by Alex Miller
Robert said, ‘Maybe the best people are always troubled.’
‘I like that,’ John said and he repeated it: ‘Maybe the best people are always troubled.’ He went over and opened the door.
Robert said, ‘I’ll see you around then.’
John looked back at him. ‘No you won’t.’ He went out and pulled the door closed behind him.
15
Before he left the boarding house for the office on Wednesday morning, the landlady called Robert to the phone. He went down to the hallway and picked up the receiver. It was Lena. She said, ‘Meet me after work at Prince Henry’s. I’ll wait for you. Just ask at the front desk for the social work department. We’re in the basement. I have to go now.’
He went to the main entrance of the hospital on St Kilda Road and was directed to a side door in an adjoining street. He found the swing doors that had been described to him—wide enough to admit a corpse on a trolley. And there she was, at roughly the halfway point of a long subterranean corridor. The tiled walls gleaming dully, the lighting jaundiced and pale. She was a figure in a white dustcoat, hands in pockets, talking to a young man who was standing in front of her, his shoulders hunched. When Robert got closer she turned and looked at him. She said something to the young man and touched him on the shoulder. The young man turned and sloped off, going deeper into that endless corridor which was lit by a series of dull greenish strip lights set in the ceiling. There was a smell, cold, metallic and chemical. Lena in her white coat, a professional woman in that place. Institutional settings like this had always made Robert anxious. There was a steady humming noise which seemed to be coming from the weighty fabric of the building, somewhere deeper.
She waited for him to reach her. ‘Come into my office,’ she said. He followed her into a small office with no window. She closed the door and embraced him quickly, their lips meeting for an instant, then she stepped away and moved behind the desk. She sat in the shiny blue office chair and picked up a file that was lying open on the desk. ‘I just need to get this done while it’s fresh in my mind,’ she said. ‘I won’t be a minute. We can go for a walk in the botanic gardens.’ She took a fountain pen from the pocket of her white coat and began writing in the open file. Robert sat in the straight-backed chair that faced her across the desk. He said, ‘The patient’s chair.’ She frowned at the file and went on writing. The humming sound from the depths seemed to grow more insistent.
He said, ‘I was interviewed by a lady almoner when I was a kid.’
She didn’t look up. ‘We’re not lady almoners these days.’
‘It’s just a name change,’ he said. He found himself wanting to speak up for the child he had once been. ‘Everything else is the same. You still think you can help that dero you were talking to just now. I can tell you, he can’t be helped. Is it him you’re writing about?’
She looked up at him, her pen poised over the file. ‘We do help people. They need our help. They depend on us. And, yes, I’m writing up his case notes.’
‘You can’t help people who don’t know how to help themselves,’ he said. ‘It’s like holding someone up in the water who can’t swim. The minute you let them go they thrash about and drown.’
‘Please!’ she said. ‘We’re a team here. You can’t possibly understand what we do. You don’t know anything about our work. Just let me get this done. We’ll go for a walk.’
‘I know more about it than you think,’ he said. He didn’t really want to persist with this line, as he could see it was annoying her, but he felt compelled to have his say. ‘I’ve known plenty of people like that guy you were talking to. You think they want to change. But they just want to go on being who they are, the same way you want to go on being who you are. They’re hooked on the feeling of sinking the way your mob is hooked on the feeling of rising.’
She said calmly, ‘My mob? Let me finish my notes, please.’
He sat for a while, saying nothing. He wondered if the chemical smell was something to do with the mortuary. Her office and the hallway had no windows. ‘This is a creepy place to work,’ he said. She didn’t respond. ‘The smell of despair,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how you stand it. A parade of tragic human beings going through your door every day.’ She went on writing in the file. ‘How can you understand them or their lives? You don’t know anything about their world.’ He watched her sitting there across the desk from him writing in the file, wearing that white coat, separating herself from them. He said, ‘You’re a figure of authority to those people. There’s no way I could work in here, even for a day.’
