He picked up the top sheet and held it out in front of him at arm’s length. He did not bother to put on his reading glasses. He would not enter into her game. ‘O wretched man that I am!’ he read. ‘Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? For I know that in my flesh there dwelleth no good thing …’ But she could not contain herself even for this long.
‘You are supposed to be teaching him to think rationally and analytically!’
‘That’s part of what we’re here to do,’ – was there safety in that ‘we’? – ‘but in the end students must make their own choices.’
‘That’s all very well but my son has turned into a zealot. As soon as we get in the car or the house he starts to preach at me. And sometimes he prays aloud in the living room or reads aloud from the Bible. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ She paused for a moment, and glared at him. ‘He calls it crying out to the Lord! And he insists on saying Grace at the table, very loudly, like he’s in a stadium.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I can’t bear it, Dr. Garde.’
He felt uncomfortable. It was something to do with the way she used his name, a dark intimacy, as if already they were colluding against the boy. He sensed that she was one of those women for whom there were no half measures; but that was her problem, not his. She needed to deal with this analytically and it was up to him to steer them both onto neutral ground.
‘Are you a Christian, Mrs. Charlton?’
‘No, I am not. I hope I would have the courage to live without facile consolation—’ She stopped suddenly, as if a thought had just occurred to her. She was looking at him shrewdly. ‘And what about you, Dr. Garde? Are you by any chance a Christian?’ She was probing him. It had no doubt occurred to her, long before she walked through his door, that he might be a proselytising pedagogue, a Pied Piper who ran scripture classes on the side and had led her son astray.
‘No.’ He looked at her coldly.
‘I’m sorry. That really is none of my business. I do apologise. But the thing is …’ She sighed, almost entreatingly. He saw that some old-fashioned notion of good manners had begun to exert a check on her confrontational mood and this visible effort to rein in her passion disarmed him. ‘Have you read this stuff?’ she asked, and her tone was more conciliatory. ‘It’s a rant, it’s all over the place. I wouldn’t mind if it made any sense but it doesn’t. It’s unhealthy.’
‘How long has Daniel been an evangelical?’
‘I’m not sure. Three months, maybe four.’
‘It could be worse, Mrs. Charlton.’
‘Inez.’
‘It could be worse. He could be shooting up in a back lane. He could be hanging from manacles at the Hellfire Club.’
‘You think that’s funny?’
‘I’m perfectly serious.’
‘I’ve raised my son to be sceptical and above all tolerant of others and now he’s a Bible basher, a religious nutter! If he has to save his soul, why can’t he be a vegetarian and a Buddhist like all the rest? Isn’t that the fashion now?’
He couldn’t help it. He laughed out loud.
‘I know, I know.’ For the first time since entering his room she smiled, and with a hint of self-consciousness placed her right hand over her chest in a protective gesture, as if the rapid beating of her heart was too much for her. In that moment she looked like a demure madonna in a painting. ‘No doubt you think I’m a monster and I’ve driven the poor boy to it.’ Now she was rueful, but had relaxed a little. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs so that her skirt rode up to mid-thigh and he could observe the perfectly moulded shape of her knees, neither bony nor fleshy.
What could he say? He liked her; she had a frankness and a sardonic edge that he warmed to.
‘He gives me things to read, you know. He puts extracts from The Book in my briefcase. Folds little bites from scripture into my filofax. And I can’t help myself, I have to speak my mind. Have you read this stuff?’ She nodded in the direction of the stapled extract that lay on his desk. ‘Their throat is an opened grave; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips. Charming isn’t it? All sin and righteousness, and more sin, and the evils of the flesh and talk about how we should all become the slaves of God. For I know that nothing good dwells within me? I ask you, is that healthy?’
Yes, she was vivid. There was a current in her that surged around the room.
‘Tell me, Dr. Garde, what impression do you have of my son?’
‘He seems perfectly normal to me.’ He recalled Daniel sitting at the seminar table and droning through a lacklustre paper. Tall with a loping gait and lank, unruly brown hair pushed behind his ears; conventionally dressed; a private-school boy but not the bland, complaisant type. There was a diffidence there, a modest reserve, with a strange, abstracted insolence just beneath the surface.
