The Fog Garden

by Marion Halligan

  It’s clear to Clare that Schnitzler is showing that the world’s greatest lover doesn’t know the first thing about love.

  Loving is huger than making love, warmer. Longer, harder. It remains when the lover is gone. Clare gathers up her paper pigeons and makes a nest for them under Geoffrey’s pillow. Now and then she writes another. Little flights of love letters, kept under the pillow. You might think she is not sustaining the image too well; birds under a pillow can’t fly, could suffocate. But paper pigeons with words on have special powers.

  love potion

  THE NAMES SOUND LIKE THE characters in a novel. A Proustian sort of novel. Madame Alfred Carrière. Madame Isaac Pereire. Zéphirine Drouin. It would be nice to write a novel with a character in it called Zéphirine. But difficult, names are such a delicate matter, you could run the risk of being thought precious. Or overly French. Lucky French, who can manage much more glamorous names than English. Who can put fairies in place names and be taken seriously.

  Albertine: that’s perfectly Proustian. Armandine. They have a curious music, these names, a grave and stately music. Not to be abbreviated. Not Mandy. Not Bertie. They are as they are. And they are men’s names made female by those extra leisurely syllables.

  There’s Martin Frobisher too, and Mrs Herbert Stephens and Cécile Brunner; Clare and no less than four of her friends discovered only last year that this wasn’t the man’s name Cecil but the feminine version. Except Elvira, who’d known all along.

  Of course these names aren’t characters in a book, but roses in a catalogue. Everybody seems to be talking about roses these days, ordering them from nurseries, comparing. Clare has had some men dig out the hideous self-perpetuating roots and trunks of the bloodtwig dogwood, the bloody bloodtwig dogwood, that dates from the days when the garden grew nothing higher than a paspalum stalk, and any green was grateful. It pushed densely up against the bedroom window, in front of the house. Now there’s a good dug-over composting space, she is planning what to plant. A quince tree, Smyrna is the one, so she can make quince paste, Cotignac, carnelian-coloured; cooking it is like supping with the devil, you need a long spoon, it sputters and spits. And quince jelly. And quinces are good just to put in bowls, so their ancient yellow smell fills the house with memories of autumn.

  A quince tree, and as well some roses. Polly said she must have Madame Isaac Pereire. Clare wasn’t sure, it was awfully puce-coloured in the pictures. It’s the smell, said Polly, you can smell it right across the garden, it’s so heady, so swoony, put it in the house and you might faint.

  So perhaps Madame Isaac. The roses she plants must be fragrant, she doesn’t like scentless roses. The catalogue puts a row of fat little bottles after each of its listings, which indicate intensity of smell. She’s going for the five-bottle rating. Presumably they are perfume bottles. She and Geoffrey bought a car from a shop in the Boulevard Pereire once. In Paris, that is, a long time ago. She wonders if it was the same Pereire. The boulevard not one of the great Hausmann constructions, but over beyond the Arc de Triomphe in a dull bourgeois area that seemed to have no beauties at all. They had been going to do without a car, but it was too hard, with small children; they rang her father and borrowed some money (was it $400? She can’t remember) and bought a Peugeot from the man who’d sold Geoffrey a Renault Dauphine when he was a student, a decade before. She remembers going on the metro to pick it up, the long journey, the stolid streets, everything grey. Boulevards and roses: seemed likely they’d be the same person. Except that the rose was the wife, there were a lot of roses named after wives but always with the husband’s name.

  The year she was married she had her photograph taken at an embassy party and published in the Sunday Telegraph, herself and two friends, all looking about eighteen, their innocence sinister, she thinks now. Mrs Gerald Laman, Mrs Dieter Wimmer, Mrs Geoffrey Charllot, said the caption. Mrs Gerald Laman is Polly, and the other woman, called Leisl, she hasn’t seen for years.

