Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  Joyful

  Robert Hillman is the author of a number of critically acclaimed books, including the memoir The Boy in the Green Suit, which won the National Biography Award, and Gurrumul: His Life and Music. He lives in Warburton in Victoria’s Yarra Valley.

  JOYFUL

  Robert Hillman

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © 2014 by Robert Hillman

  The moral right of Robert Hillman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in 2014 by The Text Publishing Company

  Book design by WH Chong

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author: Hillman, Robert, 1948- .

  Title: Joyful / by Robert Hillman.

  ISBN: 9781922079916 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781921961632 (ebook)

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  To Ann Dillon

  LEON’S WIFE had been ill enough to die any day over the past month or more. Today it was certain. Nothing was left of her beauty.

  ‘You’ll find me a small table,’ Father Bourke told Leon. The table beside Tess’s bed, cluttered with medicines, apparently would not do. Tess’s daughter Evie was already on her knees, dabbing with clasped hands at the mucus on her upper lip. Justin, Tess’s son, stood against the wall, arms folded on his chest. His bleakness, if not his posture, expressed grief.

  Leon brought the priest a chalice table with a top of mosaic marble, something from a Viennese workshop of the early nineteenth century. The priest grimaced but made no objection. From a black attaché case he took a white cloth and spread it over the mosaic surface. He opened a silver box and set on its lid a candle in a pewter holder. He lit the candle with a match.

  Tess watched in dread, her lips parted on her teeth.

  Father Bourke, seated on the bedside, took up Tess’s hand and put it to his heart.

  ‘Now my darling, we are where we have to be,’ he said. He spoke quietly, but not privately. This was for Evie and Justin, too. ‘Are you sorry my love for all the sins of your life? I know you are. You can tell me.’

  Tess said, ‘I am sorry for all the sins of my life. For everything. Oh Terence!’

  ‘Of course you are. Of course you are.’

  Father Bourke lifted Tess’s hand and kissed the tips of her fingers.

  ‘Tess, God the father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son has reconciled the world to Himself and sent the Holy Spirit amongst us for the forgiveness of our sins. Through the ministry of the church, may God give you pardon and peace, and now I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’

  Father Bourke held Tess’s hand against his chest as he made the sign of the cross above her. Tess nodded her head just barely on the pillow. She closed her eyes, then opened them again. ‘Oh Terence,’ she said. Her breathing immediately set into a dire labour.

  Father Bourke put aside the words of the sacrament to whisper, ‘Lovely, the dying part is piffle. Rest your heart.’ And Tess did appear to take something from this. She nodded once more, and her lips drew together in a straight line of determination.

  Father Bourke anointed her with oil, making the sign of the cross on her forehead with his thumb. ‘Through this anointing, may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit. Amen.’

  He anointed first the right then the left palm of Tess’s hands.

  ‘May the Lord who frees you from sin raise you up.’

  Tess again managed to nod, as if her endorsement had become crucial. The rasp of her breathing had eased.

  ‘Lord Jesus Christ, you chose to share our human nature, to redeem all people and to heal the sick. Look with compassion on your servant Teresa, whom we have anointed in your name with this holy oil for the healing of her body and spirit. Support her with your power, comfort her with your protection, and give her the strength to fight against evil. Since you have given her a share in your own passion, help her to find hope in suffering, for you are Lord, forever and ever, amen.’

  Father Bourke returned Tess’s hand to her, the one he’d been holding to his heart. The authority of the priest had settled a spell on all those kneeling, leaving them mute of thought.

  Father Bourke said, ‘Will you take communion my darling?’ and Tess nodded. He had come prepared. From the small gold pyx, he took a wafer and held it ready while Tess found her way through the Our Father with him. She joined Father Bourke in the concluding lines of the communion prayer, providing what fragments she could: ‘This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper. Lord I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.’

  Tess received the consecrated Host in her hand.

  ‘The body of Christ,’ Father Bourke whispered, and Tess, still holding the wafer in her hand, murmured, ‘Amen.’

  part one

  Tess

  chapter 1

  Courting

  LEON JOYCE’S years with Tess Wachowicz began with an Emanuel Ungaro taffeta ball gown, part of his collection of women’s attire kept in three wardrobes at the South Yarra house. The collection took in Givenchy, Jacques Fath, Schiaparelli, Ungaro, Madame Grès, Helmut Lang, Claire McCardell, Mainbocher, Miyake, Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel, Dior, Travis Banton, Pucci and Antony Price. Outfits and gowns were hung on broad-framed oak hangers and covered in polythene; items such as his Givenchy cashmeres were folded in white tissue. Except for three of the classics purchased second-hand (Madame Grès, Schiaparelli, Travis Banton) the garments were kept in a range of sizes.

  He had known Tess for a year before asking her to try anything on, but he’d dreamed of her in the Ungaro from the instant of their first meeting in his shop. She’d called in to look for a gift; for her husband, an anniversary, something special. Leon offered her an Oligarch Press edition of Rupert Brooke.

