The Death of Noah Glass

by Gail Jones

  Frank looked confused. Faced with fifty nude sculptures, all posing and disporting in a marble circle, he didn’t know where to look. ‘Bit over the top, isn’t it?’ he whispered.

  ‘They call this the fountain of shame,’ Martin replied. ‘Too many ignudi, too many naked bodies. High renaissance, mid sixteenth-century. Don’t ask me how I know.’

  Noah again: Noah had taught him and Evie the art-historical markers. He could recognise Carrara marble at fifty paces. There were fantastical figures, monsters, nymphs, a brawny Dionysus, both too masculine and too fat, and one or two attractive women, demurely looking away. Frank, though embarrassed, wanted a photograph of himself standing in front of the fountain.

  ‘This one,’ he said.

  From the circus of virile monstrosities he had singled out the sculpture of a woman who appeared reserved in this flagrant company. Martin had not noticed her before: she touched her own naked breast and turned her small head as if blushing and seeking her privacy. He guessed Frank was secretly aroused, like a teenager. The policeman removed his dark glasses and cap, stood near the woman and smiled at the camera.

  In the viewfinder Martin saw Tommaso Salvo. He was lingering in the corner of the square, standing near the side of the Church of St Catherine. He was looking in their direction, but not approaching. Martin waved. Tommaso gave an anxious, guilty look and slid away. The moment left him with the strong impression that Tommaso had been following them. Martin thought of mentioning this matter to Frank, but instead took another photograph, and dismissed the idea. Frank seemed less adult and more a gawky adolescent, tragic with insecurity and wishing to impress, but pleased, if only briefly, to be in Italy and now to have a snapshot to prove it.

  They walked twice around the fountain. As the rain began again, Martin suggested they have an early lunch, claiming he had ‘matters to attend to’ in the afternoon. It had been a dull excursion. The black dog, a pool of shadow, rose up when the rain began and moved with arthritic stiffness towards a more sheltered spot. Martin felt such relief: this was what had distracted him. He did not want a dead dog in the photograph or at the periphery of his vision. The dog moved as if puzzled, wavering, to stop beneath an awning, and rested by tipping over as his legs collapsed beneath him.

  At lunch the talk was desultory and mostly of Sydney. Football. Rugby. Real estate. They both ate too much. The antipasti, the primi, the secondi, then the dolci: both were eating as if food was filling something missing. Frank tilted the wine bottle towards him to try to decipher the label. He sighed, none the wiser. Martin felt he would die of boredom. Maybe it was the wine: he suddenly laughed for no reason. Martin laughed for no reason and thought of Noah.

  31

  THERE WAS A timelessness to Skype that Evie found compelling. She heard Martin’s ring and was home to receive his call. At once, forward motion ceased and they were both in their screens, in the lucid waft of a satellite drift. She imagined beams diving through space, connecting them in the shape of a colossal A. Martin sat back, so that his face was undistorted; Evie was loose-limbed and relaxed after her zesty swim.

  ‘Evie, I’d like you to meet my good friend Veeramani,’ Martin said.

  She saw another face enter the screen as Martin tilted backwards. The lustre of warm eyes, and a discreet smile.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Veeramani.’

  ‘Miss Evie. Your brother, he is an outstanding artist. Truly topnotch.’

  ‘I did a portrait,’ Martin explained, ‘of his delightful children.’

  Veeramani wagged his head. ‘And what a portrait. Topnotch. It is an honour to meet you, Miss Evie.’

  And then he disappeared. Martin tipped forward. Evie saw that he was jammed in a small, dim booth. There might be dangling wires and sizzling electricity. She would suggest again that he move to a hotel with wi-fi.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘I’ve booked the flight home. It’s made a difference, I think. Now I can settle better into work. And Nina will be pleased. The seventeenth, two weeks.’

  ‘I saw Nina today. We ate sultanas and played with her doll’s house.’

  ‘Yeah, the Barbie house.’ Martin was inscrutable. She waited. ‘I saw the detective again yesterday,’ he announced.

