The Science of Appearances

by Jacinta Halloran

  When Robbie told her about Dom she knew, then, she’d find him, even though she dreamed for nights on end of her mother hiding in a cupboard in the Rose Street house, waiting for her to arrive. She’s found him, even though he can’t find her. Half of a good thing is good enough for now.

  She waits until he’s left the garden — his attention is turned to the man at his side — and shakes the stiffness from her legs. She’ll follow at a distance, just for a while, so she can piece together something of this new life of his. The man beside her brother’s a lanky, loping redhead who throws his hands into the air as he talks. A lively friend, Mary deduces, a bit of a clown who’ll draw Dom out — that’s what he’s always needed. She hugs her arms to her chest, breathing in the sheer wonder of it, the luck: the two of them in Melbourne, and right here together. Dom glances over his shoulder and she quickly bends to tie an imaginary shoelace. When she looks up, he’s gone.

  Around the corner she finds him again, at a table in a courtyard crowded with diners. She watches as he removes his coat and drapes it over a chair before disappearing with his redheaded friend into what must be the cafeteria. She crosses the courtyard, weaving between tables so quickly that a plate clatters as she passes and someone calls, ‘Hey, slow down! The food’s not that good.’

  A bearded man at the next table looks up from his plate as she slips her hand into Dom’s coat pocket, still warm from his body. ‘Doesn’t that coat belong to the bloke who was just here?’ the man asks with a smile. ‘Hardly fair to pickpocket him if he’s not even wearing it.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she answers. ‘I’m only looking for paper. I need to leave him a message.’

  The man slides a notebook towards her. She tears out a clean page and, with a pencil stub from her bag, sketches the tower in the garden from which they’ve just come. It’s the barest outline — there’s so little time — but she tries to capture the curve of the roof just so, a line of jagged bushes at the base. He’ll know what it means. She signs it I’m safe and well. Love, Mary and slips it into Dom’s pocket.

  ‘Why don’t you wait until he comes back?’ the man asks. ‘He’s only ducked in to get lunch.’

  She hesitates, wavers for an instant. ‘I — I can’t stay. Make sure he sees it, will you?’

  Just outside the grand university gates she finds the Clyde Hotel. The plush crimson carpet in the ladies’ lounge still carries its newly laid smells of rubber and glue. A generous fire burns in the hearth and, two tables away, a foursome of women gossip over shandies.

  When she’d set out this morning to find Dom, she’d thought only of the quest. She hadn’t bargained on the memories his face would stir up in her. As he turned back along the path, she’d seen, just for a second, all the sad reproach that any face could show — she was sure he’d seen her then, and that face was to be her welcome. So solemn: she’d forgotten all that, the weary solemnity of her Kyneton existence. I’m safe and well she’d written, but she should have added, Who are you to judge? It’s different for you. It always has been.

  A log crackles in the hearth. Her collarbone aches. ‘I never had a problem that a stiff gin couldn’t solve,’ Molly always says. There’s a woman behind the bar, a bottle-blonde with a no-nonsense face and a striped tea towel draped across a fleshy shoulder. Mary counts out her change.

  By the time the ice has melted at the bottom of her second glass, she can put a name to the feeling she’s had since she laid eyes on her brother. That name’s Ellen Quinn. She’d never known how much he resembled their mother, but perhaps he hadn’t when she’d been there with him. Poor Dom: she’s always pitied him his loyalty. Now she’s afraid of it.

  Dearest Dom, it’s not you I’m hiding from. I can’t go back to Kyneton. Just so you know. She imagines the whole town — all the Catholics, at least — crowded into Mollison Street, baying for her blood.

  You told Father Clancy to rot in hell.

  Your mother doesn’t know how you turned out the way you did.

  Throw her in the river and see if she floats.

  She tips back her glass and drains it. ‘Having it off with her best friend’s husband, and Betty barely out of hospital,’ she hears the stout woman, two tables away, say to the others with her. ‘“He doesn’t love Betty anymore,” she tells me, as if that’s some sort of excuse. And I said to her, plain, “There’s love and there’s lust and there’s compromise.” I left it at that. It’s her own lookout, though I do feel for Betty and the kids.’