  She came to the shop frequently after that first visit. She purchased something every so often but her real purpose was to allow Leon to admire her. She was not especially vain and preferred to be thought of as a person who wore clothes well rather than as a beauty. Leon was able to give the impression to any woman he admired that his interest was for the most part aesthetic, but with certain interesting impurities mixed in. He was also able to talk intelligently about what women wore. He believed what he’d been told by a client who knew Tess and who sometimes chatted with her in the shop—that Tess was promiscuous—and that naturally worried him, but not too much. If anything were suggested, he would have to decline. But in the courtship he imagined, Tess would realise that he was not interested in sex and would agree to wear his dresses without any rigmarole.

  Their friendship grew. Leon told her about rare books and about the passions of his customers. He told her of a client who had sold his wife’s car behind her back to purchase a Rossetti Ballads and Sonnets with scribbled notations by William Morris. He also spoke to Tess about her music. She taught piano, played for friends and presented a program on the radio. Leon was
knowledgeable about music up until the early twentieth century, and was able to engage Tess in that way.

  They made a regular date for lunch, Thursdays at the Greenhouse, and after lunch Tess would drive him to the studio to watch her broadcast her two-hour program. She took to kissing him on the mouth when they parted. Leon was not very responsive to the kisses, but he did his best. Tess asked him one day, out of the blue, if he were gay.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Well, good,’ she said. ‘I do like to feel that I’m having some impact. Am I?’

  ‘You are, yes.’

  They had known each other for a year before Tess began to confide and confess. Her marriage was in tatters—that was what she told him. Then she told him much more. She came to lunch one Thursday with an ugly welt on her cheek. He asked her what had happened. She said nothing for almost five minutes, only sipped her wine and looked out across Domain Road at the Botanic Gardens. Then she told him everything. Kazi—her husband, Kazimierz, a Polish immigrant who had come to Australia in 1970 and had made a lot of money out of copper wire and cable—was a wife-beater. She had taught herself to duck but sometimes struck back; when she did, she always came off worse. He wasn’t faithful to her and never had been, and she wasn’t faithful to him, but he’d started it.

  ‘I love him in some absurd way, but the marriage is a travesty, Leon dear. What do you say to that?’

  ‘A shame.’

  ‘Yes. A shame. Evie knows it’s all a charade. Justin knows. They hate it when he slogs me, but they adore him most of the time. He’s very alpha, very Polish. In all honesty, I don’t think he can be any way other than he is. Thank goodness for you. Thank goodness for my Leon.’

  After that breakthrough, Tess couldn’t be quiet about boyfriends and lovers. It was one of the few things Leon thought vulgar about her. At lunch, she would suddenly cover her face with both hands and give a little gasp, then peek out at him. ‘Do you want to hear?’

  And out it came. He was twenty-two, the son of a friend of a friend. He was fifty, an alcoholic. He was sixty and fat and covered in curly grey hair, like an overfed billy goat. He liked to smack her on the bottom. He liked her to spit. He tied her up with rope made from alpaca fleece. He’d stopped attending lectures because of her. He was a Muslim but liked her pubic hair.

  Leon understood Tess’s confessions as a form of bragging. Did she wish to sound loose? Did she wish to be seen as an adventuress, something like that? Stranger that he was to sexual passion, Leon nevertheless perceived all this as a little juvenile. A grown-up woman does not boast of her sexual escapades. She just has them and keeps them to herself, so Leon guessed. He hated to hear Tess speaking such nonsense. He wanted her beauty, her accomplishment, her grace and intellect to inform everything about her. Fragments of commonness in a fine woman nauseated him. It was possible, of course, that she was making things up, but Leon didn’t think so. She just sounded as if she were. Certain categories of experience, even when real, remain essentially works of fantasy. The more they are acted out, the more gravity they lose.

  In the end he betrayed his irritation with her. Tess was whispering to him about climaxes in the nightclub voice she adopted for such occasions when he suddenly heard himself emit a sound, a yelp. He turned his head away from her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, after a minute of surprise.

  ‘Sorry? For what?’

  ‘Is it disgusting? It is, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘No, be honest with me, Leon.’

  Leon didn’t want to be honest. Where in God’s name had that yelp come from? Partly it was to do with the awful green skirt Tess was wearing that day.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, feigning a feeling he had never felt, ‘it makes me jealous, that’s all. I apologise.’

  ‘Jealous?’

  Tess propped her elbow on the table by the broad disc of her empty plate and rested her chin in her palm.

  ‘Now, Leon.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Very much so.’

  Tess smiled and touched him on the hand.

  ‘I think you’re fibbing to me,’ she said.

