by Alex Miller
‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.
Lena drove the Renault through the early-morning streets. The day was clear and windless. The waters of the Bay flat and still, lying like a sheet of silvery glass to the horizon, a string of cargo ships and low tankers lined up waiting to get into the port. He suddenly remembered Doctor Faustus sitting on his desk waiting for him. It was hard to believe he’d forgotten all about it.
‘Yes, Mum,’ Lena said. ‘Robert and I slept together last night.’
Mrs Soren was calm, her blue eyes flinty, her manner determined, no longer the comfortable little woman in the country cottage. The three of them were standing in the sitting room, she facing the bow window, Lena and Robert a step inside the double glass doors to the hall, facing her. Mrs Soren had standards. Indeed, principles. She got straight to the point. ‘I’ve been expecting this from you two. You’ll get engaged at once. I shall put the announcement in Saturday’s Age. Lena will have her grandmother’s engagement ring. I’ll set a date for the wedding with Dr Eady.’ She regarded them both steadily. There were to be no negotiations.
Lena said, ‘Mum, I’m twenty-two! You can’t force us to get married.’
Mrs Soren said, ‘Yes, I know you are, darling. I can’t stop you from leaving home with Robert if that’s what you want to do. But will any of us be happy if you do that?’ She paused. ‘I don’t think so. Do you? You’re talking about the kind of unhappiness that tears families apart. Your father would have wept to hear you suggest it.’ Tears sprang to her eyes at the mention of Lena’s father.
Lena said, ‘Of course that’s not what I want, Mum.’ She stepped forward and embraced her mother. Mrs Soren closed her eyes, resisting Lena for a moment, then she relented and hugged her daughter to her.
Robert stood there watching them. He didn’t feel any hostility towards himself from Mrs Soren. She didn’t seem to bear him or Lena any ill will, but apparently felt compelled to issue them with her ultimatum all the same. She was like an officer who gives an order he doesn’t agree with for the sake of the greater discipline of his caste. Robert felt that Mrs Soren was prepared to be as tough on herself as she was on her daughter and on him. She would rather risk losing Lena than disobey her conscience. He had never before met anyone capable of this kind of thing. And he began to see her as a representative of an inflexible social order that was foreign to him and to his experience and upbringing. He had been prepared to meet her anger and had had an apology ready. He hadn’t expected this.
Lena and her mother were standing facing him, their arms linked. If he turned around and left the house, that would be the end of it. The thought flitted across his mind and was gone. Lena was taller than Mrs Soren by half a head. The two of them were close, they understood each other, they knew what to expect from each other. He saw that they were looking out at him from within their own place, and he knew it was a place whose values he did not understand and probably didn’t share. The cage of Lena’s un-freedom, her divided self. Mother and daughter might have problems with each other, but that was another matter. For now it was him they were waiting for; waiting for him to say his piece, waiting for him to affirm his honourable intentions. He was nervous. He wanted a cigarette. He wasn’t sure he could handle the situation well. He said, ‘Look, Mrs Soren, I don’t mean any harm by this, but I really don’t think marriage is the right way for me and Lena to go.’
‘I know that, Robert,’ she said calmly. ‘I know how you feel about it. But there’s no other way.’ She gave him a chilly smile. ‘You can live here and you can use Keith’s study. I know you like his room. It can be yours.’
He looked at Lena and knew the whole setup was wrong. He said, ‘You can’t just dismiss my views like that, Mrs Soren. That’s not on. Okay?’ Her lack of respect for his views hurt him and angered him. She was sweeping his feelings aside as if they were irrelevant. He had met such responses as a child. He wanted to tell Mrs Soren she was not his superior. There are no superiors here. This is not England.
She sensed the fierceness in him, and knew the danger of it for her daughter, and she smiled and reached for his hand and said, ‘Well, why don’t we all sit down and talk about it over a cup of tea, Robert. There’s no point in our opposing each other, is there? Come along!’
He went. Unwilling and resentful. Burning inside. But he went.
