She looked at me and rolled her eyes. “He didn’t answer either.”
I couldn’t think of a conference or such where I’d been with John and he hadn’t had a night with a student.
How many letters like that did he get?
“John has a reputation,” I said, hunting for the word. “He’s known as a cocksman.”
She coloured. “Oh,” she said, “that was pretty obvious, I suppose.”
Then she said the word “cocksman” as if learning it. “Cocksman.” Putting the word in her mouth.
She looked intently at me. “You’re not happy about me coming down to the city.”
She put her hand on mine as if to extract complete frankness from me, but it was intentionally ambiguous too—it involved some sexual possibility, “a payment”. For all her humanism, the gestures of integrity that she gave out, there was also a calculating person there, speaking through her hand.
“I refuse,” I said laughing, holding up my hands, breaking the touch. “I can’t even make my own life decisions.”
“I’m not asking you to do that. Just to help me find somewhere to live, basically. I wrote to John but he didn’t answer. I don’t want to ask him.”
“But what if you came down and found yourself desperately unhappy. My friends and I have enough trouble coping with each other.”
“I see, I’m not up to club membership,” she said. “That’s what you’re trying to say.”
She was both aggressive and, at the same time, asking me to deny this possibility.
“There is no club.”
She changed to a knowing, “worldly” tone. “I—I know it isn’t all heady discussion—I’m not that naive—the glittering first nights.”
I was tired of the conversation.
“I’m saying,” she said, “only that I have to get out of what I’m in now.”
I wondered.
“You know,” she said, “I envy you people so much that I almost hate you.”
That sounded honest.
I said, “You wouldn’t if you saw an overview of our lives. Thank god no one looks down on any one of us over, say, twenty-four hours.”
The elaborate self-deceptions, anxiety attacks.
“You don’t really know how fortunate people like you are, you.really don’t,” she said, exhibiting anger.
“Oh come off it, Kay.”
She changed tone again.
“I suppose you’re active in the uranium thing.”
She made it sound like one of the advantages of city life—the opera, the theatre, the “uranium thing”.
“I haven’t done my homework,” I said tiredly, “but the technological argument seems stalemated to me.”
“It’s dreadful stuff. If you had children you’d feel differently.”
She took an emphatic voice. “I was sure you’d be against uranium. Even cattlemen’s wives in North Queensland are against it.”
I forced out a reply. “I sometimes think now that if I want something to happen it’s not likely to happen. Anything I’m for is likely to be defeated.”
“I suppose that’s the sort of grim, hopeless thing I’ll have to say if I come down and get in with your group.” “For godsake, Kay, stop talking like that.”
I noticed then out of the corner of my eye that Cindy had come into the cafeteria on the far side.
She sat alone writing, looking serious.
I pointed her out to Kay to change the subject and to recklessly shove Kay’s nose into something more sordidly real. I told her that Cindy had been sexually assaulted. “She’s an old friend of mine from the city,” I said. “Sexually assaulted?”
Her eyes went to Cindy and then back to me.
“Yes, and by a couple of aboriginal delegates.”
“Here? At the conference?”
Her eyes went back to Cindy, staring.
“I didn’t hear anything about it,” she said.
“She didn’t tell anyone.”
“She didn’t?”
“No.”
“She didn’t go to the police?” “No.”
She frowned and then said, “Oh—because of the way the police treat rape victims.”
“No, because of the aboriginals.”
“Well,” she said, “well, nothing like that happens up North.”
“Perhaps Cindy will introduce you to them.”
She looked back at me with a jerk. “What a callous thing to say.”
I had to go.
“But no,” she said softly, “that’s just your way of handling it. Being ironical.”
I regretted breaking Cindy’s confidence.
“I’ve read all the rape material,” she said, “that’s come out.”
“Oh go back to the farm,” I said, suddenly. “Stay on the farm.”
The conversation seemed suddenly to be very skewed. “How rude,” she said, but then began to ingratiate herself again almost immediately, “but I suppose I asked for it . . .”
“I have to go.”
I left her sitting on the grass.
On the pathway I acknowledged that, yes, of course there were life traps, and she was possibly in one, or maybe not. And perhaps I had some small responsibility to her.
No. I really thought she was novelising her fairly decent, affluent life, giving herself a part in some sort of feminist narrative. But all right, affluence did not shield us from problems of the psyche.
No, I did not think she was seriously planning to leave her husband or in crisis. She was just writing herself a faddish narrative and not doing it well.
And I shouldn’t have brought Cindy into it.
But I owed Kay the benefit of the doubt. I supposed I could help. I turned back.
I got to the door of the cafeteria.
Kay had now gone over and was introducing herself to Cindy.