  ‘No, I promise.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  They both became quiet. Over her coffee, Tess looked across at him regularly to smile, to assure him that all was well, that she was not offended. But she was. Leon knew that their relationship would alter unless he acted. Tess would gradually turn away from him. The idea filled him with alarm.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘whether you would do me a favour?’

  ‘If I can,’ she said.

  ‘After the studio, could you come back to my place for an hour?’

  Tess turned her head a little to one side. Her coffee cup, which she’d been lifting to her lips, was allowed to settle back on its saucer.

  Leon held her gaze.

  ‘Of course, Leon.’

  chapter 2

  Dressing

  THE HOUSE in Moore Street was impeccably kept. A cleaner, Mandy, had looked after the place for the fifteen years that Leon had shared it with his mother, and had stayed on after Dorothy’s death. The intimidating standard of maintenance aside, the house was warm and welcoming in a way that anyone meeting Leon for the first time might not have expected. His shyness made people think him locked away, unproviding. Except for the Saarinen wardrobes and chairs in the upstairs room in which the gowns were stored, the furniture was all from earlier centuries. The guest room at the front on the second floor had been given some of Leon’s best pictures. His reputation among those who had been weekend guests (clients from overseas, his half-sisters, Janet and Melanie, their families) was that of a conscientious host whose good manners extended to making himself invisible.

  Tess had visited Leon’s home twice in her life, but only as one of a half-dozen dinner guests; book people, predominantly. Leon had been waiting for the right moment to ask her to the house alone. That moment, in the normal course of events, might not have arisen for a year or even two; Leon was against haste. He wanted it to be clearly understood by Tess that her sex appeal played no part in his love for her. Driving to Moore Street from the studio, he hoped with all his heart that Tess was preparing to tell him that she did not quite have those feelings for him and therefore could not sleep with him. He wished he could simply come out and tell her that he had no desire to sleep with her, but he had been down that road before. It was a very difficult thing to say and usually led to disaster. What, then? Waiting at a red light on Punt Road, he cleared his throat to attract Tess’s attention.

  ‘I have something to show you.’

  ‘Something to show me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it a surprise?’

  ‘Yes, in a way.’

  Once indoors, to Leon’s dismay, Tess became embarrassingly flirtatious. She snuggled herself into his back while he poured wine in the living room. She wet the nape of his neck with soft kisses. Her long fingers crept around his throat and caressed the smooth flesh under his chin.

  ‘Do you know, this is the first ever time I’ve been here without your friends?’

  ‘Really?’

  The caresses were a warmer version of the casual touching for which Tess was famous. Everyone enjoyed it, both men and women, but it made Leon uncomfortable. He’d invented ways of keeping out of her reach, but it wasn’t always possible. Holding him prisoner from behind, she also had the advantage of a few centimetres in height. When she began to exert gentle pressure with her groin against his buttocks, he deliberately knocked over a full glass of wine and made an apologetic fuss about cleaning it up. Tess stood by watching him, her expression something between an amused smile and a mild frown of puzzlement. On his hands and knees on the floor, dabbing away at a Mashad runner with a sponge, Leon took in at close quarters Tess’s red ankle-boots, black stockings and the hem of her short pleated skirt. He disapproved of her wardrobe on days like this, when she came out dresse
d as if she were seventeen instead of forty.

  He excused himself for a minute to get things ready upstairs. When he returned, he poured another glass of wine, held both glasses and invited Tess to follow him up the stairs. Which she did, very closely, patting his behind at each step. He risked a grimace of impatience over his shoulder. Tess grinned up at him and wiggled her fingers in the air, as if she were about to tickle a puppy.

  The room Leon was leading her to, the largest in the house, was the second along the corridor past the guest room. The door was slightly ajar and Leon pushed it open with his knee. Tess paused in the doorway, gave a long, low groan of pleasure, forgot about Leon and took five slow steps towards the display at the centre of the room. Her hands were raised as if in reverence.

  It was a taffeta silk gown of midnight blue, a strapless ball gown, held erect by a headless wooden mannequin. The crinoline skirt swelled from the tight waist of the bodice in deep folds descending to the pale grey carpet. The train of the gown was arranged in dark valleys curving away to the right of the figure.

  Tess reached to feel the texture of the silk between her fingers.

  ‘Oh, God!’

  She walked a semi-circle around the mannequin, arms folded on her chest, swaying to take in a view more to the right, more to the left.

  The wooden mannequin was as arresting as the gown, in its way. Tess ran a hand over its bare shoulders. It was carved from pear wood and polished with beeswax. The fingers were rendered in close detail, down to the nails. The figure had been made to lean forward at the waist, with the arms reaching back.

  Leon crossed to a small lacquered table below the long, bare windows of the west wall and set the wine glasses down. He nodded towards the three wardrobe doors on the north wall, inviting Tess’s gaze. The doors were of varnished teak and reached to the ceiling. Each door was fitted with a full-length mirror framed in black iron. Leon opened each door fully to reveal his collection hanging in zippered plastic sheaths.