19
I’m watching through the study window as my wife cuts winter roses and sprigs of pink blossom from the leucoxylon, which she will arrange later in the grey stoneware vase in the sunroom. To watch her out there in the autumn day cutting flowers is a joy for me, and I am reminded that the beauty of our lives cannot last forever. The apple tree has finally lost its leaves. Our apple tree is one of the last trees in our garden to lose its leaves in autumn and one of the last to get them in the spring. Only the hedge of red hawthorns along the back boundary that I planted our first winter here is slower than the apple tree and still has a rusty flecking of autumn.
My wife straightens up and looks over her shoulder, as if she has felt me watching her. The pattern of my leaf piles on the lawn reminds me of the pattern of dung mounds in the arable fields I made in spring after the cows had been turned out to pasture from their wintering in the byre. In winter the ground was white and hard, the turnips frozen in the iron earth, the sky a solemn unrelenting grey. Here in winter the grass is always green. Gus is lying with his front paws on one of the leaf piles, watching my wife, a dapple of branch shadow cast over him from the bare tree. I see in him an old gentleman reclining on a chaise longue, the shadow of his spectacles on the end of his nose.
20
Mrs Soren’s notice of the engagement of her daughter to Robert Crofts appeared in The Age and Robert moved in with them at the Red Bluff house. He’d managed to pass his three subjects and was admitted to an arts degree. They were married on a Saturday morning in the Sandringham Presbyterian Church at the end of second term. A light rain was falling and a cold wind blowing in off the Bay. Lena wore a simple tailored white dress and Robert wore a new dark grey three-piece single-breasted suit. Mrs Soren’s friend the Reverend Dr Frank Eady—her partner in violin and piano duets in the sitting room of the Red Bluff house, an old friend of her husband’s and her spiritual adviser—performed the ceremony. Lena and Robert looked into each other’s eyes and swore with due solemnity to uphold the traditional vows: honour, obey, protect, forsake all others. All that.
Robert approached the church ceremony cynically, even though in the back of his mind the word vow troubled him. Making a vow wasn’t just promising in the ordinary way of things. It was surely something bigger than that. It was a word he’d never had to deal with and had probably never used. A concept foreign to his way of thinking. Something rare and potent about it that he believed in as part of the bargain. When the moment came to commit himself he was moved. The emotion caught him off guard, the sudden tension in his chest, the tightening in his throat. It wasn’t the church or any sense of religion or the rules of middle-class behaviour, but something far more powerful. It was the knowledge that he was changing himself. He was afraid he might also be losing himself.
There were half a dozen of Lena’s old girlfriends from school and their husbands, and two of her colleagues from the hospital. And there were Mrs Soren’s two sisters and their husbands and her brother, the patriarch of the clan. And, of course, Martin and Birte were there, standing beside Lena’s piano teacher, Leonard Kohner, and his wife Peta. And Mrs Soren herself. Mrs Soren’s brother, the patriarch Ralph—an anxious thickset man, a millionaire many times over with no children and a tall film-star-style wife with sparkling eyes and golden hair—gave Lena away.
During the service and at the reception afterwards Robert found himself being welcomed by these people. They were pleased to see him coming over to their side. They were all smiles and congratulations. All of them, without exception. Unreserved. Glad to have him. A new recruit. He was caught by the force of their combined decency and enthusi
asm and he responded with genuine feeling to Dr Eady’s portentous question, ‘Do you, Robert Crofts, take this woman, Lena Soren, to be your lawful wedded wife?’ Or whatever the precise words were. The vow. He made it. He gave his solemn word.
And when Lena looked into his eyes, what he saw was not the happiness of a bride, but a kind of sorrow, a longing and a melancholy that lay deep within her, as if the person she really was, her own person, that secret person not displayed in the portrait but left blank, would be required to fight its way to the surface from the suffocating confinement of this other existence. He saw that he did not know her. And he understood in that moment that the passage of love was not to be known any more than was the passage of death. And as he looked into her eyes there in the church, the congregation listening to the vow that was coming out of him, he was remembering her swimming freely ahead of him through the cold grey sea that day when they made love in the bathing box, heading out confidently and alone towards the rusting hulk of the sunken ship. And he saw that she was still far ahead of him, seeing something deeper than he was seeing, something older, something more adult and more mature and more lonely, lured out by it, leading him to a place he would never have gone to alone. And he knew he had been right all along, and that marriage was not the way for the two of them. But all the same he said it, he responded as he was expected to respond, ‘I do,’ and was obedient to everyone’s expectations that day, and to Dr Eady’s portentous question.
