‘Botany.’
‘Christ. Whatever for?’
As the week wears on, Dominic learns one thing: Tibble’s obsessed with sex. It’s not hard to see why — the number of pretty girls here would eat away at any man. In the library they queue at the borrowing desk, cardigans draped over bird-wing shoulders, books hugged to their chests as if to keep them warm. ‘Oh, to be a library book,’ groans Tibble. In the cafeteria the girls linger over coffee, pressing cake crumbs to their fingers and toying with spoons. He and Tibble tear through sausages and gravy, ashamed of their hunger, the ugly business of knife and fork. Tibble waxes lyrical about lipstick marks on a cup.
The two of them sit on Professor’s Walk while the girls parade before them in twos or threes, from Arts to Architecture, from the caf to the Con. When the weather’s good the girls drift to the South Lawn to flirt with the college blokes. So after lunch he and Tibble lounge too, Tibble to drool and he to marvel — or so he tells himself — at their long legs, neatly folded, and the thoroughbred sheen of their hair. They’re not a bit like Kyneton girls, for whom he now feels a newfound fondness. Home-town girls were easily explained (except of course his sister, who was a law unto herself). Joan Corrigan, the Bourke sisters, even hard-faced Eunice Moran — he recalls their ubiquitous freckles, the unruly dry curls, the breathy rasp of their chanting as they turned the rope and jumped:
Charlie Chaplin sat on a pin,
How many inches did it go in?
One, two, three, four …
These girls would never have sung like that. He can’t imagine them ever snotty-nosed or scrape-kneed, and if they have any lingering freckles they’ve managed to conceal them. Concealment, it seems, is the name of the game — hide your real self but make it clear that you’re hiding something worth finding.
As the clock strikes the hour, they rise from the lawn and brush the grass from their skirts, their hands against their thighs, their buttocks. Tibble sighs in pain. And they leave, again in twos and threes, laughing softly at something unknowable, straight-backed, mysterious and absolutely terrifying.
When, two weeks into the semester, it comes time to choose their electives, Dom decides to take genetics. ‘Why?’ asks Tibble, who watches as Dom writes his name on the sheet of foolscap pinned to the wall near the Professor’s office.
He’s been thinking about it all week. ‘Because I’m a twin,’ he says. As if studying heredity might lead him to Mary.
‘A twin? First I’ve heard of it.’ Tibble’s predictably enthusiastic. ‘Identical? Have you been doubling yourself up all this time?’
‘Absolutely. We take it in turns, a day at a time. Makes the study easier, but it’s going to be a bugger come exams. Each of us only knows half of each subject, so who’s going to sit?’
Tibble grins. ‘You’ll just have to toss for it.’
‘I have a twin sister,’ he tells Tibble, when the banter has run its course. ‘Non-identical, of course. And missing.’ He tells his friend about Mary and his fruitless efforts to find her, of his regular visits to the Coburg police station, where the news is always the same. He knows every desk sergeant by name.
‘Fuck, mate,’ Tibble says. He puts a hand to Dom’s shoulder. ‘I’m truly sorry.’ He pulls out his pen and, on the sheet marked Genetics, writes his name next to Dom’s. ‘You seem like a bright young lad. Whatever you sign up to sounds all right to me.’
~
Dear Joan, now I know that Robbie
She screws up the sheet and starts again.
Now I know that my boyfriend and I are truly made for each other. As we made love last night, the thing that I thought must happen eventually did happen. Do you remember the film Homecoming, when Clark Gable and Lana Turner kissed? Remember what we said afterwards about how we felt inside? What happened last night was like that, but a hundred times more exciting. It’s as if your body knows more than your head does, as if it’s telling you that love is everything, nothing else matters. I cried happy tears as we held each other. He understood. He said he felt it too …
The truth is, there’s something wrong with their lovemaking. If she could put her finger on any one thing, she’d say heat. She may not have much experience, but she knows enough to guess they’re lacking in heat, the two of them. It’s not only the skin-scraping, sweat-raising kind — yes, there could be more of that, but there’s also an absence of the soft-burning heat that should be kindled when two people who love each other put mouth to mouth, skin to skin. She loves Robbie and he loves her. Perhaps it takes time.
