Catherine reaches for the oysters. Beverley someone, from across the table, remarks: “Tom says you can’t grow peaches on the North Shore anymore, it’s all mangoes and lychees. The climate’s shifting, he says.”
“Ah … yes.” The judge is only momentarily thrown off course. “The climate is shifting. But it’s almost like a geographical trace laid down, isn’t it? The first felons, the quarry, it’s as though Sydney Cove … I mean, you look at those convict striations on the rock of The Cut and it’s like a prophecy. And we can’t underestimate the contribution of the First Settlement to the kind of people we are. Thank you, yes I will.” He accepts a smoked oyster. “Moral causality, a sharpened instinct for what it takes to survive, that’s part of it. And what I like to refer to as psychomachia, our own distinctive and nationalist form of psychomachia, that abiding conflict in our cultural soul, the convict and the law enforcer still locked in combat. When I go back over my articles and constitutional essays and the pieces I have written for newspapers and academic journals, I’m struck by this most of all, by this almost lyrical leitmotif throughout my work.”
A man rises from his words, said Fu Hsi, as mist rises from a marsh. Or so Charlie claimed. The discernment and translation of mists was not something Charlie chose, it was not something he could prevent, it was something that trailed along with his name, his real name, like the tail of a kite. The mists rose and settled onto his photographs. And so — it was plain to Charlie in the eddies above the judge’s words — he knew unexpectedly how it would be with Robinson Gray alone in his bathroom. He knew how, before and after his shower, the judge would stand in front of the full length mirror, how he would turn a little, first to one side, then to the other, how he would move away and glance back over his shoulder, trying to surprise himself, trying to get a candid view of himself as others saw him. Charlie knew how, in the spirit of radical and earnest inquiry, the judge would strive to be that passing casual stranger, that objective eye, and how he would search for the perfectly apposite word to describe the body he (as the passing stranger) could see in the mirror. Eumorphous? he would hazard. No. Eumorphous might capture the earthy, the rugged, the weekend footballer quality, the purely bodily, but not … Insouciant? Possibly. Insouciant would intimate the boyish Pan-like nature, the Papageno-like innocence of the … but not that dimension of torment … not that rarefied malaise which must always surround the moral being, must always keep him …
Promethean?
The search would go on until the judge’s wife, a highly intellectual woman but a little insensitive perhaps, a little impatient, not sufficiently attuned to the philosophical and metaphysical … a little philistine, in truth, in a particular kind of intellectual way … until she rapped on the bathroom door.
Oh, were these Charlie’s words? Let me be scrupulously honest. Whatever Charlie divined, and Charlie’s powers of divination were unnerving, he kept between himself and his camera. But I myself was not without experience in decoding hot air.
I knew, for example, how it would be with Robinson Gray and a woman (and here, I happen to have more substantial information), I knew how he would rise to smooth down the bed covers, or move to pick up the clothes and fold them on a chair, or how he would cross to the window where the light would gild him, how he would do these things with studied unselfcon-sciousness, absorbed and abstracted, granting to the woman on the bed the pleasure of observing him from multiple points of view.
“Pardon?” he would say to her, startled. “Oh, sorry, I thought you said something.” And carelessly: “I still play football, you know.”
“Are you joining us for the football tomorrow, Catherine?” Roslyn Gray asks, apparently benign. “A motley crew of Sydney Grammar Old Boys (with a few Brisbanites thrown in) versus a ragtag team from Sydney Uni. My loyalties are divided.” She raises her glass in wry salute and from the other end of the table the judge makes a modest gesture of repudiation. Small ritual sighs scuffle about, token commiseration, token envy. Roslyn accepts them graciously. She accepts them as legal tender. They are diligent bookkeepers, she and the judge. They know their due. “Robbie’s playing,” she says disarmingly. “He keeps in frightfully good nick. He puts me to shame.” She takes a sip of wine. “No, really,” she says, as though someone has strenuously demurred. She is given to letting slip that she was trained as a classical dancer, “a frivolity of my pre-feminist youth”.