ONLY THE INTERACTION
OF COMPLEX THINGS
“Anderson, in contrast, wholly rejected the concept of total system and with it that concept of ‘meaning’ or Cosmic Significance . . . ‘We have to recognise the accident,’ Anderson writes, i.e., the fact that there is no totality or system of things . . .” As I make a note of something suggested by this I see an unrelated note written in my note book about Cindy many months before .the conference. I had noted down that she had found that a friend, Anna, with whom she shared a large, rambling house, was secretly wearing her clothes. “For the concept of total system Anderson substituted, one might be tempted to say, the concept of space-time. To be is to have a place not in the unfolding of the spirit, but simply in time and space . . .” Cindy is not following the lecture. She is her restless, smoking self, sitting, I am about to say, “flagrantly” with one of the aboriginals. “. . . To be in space-time is, of course, to have certain properties, to have position, duration, successors and predecessors, extension and surroundings . . .” Cindy was a pub-Andersonian—a Libertarian—from the old days. She had “received” Libertarianism, as I had, in those years back, in an unformulated way from a thousand conversations at the Royal George and in a disorganised way from papers and articles. We had made Libertarianism a total system. She’d since gone in other directions but I didn’t know how far. She’d had a child. I’d been out of contact with her during the baby years. We had all drifted from those old circles. She’d told me only in the last year or so that she had been a “Vadim’s person” too. That she had gone frequently to that legendary cafe in the days of Nation magazine. I’d been silently curious and wounded to realise that she had been a “Vadim’s person” during the two years that we’d been in love but we had never gone there together. I was never a Vadim’s person. When I had been a late-night subeditor on the Financial Review, I suppose it was about then, she had spent the evenings at Vadim’s. We never asked where the other had been. But maybe it wasn’t during the time when we had been together, maybe she had the years confused. She had lied about her age and other things for so long she had probably lost possession of con
ventional time. She had been, then, astoundingly perfidious. Devious. It was hard to believe this of her because we had belonged to a group which made a fetish out of being free of illusion and harshly honest. But some things she had chosen to be dishonest about for no good reason. I would have been interested in her going to Vadim’s. I would have thought that to be a good thing. Instead, she hadn’t mentioned it, had not brought back any gossip except perhaps by attributing it elsewhere. So while I had been sweating over bounced headlines, layouts which didn’t fit and the alien language of finance, she had drunk wine, played chess and talked with one of the significant groupings in the city’s history. “. . . People in general do not think very much about the goodness of their activities. They are simply to be found trying to make discoveries, or to produce works of art, exhibiting love or courage, or, on the other hand, imposing obligations on themselves or others, because they are made that way, i.e. because their character, in relation to their history, has so developed . . .” My foot is aching, Anderson, and I have warts for the first time in my life. I used to worry about any slight physical defect, or acne. Now I think, well that’s caused by stress, or age, or that’s an old wound. I do not strive to repair or restore the body to youthful perfection. “. . . Anderson says that Laplacean determinism begins with the hypothesis that ‘If we could give a complete account of the present state of the universe’, but that is ruled out by logic . . . there is no static universe and there is no complete description. Anderson was a retrospective determinist but did not hold that a determinist could ever be predictive.” But we live by the illusion of an unchanging self, we have the illusion too of control and decision making, and we proceed as if we have a working analysis of the future. Our consciousness refuses the truth that we are “slow-burning fires”. Cindy, yes, Cindy’s friend Anna was, she thought, stealing her personality by secretly wearing her clothes. Her first assumption had been that Anna was trying to look like her to attract away Cindy’s men friends. I suggested that it might be Anna’s way of private adoration of Cindy. But Cindy had decided it was Anna’s attempt to be like her. “. . . Anderson mockingly said, ‘Are we to learn how societies work in order that we may introduce our particular variations into them? In other words, are we to “use” laws that we think we know and in so doing obey laws that we do not know! What partisans of scientific “helpfulness” do not grasp is that theories occur as features of social movements, not as individual forces, that they are descriptions, indices, of what we are doing rather than guides for future conduct . . . they pursue a line of policy under the pretence that it is universal . . . and the illusion that if we could only “learn to agree” we would be bound to agree on something. But whatever we might know about what we are doing, there are always things based on the unconscious, reasons based on the irrational.’ But Anderson does not allow us to take a moral holiday. The assumption of meaninglessness can itself be a defence mechanism, as Freud has shown . . .” Ah, but we took a holiday in the old days. Libertarianism was an exit visa to avoid the complications of a fully operational life, many of us closed down, rationalised the closure of our abilities and our alcoholism by professing a belief in philosophical absurdity and the futility of endeavour. We promoted a sense of futility to excuse a deficient life, we were even deficient at being hedonist. We thought it wrong to care about what we did.
What I assume to be two plainclothes detectives appear at the door of the auditorium. One of them leans forward and asks someone near the door a question. The person looks around and points at Cindy. Cindy is self-preoccupied and I doubt if she is listening to the lecture. She does not notice the police. The detective asks something of a person at the end of her row and the message passes along the row to Cindy, who looks up with a jerk and sees the police. She points at herself and the detective nods. She gets up, gathering her two bags. Why two bags? A hangover from motherhood? And then she crabs her way along the aisle.
. . . Anderson says we may try to escape from risk by lapsing into servility, by accepting absolute authorities, but to do this is to take an even greater risk . . . there is no total system, only the interaction of complex things . . .”