Lena, he understood, but too late, had expected more from her wild cowboy lover than obedience to the stifling rules of her caste. Maybe she had even expected to be rescued by him from the confinement of her solitude. To ride behind his saddle into the sunset of a romantic and mysterious freedom. He didn’t know. How could he know? He was still young. She hadn’t joined him. That was what he did know. He had joined her. And perhaps she was disappointed. The force of his reality had capitulated to the force of her reality. It was real, this moment, for both of them; it was a revelation and a disavowal of their freedom. And it was more powerfully real than he had foreseen. He placed the plain gold band on her finger, sliding it next to her grandmother’s sparkling diamond. Her hands were beautiful, her fingers long and smooth and flexible, full of expression and music and the secret sadness of her heart.
And of course there were none of his friends from his past life in the church to witness it that day, none of his own family and no one from his school. The only friend who came into his mind that day was Frankie. He saw Frankie look at him and nod and know him. And he looked back at Frankie with gratitude and knew he was a man who had known how to love properly, and that to know this is not given to everyone. He knew Frankie understood and would not mock him for it.
That afternoon at Mrs Soren’s Red Bluff house the guests shone, their eyes brighter than usual, a golden mist in the crowded rooms while they drank French champagne and laughed and clasped each other’s hands, some even clutching Robert to them in a sudden excess of goodwill, embracing him and taking him to their hearts. Welcome! Welcome! Welcome, Robert! And they drank more French champagne and laughed and raised their glasses and Lena and he kissed and he made a surprising speech that was met with cheers and applause and more laughter. Mrs Soren stood beside him and held his hand while she said her few modest words in reply, and then she turned to him and put her arms around him and hugged him close to her for everyone to witness that she and he were friends, and there were tears in her eyes. And by then Robert was drunk. And Dr Eady played his violin and Leonard Kohner played a joyful dance on Lena’s upright Rönisch.
And Robert did not yet see that he was no longer as free as he had been.
He thought he had joined them. They thought he had too. What did any of them know?
Lena and Robert spent that night in a grand suite at the Windsor Hotel, paid for, like everything else, including his new suit, by her mother. And in the morning they drove to Point Lonsdale in the little yellow Renault. They stayed a week in a darkly panelled boarding house where a gong was sounded at dinnertime. And every day they swam together in the ocean and made love in the dunes. The sea was cold and thunderous and the wind from the south was colder than the ocean, and Robert learned during that week to enjoy the first chilling plunge and the blows of the surf. When the week was over they returned to the house at Red Bluff to begin their life with Mrs Soren in Lena’s old family home.
The blue room was theirs. He was at the university most days and Lena had moved across town to the alcoholism and drug dependence unit at St Vincent’s Hospital, where she was already more than half in love with one of the doctors. In the evenings he chopped wood in the shed and lit the fire in the sitting room. Mrs Soren sat in one of the armchairs and knitted and he sat across from her and read. He read everything. Day and night. He was desperate to catch up. Nothing on the English reading list escaped him. He read far out beyond the reading lists supplied to him by his history tutors. He wanted not simply to catch up but to overtake and ride on ahead and scout the clean country. And he made Keith’s study his own. It was the one room in the house where the clutter of their lives had gathered and been stored, piles of books and periodicals on the floor. Even a saddle and a pair of riding boots. Drawings and photos on the walls. Half-finished articles and old newspapers. And the green Roget’s Thesaurus his mother and father had sent to him with their loving wish that he achieve his new ambition. This will help you, son. All our love, your mother and father. And three kisses.
While Lena practised Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 at the Rönisch, Mrs Soren and Robert held their breath and hoped she would get through it without slamming the lid of the piano and storming out of the room.
Mrs Soren was eager to know what he thought of the possibility of an afterlife. ‘So, Robert, tell me, do you ever wonder if there is really life after death? Do you think about it sometimes?’
