They thought it was I who was eccentric.
I am forgetting to mention: Augustine has a little dog, a white rough-haired perky little fellow sitting at attention on the floor. Not parked on the page, like my Leonie.
It was thought until quite recently that the saint in his study was a painting of my namesake, but scholars (American of course) have worked out that it is in fact Augustine, writing a letter to Jerome on the question of eternal beatitude. At this moment the room fills with light and a voice tells him that Jerome is dead and ascended into Paradise. The painting is called The Vision of St Augustine.
That light, so clear and luminous … a light to live in, and know. The light of God, and the light of man also, the highly wrought light of the city of Venice, as created in paint by Carpaccio. A fine amber light, water borne, that bathes the room and is the gift of the city, and the painter, and the story.
I have Carpaccio’s painting of the death of St Jerome in front of me, too. The earthly part, not the ascending. He lies on the ground, while various religious recite the office. There’s nothing tragic in the scene, it is busily peaceful. The saint’s long body is lean, hardly more than white-shrouded bones, his white beard combed down his chest.
In the middle distance is a Turkish-looking figure with a turban and scimitar, mounted on a delicate spirited horse with its head in the air. He is a mystery. Why is he there? Unless it is because the horse being simple and animal can see the saint’s soul mounting to heaven. That is a sobering thought, that animals may see in a more spiritual manner than is vouchsafed to us humans.
I remember my delight when I saw these pictures in their place in Venice. I knew them when I was with the Franciscans but only from a small book with such poor smudged reproductions it was hard to see any detail in them. The real thing was a revelation of light and colour and space. I thought I might see this as an emblem of the vast difference between the world God made and our dull perception of it.
I look at St Jerome lying beyond all mortal care. I do not have his long white beard, though I am becoming as lean and bony as he. I shall not die in the odour of sanctity. My young men could not have played the part of the ceremonious monks, solemn but not grief-stricken, knowing their elder in a better place. They kneel with bent heads, lowered lids, they contemplate themselves in his passing, with a kind of humble radiance. He is beyond care, but attention is being paid. My young men, those children – once I forgot and said to a client, The children will sort it out for you – bent their heads and lowered their eyes over my computers and believed themselves masters of the universe. With no notion of the way they had to go.
This was not to decry their good natures. I would not have expected them to stuff themselves drunk into a car and attempt to kill people. I believed them to be very moral young men, in their own way. And ascetic. You notice I talk all the time about young men. I do not know why young women never applied to work for me. At the time I thought, maybe female intelligences would have been more inclusive, but I did not get the chance to find out.
They were beautiful, my young men. I did not quite see it at first. I noticed their difference, their oddity, a deliberate avoidance of the ways of being that ordinary people, people like me, would have chosen.
I used to be a bit of a dandy, but within the conventional. The acme of the conventional, perhaps, at a certain extreme of cut, colour, fabric, but within a space of quiet good taste. My young men were flamboyant, they invented themselves, invented and reinvented. Wondering what they’d be wearing, how they’d be looking, became a habit, a small pastime, as I paced about my Venetian workroom, waiting, you could have thought, for them to come.
Jake, Novica, and Clement. They were the lads in my employ at the time I am writing about. Even their names had a certain rare and beautiful quality, juxtaposed. They were characters in a poem, sprung to mysterious instant life.
I wondered, to begin with, if they belonged in my Venetian space, with its timeless poise and gravity and limpid light. They were hardly scholars, and certainly not philosophers. And yet … their energy, the disciplined flamboyance of their lives: I could see in that some piratical questing Renaissance spirit, a desire to know, to do, to find. Heroes of virtuality, swinging on their swivel chairs from screen to screen, travelling through infinite possibility without needing to go anywhere.
Jake, with his hair spiked into blond bleached points above his brown face, his treacle-coloured eyes with the dark-stained whites, Novica’s pale curls tumbling to his shoulders, Clement close-cropped with a small beard as cultivated as topiary. You can see them in paintings of the period, the Renaissance I mean, dazzlingly dressed, gorgeous even, looking out of the canvas at you with wide knowing eyes. I could tell you what’s going on, their faces say, I can see what is happening here. The red taffeta cape is held with an indolent long-fingered hand, the shapely leg in green tights sketches a graceful diagonal.
And had I said any such thing to them? To Jake, Novica, and Clement? They would have thought I was playing some game they had never heard of, okay for me, of no interest to them.
Moreover … they see, they observe … but is there any doing?
Once I said to them, When men worked in rooms like this – meaning my lovely Venetian study – they believed they could know everything there was to know. That all knowledge was available to them, and could be held in the brain of one man.
And could it, asked Clement.
They believed it could.
Yeah, but the thing is, was there any one person who actually did have all this knowledge in his one head?
I expect not. But the fact is, people believed they could, it was what they tried to do, it seemed a possible ambition. Noble of course. A bit more study, another book read, more candles burned, they would have it. It was the belief that counted.
Not if they couldn’t actually do it, said Novica.
These days, I said, we know it isn’t possible, we know there is too much knowledge for any one person’s brain, even to contemplate, let alone know.
