Original sin. It seems hard to visit this upon a newborn, until you hear them cry and you know that they know. And yet, wouldn’t we each choose the apple, if the snake whispered it to us?
So, the beautiful slender scaly snake, the beautiful portly scaly fish. Not whispering, but kissing.
If only I had had my Leonie, then. One scoop of her dazzling white paw and she’d have plucked out that fish from his deceiving pond to lie frantically popping his kisses on the pavement until he drowned in air. I remember that the dexterity of the cat is an instance of the love of God to her exceedingly. And indeed when I consult my Christopher Smart I find that the cat has the subtlety and the hissing of a serpent, which in goodness she suppresses.
Of course when I looked in the pond that day and saw the fish I did not believe in the devil. I was a man walking in the sun dissatisfied with his life. Remembering the child he had been, solemnly forswearing every earthly desire. Ha. What are the world and the flesh to a boy of eighteen who had been in an ecclesiastical institution all his schooldays, not to mention a Christian home before and as well. Becoming a religious is like writing a blank cheque and too late discovering what monstrous sum you are being asked to pay. Please sir, I was a child, I knew not what I did.
The enormous promises of the religious life didn’t lead to holiness, or peace of mind. Not even the holy itchings of doubt, that could have occupied my days in the scratching of them. Just that Rimbaudian sense that life is elsewhere.
And the devil certainly not relevant. I was the product of my time. I could conjure him, but as myth, as metaphor. As a code that people of my intellect could decode.
The devil’s sin was pride, and maybe so was ours.
Nowadays, I fear metaphor. I am courteous and careful with it. You form the words that give shape to it, and shazam, shape and body it has, and its own mind, and the feeble leash of your wit cannot hold it. Metaphor exists, it will pad around your house at night with eyes like hot coals and heavy stinking breath. It will sink its teeth into your neck and not let you go. Try decoding the clamped jaw, the raking paws. Better to try to force them apart and escape. Better still to have learnt the words of command before it was too late. Stay. Back. Heel. Maybe even, Avaunt. Better above all never to have conjured the beastly image in the first place.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by frisking about the life.
And certainly my Leonie is safe, no clamping jaws and raking claws can come near her, and she is like to rake a claw in return. I suppose the danger is real but she is always safe, it is the other who is at bay and in flight. I doubt she can do it for me, though. She puts her paw on the word bay, the ink smudges, her pink pad has a blackish stain. If you were really a lion, Leonie … but maybe you are one by metaphor, and can save me from other metaphors.
My namesake interpreted the Bible, and I maunder on through my own sorry life. He translated it, but the monks who knew the bad translations of the psalms by heart stuck with them and refused his accurate ones.
And yet, had that fish stopped kissing its fellow long enough to tell me all that was to follow my leaving the order … what am I saying. Of course I would’ve … wouldn’t have … left … I am not that big an idiot. But of course I would have; our own suffering, it is something that we earn and would not give up, after all.
I have my hindsight, and that is not entirely regret.
The restaurant was octagonal, with the kitchens in a long slender shaft that pierced it, with windows overlooking the entrance path. I don’t have a car, I usually walked, it was pleasant exercise after a day in front of the screens, and I often went along the edge of the lake. The time I am thinking of was winter, it would be dark and you would approach this lantern-shaped structure, see it hanging in front of you, dim but full of rich muted light, and always I felt that remembered pang of a someone excluded, like a poor child in a Dickens novel, nose pressed to the glass of the rich family’s window, looking at the presents, the food, the warm firelight, the smiling faces and all the images of love that will never be his. I loved that moment of pang because that was all it was, because not any longer did I have to press my nose up against the glass, I would not be found a little frozen body when the sun rose next morning, I could go in, I belonged within the warmth, the lights would welcome me and the dwellers therein turn smiling faces upon me. You may think me naive, as now I do, to believe that love was to be had because I was on the right side of those double-glazed panes of glass. But then, I was new to that world, I disported in it, gambolled like a little dog who is petted.
Anyway, when you go along the path to the entrance, to the right is a row of brightly bluish-lit windows, with steel glittering, full of bustle. And sometimes Flora to be seen, somehow shining through the glitter.
I’d been to The Point a lot of times before I actually met Flora. Talked about her, had the feel of her name in my mouth. The sound in my ears. Flora’s happy, Flora’s doing, Flora’s decided, Flora won’t. You knew she’d have a last name but it didn’t ever come up. And of course I’d seen her, in glimpses.
Sometimes Terry Feldman persuaded her out of the kitchen. He took her hand and kissed it and said in that booming voice of his, Brava, brava, Flora my flower, Flora ma fleur, fleurissima, brava, brava.
That’s when it occurred to me that all of us were in love with Flora. We came and we adored, and the food she gave us was what fed our adoration. Of course there were some people, tourists for instance, who came once, you could see them looking round rather nervously, and you felt sorry for them, they would have their perception of bliss and then be excluded, by distance, or poverty – the special-night-out visitors – or even ignorance.
