Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  Other more homely joys came his way: Tess dithering in the kitchen, where she was hopeless; Tess sewing a button onto a blouse, her tongue sneaking out from between her lips in the effort of concentration. And her interaction with the television—he adored that. She called musically to presidents and prime ministers: ‘Daft fooker!’ or much worse if she was in a worse mood. Even entire days could develop a soft glow, one especially helping Tess research a submission to a funding body on behalf of music students from some third-world hellhole. She was ill with a sinus thing that came and went, and in any case, her patience for forms and questionnaires was minimal. She said: ‘Now what?’ and he showed her. She said: ‘I have to write a summary. I can’t!’ Leon wrote the summary in longhand, sitting beside her on the sofa while she ransacked her notes. As he read her what he’d written she leaned her head against his shoulder and kneaded her aching face. She said: ‘It’s so nice of you, darling. So good of you to help me.’ Later Leon thought: ‘But this must be what people mean when they say they are married.’

  With the passing of anniversaries Tess’s beauty meant less and less to him; everything ordinary meant more. He gathered garlands of her common moments. Cavernous yawns at the breakfast table that displayed her old-fashioned silver fillings; arm over her head in the bathroom rasping away at the stippled flesh of her armpits.

  He thought: ‘Nobody told me.’

  =

  Moore Street had never suited Tess. She complained of its ‘Methodist pong’, meaning her resentment of Dorothy’s having lived and thrived there. Evie had moved into a flat with her boyfriend, so when Justin shuffled off to a share house in Abbotsford, Leon and Tess made their own move to the three-bedroom flat above the High Street shop.

  It hadn’t been leased as a residence since Leon had owned it. He had only ever used it as a storeroom. Its features were beautiful, though. Tess had it repainted and recarpeted, the unsteady staircase from the shop replaced. Otherwise she left it looking as it had when the shop and flat were built in 1910.

  Tess chose the bedroom with windows above High Street as theirs. The largest bedroom became the music room; another was set aside for Leon’s collection. The ball gown on the carved mannequin still stood in the centre of the room, but the garments, shoes and jewellery had to make do with more cramped quarters. The arrangements left them without a guest room at High Street, but Moore Street was kept for visitors and against the day Justin got sick of paying rent. The office of the shop downstairs would serve as Leon’s study.

  Tess’s friends, at first amazed at her marriage to Leon, soon began to appreciate the narrative: the most beautiful woman in the world moves in with a gentle, courtly bookseller who could not be expected to satisfy her famous appetite, but who turns a blind eye to her adventures: a type of civilised alternative to the shouting and resentment and plotting for revenge of a normal marriage is charmingly established. Each is free in passion: Tess has her music, her students, her radio show, her lovers; Leon has his books.

  But even the most generous of Tess’s friends in their less generous moments had to laugh. Because wasn’t it really only Tess’s beauty and style that allowed her to get away with it? And wasn’t it really only Leon’s big wallet and lovely manners that saved the whole thing from looking as pathetic as it really was? Oh, they carried it off magnificently, but it smelled slightly rank, in truth. Kazi’s observation about his wife being basically a cultured whore—amusing to Tess herself in certain moods—was repeated more often than in the past. Leon’s friends pitied him, too, but it was a pity laced with concession: to sleep with Tess, who wouldn’t look the other way?

  Leon was fully aware of the score kept by his friends and Tess’s, but it was only ever a minor part of his torment. People outside—what could they ever know? Playing the fool for Tess’s sake—well, if people thought that was funny but tragic, what would they think if they knew how far he would go to keep Tess and what he would give? Anything. Everything. Forever.

  chapter 4

  Rite

  THEN SHE was ill. Then she was dying. The second opinion was worse than the first. She said: ‘It’s as bad as it can be.’ But there wasn’t a blemish anywhere on her body. Leon pleaded with her to speak up in her own defence, spurn the doctor’s verdict, but Tess was adamant: she was ill and would soon be dead.