‘Does he say much in class?’
‘Not a lot. But that’s not unusual.’
‘What is he studying with you? I can’t get any sense out of him.’
‘He’s enrolled in II B, Option A.’
‘He told me he’s writing a paper on whether animals have souls.’
‘I haven’t seen it yet.’
‘Would that be considered a major question in this department?’
‘You could say, from the point of view of the study of philosophy, that every question is a major question.’
She gave him a look, as if to say, ‘You’re playing games with me.’
Then something occurred to him. ‘Tell me, does Daniel’s father have a position on this?’ He ought to have raised this earlier.
‘His father is not in the picture.’ She said this coldly, and then:
‘Will you speak to my son?’
‘I’m sorry, Inez, this is none of my business. It’s a private matter.
I really can’t help you.’
At that point, he recalls, her mobile rang, a soft discreet brrrrr. Without missing a beat she extracted it from the outer pocket of her handbag and cupped it to her ear with a heavily ringed hand. Lowering her voice she said, almost furtively, ‘I can’t talk now.’ She looked up. ‘It’s him,’ she mouthed.
He felt he should look at his watch, pretend to have another appointment, but by now he was fascinated by her manoeuvres.
She flipped her mobile shut and dropped it into the gaping hole of her very large handbag. ‘You know, Dr. Garde, my generation fought to free itself of all this … all this stuff, and I can’t believe my own son is turning into a puritan before my eyes.’
No, not your generation, he thought, my generation. We were the baby boomers, we broke the rules first. He guessed that she was ten years younger than him, at least. ‘It’s probably just a phase,’ he said, lamely, and as the words came out of his mouth he was ashamed of them, ashamed because they patronised the boy. Perhaps it was not a phase and Daniel would end up a missionary in Africa, tied to a stake in the desert and eaten alive by ants. ‘Adolescence is a time of extreme opinions,’ he added. ‘Everything is black and white.’ And there’s a passionate desire for truth which later fades, he might have added, but refrained.
‘I hope you’re right,’ she said, and rose, looking towards the door. It appeared that she was satisfied, her anger discharged, at least for now. Well, that was a relief. He had navigated the tempest for them both, piloted them into the shallows of a nil-all draw. He always was good with women. Politely he rose to escort her to the door and when she turned to offer her hand an impulse took possession of him. ‘I’m just on my way to have coffee,’ he said. ‘Would you care to join me?’
Within days they were lying together in small motel off Parramatta Road. It was a place that was commonly used for visiting scholars and he knew it well.
Thereafter they met every Thursday evening; same place, same time. Since he was a widower and she was divorced, with no current entanglement, there was no obvious reason for this clandestine arrangement. They never spoke o
f it but he assumed she did not want him to visit her house because of his pedagogical connection to her son. And he was reluctant to ask her back to his place because the presence of his dead wife was still everywhere; it saturated the house, the garden, the air in every room.
On their first night in that motel room with its flecked beige wallpaper and murky green upholstery, disaster had threatened. At first she removed her skirt and he was delighted to discover a hint of glamorous and no doubt expensive lingerie. Then she surprised him. Still fully clothed above the waist she removed her skimpy lace pants so that his breath caught. Next she unbuttoned her shirt to reveal a deliciously seductive bra, what there was of it, and it suggested that her breasts were small, like those of a young girl. She loosened her hair, which was pulled back with a tortoiseshell clip, and by this time he was fully aroused, entirely without trepidation. In that exquisite flex of the shoulders that women give, she unhooked her bra and removed it in a single gesture, and his eyes went straight to the pinkish-white scar where her left breast should have been. It was long and neat and disappeared under her right armpit. Mastectomy. The hideous word captured him; it might just as well have been tattooed on her skin. Caught. He was caught, and he could feel the rush of detumescence, like air escaping from a tyre. Thank God he hadn’t undressed yet and she couldn’t see.
