by Alex Miller
On Sunday he went back into the study and sat at the desk. He heard Lena go out the front door. A while later she came back. She began playing the piano. The sound of the piano was loud and insistent and it was all he could think about. He went on with the summary of his story. A dead, mechanical exercise. The room was chilly. He would buy a heater. And maybe get some curtains. Magpies were finding things to stab at in the bare ground. He felt sick. When he got up to leave the study on Sunday evening he screwed up everything he’d written and decided to buy a wastepaper basket.
On Monday morning he was glad all he had to do was to put on his suit and tie and go into the office and read about post-colonial life in Kenya. It had shocked him to discover over the weekend that his imagination couldn’t be coerced, but could hide in its black hole and refuse to be enticed out into the open. It wasn’t enough simply to want to write. Did he want to write? There had to be something else. Whatever that something else was, it was missing. He felt burdened and unhappy when he thought of the shiny green Helvetia waiting for him on his new desk in the spare room of their rented house on the hill at the edge of the forest, the red light blinking on the mountain, warning of the coming disaster.
After dinner he went into the study and sat on the floor next to the bookshelf and looked at Camus’s The Outsider. It was a book that everyone had read at university. Where was the magic? He opened the book and read the first sentence: Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. It was all very straightforward. He read a couple of pages and was soon engrossed in the story and forgot to think about the words. He was confident there was nothing unusual or special about the writing. It was just ordinary words strung together. One simple sentence after another.
He took Lena’s copy of Jane Eyre off the shelf and opened it. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. He put the book back in its place and picked out Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. A squat grey building of only thirty-four storeys.
He lit a cigarette and leaned his back against the wall. All he had to do was write the story. Emboldened by this discovery, he got up and sat at the desk. He put a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter and sat staring at it. The spirit in which he had written Frankie in Sydney was missing, and he was unable to conjure it up. He realised Lena had stopped playing the piano some time ago. Was she listening for the tick-tick of the Helvetia?
He had thought he knew how to write. He felt rebuked. It was as if he had returned to the home of an old friend and knocked on the door, and discovered his friend had left years ago without ever telling him. Nobody was home. Kenya. The Mau Mau. Jomo Kenyatta. The Kikuyus’ fight for freedom. That was real, the reports and histories he was reading in the office. He felt very lonely. Empty. He missed himself. Where was he? It was him. He was the friend who wasn’t at home. Maybe this was a punishment. He smoked another cigarette and looked at his watch. It was nearly ten. He would leave the study at ten-thirty and Lena would say, ‘When can I read something?’
37
The weeks became months and Robert became increasingly dispirited. Lena worried about him. But apart from that she seemed happy. She met work colleagues for lunch and coffee in Manuka and found a new piano teacher and she began to plant out the garden. She stopped asking when she could read some of his writing. He stopped writing. One night he stayed up till first light the next day writing a long letter to Martin. A confessional outpouring that went on for twenty pages. He told Martin the whole story, from the moment he had found Lena sitting on the steps in Perugia to his present state of despair. He shared with his older friend his agonisingly conflicted feelings about his abandonment of the manuscript in Sydney. The last sentence of the letter was just as simple as Camus’s first sentence: I’ve lost myself.
He didn’t post the letter, but kept it in a drawer in his desk. He was going to post it sometime. Then one day he took the letter out and read it. The self-pity disgusted him. He screwed it up and shoved it into his metal wastepaper basket.
Lena’s new friends at the hospital were young women like herself, with private school and university backgrounds. She even found among them an association with her old Melbourne life. Lena practised her piano every evening and began going to concerts and recitals. He stayed home. He could see that the lie was working for her. She might even have begun to believe in it. And the more he saw her finding her way, the more lost and desperate he felt. He hid it. His own lie he knew to be too deep to ever become a reality for him. He started opening a second bottle of red wine after dinner every evening instead of only on weekends. He watched them both eroding, as if he was someone standing outside looking in. Morally and spiritually, their lives were eroding. Although she remained frighteningly thin and continued to eat very little, no one ever commented on it. He supposed they assumed she’d always been like that. Men didn’t ogle her, however, as they used to do when he first knew her. She had neutralised the issue of sex. They rarely attempted to make love. His torment was private. Outwardly he appeared to be sane. He had sex with married women they met at parties. ‘Fuck me, Robert!’ they said, pain and desperation in their voices, and he did. It was deeply dispiriting. The emptiness of it shamed him. He sought refuge in drink and meditated on the idea of suicide. In Japan it was an honourable way out.