Afterwards, when he’s lying beside her, she sometimes thinks of her father. How is it that boys grow into fathers, with bodies that never see the light of day? Her father was always clothed: the palm of his hand was the only skin of his she knew. She’d held his hand when she was little and they’d walked to Mass. She felt it, again, many times, on the back of her legs when she’d not done her homework, or when her answers didn’t please him. Sometimes, as Robbie moves on top of her, she thinks of her father on top of her mother. She puts her hands on Robbie’s spine — one at his neck, the other at the small of his back — and the shape of his bones helps her to push the thought away.
Dear Joan, last night he kissed me all over my body as I lay naked on the bed, the sheets thrown back, the moon shining through the window …
Even though she never sends them, she’s not ashamed of these letters. She wants to write of love and sex, for these are the things that are shaping and guiding her. She stows her writings in a box beneath her bed, along with Mr Welsh’s sketchbook, brimming with drawings of her St Kilda life: a pot of red geraniums on an Esplanade balcony, a child building sandcastles at the water’s edge. One day she’ll have a flat of her own, with a little painting studio at the bottom of the garden, and cushions like Mrs Cameron’s, and shelves full of bright and beautiful things, and nothing, not one scrap of her life, will be hidden under the bed.
Eric, Tom’s father, tells stories of steamships that used to criss-cross the bay, making weekend excursions to Snapper Point, Sorrento, Portsea and Queenscliff, to the grand seaside hotels and picnic lawns a stone’s throw from the pier. ‘The SS Edina, now there was a beauty,’ he tells Mary. ‘Built in the 1850s. Carried horses from England to the Black Sea during the Crimean War, then transported cotton from the South in the American Civil War. When she came down our way she took prospectors across the Tasman during the New Zealand gold rush. I travelled on her once to Geelong, soon after she was stripped down to one mast. A grand old lady. She’s still working as a lighter down at the docks.’
From England to the Black Sea, America to Melbourne: that a ship can sail here from the other side of the world without running into land! Now Mary knows that right across the planet there’s always an escape to be made by water, always a passage through. In Kyneton there was only ever the land, the fenced plains that seemed to stretch forever, but here she’s been opened up to the sea.
From the pier she watches for ships on the horizon, and imagines herself on a deck in the sun, or lying in her cabin, being rocked to sleep like a baby. She closes her eyes and tries to conjure the feeling of onward movement, a boat cutting the waves with the bow, like slicing through cake; onward, onward, leaving the shoreline behind. To London and Paris, where all artists must go. But it’s Naples she imagines more clearly — the red of the gingham cloths, the singsong call of the fishermen from their blue and green boats. A man on the pier once showed her a picture of Naples, his birthplace. She looked at the creased photo he took from his breast pocket, and the blue of the water made her heart race. ‘Why did you leave?’ she asked.
‘For a better life.’
‘Yes.’
Tonight there’s a strange music coming from the Esplanade Hotel, reaching out to Mary as she hangs tablecloths on the line. Friday night and an Indian summer, a red moon over the bay, and the air so thickened with heat that even tim
e stands still. The music follows the languid stream of her thoughts — or is it that her thoughts are slowed and splintered by the music, dissolved in the warm, heavy air into nothing more than feeling? She wanders halfway down the pier, where she leans on the railing and closes her eyes. A husky note strikes up, from an instrument she can’t place. It dies away and rises once more. The other instruments join in to make up a sad, uneven melody.
Tom comes out to find her. ‘Mares?’
‘Listen,’ she whispers. She raises her hand and, as if in answer, the mysterious notes grow faster, higher, wilder. ‘What do you think that is?’ she asks.
‘Blowed if I know,’ Tom says. ‘Sounds like someone’s treading on a cat’s tail.’
‘No, it doesn’t. It’s wonderful.’ She pulls at his sleeve. ‘Come on, let’s go and see.’
‘No way.’ Tom leans against the railing and lights a cigarette. He throws the spent match into the water. ‘Couldn’t think of anything worse.’
