by Alex Miller
The waitress came over and they both ordered steak and chips with tea.
Wendy said, ‘So you’ve joined them?’ She gave an ironic kind of laugh that Robert didn’t much like the sound of, her critical gaze giving his new clothes the once-over.
‘Joined who?’ he said.
She was looking tired and maybe saddened by something that had happened and which he was pretty sure she wasn’t going to tell him about. Her air of sadness and irritation made her more intensely beautiful—a dangerously elusive kind of beauty that belonged more to her other world than it did to his world.
She tapped the ash from her cigarette into the tin ashtray on the table. ‘So did you finish writing Frankie’s story?’
‘I went on with it,’ he said. ‘But it’s no good.’ He was nervous and was rushing her with his news but he pressed ahead anyway.
‘How would you know whether it’s any good or not?’ she said, leaning her elbow on the table and blowing smoke into the air.
‘Well, it just isn’t any good,’ he said. ‘That’s how I know.’
‘First drafts are never any good. Any idiot could have told you that. It’s just laying the thing out at that stage.’
‘You’re not talking to a halfwit,’ he said. He was offended by the way she seemed prepared to take out her mood on him.
This brought a smile to her eyes. She was gripping the elbow that was resting on the table with her other hand and holding the cigarette close to her lips. ‘So you’re going to tell me you burned it.’ She laughed and took a drag on her cigarette. ‘You’re about to develop the disease of artistic entitlement. I can see it coming in that red tie of yours.’
‘We have to wear a tie in the office.’
‘So we’re in an office now? Is that your news?’
‘I’ve started night school,’ he said. ‘I’m going to go to the university when I qualify. The English test is in five months. I reckon I can do it.’ He had wanted to share his confidence with her but he could feel it going off the track. He needed her to believe in his plan.
She smoked her cigarette, not looking at him now, gazing around at the people in the cafe as if his news was nothing to her. ‘So you’re a student, not a writer.’ She tapped her cigarette in the ashtray and looked sideways at him.
‘I’ll write Frankie’s story with more power, the way it deserves to be written, when I’ve got a better education,’ he said.
‘Writers write.’ She was dismissing all other possibilities, dismissing him and his plan. That was the way he heard it. ‘Singers sing,’ she said. ‘Painters paint. You either do it or you don’t do it.’
The waitress arrived and laid their plates of steak and chips in front of them. Wendy looked at her. ‘We need a new one of these.’ She held up the tomato sauce bottle. The neck of the bottle was thick with a black goo of dried tomato sauce. The girl, who was maybe seventeen, said, ‘There’s plenty in that one.’ Wendy gave her a mean kind of smile that more or less indicated she thought the girl was a fuckwit. ‘It’s got a snotty nose, darling. Do you want to give it a wipe for us?’
When the waitress had gone, Robert said, ‘She’ll probably spit in it.’
Wendy was eating chips from her plate. She looked around at the other diners. ‘I hate these places.’
The waitress did not return with the tomato sauce bottle.
He cut a piece from his steak and forked it into his mouth. ‘It’s best to be polite to waitresses,’ he said. ‘And what’s the matter with you, anyway?’
‘You’re just like the rest of them.’
He looked at her. ‘What is this shit?’
‘You’re going to betray your class and become just another one of them.’
‘That’s fucking bullshit. Whatever else I might become, I’ll always be who I am.’ His stomach was churning with the way this was going.
‘You sure of that?’ She pushed her plate away and lit a cigarette.
The waitress came over and set down their thick china cups of tea and a new sauce bottle. Robert thanked her. Wendy gave her a wink. The girl made a contemptuous noise and swung away.
They sat in silence. The place was in uproar. Everyone yelling over the top of everyone else. Out the window he could see a big black cloud rearing up from the direction of the bay. He was filled with dismay. He looked at Wendy. She looked like someone’s mother. He could see it in her, this older woman with a long history of strife and anxiety, some weirdo giving her a hard time. Sorrow of some kind. Responsibilities. He put his hand on hers and she looked at it as if something had settled on her hand. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘You know that.’ He tried a smile, but he knew he wasn’t going to be able to lighten the feeling between them.
