by Alex Miller
They were both silent.
He tried for a neutral tone. ‘So how’s Phil? I don’t think I replied to his last letter. It’s a while ago now.’
She gave a short laugh. ‘You didn’t reply to quite a few of Phil’s letters,’ she said. ‘Phil’s fine. He’s at home in Boston. Have you got a piece of paper and a pen? I’ll give you Sylvia’s address. It’s the white house, the last one at the top of the hill. The lights will be on.’
He hung up the phone and went out of the kitchen and sprinted down to the creek, the dogs yelping at his heels. He snatched off his shirt and pants and dived into the bathing hole. He swam underwater to the far side and held on to the familiar root of the old casuarina, keeping himself submerged, looking up through the dazzle of the water, sunlight flicking back and forth among the tree shadows, the small brown-striped fish passing above him through the agitated water. The dogs’ twisted reflections through the water on the silt bank, barking and pawing at the water and snapping at each other, their barks distant, muffled. Was he coming up again, or was he staying down in the fish world? Not hanged but drowned! He surfaced and yelled, ‘She rang me!’
He waded to the bank, the silt squeaking under his feet as he came out of the water. The yellow soap lodged in the crotch of the tree. He soaped himself all over then stood a moment looking down, admiring his erection, soap dripping off the end of it—quivering, hard as wood. He said, ‘Now don’t you go getting any ideas! She’s only invited us to a polite Canberra dinner party. You are an uncivilised beast.’ He gave the beast a flick with his finger and dived into the water and swam down to the bottom again and washed the soap from his hair and body. He stayed down, sitting on the river stones, thinking thoughts about Ann, till his breath was used up. He surfaced and got out and picked up his dirty clothes and walked back to the house, the dogs trailing along, Toby snapping at his mother’s ears, Tip pretending to be annoyed.
He went through into the bedroom and tossed his dirty clothes on the floor, got out some fresh gear and went back out into the kitchen. He stood at the kitchen table in his town shoes and pants and ironed a shirt. It was an expensive Italian white linen that Lena had bought for him in London. A real summer shirt. On the two or three occasions he had worn it, Lena had said how well it suited him and had looked at him with something like admiration in her eyes. He put the shirt on and gave his shoes a quick polish and went out to the Rover and told the dogs to take care of the place till he got back. ‘I’m going to dinner with the girls tonight.’ He climbed into the Rover and drove out of the farm and turned left at the road. Crossing Big Oakey Creek, the last golden touch of the sun flickering among the trees on the side of the hill. He went on through Araluen until he hit the winding mountain road to the tablelands. On into the evening, through Braidwood, and across the open grasslands of the southern highlands. Driving through the black night, getting closer to Canberra, he realised he hadn’t been thinking about the real woman, Ann, but about his fantasy of her. So the real Ann had come back to bury her mother and had called him and asked him to come to dinner. His reaction while he was sitting at the bottom of the swimming hole was that she had snatched him from the jaws of death. But the person he was going to meet was not the forlorn fiction of his hopeless fantasies but the real flesh-and-blood woman, a complicated person he scarcely knew. What did she really expect from the meeting? It was true what he’d said to her on the phone, she did sound just the same, but it was also true that he scarcely knew her. He wondered if maybe it was Phil who’d asked her to call him. The thought sobered him.
The closer he got to Canberra the more anxious he began to feel. She was probably just being polite, asking Phil’s old mate to join the dinner party. Another guest to sit around Sylvia’s table in her white house on the top of the hill to exchange small talk with the smart Canberra people till one in the morning. Then go on home alone, half-pissed and angered by what some dickhead had said, about the failed novelist from the bush—those journos and out-of-office pollies and academics and their smart-arse ironies. As if they sat at the centre of the world and ruled it. Was a Canberra dinner party really an improvement on hanging himself from the crossbeam of the barn? What would be so bad about that, after all? He wouldn’t know anything about it after the first couple of choking minutes. Lights out. Leave the theatre. Go home.
But, all the same, despite his doubts and anxieties, he wasn’t going to turn around and go back. He was going, not to his Maker but to Canberra. He would sit and suffer and drink too much and maybe vomit in Sylvia’s garden as he was leaving. But he would go, and he would endure it, and afterwards he would reconstruct his fantasies.