  Two months further along, Tess losing flesh each day, Justin and Evie set up the music room so that she could look out the window from her bed. This meant forcing the piano into a cramped position in a corner. ‘She wants to see sky and trees,’ Evie said. Leon was distressed by this movement of furniture. What was implied? That Tess would have no further use for the Steinway? That her students would cease to make appointments? That sky and trees would suffice as consolation for the rest of her life?

  One evening, Evie came into the study and began to speak of a particular church, a particular priest, and of an organist, Tess’s friend, who had agreed to return from a festival in Oslo to play at the funeral, if the funeral should be held in March.

  Leon said: ‘This is premature.’

  Evie said: ‘Hardly.’

  But Leon at last accepted that Tess would soon die. It felt like betrayal. He had conceded a crucial argument to Tess’s opponent. Tess, of course, had well and truly conceded the same argument. People came to visit, some bringing books that outlined schemes of rejuvenation, stories of amazing recovery, exhortations. She accepted such books with a smile of gratitude but when the visitors had left, would ask Leon or Evie to take the books away to another part of the apartment. She didn’t want them in the room.

  =

  December came, and the heat. Justin and Leon moved the air conditioner from the bedroom to Tess’s room. She asked for it to be taken away. It was too noisy. She grew very sensitive to noise, although she still enjoyed the muted racket of the trams and the traffic on High Street. She was concentrating, Leon thought. He watched her concentrating. The sky played a big part. She would wriggle beneath the white sheet, wriggle in pain, searching for a position only slightly different from the one she’d abandoned. Leon heard her sobbing one morning in her struggle. ‘Fuck!’ she hissed, an agonised whisper. If she found relief, she would again begin to concentrate. The morphine helped.

  =

  Christmas had always been Tess’s season. The care she took in the purchase of gifts! That year, she sent Leon on a long drive to a small shop in Castlemaine for a pair of antique Minton eggcups she believed might be found there. She equipped her husband with a drawing. He came back with the eggcups only to have Tess weep with disappointment over a tiny chip on the base of one of them. And for whom were the eggcups intended? A cousin in Perth she had never met, as far as Leon knew; a cousin who had once done her a favour, and who had mentioned in a letter that she collected eggcups. Leon was sent immediately to Charles Meismer’s workshop in Mount Martha to see to the expert repair of the chip. Charles, twice Tess’s age at eighty-six, threw back his great mottled head and stared in amazement at the news of Tess’s illness, of the death awaiting her. He’d last seen her in the ripeness of her beauty.

  ‘If Tess can die,’ he said finally, ‘anyone can die.’

  She had Leon hoist her upright on Christmas Day and place on her head a hat of purple tissue with the top cut to imitate a crown. The circumference of the hat was reduced with paperclips at the back to keep it from slipping down. Tess’s face was the colour of tin, her teeth were exposed in a fixed smile that took up half her face, her green eyes glittered with fear. But she wanted Christmas pictures and she expected Leon to put them in the Christmas album. And so he did.

  =

  Tess wanted Father Bourke, her old priest from North Fitzroy, but Father Bourke was doing something official for the Vincentites in South Africa. Leon told her she would have to make do with Father Menelik, an Ethiopian from just down the road in Ashburton. Tess sent him home after half an hour. Father Menelik was silent when Leon saw him out. He was a small, neat, handsome man and h
ad the pride of a prince in his face. ‘Not a trouble for me,’ he said, and put his hands on Leon’s shoulders. Leon was afraid that Father Menelik was about to kiss him on the cheek, but the priest sprinted off to catch the tram before the traffic lights changed.

  ‘He’s been a Catholic for about five minutes,’ Tess said as soon as Leon returned to her bedside.

  ‘What’s the difference?’ asked Leon.

  ‘Don’t worry about the difference,’ said Tess, and motioned to the nurse for morphine. The nurse, Lisa, had been living in since just after Christmas.

  Justin brought home a priest who was studying fine arts with him at Melbourne University. Father Crane looked about sixteen to Leon and was so cheerful he almost seemed mentally unbalanced. Leon knew it wouldn’t work, and sure enough, Father Crane was speedily sent away.

  ‘He talked about films,’ said Tess. ‘About the Oscars. Why on earth would he think I would be interested in the Oscars?’