She gave him a sidelong look and said nothing.
‘I’m making a new start in life,’ he said. ‘Like you said, it’s time for me to get serious. I’m doing the grown-up thing. I’m grateful to you.’ There was something not quite right about the tone in which he delivered this but he couldn’t fix it.
She said, ‘Don’t do this, Robert.’ She took her hand back, reached for her bag and put her reading matter into it.
‘So which part of what I’m doing are you talking about?’ he said.
‘All of it.’ She drank the last of her tea and wiped her lips with a paper napkin. ‘I don’t like it. I’ve been there before. The nagging has begun. We’re into discord. It’s not your fault and it’s not my fault. It’s the way it is.’
‘So what’s his name?’ The jealousy hit him low down in his guts. A wave of nausea going through him. He took a swig of tepid tea.
She said, ‘This one’s my shout. Can I get out, please?’
He said, ‘You’re not leaving.’
‘I’m leaving,’ she said, and she was no longer Wendy his lover but was someone else. He slid out and stood up and stepped to one side. She got up and picked up her bag and stepped out of the booth. ‘Thanks for everything, Robert.’
He said, ‘For Christ’s sake, give me a fucking chance. Let’s at least give it a minute. Please!’
She paused, standing there looking at him. ‘When something’s not working you’re a fool to stick with it. The signs are not good.’ She touched his cheek gently. ‘Take it easy, eh? I’ll see you around.’
He watched her walk over to the cash register and pay. And he watched her go out the door into the street where the southerly buster was making the plane trees sway and thrash. He saw her yellow dress blowing around her and he saw her hunch up against the hard wind and the sudden slap of rain. And he didn’t follow her. When she was gone he slid into the booth and sat down again. He told himself she would come back.
He finished his tea and smoked a cigarette, then he put his cigarettes in the side pocket of his new brown jacket and he put his books back in his smart new leather satchel and he got up. He was angry and confused. One of the men in the booth behind him said something and both men laughed. Robert stopped and looked down at them. The skinny one said, ‘It’s not working. The signs are not good.’ They both cracked up. The other one said, ‘So, it’s kaputi with the sheila, eh, mate?’ A couple of other people at nearby tables were enjoying a laugh with them.
Robert stood by the booth looking down at the two men from the boarding house. A good half-minute ticked slowly away. He could snatch the hair of the skinny one and smash his face into the table top. Bang! Bang! Bang! Sudden and fierce. Smash their skulls together and thrash the pair of them till they pissed themselves. He just stood by their table looking down into the shifty eyes of the skinny one, watching him blinking and wavering and glancing around for support, the fear coming into his eyes. The cafe had gone quiet. People were watching, hoping for a bit of action. But Robert was thinking of the Springsure rodeo the year Ronnie Doorman beat the whitefellas and became Australian saddle bronc champion. When Ronnie was walking back to the chutes after his winning ride on Nobody’s Darling, someone on the rails shouted a racist taunt at him and the crowd laughed. Ro
nnie did not look aside or adjust his stride but kept walking as if he had heard nothing, and when he reached the chutes the crowd cheered. Robert had admired Ronnie that day and still admired him for the simple dignity of his powerful response. He smiled now at Shifty Eyes and said, ‘Yeah, kaputi. Like you, mate.’ And he turned and walked out of the cafe into the rain.
It was bucketing down, splashing up out of the gutter and running across the footpath, the cars going by with their headlights on. He walked through the downpour to the boarding house, getting soaked to the skin. He said to himself, She knows where to find me. But he knew that Wendy wasn’t going to be coming around looking for him.