And there it was! The suddenness of the perfect city glittering in the wide realm of the black night. He remembered Ray telling Lena they were the first people from Canberra he’d ever spoken to. It would have been all the same to him and to the Araluen folk if aliens had landed in the middle of the bush.
The lights of Sylvia’s house were shining onto the tightly clipped grass, a border of small tightly clipped bushes, sprinklers sending up a gentle mist into the summer night, the long white house with the yellow lights within. A shiny low-slung silver Audi convertible parked in the drive. He drove in and parked the steaming Rover behind the Audi. Sylvia was standing at the door. As he walked up the path to her she smiled, her lips glossy and very red, her big teeth white and even. ‘Hello, Robert, it’s so lovely to see you.’
She was fatter than he remembered her. He said, ‘You too. How have you been, Sylvia?’
She offered him her chubby cheek, and he leaned in and touched her cheek with his lips. Her skin was damp. She was wearing Hermès Calèche. He recognised it from Lena’s perfume-wearing days.
She said, ‘So how was the drive?’
‘The drive was fine. Thanks for asking me to dinner.’
He followed her in. A steady throbbing pain had started up in his groin. A large blue suitcase was standing in the hall. They went into a big open-plan room, couches and chairs, mirrors and a couple of colourful posters on the walls, some kind of Asian matting on the floor, over by the kitchen a table laid for three, a single candlestick, the candle unlighted, glasses catching the lights. Lights everywhere.
Ann was sitting on a grey-striped couch, in front of her a low table fashioned from a slice of red gum, with a bottle of wine and three glasses. She was leaning back, her right arm resting along the top of the sofa, her legs crossed, her bare knees catching the light, just as he remembered them. Her Jeanne Moreau lips. Italian sandals on her feet. She was wearing a short-sleeved light blue linen dress with big white buttons down the front, her glossy brown hair curled around her cheek. Her large-framed glasses making her look more beautiful and more sexy than his fantasy of her had ever been. He’d forgotten the glasses.
He said, ‘Hi, Ann. It’s good to see you.’ His groin gave him an extra-sharp jab and he flinched.
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
‘It’s nothing.’ He tried not to flinch as the jab struck again.
‘I’m glad you could come.’ She looked him over and smiled. ‘You’re looking very brown and healthy. Country life suits you.’
Sylvia said, ‘What would you like to drink, Robert? Is red okay? I’m afraid we didn’t wait for you. We’ve been getting stuck into it.’ She gave a nervous giggle and glanced at Ann.
The three of them sat around the red gum table. They clinked their glasses and wished each other good health. The stabbing pain in his groin abated, assumed a dullness. He eased his shoulders. Ann was watching him. He thought she was going to ask him something.
Sylvia said in her bright clear voice, ‘You’re driving Ed’s old Land Rover. Do you still see Ed and Mary?’
‘We haven’t seen them since they left to have the baby.’ He told them the story of Ed and Mary’s sudden departure in the night in the Holden.
Ann said, ‘Ed’s a drunk and a manipulator.’
He looked at her. ‘I’m sorry about your m
other.’
She leaned forward and picked up her glass and took a drink of the wine. She looked bored, or fatigued perhaps, maybe wishing she hadn’t suggested this dinner to Sylvia.
There was a long silence. No sounds of a city. The front door open to the night. No distant roar of traffic. The black silence of the bush out there. Miles and miles of it. Mountains and forests. Tiny lights glimmering in isolated homesteads. The humming of the refrigerator behind him in the kitchen. The large floor-to-ceiling windows uncurtained, the mist from the sprinklers drifting across the illuminated grass. A faint hissing.
He took out his tobacco and began to make a cigarette. Ann watched him.
Sylvia said, ‘I don’t think I’ve got an ashtray, Robert.’
Ann said, ‘A saucer will do. Could you make one for me?’
Sylvia said irritably, ‘You’ll just start again if you have one now.’ She got up and went back into the kitchen and rattled around in a cupboard. She came back and plonked a saucer in the middle of the red gum slab.