  Mary stands to leave. ‘There’s only love,’ she says grandly as she sails past their table, the drink flowing sweetly through her veins. ‘Love’s all that matters. And Betty’s probably let herself go to seed.’

  ‘The cheek!’ says the stout one, while another sniggers behind her glove. ‘Mind your own bloody business.’

  It had to be said, thinks Mary, as she steps out into the afternoon light, and she’s the one to say it. She swings into Lygon Street to be swept up in its wonders: the chiming sounds of Italian; the aroma of freshly ground coffee; the comical sight of a round of cheese, as big as a cartwheel, squeezed into a shop window. The world’s divided into the cautious and the brave. Now she needs to be a little of both.

  ~

  Dominic telephones his mother as soon as he returns to Rose Street. ‘She’s alive.’ He can barely get the words out. ‘Mary’s all right.’

  ‘Thank God!’ his mother says, over and over. ‘I must be dreaming. I’m not dreaming, am I?’ He hears her broken breath. ‘She’s well? You’ve spoken to her?’

  Dot’s in the kitchen, just ten feet away. He lowers his voice. ‘She left me a note, at university. Put it in my coat pocket. She must have followed me. I didn’t see her.’

  ‘Could it be a trick? It may not be her.’

  Look in your pocket, the bearded bloke had urged him. She’s left you a message. He’d pulled out her drawing, and whooped with joy when he’d seen her name in the corner. ‘Someone else spoke to her,’ he tells his mother. ‘It was Mary, all right.’ A dark-haired beauty, the beard had said. Something lively about her. Something different.

  ‘Why didn’t she speak to you? What on earth is she playing at?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He’s been asking himself that all afternoon.

  ‘She didn’t leave an address?’

  ‘No, but I’ll find her. Soon. I promise.’

  That night he goes to bed deliriously happy. His sister, alive and well. She’d sketched the tower in the Systems Garden: a tribute to him, a sign that she knew what he was doing. But how did she know?

  Dom sits up in bed. Robbie Cameron.

  Just a few days ago he’d sworn he hadn’t seen her, and now she turns up at the university? Logic tells him it can’t be simply coincidence. And Cameron had been downright shifty when he asked about Mary. He thumps his pillow, remembering that punch he’d wanted to throw, down by the Piper Street bridge, years ago. These blokes have to live here. Bob bloody Cameron. He’ll find him again, and shake the fucking truth from him this time.

  That night he dreams he teeters on a cliff’s edge in the Kyneton Gardens, peering over what was once a grass-covered slope he had rolled down, now grown precipitous and rocky. At the bottom he sees Mary, dressed in an embroidered red dress with a white apron, a floral headscarf tied under her chin. In her garb he recognises the Russian dolls she once brought home, wrapped in a tea towel, from her piano teacher’s house. Pavlova, he’d said, when she’d asked about names for the dolls. Call one of them Pavlova. He’d been pulling her leg. ‘Mary,’ he calls, ‘I’m sorry,’ and she’s suddenly beside him, a bundle in her arms.

  ‘This is the reason I’ve been away,’ she says brightly, pulling back a swathe of towel to reveal a round-faced infant with cheeks like two plums, and a headscarf that matches her mother’s.

  At the post office on Moreland Road, Dom finds the Kyneton directory and, ins
ide, the number for Doctor Cameron’s clinic. Judith Mudd answers the telephone.

  ‘May I speak to Doctor Cameron? It’s Dominic Quinn,’ he says nervously. Will she remember him?

  ‘Dominic! Hello, there. Would you like an appointment?’

  ‘No. I just wanted to ask him something.’

  ‘He’s with patients all morning. Perhaps I can help?’

  Her voice is so kind that he decides to take the risk. ‘I’ve heard that Robbie’s in Melbourne, and I was wondering where he’s living. I’d like to see him. We were mates, you know, at school, and I just want to look him up.’

  ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Judith Mudd says. ‘He’s at Ormond College, on the university grounds. I’m sure he’ll be pleased to see you.’