He stared into the red gum fire. ‘I think death is death,’ he said. He was seeing the bodies of their neighbours when the doodle bug blasted their home to pieces and the firemen dragged them out onto the grass, their bodies smoking, the arm of Mrs Ezzard raised, still moving, attempting a signal for help. As a child then he protected himself from the horror by believing those burnt carcasses had nothing to do with the living people he had known: kindly Mr and Mrs Ezzard, their neighbours. It was the ugly difference of death that haunted him. And so he turned to Mrs Soren and, without thinking too much about it, said, ‘The idea of an afterlife seems to me to be a way of trying to avoid accepting the finality of death.’
She looked down at her knitting and said nothing.
21
It was late afternoon, a Wednesday, when Robert had no lectures or tutorials. He and Martin were sitting together in the front room of Martin and Birte’s house. They had been talking earlier about Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and the collection of essays by disillusioned communists of Martin’s generation, The God That Failed, both of which Martin had given to Robert some weeks earlier. They sat in a companionable silence now and might have been waiting either for the conversation to regenerate itself or for the sense of an end to Robert’s visit to arise. The day outside was rapidly fading and the shadows in the room had deepened. The books on the shelves, the three pictures, the dark gloss of the leaves on the pot plants by the windows, they had all receded into the shadows. Robert felt it was time for him to leave, but he was reluctant to break the spell of their communion in the silence, the smoke of their cigarettes drifting towards the ceiling, the empty white china bowls on the low table between them, the remains of the chilled yoghurt and cucumber refreshment Martin always provided on these afternoons, the crumbled remains of dry biscuit on the small white side dish.
Martin leaned forward and lit a fresh cigarette from the smouldering butt of the one he had been smoking. ‘Yes. You are right,’ he said, as if Robert had only just spoken. ‘All that is true. But in 1933, not much more than a hundred years after your wonderful French civil code was introduced, when I was
a young man and still believed the Nazis could be defeated, Joseph Goebbels was cheered like a modern pop star in the Berlin Sportpalast by a vast crowd of ordinary people from the suburbs when he declared the rights of man to have been abolished. So, it was all words. Goebbels had judged the mood of the people correctly. It was now a time for evil, a time for demagogues and dictators. The people didn’t care about the rights of man and had long ago forgotten the enthusiasms of the French Revolution.’
Martin fell silent again, his cigarette held delicately between his thumb and forefinger, the cork tip almost touching his lips. He seemed to be waiting for something, the sallow skin tight across his broad forehead like the membrane of a mask, his grey eyes alight and keen with his thought, reflecting tiny points of light from the windows opposite.
‘Two weeks after Goebbels’ speech I was arrested in Breslau by the Gestapo.’ He said this quietly. ‘People who say such a rule of terror can never happen again are wrong. Evil has its time.’ He shifted in his chair and looked directly at Robert. ‘Torture is a life sentence.’ He watched Robert, his eyes narrowed against the smoke, watching for his reaction, for a sign from him that he understood. ‘I was your age, a year or two older,’ Martin said. ‘It was not the physical pain that broke me. I was beaten senseless many times. There is a limit to the amount of pain the human nervous system can register before it is overloaded and is shocked into numbness. While the nightly beatings lasted I existed in a toxic limbo between nightmare and waking. It was not the beatings that broke me; it was when I came to understand that my torturer was my brother. That was when I lost my belief in our human project.’
They sat in the ringing silence. Martin had never before spoken to Robert about his own personal history. Robert felt rebuked for his naive attitude to the French Revolution. Martin’s astonishing confession had made him feel as if something was frozen inside him, as if he had heard a scream and then the silence again, and was waiting. Neither of them spoke. Martin’s features were a pale oval among the shadows, the glint of his eyes fixed on Robert. He said, ‘Do you want to know what I did? After I was deported from Germany because of my Polish birth I joined the resistance. My cover was to pose as a union organiser and delegate to the provinces. I travelled throughout Upper Silesia looking for men in the union movement who could be trusted to form secret cells in our movement. Everything rested on my judgement of their character. My task was to assess the steadiness of a young man’s resolve and his ability to inspire and to lead others. My task was nothing less than to see into the souls of these young men.’ He paused and drew on his cigarette, allowing the silence to open between them again, the lighted end of his cigarette glowing then fading. The cello moaning in the room across the hall. Martin went on then, speaking so softly Robert had to lean towards him to catch his words.