She looked up and said brightly, ‘It’s just as well, then, that you don’t have to, isn’t it?’ She went back to her writing.
He watched her. His world and her world had never touched, except across the almoner’s desk when he was a kid. He felt too uneasy and troubled to stay quiet. He stood up. ‘I need a smoke,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait for you outside.’
She looked up and smiled. ‘All right. I shan’t be long. Is it sunny out?’
He stood looking at her. She said, ‘What’s wrong?’
He was thinking: You and me, this is not going to work out. ‘Yes,’ he said.
Outside he sat on a low yellow brick wall on the side street and smoked a cigarette and watched the traffic and the people going home. He was feeling lonely. Suppose he were to get up and just walk away? And when she called, tell her to forget it. It’s over. You and your Red Bluff house and your mother make me feel lonely. Seeing her in that gloomy office wearing her white coat, confidently making judgements about the life of someone whose intimate realities she couldn’t possibly know anything about. He didn’t know how he was going to deal with it. He had never felt lonely with Wendy. Not this kind of lonely. He and Wendy knew each other’s worlds. How was Lena ever going to understand how someone could reach a point of disconnection so complete that they would have to sleep on a bench in a railway station?
He felt a touch on his arm and he turned and looked up into her eyes. ‘Hi,’ she said. She sat on the wall beside him and snuggled up close against him. She laid her head on his shoulder. ‘It’s been a horrible day.’
He put his arm around her and held her. When he looked he saw her eyes were closed. The trams screeched around the corner from St Kilda Road and the people on the street hurried past and the traffic waited till the tram passengers were out of the way then sped up, the air filling with blue smoke and the smell of exhaust fumes. She roused herself. ‘Let’s go to the park before the sun goes off the grass.’ They got up and walked arm in arm to the lights and waited, then crossed the road to the King’s Domain.
They walked deep into the park and sat side by side under an oak tree, their backs to the rough bark, their legs sticking out in front of them. She said, ‘I told some friends of mine about you. They want to meet you. They’re my best friends. She was my German teacher at school. They’ve invited us to dinner.’
He pointed and said, ‘Look at those hawthorns over there. When I have a house of my own I’ll grow a hawthorn hedge.’
‘Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr,’ she said. She reached and took his chin in her hand and made him look at her. ‘I really want you to meet them, Robert. Birte has saved me from myself a number of times. And I know you’ll like Martin. Say you’ll come! Please?’
He laughed at the earnest entreaty of her expression. He kissed her on the lips then drew back and looked at her. ‘You can make yourself appear helpless and vulnerable when you want to. Do you know that?’ He touched the smoothness of her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘Of course you know it. And maybe you do also know just how disconnected it’s possible for people to become. I’ll come and have dinner with your friends. But just please have a look at those hawthorns before the sun goes off them.’ The leaves of the hawthorns were a lovely soft russet in the late-afternoon light. ‘They remind me of the hedges in Somerset when I was a boy.’
She leaned against him. ‘They’re beautiful.
One day we’ll go to England together and you can show me the farm where you worked.’
‘Your hair,’ he said. ‘It smells familiar. It smells like home.’
She held herself against him, her arms around him, her head on his chest. ‘I can hear your heart. Just think, it’s beating only a couple of inches from my ear!’
He felt the soft weight of her against him, the rise and fall of her breathing, and a deep contentment came over him. He watched the last of the sunlight through the gold of the hawthorns, the slow leaching of the colours, vivid a moment then throwing off a gleam of brightness, then dying, the furthest tree on the near horizon already a grey silhouette. ‘What were you quoting?’ he asked her.
‘Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Rilke—Birte’s second favourite poet.’
They lay together in the stillness, the sun gone off the hawthorns, the roar of the city.
