Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  Leon’s mobile burst into song beside him. He answered only because he thought it would be Susie.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mr Joyce? Sandra Perelman.’

  After weeks of reading her photocopies and fielding Susie’s reminders, he’d forgotten.

  ‘Miss Perelman. How may I help you?’

  ‘We have an appointment for today? I’m at your gate.’

  ‘Ah yes. Unfortunately, I’m in Africa.’

  ‘In Africa?’

  ‘On business. Alas.’

  ‘Mister Joyce, I’m so disappointed! I thought…’

  ‘Yes. Unfortunately. Urgent business.’

  Silence. Leon pitied Miss Perelman. And himself.

  ‘Mister Joyce, I think you’re leading me up the garden path.’

  ‘Pardon? I’m afraid the reception is…’

  ‘Shush, darling, shushshushshush!’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘I haven’t wished to be a nuisance. But I see that I am. I’m sorry for that. I’ll go.’

  ‘Miss Perelman!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Miss Perelman…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m not in Africa.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m…distressed.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Mister Joyce. Very. I hope you’ll recover soon. Goodbye.’

  ‘Miss Perelman!’

  ‘Yes, Mister Joyce.’

  ‘Miss Perelman, I must apologise to you. The nature of my distress makes me…forgetful.’

  ‘I understand, Mister Joyce.’

  ‘The fact is…the fact is, I may be mad. Unfortunately.’

  ‘You may be mad?’

  ‘Yes. I may be mad. And that’s why I must apologise to you.’

  ‘There’s no need, Mister Joyce. I’m sorry I can’t help in some way.’ Leon had risen from his knees and was pacing the verandah.

  ‘You’d better come,’ he said.

  =

  Sandra Perelman pulled up in a little black car five minutes later. She called from behind the steering wheel, ‘Mister Joyce, can you cope with a baby? My daughter?’

  This was unexpected. But why not?

  The baby was hoisted from a special seat in the back of the car and lifted onto her mother’s hip. Sandra Perelman approached Leon with no fewer than three bulky bags slung about her. She engaged the baby, all in red, with cooing sounds and rapid endearments.

  ‘Now,’ she said to the baby, ‘this is Mister Joyce, isn’t it? And Mister Joyce has been very, very kind to Mummy, so we’re going to be especially cooperative, aren’t we? No whingeing, okay?’

  To Leon, she said, ‘This is Plath. Not my choice, Daddy’s choice, wasn’t it, smelly one? My rather unreliable partner, Benny. Very stubborn about the name. She’s not called Plath by anyone, except her daddy. Goldy, we call you, don’t we? After Granny Golda.’

  Leon had been anticipating a scholar of his own age, much older than this freckled young woman in black tights and denim mini-skirt, massy auburn hair escaping from bright green clips. Affection for her mounted quickly to become a lump in his throat. He experienced a sudden conviction that women with new babies had a special knowledge of life that could swamp despair. Like the secret knowledge of Kristobel and Lucas, but more…available.

  ‘First things first,’ said Sandra. ‘May I call you Leon? Would that be…’

  ‘Of course.’

  The bags—one of them a briefcase—had been dropped to the verandah floor. Now the baby was lowered into the debris of discarded sanding belts. She responded with enthusiasm, motoring speedily a metre or more before turning to contemplate her tracks in the dust.

  ‘I was left with no choice but to bring her. I’m used to working around her, but it’s hard for others. Is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I drove up from the city. I could have phoned before I left but I dreaded you changing your mind.’ Sandra pushed a sanding belt in the baby’s direction with the tip of her shoe. ‘Her daddy’s taking a holiday from fatherhood.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  Sandra glanced up quickly, perhaps to confirm Leon’s sincerity. She smiled and offered her hand. ‘Thank you so much for seeing me. I haven’t been having much luck with anything lately.’

  ‘You have some questions for me? Something of that sort?’

  ‘Leon, are you…?’

  Tears were picking a path through the dust on his cheeks.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes, perfectly. Well, no. Nonetheless.’