On the downhill side, the house next door was a large rambling single-storey white stuccoed dwelling with deep timber verandahs. The man drove a green Peugeot and the woman drove a red Mustang. They kept to themselves. There were no local shops and no public transport. When Robert and Lena ran out of milk or cigarettes or bread they had to get in the car and drive to the nearest shops, which were several miles away. Their car was a two-tone Holden station wagon with a grey roof and cream sides. On the days Lena was working at the hospital, she dropped him off at the office on her way and picked him up again in the evening. On the other days he drove himself to work. The car smelled of the factory. Being behind the wheel made him want to do something dangerous. When he was alone in the car he had to restrain the urge to jam his foot on the accelerator and speed wildly along the roads, weaving in and out of the sedately moving traffic.
Time passed. The study remained unvisited.
One morning a new young man of around Robert’s age began work in the office. During the morning tea break he came over to Robert’s desk and introduced himself. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m Phil. Phil McCrae.’ They shook hands. He stood a while, leaning his hip against Robert’s desk and looking out the window, telling Robert about himself. He said, ‘You should come and have a drink with us and meet the crowd on Saturday.’ Phil wrote his address on a piece of paper and handed it to Robert. He was tall with long dark hair, confident and comfortable with himself, the son of a local grazier. His family had been in the region for several generations, early settlers there long before the area became the site for the capital. He was working in the office part-time and was reading modern American literature at the university and planning to go to the States for further study once he had his master’s degree. He viewed the Canberra bureaucracy as a bit of a joke. Literature was his passion, he said, especially the modern American novelists. With a slightly embarrassed laugh, he confessed that his aim was to become a writer. A novelist, he said. He was a charming and very engaging kind of man.
Robert noticed that Phil gave the impression that when the time came for him to write his novels he would write them with ease and flair. He seemed to believe he was destined to be a novelist like one of his heroes: Hemingway or Henry Miller or Norman Mailer. He had a lovely open smile, his teeth as even and white as John Morris’s teeth had been. He’d recently married a girl from Goulburn. He spoke with evident knowledge and enthusiasm about the native trees of the area and said Robert must go hiking and camping with them in the mountains. ‘You should come cross-country skiing in the winter, you’d become a fanatic for it.’ His enthusiasm was kindly and generous. Robert felt he was modelling himself on someone he’d read about in one of the books of his
heroes.
Lena and Robert drove to Phil’s place on the Saturday afternoon. On the way they stopped at a bottle shop and bought half a dozen bottles of beer. The house was a big weatherboard bungalow in the old suburb of Manuka, the guttering sagging and the paint peeling. There was the impression in this part of town of being in a real city, a failure of the perfection, a place with a human past. The house was set back off the road behind a decaying picket fence that was being pushed out over the footpath by a tangle of cotoneaster bushes. A single spreading oak tree in the middle of the neglected lawn. A battered green Land Rover parked in the dirt drive.
They got out of the car and walked to the front door. It was open. Robert called, ‘Hello!’ and they went in. The hallway was narrow and dark. On the left side, against the wall, builder’s planks resting on house bricks supported hundreds of paperbacks. There was a smell of incense and the sound of Indian music. They came out of the passage into a large open living area. The room was cluttered with books and journals, a pile of newspapers beside the fireplace, rugs on the bare timber boards, odd pieces of furniture, wine bottles and glasses, fruit in bowls, chips and nuts spilled across the rug, pictures on the walls. A large sofa with frayed red cushions in front of a fireplace, a red and green rug flung carelessly over its back. A young woman was sitting on the sofa. She was wearing a summer dress and sat easily with her legs crossed, open leatherwork sandals on her tanned feet. She turned and looked across at Robert and Lena. She didn’t smile or say hello, and when Robert met her eyes she hesitated for an uncertain moment then looked away. She gave the impression of being alone. The smell of incense and dope.
