by Alex Miller
He turned to look at the picture with her. ‘The story of Ed and his home life, I guess? Where the hell is Girilambone?’
She didn’t reply but continued to stand beside him. He said, ‘You and Phil have a lot of friends.’
Her brown eyes serious, fixed on him. ‘They’re Phil’s friends.’ She looked around, pointing out people. ‘They’re the climbing club. And there’s the cross-country skiing club. Over here is the gliding club. In the corner over there, that’s the literature club. And dotted around the room are his school and university friends. They hang together in clumps. Phil needs to be surrounded by friends.’ She looked at him. ‘And then there’s Ed. The artist friend.’ She paused. ‘And now there’s you. The mystery friend.’
‘And what about you? You don’t need friends? You don’t join Phil in his hobbies?’
‘I have one good friend,’ Ann said. ‘She’ll be here. I’ll introduce you.’ She kept staring at him. ‘So what do you really do?’
He offered her a cigarette. She thanked him and took it from the packet. He lit it for her, then lit his own. ‘What do you think I do?’
‘I think you’re unhappy.’
He was surprised. ‘That’s pretty honest of you.’
‘What’s the point of anything else?’ She took a drag on the cigarette.
He considered her. He would have liked to tell her how incredibly attractive he found her, and how deeply dissatisfied she made him feel with his life. The big frames on her glasses had a strangely calming effect on him.
She said, ‘Why are you smiling?’
‘I like your glasses.’
She laughed. ‘What an odd thing to say. So, do you have any dreams or are you just gliding along with it all?’
‘I’ve dreamed of being a writer.’
‘Then why are you here being a public servant?’
‘Wanting to write isn’t enough,’ he said. ‘There’s something else. I don’t have it.’
They stood looking at each other.
‘It’s complicated,’ he said. ‘I’d like to explain. But I don’t think I can. Writing has a will of its own. For me, at any rate. I can’t force it to happen.’
She said, ‘That could sound like an excuse for not facing the difficulty of it.’
‘It might be. I’m not sure. And you’re going to America?’
‘What does me going to America have to do with it?’
‘I’m not sure. Who knows? Maybe we’d be friends if you weren’t going to America.’
She looked around for somewhere to butt her cigarette.
He said, ‘I’m sorry you’re leaving.’
She gave him a sad little smile. ‘Thank you. Phil knows people at Harvard. He’s done some work with them. They were here at the ANU. Friends. They’re supporting him. Encouraging him.’ She seemed to be trying to decide something, looking at him. ‘Tell me; I shan’t ask you any more questions, but tell me, I want to know: have you really given up your dream of being a writer?’
‘I have, and I haven’t.’
‘I believe you. Deep down we still have our secret dream even after we decide we’ve abandoned it. There is something in us that won’t allow us to finally let the dream go. We need it.’
He liked her a lot. More and more. ‘And what about you? What’s the dream you can’t let go of?’
‘My dream changed. I wanted to be a dancer. Badly. Passionately. Until I was about sixteen. But my mother refused to let me take dancing lessons. And so the dream changed, because it was refused expression for so long, and gradually it became something else.’ She looked at him. ‘I’ve come to believe I should be living in Paris. I feel as though I’m meant to be there. As if something is waiting for me there. I don’t know if I ever will. And don’t laugh at me,’ she said.
‘I’m not laughing.’
‘You were smiling. I don’t like Harvard. I’ll be lost there. I feel lonely walking around that place. I don’t fit in.’
‘But you’ll go with Phil?’
‘Of course. I’m his wife.’ She waved her hand about. It was a gesture of fatality. ‘It’s what we do. Isn’t it?’
‘You mean your duty?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Phil said your mother’s French?’
‘Mum has spent her life regretting her decision to marry my dad and move to Australia. It was my big mistake, she says. It’s her regular whinge. No one listens to her. No one has ever listened to her. Mum hates Goulburn. I think she might hate all of us: her family and Australians, the lot. She doesn’t have any friends. She spoke only French to me until I was ten. She’s caught in a bind she can’t unpick. That’s Mum’s story. She’d quite like it to be my story too, so she could say, I told you so.’
