Throughout, Celia stood up and sat down and sang and wept and wondered why she was so well prepared for the mundane yet so ill prepared for the predictable, which she should have learned by now were unavoidable: a bout of illness, and of course, death.
You mustn’t always be looking for things to be sad about, Celia love, Marcia would say. Think of James’s parties, before they got out of step.
21
Perth, 2000
The woman turned a page in her reading. Her small dog, bored, wanting attention, straddled her ankle and vigorously tried to copulate with it for a while, then became absentminded and climbed off, scratched her ear as if she was trying to remember why she just did that.
And the bad-tempered cat has changed his ways. He has taken to quietly sitting on the washstand these days, beside the bath, behind whose curtain Celia was later showering. She sensed a presence and peeked out to see the cat looking straight into her eyes with patient expectation. He blinked, a sign of friendship. Celia extended her wet face towards Cedric, so named because of his uncanny resemblance to an erstwhile camp stage manager. Cedric stretched his bewhiskered and extraordinarily pretty face and they touched noses, both with eyes closed. Brief encounters, theirs. Satisfied, the cat hopped off to sit beside his empty bowl. ‘Message received. All in due course,’ said Celia, drying herself.
Showered and changed, she prepared a cup of tea, took up her notebook in the living room and wrote a few lines she had in mind. Nothing much followed on, apart from the conviction that the older she got and the closer to death the more she realised she was getting the hang of living. She forced a couplet that didn’t work at all. Useless! – as James would say. The only thing to do in these circumstances was to take a long walk.
She walked along inner Fremantle streets, lifting her head with an animal instinct to get the full whiff from the sea. An Indian gentleman in a long white robe and sporting a fez was coming towards her. As he neared, she saw that he was smiling and uttering teasing words that sounded like: Whish whish whish. She realised that he was speaking a kind of baby lingo to a poodle who was so happy the tail seemed to be wagging the dog. Smiling, she bade the man good morning and he replied Good morning, madam, sounding exactly like Peter Sellers, and made a little bow. She wouldn’t live east of this part of town for all the coffee in Brazil.
She must ring James, hadn’t heard for a bit: they were each having a little sulk since a mild disagreement, something they both knew would come good. It wasn’t such a bad ageold method, sulking, all things considered, while you worked off your annoyance. The opposite method, violent words that wound and can never be revoked, simply wasn’t tenable, especially in middle age. A chamber ensemble was coming to town next month and she knew he’d want to go along with her. She would drive.
Making her way down to the river she passed a woman with the clamped mouth of a boarding-school mistress. Celia said good morning and the woman gave her a marvellous smile! See? Wrong again about your fellow creatures.
She reached the river which was low, and brushed against the burnt bacon-and-eggs coloured lantana with its dusty defeated look and pungent smell. She screwed up her nose. Her collection of poems would come out next month. Now, here was a treat: the purple bougainvillea, compared to said lantana, was vibrant and fairly springing up and climbing up and over a dead tree stump, like an enthusiastic romantic trying to breathe life into a wilting lover. She was all over him, she could hear someone say.
It was not too hard to find a glimpse of heaven around any corner, or to be disconcerted. Ahead of her but in the distance was a woman making progress and she could swear it was Marcia’s distinctive frame, walking along the footpath, strolling really, but with back straight, small head bravely facing the world.
With the assorted sorrows and setbacks, she could only recall the fairly regular bouts of riotous laugher between them. Mickey’s small acts of kindness, uttering a nonsense that would be a worn-out slogan in anybody else’s mouth. Marcia’s quiet attention. And thinking of them, Celia was aware, along the way, of something invisible nearby, a thread of goodness running alongside her. Surely she was able to stretch out and touch it when in trouble, connect with it whenever needed, to find her way through the boulders, to another clearing.
Their odd trio had sometimes missed the path. And occasionally things between them stalled and had to be cranked up again. But when they were together the air was continually crackling with possibilities. She saw the three of them, whiling away their time, drinking too much. Perhaps they’d not had the necessary tension, the sweating and agony of those who have a single-minded quest for greatness, and who truly believe that fame and success is theirs for the taking. Still, she believed that those individuals who seek the ideal are often as doomed to failure as those who lack intense determination. The last time she’d seen Mickey in London it was clear he was coming unstuck and she, idiot, didn’t see that either. Or was it that she didn’t want to. His shapeless form in its corduroys and sleeveless, woollen pullover, worn loose, all disguising the thin frame. His eyes, off the subject at hand, looking for the next opportunity, the next drink and the recurring tremor taking hold of him. He’d suffer no more tremors now. And now that he was gone, Marcia was gone, nothing very bad could happen to Celia again. That’s how it was.
But evening had arrived, and here was James, hastening with faint but eager step, to join her in a concert of Bach and Beethoven. ‘Something contemporary too,’ he murmured, once inside the lobby, glancing at the programme. He was always interested to hear something new. She couldn’t deny he was more open-minded than herself, who couldn’t be drawn to discordant, jangling percussion, where you had to give yourself over to the esoteric. She still wanted the old music that knocked her heart about.
They had time to spare and she noted a bust of Beethoven in a glass box in the foyer, the tousle-haired, scowling head the whole Western world knew so well. ‘They always depict him like that,’ growled James, ‘as if he was born aged fifty. What you don’t hear is that as a young man he was engaging, charming, with a magnetic personality. Encroaching deafness of course, and other things, contributed to his failure to have lasting love with a woman.’
Not unlike you? she wanted to ask, but didn’t dare. Besides he would only spend so much time talking about misery. It was unappetising fare and he didn’t want it on his plate. Grumpiness, yes, and impatience, because he seemed to see these traits as leading to a quip from Celia and then to a better outcome, such as laughter. But James and his inner turmoil would remain a mystery, a secret he would share with no one. She gave his arm a light squeeze as they turned towards the auditorium.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks go to the Australia Council for the support, to my editor Charlotte Brown for her exceptional eye and assistance and to Van Ikin for his enduring help and loyalty.
Reading Group Notes
A Reading Guide for Trio is available for download at: www.transitlounge.com.au
Geraldine Wooller was born in Perth and started travelling at the age of twenty, living in London for two years, then later in Rome also for two years, and later in Sydney.
In London she worked in the Earl’s Court Exhibition building’s cafeteria, in the industrial canteen, dishing Yorkshire Pudding and then Spotted Dick onto plates for the workers. Later she trained as a comptometer operator and earned her living thus for several years. In Rome in the late 1960s she worked as a bilingual secretary for an executive in an American company, where she ran up and down stairs in between taking down letters in almost indecipherable shorthand.
In the 1970s she took out a degree in Italian and Linguistics from The University of Western Australia and subsequently completed a Diploma in Education. Since then she has worked in a number of administrative positions in Western Australian universities and as a teacher of European languages. Still later she trained as a teacher of English as a Second Language and worked for some years as a teacher at Perth TAFE.
; Trio is her fourth novel. Her second novel, The Seamstress, was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award, the Western Australian Premier’s Award and long listed for the Dublin Impac Award.
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