16
Home again and glad to be sitting at my desk looking out the window at the familiar view of our garden. Blackbirds nest every year in the enormous Albertine rose which has grown over the skeleton of an apricot tree that was dead long before my wife and I came to live in this town. The Albertine has exceptionally vicious thorns and even the most determined cats never get far into its labyrinth before being forced to retreat in pain and frustration. Except for the coldest months of winter the blackbirds ignore the seasons and renew their nest all year round in the deepest tangle of the rose. I am watching them now busily feeding newly hatched chicks, their beaks bristling with spiders and caterpillars and the occasional pink worm, flying back and forth repeatedly across the garden and diving straight into the rose at high speed. I’ve been sitting here watching the birds for a long time, wondering how the note-taking woman is getting on. It’s less than a month since I met her. It feels as if it’s much longer. Almost as if she’s always been part of my story. Her impressive courage, the challenge of the intelligence shining from her eyes as she held my gaze and asked me her serious questions, my answers crucial to her wellbeing.
I get up from my desk and go out to the kitchen and make a pot of coffee. The house is quiet and empty. Our old cat, Gus, is asleep in the sun on the mat by the back door. I carry my coffee back into the study and close the door and sit at my desk. For some reason my eye searches out Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. The book has been on my shelves for decades, following me around from house to house, never finding itself among the hundreds of books I’ve discarded or given away over the years. My copy of Mann’s great novel reminds me of my friendship with Martin Bloch and the evening we first met. At the end of that first evening with them, as Lena and I were leaving, Martin took down from his shelves this copy of Mann’s novel and presented it to me. Doctor Faustus is, without doubt, one of the most demanding and complex novels in all of modern literature and takes for granted in its readers a familiarity with the German culture of its time. There were dozens of books on Martin’s shelves that he might have given me instead of that one. In those days I had no understanding of the issues that Mann dealt with in Faustus. Despite this, the book shaped my earliest ideas of the kind of novelist I hoped to become. Mann’s Faustus stood like a beacon at the starting line of my writing life.
Hearing from Lena that my ambition was to become a novelist, Martin let me know at once the kind of novel he admired when he gave me Doctor Faustus. It was typical of him that he wasted no words on this during the evening, making almost no contribution to the passionate discussion that was carried on about literature and its values, mainly by his wife, Dr Birte Bloch, and by Lena. It was not until we were leaving that he disclosed his thoughts by handing me the book. He said something like, ‘I should like to know what you think of Mann’s Faustus. Perhaps you can call on me when you’ve read it.’ As I took the book from his hands I felt that he was acknowledging my intelligence and placing his trust in me. Martin’s gift of the book has remained with me, along with his question. My response to that question is still unfolding.
I go over to the bookshelves and take down the old volume. I blow the dust from the top edge and open it. I bring the open book close to my face and close my eyes and breathe. And there it is! A trace, but unmistakeable still: the wonderful smell of Martin and Birte’s sitting room, a faint composition of pale Scandinavian furniture, the perfume of fresh flowers and the aroma of good cooking. And books, of course. The smell of the cultivated lives of those two.
I pick up my coffee and take the book to the armchair under the window and begin to read. Rereading Mann’s novel after more than fifty years I am surprised that I managed then to read it from cover to cover. Perhaps it was Mann’s discussions of complicated guilt-ridden sex that kept my interest alive. Sin, good and evil, the war, theology, pages and pages of philosophy, the beautiful and the ugly, and love. Lots of tortured love. It is all there, mostly in the form of intellectual discussions between young men, with scarcely any action to sustain it, but enthralling. And music, of course, the deep tones of music in the lives of the narrator and his subject throbbing through every page—the sound of the mind of the writer.
I am soon absorbed, my memories of those days accompanying me as I read. It is surely the enrichment of my intimate memories of Martin and Birte that lends to this second reading of Doctor Faustus an intensity that it couldn’t have possessed for me if I’d come to it now in my last years for the first time. I am conscious of reading something that belongs to my own history. Having become a part of history myself, I am deeply glad to recognise myself within the pages of this great book.