  ‘Will I come back another time? No, this is awful of me, to burst in on your…your distress, as you say.’

  Leon brushed his eyes with the back of his hand. It was an impossible thing he’d hoped for from Tess, wasn’t it? It was only now, while Sandra Perelman was searching his face with such sympathy that he grasped that it was impossible. But accepting this opened an abyss within. What was impossible with Tess was impossible with the world. It seemed unnecessarily cruel, to conceive the ideal destination of beauty only to find it was…what was it? Imaginary? Something like that. Too ambitious. Chimerical.

  ‘Your little girl is pretty, isn’t she?’

  Goldy had settled onto her stomach in order to study at close range the moulded plastic tray of a Chocolate Royals packet—the debris of Leon’s breakfast. She prodded it with the tips of her fingers, frowning, as if her intuition suggested, powerfully, the purpose of such engineering, a cradle for biscuits. Watching the baby and the mother—the mother gazing down with a smile that acknowledged the compliment—Leon longed to offer them the house, Joyful, in return for just one sentence of instruction in gladness. Only that—how to be glad, how to prosper, how to forge a grand coalition of consoling joys, one sentence, five words, ten. There were whole tracts on love and its varieties he’d never studied—never been offered! His own mother in her vague way had kept everything she knew of love a secret, although without denying him tenderness. When she’d wailed through the house with a broken heart because the young man from the State Library did not love her, she’d never spoken a coherent word to explain herself to her son. She was too shy. The passions of the timid were as punishing as those of the extroverted.

  Sandra Perelman wanted to know if she could change Goldy in the bathroom. She’d lifted the baby onto her hip once more and thrown one of the big bags over her shoulder. Leon, his face still wet, was as prepared as he could be for what a trip to the bathroom through the scribbled-on interior of Joyful would reveal.

  Sandra stopped first two steps inside the front door and glanced back at Leon. She was walking on his letters to Tess, staring at them growing up the walls. She stopped for the second time in the downstairs living room.

  ‘You…?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s private?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I won’t read it.’

  ‘You may if you wish. The kitchen is better for the baby than the bathroom. Cleaner.’

  Bits and pieces had to be cleared from the kitchen table, its surface covered in Leon’s Magic Marker messages to Tess. Leon didn’t mind having a baby changed on the kitchen table? Leon said that he didn’t. Sandra drew from her bag a vinyl mat on which a cartoon character in the shape of a sponge was printed. She rested the baby on the mat, responding to sharp notes of protest with affectionate disclaimers, ‘Mummy won’t let your bottom get cold, noonoonoonoonoo Mummy just wants to make a nice dry Goldy…’ Soothed with lanolin, a fresh disposable nappy fitted, the baby fixed her interested gaze on the terrain of Leon’s face. Smiles were succeeded by frowns when some feature of the face—the dust-freighted lashes, maybe—demanded interpretation. Then came sudden gleams of enthusiasm, as if the figure of Leon must be accepted, all in all, as a rewarding subject of study.

  The studs of the baby’s firm red suit now pressed home, the wet nappy sealed in a plastic bag, Sandra asked if her questions for Leon could be postponed a little longer whi
le she fed Goldy. Leon fetched an old bentwood chair. Did she require privacy, the mother? No, unless breastfeeding made Leon uncomfortable, as it did some people? It didn’t, Leon said. Would Miss Perelman care for a cup of tea? Only there was no milk—and no sugar. Sandra said that sugarless black tea would be lovely. Even as she said this, her gaze was drawn involuntarily it seemed to the writing on the table, the scent of you beside me sleeping beloved, the scent of you and your arm thrown back and your hair across your pillow spilling onto mine

  As Goldy plundered her mother’s breast one of her eyes opened at intervals, following Leon’s movements. Did the baby sense the perturbation of his heart, the tumult there? Look at his hands trembling as he placed the mug on the table! He found a second chair for himself and stared down into his own vessel of tea, aware that Sandra Perelman, feeding her daughter, was quietly retaining most of her attention for whatever it was that he was about to say to her. He hadn’t suggested that he had anything to say, only he must because Sandra was waiting.