12
He loved the solitude of the long nights alone in his room working on his books. He kept his window open, the air of the warm nights filling his room, and when a cool southerly change came through from the bay there was always the faint distant smell of the sea. The uninhabited mustiness of his room had been replaced by the smells of his own life, his cigarettes, his books, his own sweat, and the night air. For a long time he thought often of Wendy and daydreamed he was making love to her. And on Tuesdays after work he went to the Greek cafe for his dinner and ate his meal alone, the chance in his mind, vague and formless, but a chance all the same, that Wendy would walk into the cafe and come over to his booth and kiss him and sit beside him once again. He knew this was never going to happen, but the idea of it spiced his Tuesday evenings and whenever the cafe door opened he could not resist looking up to see who was coming in.
Each weekday morning he carried his leather satchel into work at the Commonwealth Offices and as soon as he’d finished his quota of Form 40s for the day he worked on his essays and assignments and read his textbooks and studied Italian irregular verbs. A language other than English was compulsory for an arts degree and they had suggested Italian to him at Taylor’s. He got on well with the Italian teacher, who was a young man from Egypt with red hair, and enjoyed hearing the foreign words on his own tongue. Robert was a ready mimic and soon developed a good rounded accent, something the tight-lipped Australian students had a problem with.
His English and Italian teachers let him know they were expecting something special from him. He felt himself acknowledged by them and was grateful to them and confirmed in the dream he was determined to realise. He now knew who the Emperor Maximilian was, that grim-featured man in the broad hat whose antique portrait adorned the front of Modern Europe to 1870. Modern, as with many other terms whose meanings he’d once taken for granted, had acquired a new uncertainty for him, its meaning seemingly a matter of opinion and argument. There was no place for Australia in the idea of Europe. Not for Hayes, anyway. Arguing about those old certainties with his teachers and listening to the opinions of his classmates, many of whom were migrants like himself, excited him and made him feel he was among like-minded people. Vienna and Hungary and the Hapsburg Empire were unfolding in front of him. He knew this was his one chance to draw even and was nervously energised by the challenge he had undertaken.
He spent all his spare cash in the second-hand bookshops along Swanston Street, buying the original sources from which his class extracts had been selected when he could find them, and began to accumulate a small library, which he arranged on a plank raised up on bricks beside his desk. Excerpts weren’t enough for him. He wanted the whole story. He wanted to experience the intimacy of the old days and to share the thoughts of the people. Details fascinated him. He wanted to see the people drinking their wine and fighting and making love. Excerpts were like being allowed to take a peek through a keyhole at a fascinating landscape. He was hungry to see the whole landscape at ground level, as if he was present in it himself. Although the book wasn’t on the English syllabus, he consumed David Magarshack’s translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in one lost weekend. When he finally dragged himself away from his studies and went to bed in the early hours of each morning, he found it hard to get to sleep. As soon as he closed his eyes he thought of something he wanted to check and he got up again and consulted his books and began making notes and was soon absorbed in the work and forgot to go back to bed until noises in the house warned him the day was beginning. The year was racing by and there was never enough time to read everything he wanted to read before an essay or other assignment fell due.
Outside in the wild garden below his window the elm copse was looking grey and tired after the heat of summer. He was due to sit the English competence test in a week and was hunched over the second-hand desk he’d bought, working on a précis of an extract he’d been given from Francis Bacon’s Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning. He had been reading far more widely than the set texts and his history essay on the question of the eastern borders of the Hapsburg Empire was already overdue. He was eager to be done with the précis and return to the wondrous place names—Karelia, Ingria, Estonia, Livonia—and the powerful men and their astonishing ambitions to rule their worlds.
He was absorbed in his work when he became aware that someone had been tapping on his door for some time. When the tapping came again, a little louder, a little more insistent now, he got up to open the door. John Morris was standing there. He stepped back a pace and raised his palms, as if he would ward Robert off. His manner was reserved and careful. ‘I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you,’ he said. He was being very formal.
‘It’s all right,’ Robert said. ‘You’re not disturbing me.’