  ‘Ormond? It’s a stone’s throw from here,’ Tibble says when, at the end of the day, Dom tells him about Cameron. ‘You reckon this creep’s involved with your sister?’ He smacks his fist against his palm. ‘Let’s go there now.’

  Ormond College, turreted and grand, stands at the end of a broad, sweeping gravel drive. As they approach, Dom considers his options. Should he appeal to Robbie’s better instincts before he and Tibble put him up against the wall? He imagines a horde of burly college men hurtling to Robbie’s defence. They probably had a secret code — a certain word yelled loud, a whistle — when one of them was in trouble. ‘I’m going to try and reason with him first,’ he tells Tibble, who’s kicking at stones along the drive. ‘Promise me you won’t start anything.’

  Tibble sighs, deflated. ‘If that’s how you want to play it.’

  It’s close to the college dinner hour and the ground-floor hallway reeks of boiled cauliflower. Along the carpeted passage they come to a large common room where a few blokes lounge in armchairs in front of the fireplace, while others play a furious game of ping pong. None of them are Robbie. Dom clears his throat and tries to sound chummy. ‘We’re looking for Rob, er, Bob Cameron. You blokes know where he might be?’

  ‘What year?’ asks one of the ping-pong players.

  ‘Second.’

  ‘Second floor, then. Ask there.’

  The second-floor hallway is empty but, lo and behold, there’s a name on each door. They find R. Cameron at the end of the row, next to the bathroom. Dom knocks while Tibble shifts his weight from foot to foot and uppercuts the air. There’s no answer. Dom tries the door but it’s locked. Tibble darts away to knock on the adjacent door, and a bloke opens up. He looks half-asleep. ‘You know where Cameron is?’ Tibble asks.

  ‘Not a clue.’ He blinks. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘We just want to chat to him,’ Tibble says, an edge to his voice.

  ‘Do you two live here?’ The Ormond man grows wary. ‘You really shouldn’t be up here if you’re not college residents.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’re going,’ Dom says. ‘After I leave him a note.’ He tears a page from the book in his satchel and hastily writes, I want to talk to you about Mary. Please telephone — he writes the Rose Street number — or else I’ll come back here again. He slides the note under Robbie’s door, and he and Tibble make a tactical retreat.

  The following evening there’s a knock at the bungalow door. Dom opens it to Bert Neville in his dressing gown and slippers. ‘There’s a fella on the telephone for you. Bob Cameron?’ Bert looks vaguely uncomfortable. The telephone rarely rings at the Nevilles’.

  ‘He’s a friend from Kyneton,’ Dom says, as together they cross the lawn to the house. ‘Just a social call, I’d say.’

  Through the patterned glass panels of the sliding door he sees Dot in the front room, listening to the radio. Dom waits, receiver in hand, until Bert joins her there. ‘Robbie?’ he whispers.

  ‘I got your note.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing, mate. I already told you.’

  His voice rises. ‘I need to know where she is, Robbie.’ How to explain the urgency he wakes up to every day since she left; the gut-twisting fear of time running out? ‘You never had a sister, you don’t understand. If you’re keeping something back —’

  ‘What? What will you do? Get the cops onto me? Put a tail on me twenty-four hours a day?’ Robbie pauses. ‘Leave it, Dom,’ he says in a kinder voice. ‘I can’t help you with this. Mary must have had her reasons for running away. Isn’t it up to her now?’

  15

  Spring comes to Donald’s studio in great hopeful bursts of air and the green of new leaves through the open windows above Collins Street. Mary’s tired of modelling. It once felt like something in which she participated, but she’s grown more passive, less invigorated by the gaze of others. She shivers and looks at the ceiling, stifling a yawn.

  Should she find other work? How can she, if she wants to remain a student here? Donald often stops at Sam’s easel on his long, slow tours of the room. She strains to hear what they say to each other. Sam, the favoured son: do the others in the class know it too?

  The studio dressing room is made of thin ply partitions that reach halfway to the ceiling. Last Tuesday evening after class, as she dressed, she overheard Donald and Sam talking in the studio. ‘I’m thinking of going to London,’ Sam said. ‘The Chelsea School of Art.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Next year.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I need new influences.’ Sam sounded cranky. ‘London. Europe. I’m stuck in a backwater here.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Donald, after a while. ‘Any half-decent Australian painter must spend time on the Continent. It’s a rite of passage.’