  ‘If your heart is broken,’ he said at last, ‘is it over? Everything?’ He hastened on before Sandra could reply: ‘Because I didn’t expect anything like this in my life, nothing like this. Nor did I wish for it, in the way that people do, the way that they wish to be…to be swept away on a torrent of passion, to go mad, as if it is only passion and madness that gives us our vital life, and all other things…all other things are dull. I have no passion of that sort, I have no sex in me to express in that way, and yet, Miss Perelman, the pain is so dreadful, so dreadful I can’t describe it, as if I were cast out of heaven, as if Tess when I dressed her—because that was what I adored, to dress her, I have many, many beautiful garments, shoes…jewellery—as if Tess when I dressed her threw a light over the whole world, and everything wretched, everything brutal and hideous retreated from the light and hid in the ground and all that could be seen was the light, a golden light. And I can’t bear it, now. I can’t bear it. And yet I should, shouldn’t I? I should bear it. Miss Perelman, your little girl is…she’s a beautiful little daughter, very beautiful. I can see the love you have for her. I can see it. But I wanted to ask you something, if I might be permitted. I wanted to ask you if new mothers such as yourself, Miss Perelman, if you…if you have come to understand something about…about how to face distress, great distress? Because it seems to me that if you have a new baby, such a lovely little child as this, you must wish to protect her with all your strength, and you must know how…how dangerous, how hostile the world you live in can be. And it must…it must trouble you, I think, and any mother, all the things that could happen, I mean the way in which your love could become…the source of terrible suffering. I wanted to ask you if there is…something, some knowledge that…that helps you? Can I ask you that?’

  The puzzlement and alarm that had come into Sandra’s eyes at the sight of the scribble on floors and walls lingered for part of Leon’s appeal. Whenever she looked up from the suckling baby, sometimes after adjusting her nipple in the child’s mouth, the alarm was vivid enough. But it diminished and was replaced by a frown of concentration. When Leon concluded, she nodded to signify that she had heard and understood, although perhaps only up to a point.

  ‘Is that enough, sweetness?’ she murmured to the baby. ‘Tummy full? No room for some squishy apple?’

  Goldy was surrendering to the tug of sleep. Sandra pushed her breast back into the cup of her brassiere, lifted the baby to her shoulder and rubbed her back.

  ‘Leon, would it be too bossy if I asked you to bring in the bassinet from the car?’ she whispered. ‘She’ll sleep for an hour now. We can talk.’

  For no sensible reason, the baby wouldn’t permit herself to fall fully asleep despite the singing of lullabies and nursery songs and the gentle rocking motion imparted to the bassinet by Sandra on her knees. Leon watched, hunched at the kitchen table, fighting the tide of tears. He concentrated on Sandra Perelman’s profile as she murmured to her daughter, on the constellation of pale freckles tiny as pinpricks that cascaded from her forehead down her cheek and neck. He followed the words of her song, moving his lips soundlessly—it was a song that Dorothy had sung on a day when she was asked to babysit a friend’s little son, Mother Duck said quack quack quack quack but only one little duck came…

  ‘Now,’ said Sandra, finally free to sit back at the table. She puffed out a sigh. ‘This is a struggle for me when I’m tired. Women with two kids, three—I have no idea how they cope. Absolutely no idea. I’m doing a rubbish job with just one.’

  Leon normally passed by comments in a conversation that were intended for contradiction, but not today. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘You care for your daughter very well.’

  ‘That’s a nice thing to say. Thank you. But you know, my mother despairs of me.’

  ‘She ought not.’

  ‘Can I make myself another cup of tea, do you think? The one you made sort of went cold while I was feeding.’

  Leon made the tea. Standing by the rumbling electric jug, he looked at his hands and tried to will away the trembling.