Ann said flatly, ‘Thanks. I need a cigarette.’ She took another sip of wine.
He decided she was either bored or nervous. He fashioned an extra-neat cigarette for her and licked it down. He stood up and passed it to her. She took the cigarette from him and waited, holding it between her fingers, her elbow on her knees, looking up at him. He struck a match. She put the cigarette between her lips and he held the flame to it and watched her draw in the smoke. He breathed with her breath. She raised her eyes and looked at him. ‘Thanks.’ She sat back against the sofa, releasing the smoke through her nostrils. She said to Sylvia, ‘You should try it.’
Robert sat down again. The pulse in his groin like a blunt thumb now, nudging at him. He made another cigarette and lit it.
Sylvia said abruptly, ‘I’ll dish up.’ She stood and took her wine and went back into the shiny kitchen area.
Ann was looking at him, making some kind of judgement. No doubt wondering if he was worth it after all. She had large dark serious eyes.
He said, ‘So you’ve stuck with French literature?’
‘It’s what I love. And you? Have you written those books you were going to write?’
‘I’ve written two. I haven’t found a publisher for them.’ In his fantasies he would tell her about the rejection of his Exmoor book and his strange abandonment of the manuscript of Frankie. And he would know that she would understand. Now, sitting opposite the real Ann, he had run out of things to say.
Sylvia called them to the table.
They got up and went over and sat at the table. Against the far wall was a small fish tank with a solitary yellow fish in it. The fish was so utterly stationary he wondered if it was a plastic toy. Sylvia lit the candle in the centre of the table. On their small plates a tiny amount of sardine with something green and mashed. Ann said something complimentary about the tiny offering and the table setting.
Ann said, ‘Have you started work on something else?’
She’s not interested, Robert told himself. She’s just asking for something to say, to keep this terrible silence at bay.
They ate the sardine and the green stuff and drank the crisp chilled white wine. The let-down that is reality which follows our soaring fantasies. He couldn’t imagine ever again being stirred by his desperately futile erotic dreams. Where was the permission for his imagination to even go there? The sterile house cast its pall over them.
They ate the meal, grilled whiting in the pan, filling the house with its smell and the smell of dill, and they drank the wine and struggled with their helpless broken attempts at conversation. Then suddenly it was time to leave.
Ann turned to him. ‘You’ve got quite a drive ahead of you. What time will you get home?’
‘It’s about two and a half hours. I don’t mind. It’s a beautiful black night. I like driving through the bush at night.’ He turned to Sylvia. ‘Thanks so much for tonight, Sylvia. It’s been a great evening. I guess I’d better be getting along.’
They stood. Sylvia embraced him lightly, keeping her body from actually touching him. ‘It was lovely to see you again, Robert. We’ll have to stay in touch now that we’ve made contact again.’
‘For sure.’ He turned to Ann.
She said, in a tone of confident command, ‘Take my case out and put it in the Rover, will you? I’ll get my coat and bag.’ She looked directly into his eyes, challenging him. ‘Is that a problem?’
‘I guess not.’ He thanked Sylvia again and went into the hall and lugged the heavy blue suitcase outside and put it in the back of the Rover. Ann came out of the house. She was carrying her overcoat and a leather satchel. She and Sylvia hugged and said a few words and Ann came over and climbed into the passenger seat beside him. She said briskly, ‘Okay. That’s that. Let’s go!’
60
They drove in silence, the terrific racket of the Rover’s broken exhaust, the smell of petrol fumes and the snap and crack of the buckles against the sides of the Rover, the warm night air rushing around them. They didn’t attempt to make conversation.
They were going past Nomchong’s hardware store in the deserted main street of Braidwood when Ann said, ‘I spent my Christmases there when I was a girl. It hasn’t changed.’
‘At Nomchong’s?’
‘Rob Nomchong was Dad’s best friend. They used to go fishing together and repair old cars. The Nomchongs were my second family.’
‘What did your dad do?’
‘He was a motor mechanic.’
So she was a working-class country girl from Goulburn who spent her Christmas holidays with the Nomchong family in Braidwood!