  ‘I told him you liked films,’ said Justin.

  ‘Did you? Well, I don’t.’

  ‘You’ve always loved films, Mum.’

  ‘Well now I don’t. Can that be an end of it?’

  Leon sat with his wife, attended to business in the shop when Susie called him down, looked after orders placed through the website, parcelled books in the packing room with Susie, showed visitors to Tess’s bedside. He dialled Father Bourke’s mobile number twice an hour. That was his life for the first two weeks of February. He didn’t watch television and had no idea that bushfires were scorching the life from people all over the state. He did whatever was required without much awareness of one thing differing from another, except when he kept Tess company. Sitting by his wife was the only thing he wished to do.

  =

  One visitor of this period Leon was glad to welcome was Daanya Delli, the Kurdish doctor Tess had befriended, whose son and then daughter had died violently. Tess had sent Daanya and her husband to Leon’s country property, Joyful, for a time after the professor lost his wits. But they had since moved from Joyful, was that right? Leon had never understood why Tess had asked the Dellis to move.

  ‘To a little house in Yackandandah,’ said Daanya. They were speaking in the shop before going upstairs to Tess. ‘I drove down this morning. I work in Wangaratta now, Leon. At the clinic.’

  ‘And the professor?’

  Daanya put down her wine glass and touched her ears. She’d once explained this was a Kurdish custom in Iraq, signifying that Leon should close his own ears if he was not ready for indifferent news.

  ‘Ah!’ said Leon. ‘Poor Emmanuel. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’ve returned to my father’s faith,’ said Daanya. ‘To Islam. It grieves Emmanuel.’

  ‘Oh! Have I done wrong in offering you wine?’

  Daanya laughed and sipped. ‘I remain a disgrace to the faith.’

  At Tess’s bedside, Daanya allowed tears to run down her cheeks without any attempt to conceal them. When Daanya had spoken of her poor daughter, she’d wept in this way. Tess took a gentle hold of Daanya’s long black locks and caressed them.

  ‘A little more grey, you darling,’ she said. ‘But more beautiful than ever.’

  Later in the visit, Tess said, ‘I remember you telling me that your sorrow for Sofia was like a dream where something…something shitty is going on, not that you said “shitty”, darling, but you meant it. Something awful and unbearable, and one says, “Oh this is hideous!” and wakes oneself up to resolve things. Simply wakes oneself up. And you said that poor Sofia, you couldn’t wake from. It’s like that for me. Darling, pray for me to Mister Allah. I’m disgracefully ready to accept help from any god in good standing.’

  =

  Father Bourke at last made his appearance. He gave no warning. Leon’s messages had all been timid, conditioned as he was by Tess’s tales of Father Bourke’s temper and intransigence. He was also said to be a man of great charm, but what Leon most remembered from his wife’s stories was that the man was a law unto himself.

  Neither charm nor temper was much in evidence when Father Bourke arrived at four in the afternoon on the last day of February, dressed in jeans and a denim shirt that he wore untucked.

  ‘You’d be Tessie’s husband,’ he said.

  ‘I’m Leon.’

  ‘And Tessie’s where?’

  ‘Upstairs. I’ll show you.’

  ‘She’s relegated to the storeroom, then?’

  ‘No, no! There’s an apartment upstairs.’

  ‘Gin? Any on the premises? Tonic?’

  ‘Certainly. Will I bring it up to you, or would you…?’

  ‘I’ll have one with you, first. And a chat.’

  Susie came in from the shop to be introduced. Father Bourke was perhaps sixty and tall. Behind the smile he turned on Susie was a lifetime acknowledgment of his good looks. A ripple of pleasure went through his body as he leaned down slightly to shake hands. When Susie returned to the shop, Father Bourke put his hand to his cheek and rubbed it, still smiling.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Vietnam?’

  ‘Hmm? Oh. Burma.’

  Father Bourke took a seat at Leon’s desk and motioned to Leon to do likewise.

  ‘Out of contact for weeks,’ he said. He put his glass down and acted out the casting of a fly line. ‘South Africa. Place called Kwa Zanele. Tessie, then. How ill?’