  ‘Leon, I know about Tess,’ said Sandra. ‘Susie told me.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘She did. She worries about you a great deal, is it okay to tell you that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Leon put the fresh mug of tea before Sandra and sat opposite her at the table. As he did so, the kitchen darkened. A cloud must have closed off the sun. In the shadowy light, Sandra lifted her eyes and in full candour let her gaze engage Leon’s. He noticed for the first time since her arrival that she was suffering.

  ‘You asked if I—if I knew something,’ she said. ‘Leon, I don’t. I’m sorry, but I just don’t.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I’m…I’m not in a good state.’

  Sandra sipped her tea, returned the mug to the table, pushed some stray strands of hair off her forehead.

  ‘Benny, my “partner”, as they say—clever word, limited commitment word—is in Israel. Being a peacenik. Good cause, absolves him from the dreary business of being a father and a husband. Not that he is a husband. So anything I could possibly say about life and love, Leon—well, what could I say? I’m not doing all that well. And about motherhood? God! My mother came round the other day and found Goldy with a little bit of vomit on her front, a little bit of throw-up I hadn’t noticed, I was working in the study and Goldy was playing on the floor in the lounge room. My mother says, “If you don’t love the child, give her to me.” If I don’t love her? Honestly, if I don’t love her? Can you imagine how that made me feel?’

  The baby, as if joining in her mother’s protest, murmured two or three soft syllables in her sleep. Sandra glanced at the bassinet, left just outside the kitchen door.

  ‘This project—the book—takes up so much time and energy, Leon. Too much. I could have postponed Goldy—God, that sounds grotesque!—“postponed Goldy”! What I mean is that I could have waited. I could have. I’m thirty-two, three or four more years. But at the time, I’m weighing it all up, here’s the baby on this side, here’s the book on that side, and things can go wrong, I have a friend who put it off—getting pregnant—and she lost her uterus in a car accident—a really freakish thing, the seatbelt bruised her womb. Other parts of her insides, too, but losing her womb was the worst thing. As you might imagine. So I went ahead. And six months after Goldy’s born—all this time I’m up to my ears in research and permissions for the book—six months after Goldy’s born, Benny’s had a road to Damascus thing and wants to build bridges with Hamas—“build bridges”—and within days he’s in Jerusalem with the Israeli peaceniks—he’s Israeli himself, we met in Gaza back when I was researching Muslim utopias, he wasn’t a peacenik then, he was a soldier—a soldier with a bad conscience—I’m left here a single mum, and Goldy’s got this reflux and I’m soaked in throw-up ten hours a day writing about utopias! Then I had this really, really offensive email from Benny last we
ek, this email lecturing me about jeopardising Israel’s survival by ignoring the violence against Palestinians, refusing to come to Jerusalem and support him. I wrote back, Benny, dearest Benny, fuck building bridges, fuck Hamas, and fuck you! So I’m maybe the worst person on earth to give any advice to anyone about anything. Anything!’

  Sandra reached quickly down to her bag for a box of tissues. She pulled one tissue after another from the plastic aperture—that sound of some soft violence being done—and applied them to her eyes and nose. She glanced across the table at Leon and offered him the tissues. ‘Oh God—look at us!’

  She laughed—a low, peasant cackle, enough to make Leon smile.

  ‘Do you know the insane thing about this book?’ she said. ‘The crazy thing? I hate utopias!’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I do. I absolutely do. I hate utopias, I hate idealism. The more I learn about utopias, the more I detest them. You know, the Gulag was part of the Kremlin’s utopia. It made perfect sense to Stalin, perfect sense even as far along as Brezhnev. You’re not into what the state wants for you, you get quarantined. Quarantine is a foundation stone of every utopia. The Chinese Gulag, right now, today, it’s bigger than the Soviet Gulag, makes complete sense to Beijing. And idealism?—spare me! It’s poison. I just want people to be as decent as they can manage to other people. That’ll do it for me. You know, Benny—Benny who I’ve just been complaining about—it’s not enough for him to work for peace, oh no, he has to believe that Hamas is a band of angels, misunderstood angels.’