  When in Geoffrey’s last year they had an area in front of the house paved so they could bring the car close to the front door for him to get in and out more easily, paved with old Canberra bricks in rosy terracotta colours with sometimes a bluish tinge, she planted a small citrus grove in tubs, where the sun-warmed bricks in winter would have a slight orangerie effect, and some roses. Lordly Oberon smells good and has long pointed pale pink flowers; he seems to be outgrowing his tub, become long and straggly, so maybe she’ll put him in the ground and give him a trellis to climb up. But the other she keeps in in its pot, it’s happy there. Love Potion.

  It has a marvellous deep crimson smell. She bought it because of the label, from the local nursery. The label said it was a small robust bush, and that its blooms were a rich lilac with slightly ruffled petals. But what persuaded her was this sentence: Though its bush is small, the exquisite colour and the intense perfume provide the reason for its name . . . Love Potion.

  She looks it up in her book of old roses but it’s too new to be there. Madame Isaac Pereire is, along with twenty-one other Madames with their husband’s names—but only eight Mrs something. Madame Isaac is supposed to have huge flowers, of a deep magenta-rose, is strongly fragrant, and blooms over a long season. Maybe she will order one, plant her beside Lordly Oberon; the French bourgeois matron beside the king of the fairies.

  She’ll have to watch the possums. The roses will grow on a trellis up as high as the roof where the possums disport in the small hours of the night, running long galloping races the length of the house, thundering across the tiles with the heavy tread of speeding wombats. Sometimes they sit in the trees making those guttural visceral hissing noises that are so terrifying when you first hear them, make you think that the beasts are about to engage in mortal combat, raking soft furry bodies with sharp claws, until you discover that they actually mean sex. Irresistible cries of love. Possums are fond of roses. Nissa in Melbourne has to cover her Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux (white, pink-blushed, fragrant, fragile) with a net to stop the possums eating her, and if a saint isn’t safe what hope for a wife.

  Love Potion flowered and she picked single blooms and put them in a tiny glass vase beside Geoffrey’s bed. Now she puts them beside a picture of him. Of both of them, eating what looks disturbingly like ice-cream sundaes in a nightclub in Katoomba. She remembers the occasion, how they ordered champagne, Australian bubbly, and the waiter opened three bottles, each of them flat. So they gave up and drank sparkling rhinegold. It’s odd how you can’t remember what things tasted like, but only the pleasure they gave you, or didn’t. She remembers their disappointment that the champagne failed, but that they enjoyed the sparkling rhinegold, and suspects she might not now. Of course, the state they were in, nothing could have worried them for long. Bliss blesses all around it.

  Geoffrey knew about love potions. The medieval kind. How they saved you from the sin of adultery.

  Like Tristan and Iseut: Tristan is cured of a wound by this beautiful daughter of the king of Ireland. He tells his uncle the king of Cornwall about her, and is sent to woo her for him in marriage. When he’s bringing her back they both unknowingly partake of a magic potion and become enamoured of each other. They are on a boat sailing back to Cornwall. It’s hot, they see the flask that has been given the lady-in-waiting by Iseut’s mother, for her daughter and King Mark to drink on their wedding night, so that they will love one another. Tristan drinks half of it and gives the rest to Iseut. So their passion is not their fault. It is not the deep sin their adultery would be if deliberate.

  Geoffrey and Clare were in a car driving to their weekend in Katoomba. Not a car, his car, that he bought so he could come and visit her, he said. He lived practically on campus, but she’d moved to a distant suburb. She remembers the night, the storminess of it, the darkness, how the rain hurled itself against the windscreen in great fountains of water that burst and sparkled in the lights from oncoming cars. Like jeux d’eau, he said, water games, in the gardens of Versailles. It was a dangerous drive
, on a winding road in a storm in the dark, but she felt safe. Not knowing it was the beginning of a lifetime of feeling safe with him.