‘And if you go to France, you might regret leaving Australia and make the reverse of your mother’s mistake.’
‘Mum would enjoy the irony of that. She’d say she had passed on her curse to her only child. For Mum it would all be part of the family’s destiny. Nothing to do with her real needs or desires or dreams. Mum believes in fate. She was raised a Catholic but she doesn’t believe in God and she hates the priests. For her we are all pawns in a mysteriously elaborate plan. The moves in the game have been decided for us long ago. The end game is known, just not to us. That, Mum says, is the mystery that entices and infuriates us—not God, not religion, but the end game that’s kept secret from us.’ She switched abruptly, as if she thought she might be boring him. ‘Have you seen the paddock? It’s a clear sky tonight. The best thing about Canberra is the stars on a clear night.’ She waved to a woman who had just come into the room from the front hall and was standing looking around. ‘There’s Sylvia!’ She was suddenly animated, forgetting herself and her mother. ‘Come and meet her.’
He said urgently, ‘Don’t give me the slip, will you?’
She gave him a quick look and laughed. ‘I won’t. I promise!’
They went together across the room. Ann and the woman embraced, holding each other close. He was reminded of the way Lena and Birte had hugged the first time he met Birte. Ann turned to him, holding the other woman by the hand. ‘This is my friend Sylvia.’ She was smiling happily. ‘This is Robert. Robert’s going to be a writer.’ There was a private smile in her eyes for him.
Sylvia and Robert greeted each other and stood a moment, silent, waiting for the other to speak first, then they both said something at once and laughed.
Sylvia put him in mind of an airline stewardess. She was wearing a dark blue blazer with gold buttons and a blouse with a choker collar and gold pin. Her hair was yellow blonde, her lips red, her eyelashes black, long and false. She didn’t seem to be at all the sort of woman he would have imagined being Ann’s close friend. Her body was round and plump, her cheeks smooth and pink, like the cheeks of a toddler. She said, ‘What sort of writing, Robert?’ Her eyes wide, a look that might frighten a butterfly.
‘God knows,’ he said.
She said wistfully, ‘I should like to write a novel one day.’
Ann took her by the arm. ‘Let’s go out into the paddock and look at the stars.’ She hustled Sylvia through the throng towards the open doors and the patio. The table in the middle of the room was crowded with wine bottles. Robert grabbed an open bottle of red wine on the way past. Obedient to Ann’s instructions, the three of them lay down side by side on the grass, like people executed by a firing squad. They lay on their backs looking up at the astonishing display in the night sky and said things like, It’s amazing! It’s hard to believe how many stars there are! It’s wonderful!
‘We are on the edge of the universe looking out into space!’ Ann said, her voice awed.
Sylvia said, ‘Are we looking into the Milky Way or out of it?’ But no one knew the answer to this.
Lying on the edge of space, the warmth of Mother Earth beneath them, the summer night, the noise of the party behind them, candles casting a shimmer of light out into the night, the shadows of people flickin
g back and forth, the tabla thrumming along at an incredible speed, a blur of finger notes. Robert knew it was a moment he would remember always, lying out there under the stars with Ann.
He said, ‘I would have missed this. This sky!’ It was easier to speak to her in the dark, not looking at her, not having her gazing at him with that serious, enquiring look of hers.
Ann’s voice came softly out of the dark beside him. ‘I dream of being a French cat in a village living with an old woman who knows my secret.’ It was as if she confided her dream just to him.
He said, ‘You can tell me the cat’s secret. I won’t tell anyone.’
‘Promise?’
‘God’s honour.’
‘It’s not something that can be spoken. You have to dream it too.’
He spread his arms, being a crucifix, and filled his lungs with the fragrant night air. His outstretched fingers touched Ann’s fingers. She didn’t move her hand away but left it there, being touched by him in the dark of the beautiful night. He longed to tell her something memorable, to fix himself in her mind so that she wouldn’t forget him when she was living in America but would remember him and think about him always. But he could think of nothing memorable. ‘You’ll be gone from Canberra next week,’ he said. ‘Do you think we’ll ever meet again?’