I wondered if I could have got as bad as Feldman and his florid tirades. I remember looking across at Flora, at her bent velvety head, her thin body in its white shirt, as she smiled, tiredly, it was the end of a busy evening, weary and yet charmed by him, as we so many of us are, it’s his gift.
Maybe it’s his not being snobbish, everyone comes within his ambit. The dishwasher, should he come upon him, would be included. Though probably more briefly. This night Laurel deflected him, allowed Flora to escape. She held out his overcoat and slid it on to him, expertly, settling it over his portly shoulders with the most delicate finger flick. She is a nice woman, Laurel, sometimes I’ve spoken to her. At the end of the evening we’ll stand and talk a little, often about her son, Oscar, a clever boy, and a worry.
He’s got into wild company, she said once. Though I don’t know whether I should say that … She gave me a painful smile. Sometimes I wonder if he is the one who is the wild company. If he leads Raoul and Hamish, all those young people he hangs out with, astray. He does seem to be the lively one, the one with energy and ideas. Experimenting, they call it. As long as it doesn’t kill you.
I should think he just needs time, I said. Though what would I know. Thinking of my own quiet life in those years, interred in the seminary, my excitements Latin and Greek and the words of the mass. But I pronounced them to comfort her. Clever boys, I said, take a while to settle down, work themselves out. These days.
She smiled, and for a moment it cleared her face of worry. Her pale blue eyes shone. You think so? she said. I’m sure you’re right. He says he’s working this year. Though he has dropped two subjects, so he can’t fail and be stuck with paying HECS on them. Which is an improvement on last year. Of course it’s his problem, but you hate to see them burdened with debt.
But it won’t be a problem, really, I said, not when he’s finished university and into a good job.
Or if he never has a real job at all, I thought, but didn’t say, I didn’t want her face to sag and her eyes to dull. When she smiled you could see the girl she not so long ago was, before scarpering husband and troubling child pinched her forehead and tightened her lips. She was slim and neat and dressed well, in simple and you could tell expensive black dresses, but her beauty did not flower. It didn’t quite wither, but it didn’t f
lower.
And Flora? Did her beauty flower? Before I fell in love with her I did not notice, did not see her. My eyes were gorged on the lusciousness of Anabel, on curves of flesh and falls of black hair, I had not learned to see how exquisite was the plainness of Flora. Once I had fallen in love with her I so desired what she was I could no longer make judgements. And could not remember the time when I might have. She was tired, she drooped, but for me … she was my heart’s Flora. I resented Feldman’s turgid mouthing of her name and beauty.
I could make an image here … Leonie, shift yourself, I do not want your bum on these words, these of all words … I could say that Anabel was like a rococo church, breathtaking, yes, all that ornate detail, gilded, gorgeous, restless, so surfacely intricate, whereas Flora was a Romanesque chapel, plain, unadorned, worn, perfect, and when you understand how to look at it, to still your eyes after all the agitation of the rococo, so beautiful you think your heart will break, just being there, looking.
Feldman. The night he dropped the hint about outsourcing, when he was with the treasurer. A useful piece of information, it was. I suppose some people must have paid him for his information. I never did. Later, in the lavatory, having one of those strange parallel conversations that you have in such places with their odd etiquette of no eye contact. So at first he seemed to be talking to himself. Sex, he said. I suppose that’s why you left.
That’s what everyone thinks, I said. But they don’t usually say it.
Frankness. That’s the way to get on in the world.
Then I did laugh. I think that’s probably the most disingenuous remark I’ve ever heard, I said, because certainly I dare say Terry is quite often frank, on occasions, but it would be as carefully plotted as any of his strategies.
You think so? he said, in an injured voice, but smug underneath, as though I had paid him a compliment and was unaware of it.
Who was it said honesty is only profitable when it’s kept under control?
(Later I remembered who. It was Don Marquis who wrote the cockroach autobiography, and possibly it’s just as well I was not recalling its source, at the time.)
By this we were zipped and washed and going out the door and I had not answered his question, for no doubt it was a question, however he framed it as a statement, and one he wanted an answer for, and which it was my intention not to provide. You can’t answer a question like that over a piss, a book might do it, and even that’s not sure.
Of course I was being less than frank myself, and having that thought sidetracked me on to the idea of being a person called Frank and writing your memoirs, Less Than Frank being such a good title, but then I thought it would be better to call it More Than Frank. Who wants to be less than himself?
Just as we were parting I said, Have you ever imagined that the devil might be a goldfish?
Ha ha, said Terry. Very good. Very good.
I thought of the things I might have said. There is a short answer to was it sex, and it is yes. Or equally, no. I might seem to be cavilling like a Jesuit, but both answers are true. It’s true that if the Church catches you as a lad, and fills your head with the noble thoughts young people used to take such pleasure in (Do they now? What would Oscar’s answer be?) of vocations and service, and the highest earthly calling, he will not know what promising celibacy means. No sex forever: we should not ask children to promise that. But neither was it, in Terry’s terms, to lust after women that I left. It was for the world, God’s world I would have said once, the world’s own world that grew into its lovely complicated self and was so much more than the friary. I was like a man denying God by not using his talent to live in that world. Which hangs over a narrow promontory of land like a lantern against the dark sky and the dark lake, and promises. How it promises.