  This was why he had called her. He had sent an email a few days ago about Malone turning up in Palermo. Evie assumed the detective had found something and Martin was stalling before a disclosure. It would be something intolerable, she feared, a discovery that would make her want to bury her face in her hands.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So: there’s nothing to report. The guy’s a wanker. He’s discovered nothing at all. It’s a relief, Evie. We can stop thinking about this stuff.’

  This stuff. Evie couldn’t bear it when he talked in this way, flip, unconcerned, reducing the world and its moral conundrums to a kind of cheeky vocabulary. It was heartless, immature. She’d felt from the beginning there might be a subtler story somewhere, not in the protocols of detection, not in a giallo or a ripping yarn, but in some more intricate version of her father’s time in Italy, and this woman, Dora Caselli, and the missing sculpture. Evie wondered what they would talk about, now that ‘stuff’ was unimportant, now that he had annoyed her. She felt for the first time that she should have followed her brother to Italy, stood by his side and gripped his hand.

  ‘I’ve just emailed you an intriguing photo of a plaque,’ Martin said. ‘It marks a house where Garibaldi slept for two hours in 1860.’

  This sober pronouncement was oddly endearing. Martin wanted to hear her voice, to assert their connection in the context of this quest she now considered capricious.

  ‘Two hours,’ he prompted.

  Evie sensed that her brother wanted to listen, but not to talk. She couldn’t understand why he was interested in the Garibaldi plaque; he may have been thinking about timescales, or documenting signs in the city, or recording the nationalist whimsy of such a dedication, minor but for the name.

  ‘Is sleep in or out of time?’ Martin asked, prompting her again. He might have been imploring.

  Evie was surprised by his question. It was a thoughtful question. Her brother was becoming a philosopher. She looked at him, his head backlit, his face in shadow, as though inside a monk’s cowl. She considered his independent artistry and his adoration of his daughter, and his mad-crazy wish to follow his father, and conceded that she must learn to take him more seriously. There was a space opening here, in the streamer between time zones, in which they could meet.

  ‘Let me think about this. It’s an excellent question. My first response would be that there is no time without consciousness.’

  Martin waited for more. ‘Another thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you remember abbracci, baci?’

  It was like a wind rushing at her, almost knocking her over. ‘Of course. Our song. Whatever made you think of that?’

  ‘I saw it printed on a girl’s hoodie, as a kind of glittery decoration. I’d forgotten, Evie. I’d completely forgotten about our song until I saw it walking towards me.’

  It was not nostalgia or sentimentality, but a mystified recognition that what she’d thought of as ephemeral culture, children’s culture, was deeply implanted. Evie considered the plaything phrase, and the hold it had over them. She remembered sprawling on the back seat with Martin as Noah drove through cypress-shaded lanes between small Umbrian towns—his grey head steady, his hands fixed on the wheel, the passenger space beside him poignantly vacant. She remembered Noah turning in exasperation to demand peace and quiet. They would go silent for a while, then start their irritant song once again. It was the power of children, to annoy, and to have more stamina for repetition. When at last they tired of their chanting, they would squabble until bored, then one or the other would climb into the seat beside their father. He would test their Italian by reciting improbable details from the life of one of the saints.

  Evie said, ‘Recently I thought again about those Piero
portraits, the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. Do you remember how obsessed you were by the duke’s sword damage, the missing eye you couldn’t see, and the bit carved from the bridge of his nose? Noah told you their story. You wanted the portrait painted from the other side, the blinded side.’

  Martin didn’t respond. Now Evie waited. She realised she’d indirectly spoken to her brother of Benjamin, including him in their circle of seeing.

  ‘Macabre little bugger, wasn’t I?’

  He remembered; she was sure. They’d been in the Uffizi with Noah, triangulated with the Duke and Duchess portraits before them. This capacity to make images live was the circuit their father had created. Now they were the effects and after-effects of his death.

  Evie was startled by a splash sound from the pool, then the muted watery rhythm of regular strokes. Not a kid this time, smashing at the surface, but someone simply taking an evening swim. The sound of moving water ended their conversation. It washed their words away; it was like the breaking of a spell.