‘You’ve got more of a history in this place than I could ever have.’
‘I knew everyone in Braidwood once.’
They left the town behind and crossed the creek. It was a dirt road the rest of the way. He slowed down.
Ann said, ‘I haven’t been down the mountain since I was thirteen.’
‘Why did you go down then?’
‘We picked peaches one year for pocket money.’
He sensed the innocence of her memories and felt a sudden empathy for her. When she said she had picked peaches for pocket money he was once again with the woman who had lain on the grass and looked up at the stars with him. This shift in her mood a softening from her distant manner at dinner in Canberra, the stifling effect of the suburb lifting from her spirit as she encountered the places where she had spent her school holidays. Sylvia’s perfect new white house on the hill with its dining setting and couches in the large empty room, the absence of any sign of the wear and tear or the confusion of living, the blankness of it had silenced them.
They entered the tunnel of the timber, the dense forests close against the splinter of road, and began at once the twisting descent of the mountain. She said, ‘That smell! If I went blind I’d know I was home by the smell of the bush. Here nothing has changed.’ She turned to him, excited by her discovery. ‘Thank you for bringing me. I was afraid you might object.’
He turned in at the road grid and Toby came bounding up the hill to meet them. The house and the yards and the barn looked romantic in the Rover’s lights, an isolated settlement deep in the valley, peaceful, old, bothering no one. A place to find peace and quiet, a place to think and work. That was just how it looked. The dream of a city dweller, a cottage in the country. He said, ‘It’s pretty rustic, I’m afraid.’
Ann said, ‘I can’t wait to see it in the daylight.’
The night was warm and still. He parked by the garden grid and dragged her suitcase out of the back of the Rover. They went together over to the house. Tip sneaked out from under the tanks and Ann crouched down and made a fuss of her.
‘My neighbour’s old bitch,’ he said. ‘She’s the other one’s mother. My neighbour died a while ago and she came home with me.’
They went into the kitchen. He said, ‘Would you like a cup of tea? I’ll need to light the stove to heat up the kettle.’
She stood looking around the kitchen. ‘You live here on your own?’ She sounded disbelieving. She turned and looked at him. ‘I’ve been trying to imagine what your house would look like. This is it! I’m here.’ She laughed. ‘I can do without tea, but I wouldn’t mind having a wash and cleaning my teeth.’
‘I clean my teeth and have a wash under the tank tap outside or down the creek. I’ll get a bowl for you from the barn if you’d rather. I take a bath in the creek. I’ll get you a towel.’
‘And what about the winter?’
‘A tin tub in front of the hearth here.’
They were both silent, standing looking at each other, suddenly awkward. She held his gaze steadily but didn’t speak. He said finally, ‘My room’s a bit of a mess. I wasn’t expecting you to be staying. I’ll make the bed while you do your teeth.’
He turned around and went down the passage and into his bedroom. He stood with his back against the door and steadied himself. His work clothes were lying anyhow on the floor. He gathered them up and whispered, ‘Ann is here with you!’ He stripped the bed back and remade it. He had no clean sheets to put on. The bed didn’t look too bad. He lit the lamp and left it on the box beside the bed. He went out onto the back verandah and fetched the stretcher and put it in his study and put a blanket on it. He didn’t know what to think.
He heard her coming down the passage. She went past his bedroom door to the verandah. ‘Lena didn’t take her piano? Is she coming back?’
‘Just to visit. I’ll get you a fresh towel.’ He went out to the pantry and found a towel and went back down the passage. She was in his study, standing at the desk looking at his books. He said, ‘You’re over here.’ She came out and went ahead of him into his bedroom. He handed the towel to her. ‘Will this be okay for you?’
The lamp was casting a warm coppery glow over the small room. ‘It looks lovely.’ She turned and smiled at him.
‘I’ll get your suitcase.’ He fetched her case and set it inside the door of the bedroom. She was sitting on the bed. She had taken her sandals off. She looked up at him and their eyes met. He held his breath for a second or two, waiting for her to say something. When she didn’t speak he said, ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it. Goodnight then, Ann.’ He went across the passage and into his study and slid the door closed behind him.