6
Do you know how to wash up, asks Flora of the young man sitting by her desk.
Yep.
How would you wash glasses?
Well, the best would be a copper sink, not to bump them too harsh like, and some good hot water, no soap, it wrecks the bubbles in the champagne, and a clean dishcloth to wipe them, very gentle, and then you have to polish them with a linen cloth, always linen, cotton won’t do. And the polishing mustn’t be hurried. It needs to take as long as it takes.
I see. How do you know all this?
My mother. Her dad was a butler. In a grand house in the home counties. She used to tell me stories about it, when she was a little girl in the big house and all the things they did. At night, when it was hot an’ I couldn’t sleep, she’d tell me the stories.
Where was this happening, the hot weather?
Out Cooper’s Creek way. Mumma was the housekeeper.
The young man is thin and not very tall, but his muscles are good.
Flora gives him a job. The grandson of a butler. And she thinks, a copper sink, what a fine idea.
But he’s never actually done it himself, says Elinor.
No, but he has a vision of it. That’s the thing.
Is vision what you want in washing up?
He has the vision, he has the theory. The practice will follow.
He’ll practise on you. However many smashed dishes later.
Well, said Flora, it’s really pots, that’s what he has to do. I hope it won’t be too much of a shock for him. Copper pots to scour and polish, not crystal glasses and fine china in copper sinks.
What’s his name?
Joe. Joseph Southey. His grandfather’s name. As a butler he was called Joseph. A good name for a butler, he reckons.
Elizabeth David’s family’s butler was called Lavender.
That’s fancy. Joe says he’ll be Joseph one day, when he gets a job worthy of the name.
Laurel had better watch out. At least if you had Joseph doing her job you’d know what to call him. The butler.
I’d have to give him a buttery to lurk in.
Oh how nice, says Elinor. The words give her a pang of envy, an excited seeing-possibilities envy, she wants them to happen, she wants the butler to be there in his buttery, simply because the words for his being so exist.
Poor Laurel, says Flora. You’re doing her out of a job.
Do dishwashers ever rise so giddily in the world?
If he wants it enough, he will make it happen.
Oh Flora, you’re such a romantic. You talk about him as though he were a lad in a fairytale.
Why not?
I suppose he’s poor but bright-eyed. Plain but with an honest face. Slight but wiry.
How did you know?
You’re impossible. Or else … You’re making it up.
You know I don’t have that sort of imagination.
You’ve invented an anachronism. Where’s he been all these years since butlers died out?
It was his grandfather was the butler, and in England, of course. He could have been quite old. And anyway, people in England still have them, there are people rich enough to have butlers still. You can do fabulously expensive courses to learn how, and expect to make a lot of money out of it.
That’s rare.
Yes, but not non-existent. Out of Joe’s league though. He grew up in the outback somewhere. His mother was housekeeper on some property. There doesn’t seem to be a father, and I think the mother might be dead. I don’t think she was very young.
So you have got yourself an innocent.
Just a good boy to wash dishes.
I still think you’re inventing him.
No I’m not. Especially not the bright eyes. I have to confess that was a huge plus. You can’t imagine … some of the people who apply for that sort of job have got such dead eyes. They know they’re the bottom of the heap and they’re going to stay there, and dishwashing isn’t going to save them, not in a lifetime.
As it may not save Joe.
Indeed, no, it might not. But he doesn’t know it yet. There’s still life in his eyes. He’ll be good to work with. Whereas the ones with dead eyes – it’s like having a black hol
e in the kitchen, they suck all the energy.
They are sitting in the sun on the terrace of a cafe in Manuka. It’s cold but the sun is warm. The sun in winter, Flora says, that’s what I came to Australia for. Funny, the sun is why my mother left, so she said. Flora likes to order a sandwich when they have lunch together. Most of hers is sitting on her plate, not because she doesn’t like it but because she doesn’t eat. She’s taken a bite, and while Elinor watches she has another nibble. She takes more mouthfuls of wine than of food.
You’re not eating, says Elinor. You’ve got to keep your strength up.
This Brindabella riesling’s good, Flora says.
Yes, but it’s not food.
It’s nourishing.
Not very usefully. You’ll become an alcoholic.
Cooks always take to drink.
Not in your league they don’t.
Flora takes another mouthful of wine.
Oh Flora. I do scold you, don’t I. Why do I scold you?
Perhaps because you are fond of me. You’re trying to improve me.
She says this so placidly that they both laugh, as she meant them to.
But it worries me. Every time, after I’ve seen you, I think, next time I see Flora I won’t scold her, then I do.
I wouldn’t know where I was if you didn’t.
Elinor picks up Flora’s hand and kisses it. A rough little paw, finely wrinkled. They sit in the sun and smile at one another. The waiter comes past and takes up Elinor’s plate. Flora motions to hers. Finished? he says. Yes, says Flora, it was an excellent sandwich. The waiter looks at the bite and two nibbles and his expression is confused. Quite excellent, says Flora.
The Point Page 5