But not for these babies. Novica patted his computer as gently as if it had actually been a baby. All knowledge is in here, or it will be soon. It can be. Not an impossible ambition. The pute will have it all.
Ah, I said, but only if you know what to ask it.
If we don’t know to ask it we don’t need to know it, said Clement.
I was silent, in the face of such ignorance. Such petty stupid innocent ignorance.
Besides, I said, after a long pause, during which the young men sat at their screens, eyes bright and darting like small birds looking to alight. Besides, who will tell the machines? From whom will they learn all knowledge?
Well, said Jake, they’re already cleverer than we are.
You don’t mind?
Somebody needs to be, said Clement, and laughed.
My Venetians wouldn’t have cared to let a machine do their thinking for them, I said, but softly, turning away, seeing this conversation had gone as far as was likely.
They had their faith, these young men, and it wasn’t, couldn’t, oughtn’t to be St Augustine’s, or Carpaccio’s, or even mine; they could not have caught up to me yet.
11
Gwyneth got into a more than occasional habit of visiting Clovis and drinking red wine with him in the evenings. It is as though I am having an At Home, he said to himself, here, and available, offering refreshment. He didn’t mind. In fact, he liked it. I suppose I have the habit of hospitality, he thought. She drank a lot of wine, but he could afford it, though going and buying it was a bit of a nuisance. He wondered if he was getting fond of her. She was quite prettily endearing, under the bruised and purplish pallor. He liked talking to her. She didn’t have much education, didn’t know the kind of things he knew, but she looked at the world and judged it. Didn’t filter her views through expectations or assumptions or make demands of him. You could say she gave, her time, her talk, her desire.
Sometimes, anyway. Sometimes she
was morose. Drinking the wine as though it were medicine, suddenly leaving without a word. He didn’t mind. He took slow sips of his as if it was a decent vintage, and thought how she was a bit like the lake, she had her moods, but they were for contemplation, not irritation. And being moody she was still, like the lake, herself.
He kept remembering the King Lear in the rubble of the bombed city. The program had said that there was a tradition of having Cordelia and the fool played by the same person, which was probably originally because of the necessities of casting, having the pretty boy who played the heroine do the fool also, because they are never on at the same time, and note this, it said, you could make a case for Cordelia being actually the fool, in the real life of the play, and therefore never on stage with him for that very reason; maybe she disguised herself as the fool to look after her father. Who at the end says, standing bewildered with her inert body in his arms, and my poor fool is hang’d. In the production he saw, the elegant pale-skinned girl who played Cordelia did the fool in gelati-coloured commedia dell’arte costume, which gradually ragged away as she became more pinched and mauvish pale. It didn’t commit itself to their both being the same person, just let you think it was possible.
If Gwyneth were going to become his Cordelia she was in her fool incarnation. Later she would wash her face and her hair, put on a pretty dress, and save him.
That was the kind of complicated fanciful thought he had time to think these days. No harm, really, unless he started believing himself. Lear didn’t recognise that the fool was his daughter, but it was a play, and in this real life he’d looked carefully enough to be quite certain Gwyneth wasn’t.
One evening he was sitting on the wall of the lake looking up at the sky and thinking it was like being inside an enormous oyster shell. The world is my oyster. Ha. All those pearly luminous translucent effects, all those masses of cloud that were grey but all different colours of grey, the light yellowish on one fringe, bluish on another edge. Open your mouth, Clovis, and swallow it. Or maybe you are the grit that will irritate into a pearl. He felt doubtful about that; it seemed a strange grandiose thought.
He looked at the swans and wondered if he’d remembered another line of the Spenser poem. The bridal of the earth and sky. The kids were walking up the grass slope with their baseball bat. He wondered where they played. He squinted his eyes and saw Gwyneth, her bee-striped jumper, suddenly jump up out of the bushes and hurry at an angle away from them, and them running to catch up with her, standing in a circle round her. He wondered if they were asking her to join the game. Here looked like a good place to play, unless it was too sloping, the lawn brightly green in the slanting afternoon light, which made a yellow haze that slowed sound. Until the scream, loud, sharp, repeated, rising, the kind of scream you want to make in a dream, when you can’t, you can’t summon up the power. Here the power was summoned. He stood up and started to run towards the group. A small woman came out of the front door of the restaurant, followed by another in a black dress, and people in white aprons came out from where the kitchens were. The kids danced off up the hill jostling and tossing the bat backwards and forwards. Gwyneth stood silent, and then walked down to the edge of the lake. The people from the restaurant watched for a moment, then went slowly inside.
What was all that about, asked Clovis.
They were going to rape me. They were going to push me down in the bushes and rape me, every one of them.
How do you know?
Because they said they were, why else.
Surely they were joking.
Of course they weren’t. They said so, they meant it. I know! she said, furious with him, her small chest heaving inside her jumper. I may be a lot of things, she shouted, but I’m not stupid.
I thought it was going to be a game.
Oh yeah, a game. Dead right. A game. Good fun for all. Except me.