There was a long silence.
Ann said, ‘Do you believe in knowing things that can’t be spoken?’
‘The best things to know are those things that can’t be spoken,’ he said.
At this he felt her fingers move against his, not holding his hand but touching him. No touch had ever felt so intimate to him, so gratifying, or so exciting. He closed his eyes to believe more intensely in the touch of her fingers. He whispered her name, and heard her whisper back, ‘Robert.’ As if she tested the sound of his name on her lips.
40
It was a bleak winter, the frosts persisting well into October. Robert received a letter from Phil. Phil didn’t mention Ann. Robert had been hoping for a letter from her, but when he considered it, he saw the wisdom of her silence. Words were so heavy and clumsy and might easily erase the delicacy of their memory of their night under the stars. You have to dream it too. He kept her words close.
The air of Canberra’s winter had the smell of real cold in it, a cold he hadn’t known since he was a boy with a weak chest growing up in London. He had the flu. It was hanging on and he had developed bronchitis, which he hadn’t been able to shake off. The doctor told him he must stop smoking or he would damage his lungs. He hadn’t had a cigarette all day.
He was in bed reading when Lena came in from work. She came into the bedroom still wearing her coat. He caught a whiff of Hermès Calèche, the expensive perfume she’d begun to wear. It was another sign of her recovery, her self-assurance. She had lost her terrible pot belly but hadn’t put on any flesh. He had accepted that her fined-down state of being was to be permanent. She was in control. No longer the victim. She said, ‘I’ve got some news that will cheer you up. I called Martin this morning. He’s coming to visit us. He’ll be here tomorrow. I said you’d meet him at the airport.’
Robert set the book aside. ‘I never sent that long letter I wrote him,’ he said. ‘I’ve betrayed our friendship.’
‘That’s nonsense!’ she said. ‘Martin doesn’t see things in that way. He’s not judgemental. Martin loves you, and he trusts your love for him. He knows you’ve been struggling. He doesn’t expect you to be anything but yourself.’ She patted his leg through the blanket, the way a nurse or a mother might reassure a sick child. ‘I bought some fish for your dinner on the way home. Will you get up for it, or shall I bring it in?’
‘What sort of fish?’
‘Flathead.’
They looked at each other.
She said, ‘I was lost when you found me in Perugia. I couldn’t have gone on from there without you. Martin has always been a part of that.’ She went over and stood looking out the window, her back to him. It wasn’t easy for her to speak of those days.
‘I was in a strange place when you found me. It’s hard to believe now that I could have gone there of my own free will. But I did. I’d reached a point where I couldn’t bring myself to care any longer about what was to happen to me. I don’t want you to go to a place like that. I don’t think I’d cope if you did. I would feel guilty for the rest of my life. I didn’t know before then that it was possible for us to believe our lives were worthless. Which was naive, I suppose. I was at the end that day when you found me sitting on the steps of the cathedral. I’d tried to do those drawings of people and I’d realised they were just stupid and that I had no skill for it. I didn’t care anymore. I wasn’t going to try to help myself. I suppose I must have thought at some stage that I had to test my resolve in this absolute way.’ She sounded puzzled when she said this, as if it still troubled her. ‘I’d gone a bit crazy on the boat. I’m ashamed when I think of it. I’m not sure what I was trying to prove. But whatever it was, I was in the grip of it for those months.’
She turned around from the window and looked down at Robert. ‘You stood by me at a time when I thought I was no longer worth anything. I must have been repulsive.’
‘I needed you too,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t just to save you; it was to save myself as well. I doubt I would have gone in search of you if Martin hadn’t convinced me you’d leave a trail. He said you’d be easy to find, especially if you were trying to hide. He made it sound possible. He was confident you’d be expecting me.’
‘You haven’t regretted it?’
‘I’ve had my moments.’
They smiled at each other. ‘I wasn’t surprised when you walked up to me. Martin was right.’ She was silent a moment, then she said with feeling, ‘Dear Martin. How well he knows us both.’ She stood looking out the window of the bedroom towards the forest. Neither spoke for a long time. Then she said, ‘I’ll cook your fish.’