Roslyn’s cheekbones and causes are immaculate, and she is intimate with great minds. “Irigaray,” she will murmur over the soup. “As Foucault says,” she will remind. She has a particular intimacy with things French. She presides over a small cultural circle and deservedly so. Roslyn is smiling, passing the lemongrass sauce down the table to Catherine. “It’s a benefit game,” she explains. It goes without saying (although Roslyn does in fact say it at some length) that the cause is important. “I hope we can count on you, Catherine.” She frowns as Catherine, absorbed in the task of spooning lemongrass sauce on fish, gives no sign of response. “Catherine?” she repeats, a trifle sharply.
“Pardon?” Catherine says, blinking. “Oh, I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.”
Is this happening now or was it a long time ago? I have difficulty with that question, you see. I do not find it a simple question. I find that the past lies in wait, just ahead, around every corner. “You need a particular blinkered angle of vision,” Charlie said, “in order to sustain belief in linear time.” Linear time, he said, was a film-maker’s gimmick, an inferior film-maker’s gimmick, and before that a gimmick of nineteenth-century novelists. It was a thoroughly Western superstition. It seems that Fu Hsi had words on the subject: When the sun goes, the moon comes; and when the moon goes, the sun comes; of waxing and waning there is no beginning and no end. So Charlie said. And now there is something behind my ribs (an infection I picked up from Charlie), something which won’t be dislodged. It induces giddiness, it tells me time is a Möbius strip and we all go round and round the mulberry bush, and I find that on the night under observation, the night which meant nothing in particular to me when I carried plates back and forth, I find that on that night, Roslyn Gray is still passing the lemongrass sauce, and signalling to me and indicating: “Another bottle, if you wouldn’t mind, Miss.”
Particularities do not impede the moral flood of Roslyn’s political commitment to women. “Miss,” she says to me, as to a chair politely treated. “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind keeping a sharper eye on the table and removing the dinner plates.”
Roslyn Gray’s mind, of course, is preoccupied with loftier matters than waitresses and the removal of plates. She is writing a revisionist biography of Christina Stead, deconstructing Stead’s unseemly passions, showing where a certain strain in the writing of Australian women began to go awry.
“Miss,” she says to me again, for alas I have gone daydreaming, wandering into a story by Katherine Anne Porter, a woman almost certainly not politically correct. I am afraid, though I cannot imagine why, that certain lines of hers have floated to the surface of my mind and interfered with the removal of plates, certain memories of Braggioni, that “good revolutionary”, that Braggioni who had the malice, the cleverness, the wickedness, the sharpness of wit, the hardness of heart, stipulated for loving the world profitably.
“Excuse me, Miss,” Roslyn says with increased aspersion, “I wonder if you could manage to be a little quicker off the mark …”
There are, of course, other members of this cast, other guests at Robinson and Roslyn Gray’s table, but as they are merely fashionable and powerful in the usual uninteresting ways, I cannot remember them. I am watching Charlie, invisible behind the polite costume of the maître d’. There is a white linen cloth, starched and folded, over his forearm. I am watching the way he pours wine for Catherine Reed.
You would never know, to look at Catherine, Charlie thinks, that the muddy paths around Cedar Creek Falls retained fossil imprints of their childhoods. He has photographs to prove it. He has a
photograph of two boulders interrupting the falls; on the boulders are delicate traces of children’s bodies, thin outlines, maps of their veins.
What went through Catherine’s mind when she looked at Charlie? Was there a third person, always absent, who walked beside her? What did she see when she looked at Robinson Gray?
You would not guess at any answers to these questions from watching Catherine return the sauceboat to Roslyn Gray. “No,” Catherine apologises. “I’m afraid I can’t make it. I’ll be working.”
“Ahh.” Roslyn sighs meditatively She concentrates on the sauce and a flake of barramundi. “Mr Chang, your chef is excelling himself.” Roslyn can behold infinity in a grain of freshly ground coriander or in well-prepared fish. This is something she is able to do in a Blakean sense, not at all incompatible with Irigaray. “Wouldn’t you say, Catherine, that Mr Chang does the best barramundi in Sydney?”