‘Come over here,’ he said, to cover his shock, and he sat her on his knee and bent to kiss the scar. But it was no good. He was impotent and he began to stall. ‘How is Daniel?’ he asked, and she jerked her head back, and looked at him askance as if to say, ‘Why ask about that now?’ Then her shoulders slumped, and he could see the moment, this moment she had been preparing for with nervous hope, beginning to dim.
‘He’s still at it,’ she sighed, ‘still tormenting me.’ Her face dissolved in an expression of silent agony and she trembled. ‘Last night he shouted at me. “As it is written, for thy sake we are killed all the day long, we are accounted as sheep for slaughter.”’
And with those words a kind of thrill went through his body, and suddenly he was erect again. ‘Sheep for slaughter,’ he murmured, nuzzling her collarbone, ‘are we now?’ And he lay her down against the murky green bedcover, and enclosed her with his hulking middle-aged body. And was himself again.
It was a short session, but satisfying to them both.
The following Thursday they met again, and again he was flaccid when he looked at that pink slit of a scar. Silently he cursed himself, and delayed the moment of undressing by pouring himself another whiskey. He could not again ask after Daniel or she would think him perverse. Instead he eased her down beside him and began languidly to stroke her hip, but it was no good. He was a torpid hulk.
For a time they lay there, side by side in a pantomime of useless caresses, until at last she sat up with her back to him and smoothed her hair. ‘I don’t think we can manage this,’ she said.
He was touched by this ‘we’. ‘Of course we can manage it,’ he said, brusquely. If he did not resolve this impasse, and resolve it quickly, she would be lost to him. He lowered his head and began to mouth at her single breast, which brought from her an instant response, until she began to sigh deeply and rhythmically and it was not a mother’s sigh. He lowered his body still further until his lips were brushing against the fine wisps of her pubic hair and he knew then that it would work. Our mouths are open graves, he told himself, the poison of asps is under our lips and all the while, as the blood began to surge through his arteries, he was spurred on by the thought of the young man, of Daniel. He wished that Daniel were in the room with them, this stuffy, banal motel room, to hear his mother’s orgasmic sobbing.
After, when they lay in grateful repose, he felt again that singular peace that can be felt in no other way, never mind that it doesn’t last. And it was odd and shameful but he felt that he had triumphed over the son. He had triumphed over the young. He was his old self again.
And so they conspired together. There was a kind of game going on between them and he wondered if her playing of the game was artless. Perhaps, even, unconscious.
‘There’s something about a bible,’ she said one afternoon as they shared their ritual whiskey. ‘Just looking at one gives me the horrors.’ She took a demure sip; she was not much of a drinker. ‘Daniel is making a collection of them,’ she added. ‘Last night he came home with two, a fresh new one with a pale-green plastic cover and a musty old hardbound monstrosity that he found in a secondhand shop, one of those with the family tree written up inside.’ She grimaced. ‘On every page there were passages blocked out in thick red crayon.’
He found the image of the red crayon titillating. He imagined a man his own age in a heavy serge suit on the Sabbath, reading aloud to his wife; a man with a large hand and a clumsy grip on his red crayon, pressing hard into the page, a pious vandal. Instantly it made him want to take the glass from her hand and push her back onto the bed, roughly. And did she guess? Did she feed him this stuff with intent? Evidently not, for on that occasion she spoke with genuine revulsion, as if she were describing some cursed or decaying artefact found on an archaeological dig. And then, more plaintively: ‘Daniel insists on keeping a bible on the kitchen table. Near the fruit bowl. Sometimes I feel I can’t bear to be in the room with it.’
‘It’s just a book, it won’t bite you.’
‘It does bite me,’ she said, and smiled sheepishly. ‘It takes a chunk out of me. I feel like, like … it’s hollowing out my heart.’
This was such an arresting image; he hadn’t thought of her heart before. He mostly thought of her other parts, her excellent muscle tone, its warmth and elasticity. Amazing that a woman’s breast could fail her while the rest of her body went on working magnificently.