She drank three glasses of wine down faster than usual.
I’m going to have to get you to come shopping with me, he said. Help carry all this wine we’re drinking.
Oh no, she said, I couldn’t do that. No. She began to cry. Tears made watery paths in the dirt on her face.
We could go up to Mancare on the way and get you something warm to wear.
Don’t you see, she said. Don’t you see. They’ll catch me.
Those kids won’t hurt you if you’re with me. I reckon they don’t mean it. One scream did for them.
She shook her head. Not them. She drank another glass of wine and scrubbed her eyes with her wrists.
I was in gaol, she says.
Straightaway he wants to ask, why? What were you in gaol for? But has enough sense to let her go.
I was in gaol and then I got out, and I was going to stay out of trouble, I had this job. In a massage parlour, it was good money and I was thinking I could get a flat and I could have Brad with me.
Brad is …
My little boy. He’s three.
Clovis thinks, this child has a child?
But then I got back in again.
She keeps stopping, and it is hard for Clovis to know whether to give her little pushes with his own words to get her going again or just wait.
What happened?
Parole. Breaking parole. But then I get out again. She sniffs and wheezes and her breath sobs in her throat. Well, I’m … you know, don’t you … don’t tell me you didn’t know, I need my methadone. I go down to the doctor with Saul, that’s my de facto, no he’s not Braddy’s dad, and I couldn’t believe it, they kept me waiting, three quarters of an hour, and Brad’s running around, he’s going spare, that’s no place for a little kid, so next time I went on me own, without Saul, and that’s when things went wrong, didn’t they. There was some Rohypnol, so I took it, that’s good stuff that is, handy to have, it was just there, I know I shouldn’t have, and then I was going home and I just wanted to get Braddy some things …
You mean, shoplifting, says Clovis.
Yeah, and I got m’self some underwear, it’s nice to have nice underwear, and perfume and jeans and things and if I hadna been on my own it would never have happened, I shouldna been on my own. So I’m back in again.
I see.
Well, I got out again. Just for a bit. It was my stepfather, he died. Daryl. The funeral, and all, they let me go to it. But everybody was horrible. They reckoned I killed him.
But you were in gaol.
When I was a kid he abused me, and I said I was gunna tell people, and he said he’d hurt me if I did. But then when I was in gaol I thought it’d be all right so I said about it. I was threatening him, they reckoned, they reckoned that’s what killed him. Oh, so I killed him, did I, he died of cirrhosis of the liver, I suppose what I said caused that. When it was long past time he should of died, the rotten old bugger. Been bashing my mum for years. And still she said I was lying
She’s just sipping the wine now, staring past the footless glass, running her finger over the broken edge of the stem till the blood bubbles up.
And now?
Well, I’m on the run, aren’t I. So I can’t go to Mancare, can I. Or off buying wine.
Where’s Saul now?
Back in Cowra, with Brad. My mum’s there too.
She pulls up the striped jumper and feels inside her bra, pulling out some pills. She smiles slyly up at him, and sighs. Only enough for a coupla weeks.
And then what?
She shrugs. He understands that she’s quite drunk after all this wine. She can name her troubles, but not at this moment think of what to do about them. It occurs to him that she possibly never can.
Are you eating, he asks.
There’s a restaurant just there, she says, pointing her thumb over her shoulder. The food’s pretty good.
You don’t …
Not the garbage bins. It’s just there. In plastic bags, beside the bottles. Quite nice and clean. Real fancy stuff. Can’t be fussy, but.
She dozes in the corner of the ferry-stop shelter. It’s quiet, n
obody around. A powerboat is making its way up the lake. The police. Nobody else is allowed powerboats on the lake. He doesn’t think they’re looking for Gwyneth. But quite soon, he supposes, they will find her.
Nevertheless, on his way to buy the wine he calls in at the Salvation Army shop. No overcoats, the young snap them up as soon as they come in, they’re a fashion item. He finds a thick knitted jacket, long and large with a deep turned collar, grey in colour, and lined with some padded material. She can wrap herself in it like a blanket.
He wonders what will happen when the methadone runs out.
12
Jerome
Often have I written on these pages that I was in love with Flora, and it is not possible to write it too many times. But notice I also said we all were. We all adored her, anyway, which may not quite be the same as being in love, but we did adore her, this un-young waif who made amazing meals for us, and our eating them was the consummation of our love for her. At the beginning I did not see myself as any different from the others, I mean the regulars, us addicted ones, who kept coming back, except I saw what we were doing, and put it into words. I am not sure that the others did.
You often hear about the meal as metaphor for sex. What about sex as metaphor for the meal? You start with the visit to the beloved, with a certain tentativeness. To begin with there are words: the menu that you read with your eyes and with the tastebuds of your imagination. This is desire. It has been with you since long before you picked up the menu. At this point all things are possible. It is perhaps the most exciting part of the meal because so far no choices have been made, which inevitably will narrow and confine the experience. The wine comes; this is like the first sweet kisses. We sip kisses like wine; we sip wine like kisses.
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