Mary steals the cigarette from Tom’s fingers and holds it to her lips. Knowing he’s watching, she arches her neck and closes her eyes so lightly that she feels her eyelids tremble. She doesn’t mean to lead him on. She’d even let him kiss her if he tried to, but it would be out of gratitude. It’s all right to do things with boys simply out of kindness; at least, it should be all right. But she’ll never love him. Poor Tom. He’s already old, in a way — sure of his views and opinions, working them over like pastry until they’re bound up tightly inside him. She smokes again and exhales upwards, looking for the moon. Change is everything; movement is everything. What could be worse than standing still? Weakness of character, Tom would say, whereas she wants to go on changing until she dies. She hands him the cigarette, takes off her apron and tosses it onto the railing. ‘See you later, then.’
‘You can’t go up there on your own.’
‘Really? Then you’ll come with me?’ she says, teasingly.
‘Not interested.’ He puts his hand over hers. ‘Stay here, Mares. We could have a night swim.’
His hand presses hers against the railing, as if to pin her to the spot. A splinter of wood scrapes her palm as she wriggles free. ‘We’ll swim later. Wait up for me. We’ll have a midnight dip.’
She runs along the pier. The water laps against the piles, beckoning her in. But right now she hankers for the heat of the hotel, the lights of the stage, the sweat of the crowd, the sound of the strange, smoky music. From the street she sees a lit room, the window flung open so that the music spills out, thick as the fast-falling night.
She stands beside the hotel window and catches her breath. There must be a hundred people in the room, some at round tables with green tablecloths and little lamps, some standing in a crowd at one end of the room where the musicians must be, though Mary can’t see them. A woman comes to the window and leans out. ‘I could just dive into that water this very minute,’ she says into the dark. Mary stays silent. The woman puts a cigarette to her mouth, and a man’s hand reaches out to light it. In the blaze from the burning match Mary sees the woman’s face, with its crimson lips and sharp, strong cheekbones. Her red hair is tied back from her face with a patterned scarf.
‘Hello,’ Mary says from the shadows.
‘Christ!’ The woman puts her free hand to her chest. ‘Who’s there?’
Mary moves into the light. ‘It’s me. Here I am.’
‘You frightened me,’ the woman says. ‘What are you doing out there?’
‘Listening to the music.’
‘What’s going on?’ a man says from inside.
‘There’s a girl out here, listening to the music,’ the woman says over her shoulder. ‘Why don’t you come in?’ she asks Mary. ‘They’re about to take a break, but they’ll be back soon.’
‘I don’t have any money with me.’ She puts a hand to her face. ‘Why, I haven’t even put on lipstick.’
The woman laughs. ‘Plenty of women here without lipstick,’ she says. She fishes in the pocket of her skirt and holds out a tube. ‘Here, use mine if you like.’ The lipstick is worn down to the last half-inch and slides on like butter in the heat. Mary puckers her lips and wishes for a mirror.
She attempts to hand back the lipstick but the woman waves it away. ‘Stand in the light again,’ she says. ‘Yes, the colour suits you. I thought it would. You should keep it.’
A man joins the woman at the window and leans out to ask, ‘Why don’t I pull you up through the window, just in case they try to nab you for money at the door?’ He speaks in an accent that Mary can’t place. ‘You don’t want to risk getting thrown out on your ear.’ He leans his body over the window ledge and holds out his arms. ‘Come on, then.’
‘Can you lift her?’ the woman queries. ‘You’re hardly bigger than she is.’
‘Bull. She’s quite small. How much do you weigh?’ he asks Mary.
‘I don’t know.’ She hasn’t weighed herself since she last stepped on the bathroom scales at Joan’s.
‘What? A woman who doesn’t know her weight, down to the last ounce? Remarkable.’
The man and the woman are Lucien and Clarissa, Mary learns. She rolls the names on her tongue. Lucien, like the devil, of course, though he looks nothing like him. Clarissa begins sweetly, like Clare, but then that hiss in the tail. Could these be the names they were born with? Lucien has washed-out blue eyes and fine blond hair that floats around his collar. He doesn’t wear a jacket or tie and his shirtsleeves are rolled, except that he doesn’t look like a working man at all. Clarissa’s the most beautiful thing Mary’s ever seen. Her hair isn’t naturally red, Mary sees now, in the light. Natural redheads have a freckled paleness to them that Clarissa does not. Eunice Moran was a natural redhead — from a large family of them — and her hair sat in little ridges against her scalp and turned orange in the sunlight. Clarissa’s hair is a deeper crimson-red, like raspberry cordial. Or red wine, thinks Mary, remembering her confirmation day, and her glimpse of the chalice contents before she closed her eyes and sipped.