‘Oh, I’m sure I am,’ John Morris said, as if the effort to address Robert civilly wearied him.
They stood there looking at each other, neither speaking, then John Morris laughed uncomfortably. ‘God knows why, and don’t ask me, but a friend of mine wants to meet you. She’s probably quite as mad and as dangerous as you are.’
Robert said, ‘I’m sorry for the way I behaved that time.’
‘No you’re not. But it doesn’t matter.’ John Morris looked Robert steadily in the eye for some time. The sound of the television downstairs in the common room. ‘You were quite menacing,’ he said, an edge of malice and hurt in his tone. ‘I was a bit pushy, but I don’t think I deserved that.’
‘Neither do I,’ Robert said. ‘Which is why I just apologised to you.’
‘You did. It was handsome of you.’ John Morris said, ‘So, would you like to meet this friend of mine or not? You don’t have to. I’m going away. I’ve been appointed to a lectureship at King’s College in London.’
‘I was born and grew up in London,’ said Robert.
‘You don’t have an accent.’
‘I can do one if you’d like to hear it.’
‘I’m quite sure you can.’
It was hard to say why exactly, but despite his smart blue and grey rugby top and his pale slacks and his expensive Italian sandals and his job at a London university, John Morris looked to Robert just then to be forlorn standing there on the landing outside his room. Robert felt strangely moved by the man. There was something infinitely lonely about him. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll come and meet your friend.’ Perhaps accepting John Morris’s invitation seemed to him at that moment to be the least he could do to make up in some way for his earlier cruelty. For that was how he saw it now: he had been cruelly and unnecessarily brutal. He was also curious about this friend of John Morris’s who had expressed a wish to meet him.
He said, ‘I took your advice and enrolled for the university entrance exams.’
‘Good for you,’ John Morris said.
‘I’m grateful to you for that.’
‘Oh, you don’t need to be grateful to me. Anyone could have told you that you needed to get a decent education.’ John Morris considered him. ‘Meg was right: you are an odd bastard, aren’t you?’
‘And you?’ Robert said. ‘Are you an odd bastard too?’
‘That’s a good one.’ John Morris looked at Robert levelly. ‘Have you realised I’m homosexual?’
‘It did vaguely occur to me, I suppose.’
‘And is it t
his that worries you about me?’
‘Nothing worries me about you,’ Robert said. ‘I don’t care what you are, so long as you realise I’m not a homosexual. Have you realised that?’
John Morris laughed. ‘I suppose I have,’ he said. ‘What a pity. But never mind.’
Robert let John Morris wait on the landing while he fetched his jacket.
They drove out along the bayside in John Morris’s smart green car, the wide blue waters of the bay over to their right dotted with white sailing boats, black and red cargo boats anchored far out, waiting to come into the port. The tight cluster of the inner city falling behind them. John Morris stopped at a traffic light to let a bunch of people cross over to the beach side of the road. Women and children wearing swimming togs and clutching towels and baskets and plastic floaters and cricket bats and other stuff. Robert could feel John Morris looking sideways at him. John Morris said, ‘So apart from studying, what else have you been up to?’
‘You’ve got the green,’ Robert said, and John Morris put the car into gear and moved off.
They went along in silence for a while, then John Morris said, ‘I haven’t seen you with your girlfriend for a while. What happened there? To be honest, I thought she was a bit old for you.’
‘Nothing happened that’s any of your business,’ Robert said.
John Morris laughed and began whistling a tune from My Fair Lady. He whistled brilliantly, touching all the notes accurately. It was a little virtuoso display. He turned off Beach Road and drove a couple of blocks before going down one of the suburban streets. The street was empty. No cars and no people. Big brick houses along both sides with mature European trees in their gardens. He pulled up and switched off the motor and they sat in the warm silence of the little car. ‘I should tell you,’ John Morris said, ‘Lena’s father died two months ago. She and her dad were very close.’