Beverley from across the table, beckoning me with her finger, interrupts. “Another dish of black olives? I wonder if you wouldn’t mind?” She has that curious rising inflection of so many Australian women (though not of the ones who move in the upstairs rooms), an inflection that renders all statements tentative.
Roslyn frowns. Roslyn does not approve of female tentativeness, and feels it incumbent upon herself to instruct when instruction is due. “Beverley,” she says, smiling. She offers Beverley many significant names and articles. “Perhaps that sounds puritanical and pompous,” she says sweetly, pausing, giving the murmurs of denial time to settle. “But I do think this disturbing lack of self-confidence is perpetuated by some of our writers. I fear this tendency set in with Christina Stead. I really cannot approve of women who think that noting down the events of their own lives without any understanding of recent theoretical work on language” — this, I’m afraid, is the way Roslyn talks, the way she writes — “without any understanding of theoretical work, especially that of the French, I cannot approve, she says, I cannot rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb, don’t you agree?”
A different sort of smile, which she is at pains to conceal, flickers on Catherine’s face. She half glances upwards so that the smile reaches Charlie who waits on the other side of the table, an attendant lord. Does her smile indicate discreet shared mirth, or merely politeness? She gives no indication of knowing Charlie beyond the context of this moment, no suggestion of having played in long grass with him, of having witnessed things best forgotten.
Does she remember? He is never quite sure. He knows it is impossible, as well as essential, to forget. He knows it is entirely likely that she doesn’t know she knows him. Sometimes, with his back to her, watching her in a mirror over a sideboard, he thinks he catches her studying him with what could be genuine puzzlement. But then too he has observed how she disconcerts other guests, acquaintances and colleagues of hers, from time to time. “Oh,” she will say with a vague smile. “I don’t believe we’ve met before, have we?” And then, embarrassed, “Oh dear, have we? Forgive me.” Some people make allowances, some do not.
“I was between wives at the time,” Judge Robinson Gray is saying with a self-deprecating smile. He moves crumbs across the damask surface with his fingertips, illustrating something, deploying facts, and manages once again to brush Catherine’s hand. How interesting it is, the way Catherine flinches, that momentary thing. Her face is politely expressionless. Robinson Gray notes the flinching, he was not elevated to the bench without cause; there is a moment when his fingers hesitate as though losing their way before they begin methodically reassembling the crumbs, “I’ve had rather bad luck with wives,” he says disarmingly to the table at large, expecting absolution, implying that when all is said and done he is preoccupied with rather larger issues than the bric-a-brac of marital accord. “Until now, that is,” he adds smoothly, raising his glass. Roslyn gives him the smile of those who share a private joke.
Into a slight strain that seems to be felt, not by the hosts, but among the guests at the table, someone says lightly: “Third time lucky.”
The judge murmurs to Catherine: “It was a time of personal turmoil, when the appointment was made.” He makes a neat pathway through the crumbs with the blade of a knife. “A painful time.”
Roslyn says comfortably: “Painful for both of us, really. She just couldn’t cope, I’m afraid.” She shakes her head, marvelling, and takes a thoughtful sip of wine. “The second, that is. Of course, we have no contact at all with the first.”
Catherine passes the judge the salad bowl just as Beverley, determined to lighten the mood, chips in brightly: “By the way, what’s your son doing these days, Robinson? I heard he was back from Queensland.”
“Ah yes?” The judge concentrates all his attention on the salad bowl, but it is Catherine whom Charlie watches, and I am watching Charlie. Charlie is unreadable, but Catherine forgets to let go of the wooden bowl.
“He drifts,” Roslyn says. “His mother’s in Brisbane, that’s Robbie’s first, you know, and she dominates him. The oldest battleground.” She spreads her fingers in bemusement at the things certain women will still resort to. “We don’t see much of him. He gives us a wide berth, I’m afraid.” One does not have the feeling that this devastates Roslyn Gray. “It’s hard on Robbie,” she says.
Catherine and the judge are still holding the salad bowl between them. Beverley laughs. “Are you two meditating on artichoke hearts, or what?”