  He told her about Tristan and Iseut, his voice full of affectionate irony when he described the love philtre. How the smitten pair tried to behave well, but were overwhelmed. About King Mark spying on them while they played chess, and discovering that was not what they were doing. That day they got no further with their chess-playing . . . He talked about Tristan running mad in the forest. And about Mark finding the lovers lying asleep, their lips not touching, with a naked sword between them. How Tristan, realising their love was doomed, and worried about the adultery after all, married another Iseut, named Iseut of the White Hands, to distinguish her from the Fair. And most terrible of all, of him lying wounded, sick to death, and his wife sending for the first Iseut, who’d shown herself so good at healing him before, and then the wife, attacked by jealousy, telling him the ship that ought to have brought her had black sails, meaning she had not come, when in fact they were white, meaning she had. So Tristan turned his face to the wall and died, and when the Fair Iseut came to him she held him in her arms and died too.

  Clare sort of knew these stories, but liked hearing them again.

  His original name was Dristan, said Geoffrey, but writers changed it to Tristan, because of the association with triste. That means sad, you know.

  Yes, I know, she said.

  When they’d had enough of old stories they told one another their own, their childhoods, their parents, their educations, what they liked. Their voices in the dark warm space of the car touched and plaited together as their bodies could not, in a grave and blissful dance which she perceived, tremulously, on that slow and dangerous progress through the storm, might last their whole lives. And so they got to Katoomba, and found a guest-house called Emoh-Ruo, a ramshackle old warren of a place that offered them a bedroom wallpapered in yellow roses, not blowsy Edwardian flowers but stylised Jacobean invented blooms that Geoffrey said resembled French wallpaper, oddly matt and chalky to touch. Later, when she read Oscar Wilde’s dying witticism about the yellow wallpaper in his French hotel—One of us has to go, he said—she remembered the roses in the guest-house in Katoomba.

  And so they began making their own stories that they never tired of telling one another for the rest of their lives. The flat champagne, the sundaes—can they really have eaten ice-cream sundaes? The ultraviolet light on the dance floor that grabbed her white dress and his shirt and turned them into isolated suggestive shapes. Staying in a guest-house called Emoh Ruo. The best stories are the old ones, as children understand, the ones you know and desire to hear again, but every now and then you need to brave a new one, which can then become old and beloved too. Part of the repertoire. Their voices always happy to move in that familiar graceful dance, even though their bodies could not touch. Even when they could, the words still having their place.

  No problem with bodies touching in the guest-house narrative. The creaky bed, their naked skins, their eyes absorbing one another. Spending a large part of the night upon one another. In a room like a very tall box, a very deep box, lined with imagined yellow flowers.

  Then there was the story of the curry. Later this, they were married, buying a house because it was cheaper than renting. A hot night, and they’d gone to bed straight after eating it, and made love, their bodies wet and slippery with sweat, and suddenly they smelt it: the dusky mysterious scent of the spices they’d used in their cooking. They still smelled of themselves, but themselves aromatically overlaid. They began making love all over again, intoxicated by the exotic odours their bodies were producing. Remembering it, they embroidered the narrative: It was like Conrad, they said, sailing into some tropical port, his nostrils snuffing the humid oriental night with its spice-laden air. And later still they said, Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Pass the bottle.

  Geoffrey took a photograph of her, naked. In that new house, sitting on a borrowed chair, the sparseness and bareness evident around her. The wooden floor. A yellow plastic radio, bookshelves made of bricks and planks, an ugly wedding-present lamp. She’d recently found it, looking in a box of papers for her marriage certificate. The certificate wasn’t there, but the photo was. Black and white.

  She’s sitting on one leg, the other, slightly raised, is touching its pointed foot to the floor. She’s looking at herself in a small mirror, framed in cast bronze flowers, her other hand holds her hair back from her face. Not from her body. As a nude photo it is a deception, or perhaps a suggestion. She is the least bare thing in the room. Part of one breast is visible, otherwise the heavy curtain of wavy dark hair—she must have been wearing it in a plait to make it undulate like that—completely conceals her. In another picture she’s sitting back to front in the same ugly old tapestry chair, leaning slightly over the arm, playing with the cat, and again her hair falls in a curtain, just touching the floor, leaving only her legs visible.