Phil was standing by French doors looking out onto some kind of field or vacant block, the double doors wide open to the day, the afternoon sun shining through the tree into the room. There were people sitting around talking and drinking. Phil turned around and called a greeting and started over towards Robert and Lena. He was holding a glass of red wine and smoking a cigarette. Robert looked again at the woman sitting on the couch. She had her arms folded across her chest and was looking at an older man with a woven headband and long hair down over his shoulders who was lying back in some kind of canvas camp chair beside the fireplace. She was frowning, as if something had been said that upset her, or maybe she disapproved of the man lying back in the chair. It wasn’t an ordinary camp chair of the portable kind that might be taken on a picnic, but was a superior-looking piece of furniture, solidly constructed from some dark wood such as teak. It made Robert think of English explorers in Africa in the nineteenth century who would have had porters to carry this kind of chair. The hippie with the coloured headband was smoking a joint. He wasn’t passing it around.
Robert introduced Lena to Phil. Phil kissed her on the cheek and said, ‘It’s good to meet you, Lena. Robert’s always talking about you.’
This wasn’t true. Robert couldn’t remember telling Phil any more than the bare fact of being married.
‘Thanks for the beers, Rob. Put them down anywhere. Come and meet Ed. You guys will get on. Ed’s a bit of a wild man. He’s a very fine artist.’
Ed, the man with the headband, looked up at them from his English explorer’s chair and grinned, his gaze on Lena. He said, ‘Hi.’ Two of his front teeth were missing, and there was a mischievous gleam in his blue eyes. His girlfriend, Mary, was sitting on the floor beside his chair hugging her knees and staring fixedly into the empty fireplace. She didn’t look up or respond in any way to their greeting when Phil introduced her. Robert thought she was probably about sixteen years old, if that. Ed was somewhere in his middle thirties, maybe older. His face was lined and tanned, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors.
Phil introduced them to his new wife, the woman sitting on the sofa with her legs crossed, her smooth knees catching the sunlight and Robert’s lustful attention. When Phil introduced them she looked directly into Robert’s eyes, as if she meant to challenge or rebuke him. Her name was Ann. Her lips reminded Robert of the lips of the French actress Jeanne Moreau. She was wearing glasses, heavy dark frames with lenses as large as the lenses of Birte’s glasses. They suited her. Around her neck she had a fine gold chain with a small locket or ornament that nestled in the hollow of her throat. Her hair was thick and dark and wavy. Phil said, ‘Ann’s completing a master’s degree in French literature and teaching French part-time at the university.’
Robert said, ‘Are you hoping for a scholarship to the States too?’
She asked Phil for a cigarette. He shook one out of the packet and lit it for her. She blew out smoke and turned to Robert. ‘Does that surprise you?’
Phil laughed. Robert gathered that Phil expected him to be impressed with his wife. He was impressed with her, but not with her ambitions. He thought she was beautiful and sane and very sexy and had her life together, and he envied Phil.
A burst of laughter behind him made Robert turn around. Lena was perched on the arm of Ed’s chair. Ed was looking up at her and grinning, the gap in his front teeth, his eyes alight with interest, a demonic dero. ‘Lena and meaner,’ he said. They both laughed.
‘You guessed it, Ed. So watch yourself.’
He offered her the joint and she took it from him and put it to her lips and took a long slow drag on the thing, as if she knew what she was doing. Ed watching her, an expression of delight in his blue eyes. Robert wondered if he was seeing the Lena of the boat journey to Italy. A stranger to him. She seemed to be able to play with conviction the game of being whomever she wanted to be. Here, suddenly, she was this flirtatious woman of lightness and cheekiness. A woman he had never seen. Had not even guessed at. She and Ed delighting in a clearway to each other’s lightest side, a twist of perversity in it, making them edgy with each other.