As though a pause button has been released, Catherine relinquishes the salad and I have the curious sense that the weight of the bowl alarms the judge. He sets it down, forgetting to help himself to lettuce, and is intent on making small levees in a continent of crumbs with his knifeblade. “Children go their own way,” he says.
Catherine, surprising everyone, muses without inflection: “Why is that, I wonder?”
On a zigzag route, the judge sees himself framed by ferns in the mirror above a sideboard, an elegant gentleman in the prime of life, approaching fifty to be precise, a man of private sorrows and public distinction, a man of whom biographies will surely speak well, a man for whom his difficult son will surely one day write an anguished posthumous lament. Something restorative comes to him from these reflections. He says to Catherine in an easy, wry, avuncular tone: “Thus the world turns.”
Catherine smiles, and Charlie waits, fascinated. Catherine’s smile is that of the Brisbane child, it is the smile she used to give long ago when she felt cornered, when she slipped in the knife. Charlie feels prickles along the back of his neck, he watches for the blade. “I thought I saw your son when I came in,” she says. “Is he bartending here?”
Robinson Gray makes an ambiguous gesture, but Roslyn is clearly taken by surprise. Kitchenhands and waiters silently appear to sweep up splintered glass and spilled wine, people push back chairs in consternation. Movement, anyway, much movement, but Charlie is extraordinarily still at its centre. His stillness is a measure of amazement. How mysterious chance is, he thinks. How unnerving the apparent coincidence is.
(Is that what he thought? Or did he think: Now it begins. Sometimes I choose the former, sometimes not.)
Perhaps something inappropriate has been said at the restaurant table, some fine line crossed, by Roslyn perhaps or by someone else; perhaps the judge or one of his guests, with the usual private school aplomb, is rescuing the table from awkwardness. If I was aware of Robinson Gray’s reaction, or of Roslyn’s, it is part of that mountain, the things I don’t know I know. The dinner party must have wandered on to dessert and coffee, but the tide has moved me, I’m in the bar with a tray, I’m aware of Gabriel at the bar as the kind of disturbance one gets on a television screen in a storm, people are signing chits, collecting jackets, people are discreetly disappearing into the Ladies, the Gents, except for Catherine whom I see in the mirror over the bar, still alone at the table.
She is still there when everyone else has left. She is still there when Charlie, as stranger, as deferential maître d’, goes to offer another round of liqueur.
Sh
e turns to him very slowly. She stands as a sleepwalker stands. She stares at him as though he is part of a dream that is slithering rapidly out of reach. She says in a flat drugged voice: “Why did you come back, Mr Chang?”
Dizziness, yearning, grief, memory, what a dangerous mix, Charlie is swaying, he’s losing his bearings, here’s yesterday …
“Catherine,” he says.
“Where have you been?”
“Away.”
She nods and nods.
“Can I take you home?” he asks.
“Charlie,” she says, very faintly, as though she is at one end of an infinitely long corridor but does not really expect the person at the other end of it to hear her. She seems to be in a trance.
It could be minutes or hours before Charlie reaches to touch her cheek momentarily, then drops his hand. “Catherine?” he says again.
“Yes?”
“May I take you home?”
She considers this, her eyes unfocused. “No,” she sighs. “I don’t think that would help.” She extends her hand, formal, and shakes his. “Goodnight, Mr Chang.” And then, with a flicker of satirical life: “You do the best barramundi in Sydney.”
9
Upstairs the women come and go, speaking of nothing — or nothing of consequence — and never sleeping before five in the morning. Until then there is no time for sleep, and no beds for it either, for the landlord has intimated that an idle bed is not a luxury he can afford, and that idlers will swiftly lose lodging privileges and will have to forgo their lavish entitlement to the five entire hours of sleep — unproductive hours, from the landlord’s point of view — which they get for a pittance, for a mere thirty dollars per night, from dawn right through the hot drugged headachy Sydney mornings till 10 a.m. Disseminated along mysterious channels, this rule is common knowledge. Straight from the mouth of the nine-digit number himself, the girls will say if pressed (and men do press them, in many ways, and for many reasons), but no amount of foraging can finger a name behind the number.
The Last Magician Page 11