‘You need to be desensitised,’ he said. He leaned across, opened the drawer of the bedside table and got out the Gideon Bible. ‘Here,’ he said, holding it out to her. ‘See, no teeth.’
She stiffened.
‘Read to me.’
She made a face. ‘What?’
‘How about Letter to the Romans?’
She put the book down on the side table. ‘You are ridiculous,’ she said, and gave him a shove. He laughed, and thought they might soon become friends.
‘Go on,’ he coaxed, ‘just a few verses.’
She picked up the book and searched for a moment, a seductive but dutiful schoolgirl. Then she glanced up at him coyly. ‘We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies …’
He reached out and took the book away. ‘The redemption of bodies,’ he said. ‘I can show you a thing or two about that.’
After his first encounter with Inez he felt the need to talk about her, to use her name in the company of friends. He couldn’t, of course, not under the circumstances. Though eating alone no longer bothered him, there were nights when he would sit at the table in the kitchen and say her name out loud: ‘Inez.’
One evening in the middle of dinner Alice rang, as she did, faithfully, once a week, and he told her about Daniel, and of Inez’s crack about young Buddhists and how it was the fashion now. Alice sounded tired and overworked and he thought it might make her laugh. It didn’t.
‘He’s probably lonely,’ she said. ‘When you join the Evangelical Union you get instant friends.’
‘That doesn’t explain why he reads scripture aloud at the dinner table and shouts it out in the car.’
‘Come on, Dad. He wants to annoy his mother. He’s a boy.’
‘Don’t be glib,’ he said.
‘Glib?’
‘Smart. Don’t be smart.’ Sometimes a word would come between them, a word that made him feel old.
‘I am smart, Dad. Remember? You’ve told me so often enough.’ And she laughed, and he was relieved that she had taken it in good humour. He had not meant to rebuke her (God forb
id) and had surprised himself by wanting to defend Daniel’s seriousness. He had been a serious young man himself.
After they had spoken for a half hour he returned to the cold remains of his dinner, one of his wife’s specials that he ate at least once a week: chickpeas, tomatoes, garlic and spices, smoked paprika, some rounds of chorizo and rice or bread. His wife hadn’t liked to cook; it was too time consuming. There were too many other things to do in life. A quick meal is a good meal, she would say; it allowed more time for her garden. At first he resented this; his mother had cooked for him and he expected his wife would do the same, but he’d soon gotten over that.
He carried his plate to the sink and began to rinse it, distracted by an image of Inez, naked but for a pink cotton shirt, and as the water ran wastefully over the plate he happened to glance into the white plastic compost bucket that sat by the sink. It was the bucket into which he and his wife had scraped their leftovers, scraps that were destined for the state-of-the-art compost bin she kept in the yard, a bin that hadn’t been attended to since her death. And still he emptied the leftovers into this bin as if any day she might return and resume her favourite activity, and he might glance out the door and see her kneeling on the flagstones beneath her wide-brimmed hat. On weekends he weeded the small patch of front garden and saw to it that the flowering shrubs were pruned, but her built-up vegetable bed at the rear of the house was a labyrinth of weeds. He couldn’t bear to look at it.
He knew the presence of the compost bucket was a bad joke, that one day he would have to take it outside and dump it in the wheelie bin, but he was not ready, not yet. Some reminders of his wife unhinged him, others helped to keep him on track and the bucket, oddly, was one of them. For a while he just stood there at the sink and gazed out through the kitchen window that looked onto Camperdown Park, and an old sandstone wall that separated the park from St. Stephen’s churchyard. Often on summer evenings after dinner he and his wife would stroll across the park and through the overgrown cemetery there, past the picturesque gatehouse and the enormous Moreton Bay fig tree, its roots like great sleeping pythons. The congregation had long ago shrunk away to nothing and the churchyard was derelict and filled with weeds. Many of the headstones were damaged and leaned askew while dogs roamed through the kangaroo grass and drug deals were transacted in shadowy corners.
Reading Madame Bovary Page 22