There it was. Robert was angry. He was still angry. He was always angry inside these days, the thing in him growling below the surface, thumping along with his desperation, pacing up and down. He had lost faith in himself. He was suffering. It had all briefly seemed clear to him and even settled; now he did not know where he was going any longer. What was to happen? In the night he wept with the terror of it. Was he punishing himself for putting writing second? For putting Lena and her game of life and death first? Was she playing with him now, flirting with this hippie? He watched the two of them carrying on. She knew he was watching. He had abandoned his dream for her. He was resentful and insulted by the way she was carrying on with Ed in front of him.
He took the beer Phil was holding out to him and he thanked him and watched Lena take the joint from between her lips and hold it out in front of her, her eyes closed, her chin lifted, sunlight etching the sculpted bones of her face, posing for Ed, posing for them all, slowly releasing the fragrant smoke from between her parted lips. Robert could see how she might be sexually interesting to someone who didn’t know her as he knew her. He felt a stab of jealousy at the sight of their pleasure in each other.
Robert turned away from Lena and Ed. Phil had wandered off somewhere. Ann was watching him. He had surprised her, her gaze fixed on him. She coloured up. He said, ‘How far into your master’s are you?’
She butted her cigarette in the ashtray on the arm of the couch and stood up. ‘I’m expecting to finish at the end of the year. It was nice meeting you.’
‘You’re going already?’
‘I have to walk the dog.’
He said, ‘I’ll come with you.’
She smiled, a little challenging and perhaps a little regretful, some melancholy thought edging through her mind. ‘I’d really rather you didn’t.’
He said, ‘You’re escaping this circus.’
She regarded him critically. ‘And what do you believe in?’
‘Myself.’
‘My God, you just say that!’ She laughed.
He said, ‘I was lying. And you?’
‘I have to walk the dog.’ She held his gaze, a sad smile in her eyes, then she turned and walked away, going out through an internal door on the far side
of the room, at the last minute looking back at him quickly. He wondered if he should follow her. Did she mean him to?
Phil touched his arm. ‘Come and have a look at the paddock, Rob. It was Dad’s father’s. This was the original homestead. Dad gifted the paddock for a public space so they’d never build out the view from this room. He grew up here, looking out at that view. We scattered his ashes over there by the laburnum and had a party. It was what he wanted us to do.’
Robert said, ‘So this is your house now?’ He was dreaming of being alone with Ann, dreaming of a perfect understanding between them, dreaming of being in love with her.
‘Mum lets Ann and me use it,’ Phil said. ‘She doesn’t like being here without Dad. She lives in Goulburn.’ He turned to Robert and grinned, showing his beautiful teeth. ‘Rent-free.’
Robert went with him out through the open doors onto a stone-slabbed patio.
They stood looking at the view, drinking their beers and smoking. Phil said, ‘So what do you think of Ed? You’ll have to get him to show you his pictures. He’s the real thing.’ He smiled, calm, easy, all was cool with him. Ed was another of his heroes. Phil was an open, easygoing man, content with his own perfection, ready to admire it in others. Robert was sweating into his shirt, an image of Ann holding his gaze that fraction of time longer than was needed, her dark eyes asking her own question. Had she meant him to follow her, or was he being crazy to even think it? He needed to know. He took a long drink from his beer. Ed and Lena were laughing. He heard her say, ‘So what? I can ride a bike.’ They both burst out laughing as if it was the funniest thing ever. Robert had never smoked dope.
Phil clinked his glass. ‘Cheers, mate! You look deep in thought. What d’you say we nip down to the shops and pick up some Chinese?’
When they got back with the takeaways, Ed’s girlfriend was curled up asleep on the couch where Ann had been sitting, one hand under her cheek, her thin hair fanned across her face. Robert wondered if her mum and dad knew where she was. Ann wasn’t there and there was no sign of Ed and Lena. He went out into the paddock. They were lying on their backs in the sun beside an enormous azalea bush. He stood off, spying on them. Ed was openly flirting with her and she was enjoying it. Men didn’t flirt with Lena anymore. They hadn’t for a long time.