They ask her name. Madeleine, she tells them without blinking. It suits who she is tonight.
‘Well, Madeleine, now that we’ve smuggled you in, I’d better buy you a drink to keep the publican happy,’ says Lucien. ‘What’s your poison?’
‘Red wine,’ Mary says, as if she drinks the stuff every day.
Soon the musicians return to the stage. From her position at the back of the room Mary sees only the occasional glimpse of a white shirtsleeve, the glint of brass. The audience claps and whistles. ‘Are they famous?’ Mary asks Lucien, who has an air about him of knowing such things.
‘Not famous enough.’ His cigarette droops from his lower lip, as if weighed down by the long trail of ash. ‘Bloody good musicians, but most people don’t care about jazz. At least not the modern sort. They’ll tolerate the trad stuff — you know, the big band — but when it comes to the modern sound they can’t understand it.’
‘Modern jazz? Is that what this is?’
‘You mean you didn’t know? Yes. It’s brilliant.’
Not wanting to disappoint him, Mary hurries to explain. ‘I didn’t know its name, but I love it anyway. When I heard it from outside, it was like the music was a feeling, rather than a sound. And you can’t predict what the next note will be. It jumps all over the place, and that makes it exciting. It’s telling you to expect the unexpected.’
‘Well said!’ Lucien scrutinises her. ‘I think we have a convert here,’ he says to Clarissa.
‘You and your converts,’ Clarissa says. ‘His grandfather was an Anglican bishop,’ she tells Mary, leaning towards her, one hand to her beautiful mouth. ‘It’s in the blood.’
‘Jazz is the one true religion,’ Lucien says, and bends to kiss Clarissa on the neck. Mary feels a pang: how nice it would be if Robbie did that. Lucien and Clarissa are around twenty, she guesses — not so much ol
der than her — but there’s something in their faces and gestures that make them seem ancient, as if they were a married couple with a house and a garden and children, everything ordered and stylish. Yet here they are at a hotel at night, drinking and smoking and listening to jazz.
The music starts up again, with the soft, blurred sound of a brush against a drum and the tinkling of cymbals. ‘I’m going closer,’ Mary tells Clarissa and Lucien. ‘Do you want to come?’
‘Too hot,’ Clarissa replies. ‘I’ll wait here. Come back and see me when you’ve had enough.’
Mary threads her way through the crowd until she can see the stage. There are four men at instruments: drums, piano, double bass and trumpet. The blurred sound comes from the drums, as the drummer sweeps a small brush across the skin and shivers the cymbals. The piano joins in, and she leans towards it. She knows the sound of piano chords, and arpeggios, wonderfully named, from the years she learned piano at Edna Poole’s house. ‘I’m learning arpeggios,’ she told Dom, and showed him, tapping her fingers against the table as she sang the notes over and over. ‘This is from the Moonlight Sonata, by Beethoven.’
‘You can’t play Beethoven,’ Dominic said.
‘I can too.’
She was eight when she began piano at Miss Poole’s house on Hutton Street. At first she didn’t want to go, every week, for thirty long minutes! But her mother won out. After a while she minded less, lulled as she was by the things she saw there: the enormous smoky grey cat, Toby; the silver-framed photographs of the English nieces, Julie and Beverley, who were nurses in London during the Blitz. Miss Poole had a painting, a real one, of a house and garden, on the wall above the piano. ‘A watercolour,’ she once said, ‘by a cousin of mine in Bath. Her family home. Aren’t the hollyhocks pretty?’ Mary played her scales and arpeggios, thinking of the different colours that water could be, and how funny it was that Miss Poole, with such a watery name herself, had a cousin in Bath. Perhaps they were a family of mermaids. ‘Do you like swimming?’ she asked Miss Poole, who looked at her over her little gold glasses and said, ‘Now, why would you ask such a thing?’
The Science of Appearances Page 13