattern in the paving stones. He also took a series of portrait photographs of me. I still have them; I’ll show you. Without my feathers, of course, but I was still impressive. We looked, I think, like a couple of honeymooners. Every day I powdered my face and drew scarlet on my lips; and I bought a new hat, a scarlet cloche, which I wore incessantly.
In any case, this is what I want to tell you:
On our third day in Venice it rained and rained, and St Mark’s square began to fill up and flood. We stayed all afternoon in a café reading, just wasting time, waiting for the rain to stop, and when we set out in the evening to return to the hotel, the square was inundated, completely underwater. It was extraordinarily black and shiny, like India ink. Lights reflected everywhere: twinkling stars. Jules hoisted me up like a child and piggybacked me across the water. We were both laughing, slightly hysterical; we were both very happy. The rain was still falling, and I held an umbrella, a scarlet umbrella, high above us …
Do you know the Surrealist game called Exquisite Corpse? Participants compose a fantastical body by contributing a drawing of some body part to a folded-over piece of paper. You can’t see what the others have drawn and when the paper is opened out, there it is, a hybrid creature, something new and amazing. This is what I
thought: We compose our own exquisite corpse. I was thrilled by the inky water, and the piggyback, and the absurdity of it all.
The next morning, our last, it was still softly raining. Jules took one of his photographs of me, folded it into a boat shape, and set it floating upon the bright watery square of St Mark’s. I can see it now, my own face, boat-shaped and marvellous, drifting slowly away from us.
Honey-moon, Anna. Why do you think they call it that?
5
Anna was reminded instantly of those paintings by Max Ernst, in which women have the peaked and almost monstrous heads of birds, and flounces of iridescent feathers streaming like cloaks down their backs. When she entered the drawing room Victoria was wearing her feathers, standing in birdlike silhouette, an optical illusion, peering out of the window. For the first time Anna wondered if other people had considered her mad, if this propensity for display, this pompous mummery, had ever enabled others to hurt or disqualify her as a crazy woman. The feathers were so dark they had an oily sheen. Where had it come from, this head-dress?
An hourglass, commanded Victoria. I want you to buy me an hourglass.
She was having a good day, and was up and about, alert, perky, dispensing orders.
So I can observe and calculate how much time I have left.
She moved behind her Cocteau screen — her eye appeared in a star-shape — paused for thirty seconds or so, and then reappeared.
Well? What are you waiting for? Toot sweet! Anna Griffin, toot sweet! toot sweet!
So Anna is on an errand for imperious Victoria; she sets off to scour the second-hand shops of London to find her prize.
The seasons are now in shift; the air is chill and diaphanous, but there are the beginnings at last of a spring moderation: buds have begun appearing, there is a milky quality to the light. In the past two months there were times in which Anna believed quite seriously that she would not survive the English winter. Her chest heaved with ice; her breath was frosty; she felt herself freezing inside-out. Winston had reassured her: if a Jamaican — who carries the sun of his home in his bones — can endure it, so too can a sunny Australian. They put their hands inside each other’s jackets, as children do, for the swathe and the enclosure of a warming embrace.