  32

  DILATION, THAT WAS it; Martin felt the dilation of time. Evie would be settling down for the night in Sydney: across the planet he pictured her in their father’s apartment, rising from a chair, moving towards the bedroom on bare feet with an air of self-possession. She would have a book with her; she would switch on a lamp; she would lean against the veneer headboard of Noah’s bed and open the book to her saved place. A list: she was possibly constructing a list. Martin still envied her canny poise, the way she made her own knowledge, sagely and systematically, always locating a hidden order. Their disorderly lives had needed this incongruity—her lists and his images, her calm, withholding quiet and his noisier rebellion. He saw it now, her aisles of mysterious space, mapped alphabetically step by step, while his gestures were rooms, broad openings on either side. Still, they fitted together; still, they were complements.

  Abstract thinking fell away; her location remained. Night. Elizabeth Bay. The everlasting harbour of Sydney. Beyond the window lay tangled undergrowth and a flaunting of tropical flowers, colourless in the night. Martin envisioned the swimming pool, which lately had appeared in his dreams—undulating as if ocean, scrolled with small waves, blue with impossible depth.

  He recoiled from seeking a further connection. In Palermo, at daytime, in an earlier phase of the extended day, Veeramani had placed a cup of tea by his side. Martin nodded his thanks and pretended to concern himself with his emails. Although he’d managed to tell Evie about abbracci, baci—he heard her surprise and knew he’d recovered something precious—he was still overcome by a feeling of failed communication. This had been his opportunity to speak of the accident, of the man in the three-wheeler van who went under the truck. This, in truth, was why he had Skyped, but then, like a fool, he couldn’t say anything. Some day in the future, in Sydney, he would tell Evie of the moment a man’s history shut down before him, and of the honking cars and the savage rent they made in the wet air, and of how, though anonymous, it had terribly affected him. It was a magnification of the grief he felt for Noah; it summoned a sense of panic and subjection to fate. Though remote, the man in the accident was a bond to overwhelming feeling, a resumption or culmination of the sight of his father’s body.

  Martin distrusted exaggerated responses. He was unwilling to concede the drama of the world, and how full it was of unwarranted tragedy. He still needed to believe that one chose what one saw.

  Garibaldi asleep. Noah would have liked that one. The Duke of Urbino, with his funny red hat. Evie reminded him that the duke’s face had been slashed with a sword, that Piero had hidden the hurt and disfigurement. Martin remembered Noah there, at the Uffizi, lecturing them on the twin paintings. Dates, context, the fact that the wife’s face was so pale because her portrait was posthumous. Noah’s painterly topic that day was concealment. He was telling his children that concealment was also a function of art.

  33

  IT WAS TIME, Evie thought, to turn on the lights. She closed her laptop and illuminated Noah’s flat. The room might still have contained him, she was so little in evidence. Apart from her beach towel flung across an armchair, her bag and sunglasses resting on the hallstand, the place was still his, with his relics and his various leavings intact. Martin had promised her that if she found it too hard they would clear the place together when he returned; but now it looked like an apartment frozen in time, as if nothing would budge what Noah had placed there.

  Other than his library and his icons, he had few valuable possessions. He had a weakness for Indian cushions, covered in fraying embroidery and small cracked mirrors, and, in her reckoning with the discomfort of material inheritance, Evie thought that she might claim these for herself. They were modest and homely. They all seemed to be of some shade of oriental scarlet—cinnabar, perhaps—as was an ornately patterned rug, which he’d bought in Turkey. These were concessions to the hippie days Noah had shared with her mother, the time during which, family lore had it, they were happy and harmonious.

  Evie knew that she resembled her mother. Noah had always said it, and so did her grandparents in Adelaide. She remembered them staring at her with a wistful sorrow, insisting she was a copy of someone she didn’t know. Here, in her father’s house, she was thinking again of her mother, Katherine.