  ‘Do you think I’m ready?’ Sam spoke with an earnestness that was new to her. Shoes in hand, she tiptoed from the dressing room and hovered in the shadows at the studio door. Donald stood shoulder to shoulder with Sam in front of Sam’s easel. ‘I want to move away from figures,’ Sam said. ‘I want to try landscapes.’

  ‘You can do that here.’

  ‘I want to go away to do it. I need a clean break.’

  Donald slid his arm around Sam’s waist and kept it there. ‘I’m just glad I’ve been able to teach you something.’

  Now she watches from the couch — a fold of the silk throw pressing into her shoulder — as Sam scrapes paint from his canvas with a grand sweep of his arm. Oh, to be with a man who has loved other women! To be fucked by such a man. Sam’s word, but she’s adopted it. Just the mention of it and she’s shot through with desire. Fuck me, she says to him in his East Melbourne flat. Fuck me, on the divan in the sitting room with its view of the Fitzroy Gardens, the ghostly spire of St Patrick’s piercing the sky. Fuck me, meaning show me how much you love women, and he does, every time, and with every golden part of him. She’s always known it won’t last, but that’s its beauty, its strength. Transience is seductive, like early morning light, a full moon over water. She’s a moment in history: Sam’s history, and hers. Her time with Sam is in the glorious name of sex — for the women who come after her, for the men who come after him. The holy gospel of fucking, to be spread throughout the world by its willing disciples.

  ~

  Hanna tells Dom about Freud, the Viennese Jewish professor who singlehandedly changed the way human psychology is understood. She tells the tale of fifteen-year-old Dora and her dreams of fire, of Anna O’s strange fits of paralysis and her road to healing through the ‘talking cure’. ‘Our unconscious thoughts and desires bubble up and break through to consciousness in our dreams, in turns of phrase and slips of the tongue,’ she says.

  Another weekend of sex: her parents are at Hepburn Springs again. Slips of the tongue. He can only think of his tongue and hers. She lies against him as she talks, her back nestled against his chest, the curve of her buttocks in the hollow that his pelvis makes for her. ‘Professor Oeser’s more interested in social psychology. He’s trying to push us in that direction: workplace studies, social prejudices, that sort of thing.’

>   ‘You don’t agree?’

  ‘It’s all valuable, all worthwhile. But I want to study psycho-analysis.’

  Repression, the Oedipal complex, totem and taboo. She talks and he pictures a turn-of-the-century Viennese drawing room, gleaming dark wood and crystal chandeliers. A young woman lies on a striped silk couch upholstered tight to bursting; and the woman too, full to bursting with passion or hysteria — feelings that can’t run a smooth and waning course. He sees the rise and fall of her breasts in her whalebone corset, and her hand against her eyes, shielding them from the light that slants through the window and across her face. Or is she shielding her sight from Freud himself? The papered wall of a Viennese drawing room in the light of early evening; his backyard on the winter day his father died, a maple casting shadow on the outside wall. Knowing is everything, Freud said. He both knows and doesn’t want to know.

  His mother’s letters come every second week without fail, a constant reminder of his separation from her. Relentless is the word that sometimes comes to mind. He doesn’t throw them away. They are the penance he does for absence, for the chances that have been given to him and not to her.

  Dear Dominic, I hope the mid-year examinations went well. If you could manage to telephone when you know your results …

  He hasn’t told his mother about Hanna. He hasn’t told his mother he’s going out with a Jewish girl. Early days. Let him keep it from her a while longer. She might never need to know.

  Do he and Hanna belong? When he’s with her he’d say yes — always yes — but back in Rose Street he wonders if their differences are too great. Rose Street is what he’s used to: plain talk, plain food, no airs or graces. His bungalow could sit in the backyard of any Kyneton house. Plain talk is not always plain; instead it can obfuscate. Hanna’s shown him that. When he’s with her, he understands. Can he shrug off those things that stand in the way — his religion, his heritage, his reticent country ways? If he shakes off these things, what will remain?