17
On that chilly autumn Sunday evening, Lena took young Robert’s arm as they walked up the garden path towards the lighted windows of Birte and Martin Bloch’s house. It was a solid old bluestone villa from the Victorian period, set well back from its quiet Caulfield street, just off Alma Road and only a few minutes from Robert’s boarding house. Well-tended lawns on both sides of the path, the closely clipped grass bordered by dark masses of old rhododendron bushes, a single rose climbing around one of the ornate cast-iron verandah columns, a soft yellow light from the porch lamp.
Lena was cradling a bunch of flowering eucalyptus in the crook of her arm. Robert had climbed the stepladder earlier clutching her dad’s secateurs and snipped the flowering branches from the great gum tree that hung over her mother’s garden from the garden next door. ‘Birte loves to be given flowers,’ Lena said, pointing to a branch for him to cut. Before setting out from Red Bluff for Birte and Martin’s in Mrs Soren’s mustard Renault, which Lena drove with a careless disregard for their lives and for traffic lights and other cars, they had both downed two glasses of sherry. He was surprised by the slightly panicky wildness in her. He told her to slow down before she killed them both. She laughed and ran the next set of lights, her foot on the accelerator. He said, ‘That was pretty bloody stupid.’ She said, ‘Don’t be so bloody stuffy.’ But she did slow down and drove the rest of the way more carefully. She had something to prove—to herself about herself, no doubt, and perhaps to the world.
As they walked up the path to the Blochs’ house he sensed Lena’s need for his reassurance in the firmness of her grip on his arm. She’d had an asthma attack on Thursday night and had been too exhausted to go to work on Friday. She was still looking pale and washed out, the circles under her eyes darker. Her asthma attack had been violent and frightening to witness. She sat in one of the armchairs in the front sitting room at Red Bluff, wheezing horribly, getting only a thin seepage of air into her lungs, gripping his hands, her mouth distorted, fear in her eyes. He could do nothing to relieve her distress. Remembering Thursday night now he pressed her to his side and leaned down and kissed her on the lips. ‘I love you!’ he said. He said it to reassure her.
‘I don’t know why you do,’ she said.
She rang the bell and turned to him and smiled. ‘Are you nervous?’
‘Not really.’ This wasn’t true. He was concerned about the impression he was going to make on Len
a’s cultivated Europeans, as she’d called them.
Lena laughed and squeezed his arm. ‘Maybe you should be nervous. Birte has never approved of any of my boyfriends.’ Her voice was still throaty from Thursday night’s struggle.
He said, ‘So how many boyfriends have you had?’
‘Dozens,’ she said lightly and rang the bell again.
A woman’s voice, with a thick foreign accent, shouted impatiently from inside, ‘All right! All right! I’m coming!’
The woman who opened the door was in her middle fifties. She stepped towards Lena with a dragging limp and embraced her. The old woman and the young woman stood hugging each other for a long time. Robert saw that this was not the light social greeting of two friends but was the embrace of people who are emotionally close and in need of one another. It was a loving embrace. When they moved apart and turned to face him they were holding hands. Lena’s colour was up and she looked restored, the light from the porch lamp in her eyes. She was holding the bunch of flowering gum erect, like an Olympic torch.
‘So this is your cowboy?’ Birte said. She didn’t offer to shake hands with Robert but inspected him openly and in a manner that might have seemed rude in someone else, but with her seemed natural. She let go of Lena’s hand and stepped up to him. She astonished him then by pinching his cheeks between her thumb and forefinger, while peering closely into his face through the strong lenses of her oversized glasses with their great black frames. She laughed and stepped away from him. ‘But he’s beautiful!’
He smoothed his palms down over his cheeks and laughed at the eccentricity of her behaviour. There was such a confident intimacy in her pleasure at meeting him that he felt pleasure himself. He knew at once that this extraordinary woman approved of him. He was moved and delighted.