  There was something in the sound coming from the swimming pool that troubled her, so that, standing at the window, she shivered in the warm night. Having just lit the apartment, Evie now turned off the light. Darkness fell around her shoulders and into the room. She listened to the swimmer and stood in vague meditation. Reflections played on the wall opposite, streaming in like phosphorescence. Light sparked and swung. There were odd astral spots and a trail of fluctuating ripples.

  In the place of her father, Evie slept deep and long. She relinquished time. All that the day had brought with it, even her afternoon swim in the mighty Pacific Ocean, fell away into a private floating darkness. No dreams, or none that she would remember. No disturbance. If there was someone still in the swimming pool, she did not hear him or her. If there was a tragedy in the harbour or a celebration next door, she was unaware. And when the day dawned, Evie knew it would be dark in Palermo, and rose in the morning wishing her distant brother a silent, loyal goodnight.

  As she stood in her nightie at the gas ring, making coffee with her father’s pot, pouring it into his cup, stirring it with his spoon, sitting down in his favourite comfortable chair, she was mysteriously calm. She noted the diagonal light of the new day. There was the sound of a cat mewing at the door. Evie put her coffee aside and admitted Strozzi. His fur was warm from sun, and he brought with him a benign animal silence. Evie stroked his cheek, rubbed under his chin, and fed him a can of tuna. His body rolled at her touch. No sign of Yours Truly.

  ‘This is the first day,’ Evie said to Benjamin, ‘that I have felt lighter, and less burdened. I think it was the conversation last night, with my brother, Martin. Memories we shared, small things recalled. It began badly, with me annoyed and upset—no real communication—but in the end there was an ease I cannot really understand.’ She was already thinking: this ease cannot last. This was some kind of fake relief, like a childhood song. Abbracci, baci.

  They were sitting together in a park under the white radiance of a flawless day. Rocky was frolicking before them, mad with his liberty. He ran back and forth, as labradors do, greeting them, then hurling himself away, returning and leaving, returning and leaving. Evie knew that in speaking this way, so personally and so far from her habitual reticence, she was also exhibiting her feelings for Benjamin. But he could not see how she stared at him; she told herself, protectively, that he could not know what she truly felt.

  Rocky launched in a friendly welcome towards an approaching jogger and caused him to lose the rhythm of his stride. The jogger swivelled and half-stumbled and shouted angrily at them to leash their dog.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ Benjamin said, and called to Rocky, who obediently gave up his freedom. So they set
off for home, Evie’s arm linked in Benjamin’s, the dog straining before them and sniffing at the earth as they went. Dog-spirit conferred a certain lightheartedness. How she and Martin had longed for a pet when they were children, a Strozzi, suave and silent, or a barely controllable chaos, like Rocky.

  As they passed under the ultramarine shade of Moreton Bay figs, Benjamin said he knew they had left the sunlight. The loss of sun on his skin, and a shift in the quality of darkness: both told him so. He was host to an other world, Evie thought. The dimensions of things must be inconstant; objects might strike out at him, or retreat, or exist as points of intensity in a field of reaching and touching. Everything was an invisible betokening, the foundation of apprehensions possible, not given. She realised she was idealising a deprivation. But it was admiration she felt, and her admiration was close to love.

  When they walked up the hill towards his home, their bodies moved in step. Linking his arm had allowed her to place her body near his so that their hips rubbed together, and they felt each other’s warmth. The confident swing of his stride, the new intimacy of a walk. The triangle in which his arm contained hers was both cordial and suggestive. And during the short climb they seemed to come to an agreement. When they reached the front door, Benjamin asked, ‘So, will you stay?’ Evie, her mouth papery, her skin alive, replied yes; yes, of course she would stay. They shut the dog in the back courtyard with a huge feed, so that they could have their peace.

  Evie undressed Benjamin first. He stood still as she kissed at his throat just inside his collar, then unbuttoned his shirt. There was a formal, slowing ease, pulling the shirt away, resting her hot face against his exposed neck, tasting its salt. She felt without looking for his belt and zip and undid his trousers; then she bent and he helped her by kicking them away. He removed his own underpants, without haste, almost coyly. To her shame, she was reminded of another man. Then he said, ‘Close your eyes,’ but she did not, and she could not; she continued looking.