He said, ‘I’ll have a quick shower.’
The following afternoon Robert was waiting in the arrivals lounge when Martin’s plane landed. He watched it taxi to the end of the runway and turn slowly as if it meant to go back the way it had come, then hesitate a moment and begin its stately approach to the terminal. He was nervous. He couldn’t believe that for more than a year he had neglected this most important friendship of his life.
Martin came down the steps with the other passengers and walked towards the doors, which the ground staff had opened, the cold air flowing around the people waiting, the chauffeurs with their signs. Robert was seeing Martin now as other people saw him: a middle-aged man of medium height, his hair grey and receding from his broad forehead, a man wearing an old-fashioned black overcoat, his black shoes polished, glasses glinting in the pure limpid light of the Australian inland—a light Renaissance painters like Botticelli would have given their eye teeth for as a model for the light of celestial promise. He was carrying a small brown leather case. He saw Robert as he came through the door and a smile lit up his eyes. At once Robert was remembering the consoling reality of Martin’s physical presence, his warmth, his generosity, and the wisdom of his precious silences—silences as filled with meaning as Frankie’s had ever been.
Robert started towards him. Martin set down his case and opened his arms and embraced Robert, holding him firmly against the lightness of his body. He said with feeling, ‘I’ve missed you!’ At once Robert was liberated from his fear of having failed to live up to the beauty of their friendship.
Martin picked up his case and put his arm through Robert’s. ‘So, are you well? Lena said you’ve had the flu.’
Robert said, ‘I’m better. And you?’
‘You’ve still got a bit of a cough.’
‘It’s nothing.’
Martin paused and looked about him. ‘Do you know, I’ve never been to Canberra before.’ He was evidently delighted. ‘You’ll have to show me everything.’
They walked out of the terminal together, Martin’s arm in Robert’s
, and crossed to the car park.
After dinner that evening the three of them were sitting watching the purple and green clouds lowering over the Brindabella Range, cold grey streams of snow angling downwards from the troubled weave of the clouds across the horizon, the peaks disappearing into the darkness of the winter storm. Martin said, ‘I haven’t seen snow clouds since I was in Russia.’ He smoked his cigarette and sipped his vermouth, the ice clinking in his glass, gazing at the distant turbulence of the storm.
Robert was moved to see how content Martin seemed to be. They were sitting with the lights off, the electric heater spreading a soft reddish glow through the room, giving an illusion of homeliness to the barren house. As the storm darkened the sky, the uncurtained windows began to stare back at the three of them from the blackness, a blackness populated by their own ghostly reflections, their faces reddened by the glowing bars of the heater.
Martin leaned forward and set his glass on the coffee table and balanced his smoking cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. He excused himself and stood up. He left the room and went into the spare bedroom, where they had set up a bed for him. He returned a moment later carrying two books.
He went up to Lena’s chair and kissed her on the cheek. He handed the smaller of the two books to her. ‘Birte sends you this little gift with her love.’ Lena took the book and thanked him. He said, ‘We can talk later.’
He stepped across to Robert and handed him the other book. On the white cover there was a dramatic black and red title, The Last Temptation. The word Last rendered as a violent red slash. In the centre of the cover an image of a tortured hand with a massive nail driven through it. At the very bottom of the cover, in small red capitals, the name KAZANTZAKIS.
Martin said, ‘It was his final novel.’
Robert opened the book. On the blank page facing the inside cover Martin had inscribed in his neat hand the words, To my friend Robert, with love, from Martin. Robert looked up at him and thanked him.
Martin nodded and turned away and sat in his chair. He picked up his smoking cigarette and put it to his lips. He said, ‘Kazantzakis was in Berlin during the working-class struggles of the mid-twenties.’ His gaze was directed into the dark beyond the windows. ‘He became a friend to some of the Berlin members of our movement.’ He drew on his cigarette. ‘He was one of my heroes.’ He said this softly, as if he wasn’t so much giving them information as reaffirming the truth of the claim for himself.