  There’s another in this series, in the album, also playing with the cat, her hair equally evident, but she’s buttoned up in a long cherry-red wool dressing gown. This for the album, the others not for public display. Geoffrey would have liked the photographs to be of her nakedness, but she resisted, was too shy. Now she’s sorry, she’d have liked to see again her twenty-three-year-old body. She remembers him lifting her hair back, drawing it away so her flesh could be seen, and how she’d felt a kind of terror, of being caught forever like that, of being seen, being exposed, no longer in control of herself, subject to the eyes of people she knew nothing about, from the man who processed the films to who knew what lascivious critical indifferent gazes.

  People do it all the time, said Geoffrey. People are always photographing their wives and girlfriends without any clothes on. It’s not an odd thing to do. But she spread her hair out, and hid behind it.

  Later still, when there were children, put to bed, they’d find themselves on the floor in front of the fire, their clothes off, making love on the silky wool of the Persian carpet. You just had to hope the children didn’t wake up. Though the sofa would have protected them from view.

  And so you plant roses, and grow children, and one of you buries the other.

  Horace says, his Latin so much shorter and sharper than the English she needs to know what it means:

  Tecum vivere amens

  Tecum obeam livens

  With you I love to live, with you desiring to die.

  On that night drive to Katoomba they learned about loving to live with one another. Dying didn’t come into it. There seemed enough life ahead to make mortality irrelevant.

  There is that lifetime of gentle growing together, intertwining and inextricable, towards some light that pulls and warms without needing to be named or even understood. You can keep the metaphor going: the old wood, the new wood, blooming on whichever, dieback, the pruning, the water-shoots, the worm-i-the-bud, and rose bushes with separate roots but their branches so plaited together that there is no possibility of unentwining them, no one could uncurl each tendril and make them separate, the old soft shoots have grown into strong hard branches, thick and woody, shaped and fixed to those entwinings. Trying to part them would kill them. Until one dies, and the branches wither, and can be clipped away with secateurs, damage to the dead not being relevant.

  And then, adultery. The sudden lover. The dark journey into the erotics of grief. Oliver who is playful in his names for her sometimes calls her schöne lustige Witwe, which she had to look up in a German dictionary. Schöne she knew meant beautiful, and lustige she thought she could guess, but was wrong, it didn’t mean what it sounded like, but happy, cheerful. Merry would be the best translation. And Witwe was clearly widow. Reminding her that widows are famously given to lively behaviour, for which read sex. Clichés always have their reasons. Merry widow, lusty widow. Lust is the word here. The couplings are short, urgent, they cannot wait, there is not a lifetime, desire overwhelms its subjects. Not time even to unlock the front d
oor; there on the table in the courtyard, not even her knickers taken off; thrust aside. Who’d have thought she’d be so athletic, her hips on the edge of the garden table, her legs around his neck. And afterwards falling into laughter at the urgency, the immensity of it. Laughter excited, delighted, slightly ashamed. Or getting inside her door, just, and starting there. This is the first time, she said, I have fucked in overcoat and scarf and gloves with my handbag still slung over my shoulder. It was interesting, all that.

  But then she said, No more table fucks, we have to pay attention, it has to be splendid, or not at all. And when suddenly it was all over, and they were not supposed to be lovers any more, when they were one day sitting drinking wine in a small suburban cafe, a dim gloomy distant place, but not so dim that anybody they know, had they been there, could have failed to recognise them, she remembered that setting of rules.

  I was wrong, she said. There was something splendid about our table fucks. I wish we’d had more. Sadly she thinks of the times she said no, not now, not here. All a mistake.

  We could do it here and now, he says. Like the joke.

  She manages a wan smile. Polite. She wants passion, if not the fact then its memory in words, not a joke.

  You know that joke? He is stroking her fingers, his eyes sparkle.

  She shakes her head, but when he begins she does know it, her son told it to her, her and Geoffrey, once, years ago, but she’d forgotten.

  There’s this couple, he says, they’ve been married for a while and their sex life’s no good, doesn’t exist really, no spark. They think about getting divorced. But they decide to go and see a psychologist, see if he can help them.

  He takes a pull at his wine. He makes his jokes last, does this lover. He embroiders, he decorates, he adds diversions and red herrings, anything to spin out the narrative. The upshot is, the psychiatrist. . .