The presence of the police must have to do with the incident. She reaches the police and together they leave the auditorium, all eyes on them. I wonder if I should join her but feel that I am not at present seen by her as a comrade. And I feel hellishly guilty for having broken her confidence with Kay Norris (and, I suppose, with Charles too).
Anna. Cindy had gone to a photographic exhibition at an art gallery. In the exhibition was a photograph of Anna at another photographic exhibition opening (the opening of the photographic exhibition was the subject matter of all the photographs in this second exhibition) and she was dressed in Cindy’s clothing and jewellery.
Cindy reappears in the auditorium, without her bags, and she looks around, sees me, and comes up the aisle to where I am sitting.
“You deadshit,” she says in a strong whisper, “you brought the police into this.”
“Me? I haven’t anything to do with the police.”
The people around us are listening.
“If you thought you were helping me or protecting me from myself or some such scheme, you were wrong. You’ve done immense damage.”
Before this madness can be straightened out she leaves me and goes back out of the auditorium, presumably back to the two detectives. I do not know what is happening and do not particularly care. Surely, though, Charles didn’t go to the police with the story. I couldn’t imagine it.
. . . what lies behind motive and wish?—social conditions, social conditioning, ancestry, and atavism.” Anna. Cindy’s friend Anna eventually had a telephone voice which was indistinguishable from Cindy’s. When Cindy found this out she asked Anna to stop doing it. Anna pleaded that she did not understand. Was unaware of it.
Cindy and I are not as close now as we were. This incident and my role in it has been an indicator. The assistance I’ve offered her has been conscientious, obligatory, rather than instinctive. Holding on to friends, as Cindy and I have tried to do with each other over the years, fails regardless of wish and will. There is an unwanted awareness that there is no longer the same engagement or enjoyment coming from the friendship and no matter how one doesn’t want this, there is no technique for reviving it, no way of manipulating oneself into remaining a friend. But Anna. Finally Cindy confronted Anna. Coming home late one night she found Anna in her clothing. She ordered Anna to take off her clothes. Anna undressed there before her and had on not only Cindy’s dress and jewellery but also her underwear—bra, slip, panties. Anna stepped out of the clothing and stood naked before Cindy, and then confessed her love for her and tried to kiss her. They had kissed but Cindy told her she would have to leave the house. “I am inveterately heterosexual and it is too late for me to change.”
Eric Bottral, ex-trade union leader, is dozing forward, tripping that mechanism which prevents us falling to the floor, re-awakes us to allow us to appear immediately alert. I decide to hell with the lecture and to hell with Horne’s Rule. I gather my papers and move out of the auditorium, stopping at where Eric is seated.
It occurs to me that, paradoxically, now that Eric is no longer a star, no longer a leading participant at the conferences, and not invited officially to this one, he attends the sessions dutifully. He and I had not missed a lecture. In the old days he spent most of the conference in bars—at the sub-conference.
He becomes immediately alert, concealing his sleepiness. “Too philosophic for me, boyoh.”
“Come for a drink?”
“Too right,” he says, getting his satchel. “Another minute and I would have been asleep.”
“. . . there is only the interaction of complex things which cannot be fully known and will have changed by the time they are known, and will be changed by knowing them . . .”
“You missed the police drama, Eric.”
“Police?”
We reach the door, Cind
y and the police are not about. “You could have chaired a protest about police disruption.”
This is a reference to another conference.
“I saw no bloody police.”
I laugh. “They came to interview Cindy Broughton.” “What’s she done?”
“Don’t know, Eric, traffic offence maybe.”
“You must explain this lecture to old Eric, this Andersonianism. I’m forever hearing about this Anderson.”
“You must still be mixing with those Push women, Eric.”
“It’s their middle-class flesh.”
I look at Eric reprimandingly.
“It’s the class taboo—that’s what one of them told me, boyoh.”
He winks at me and we leave the auditorium lobby out into the bright sunshine.
ONLY THE INTERACTION
OF CONFUSING THINGS
I opened the door of my room to confront the Master of the College and a Detective-Sergeant Hogarth and a Detective-Constable someone.
Could I “give assistance concerning a young aboriginal lad we have in custody on a rather serious matter”?
They were the two who had come to the auditorium yesterday.
The Master of the College excused himself.
We remained at the door. The constable peered into the room, he either had not seen inside a college room before or suspected that I was harbouring a fugitive.
I became aware of the locker I had illegally opened to look at the student’s letters.
They addressed me as “Doctor” (which I savoured) rather than using the police technique of first-name confidentiality.
They said that maybe I could tell them something which might “help the lad”.
I was racing with caution. What had happened here? Surely Cindy hadn’t made a statement to the police? What did the police know and how could I avoid implicating anyone—if that was the right thing to do? I was sure they weren’t interested in “helping the lad”.
“You’ll have to tell me more—explain,” I said. “I don’t quite follow.”
“You do not know to what we refer?”
The Everlasting Secret Family Page 12