  ‘Very,’ said Leon. ‘I’m afraid she’s dying.’

  Father Bourke’s vanity faded instantly. He arrested the motion of his glass to his lips and placed it deliberately on the desk.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t know. You poor man.’

  He reached across the desk and seized hold of Leon’s hand and wrist.

  ‘Cancer, is it? That bastard?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘No prospect of…?’

  ‘She’s had a lot of treatment. She’s ruled out anything more.’

  ‘Ah, Christ. Haven’t I seen my share of it? Haven’t I just.’

  Father Bourke swallowed down his gin and tonic and came to his feet decisively.

  ‘Will you take me up, you poor fellow?’

  Leon led the way up the stairs to Tess’s room. He opened the door softly, Father Bourke standing a pace behind. Tess had her back to the door, either sleeping or watching the sky. She didn’t turn. The form she made under the white sheet seemed to Leon to have diminished even since the morning. Lisa the nurse, moist from the heat, looked up from the book she was reading over in the shadowed part of the room and nodded, meaning that things had not changed from when Leon last looked in.

  Leon went to his wife. Taking care not to disturb the little table on which so many different bottles were kept, he leaned over to see her face. Her eyes were open. She was staring through the window at the branches and foliage of the alder that took up the whole of the property on this side. The tree’s closest branches overhung the roof of the apartment. The blue of the cloudless sky on this hot day appeared through the foliage.

  ‘Tess darling, Father Bourke has come.’

  Tess’s eyes blinked once, twice and she turned in the bed with a more rapid movement than Leon could have imagined she had in her.

  ‘Terence!’

  Father Bourke sat on the side of the bed and accepted the sticks of arms that Tess raised to him. He gathered her to his chest and for some minutes, stroked her fair hair, wet as it was with sweat and with the sponging that Lisa administered twice an hour. Leon could not intervene to cover the bones of his wife’s chest and the brown nipples that had escaped her white nightie. He would usually leave his wife with her visitors, but this time he sat in one of the two Shaker chairs beside the bookcase.

  For a moment, Leon was not sure what had surprised him.

  Then he thought: ‘He loves her…’

  Father Bourke kissed Leon’s wife on her lips, and again, five or six gentle kisses.

  ‘Oh, Lovely, will you look at you!’

  He lower
ed Tess to the bed.

  ‘A scarecrow,’ said Tess, and gave a brief, embarrassed laugh. ‘Thank you for coming, Terence. Thank you.’

  She had kept one of his hands and held it to the side of her throat. While he spoke, telling her about South Africa, she kept her eyes on his face. Once she attempted to lift her face to his lips, and so she did, with help.

  Sitting in Leon’s office once more at the end of his visit, Father Bourke put a hand over his face and wept. The tears ran through his fingers. The shuddering of the priest’s big frame startled Leon. He thought he should offer some comfort, perhaps put a hand on Father Bourke’s back. He made another gin and tonic instead.

  ‘Ah, fuck it,’ said Father Bourke, his tears abating. ‘Fuck the whole thing.’

  ‘Appalling,’ said Leon, feeling more than anything at that moment a great unease with the priest’s use of a four-letter word.

  ‘She was strong, she was healthy, the loveliest thing in creation,’ said Father Bourke. ‘Will you take a look at her now?’

  ‘Like Felix Randal,’ said Leon.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘In the Hopkins poem. Felix Randal the farrier. He was strong and handsome, but he became sick and died.’

  Father Bourke blinked at Leon with puzzled distaste.

  ‘Hopkins was a priest,’ Leon added, now feeling foolish.

  Father Bourke made a motion with his large hand as if to express disdain for all poetry-quoting husbands of dying wives and took a gulp of the gin and tonic. ‘Fuck me,’ he said and turned his head to stare away from Leon.

  Father Bourke promised to return the next day, and as often as he could until it was over.

  =

  That night Leon awoke in his upholstered chair beside Tess’s bed to find his wife watching him.

  ‘Sorry. Drifted off.’

  Tess said something that Leon didn’t quite catch in his drowsy state.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Dear man,’ said Tess. ‘Dear Leon. Dear kind Leon.’