The Children's Bach

by Helen Garner

  Contents

  About the Author

  The Children’s Bach

  Acknowledgement

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  About the Author

  Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942, and has been writing and publishing since her first book, Monkey Grip, came out in 1977.

  ALSO BY HELEN GARNER FROM PENGUIN

  Monkey Grip

  Honour and Other People’s Children

  Postcards from Surfers

  For Alice and J-J, and for some very good friends of mine.

  This book is a work of fiction. Its characters do not exist outside these pages.

  Dexter found, in a magazine, a photograph of the poet Tennyson, his wife and their two sons walking in the garden of their house on the Isle of Wight. To the modern eye it is a shocking picture: they are all, with the exception of the great man himself, bundled up in such enormous, incapacitating garments. Eye-lines: Tennyson looks into the middle distance. His wife, holding his arm and standing very close to his side, gazes up into his face. One boy holds his father’s hand and looks up at him. The other boy holds his mother’s, and looks into the camera with a weak, rueful expression. Behind them, out of focus, twinkles the windy foliage of a great garden. Their shadows fall across the lawn: they have just taken a step. Tennyson’s hands are large square paws, held up awkwardly at stomach level. His wife’s face is gaunt and her eyes are set in deep sockets. It is a photo of a family. The wind puffs out the huge stiff curved sleeve of the woman’s dress, and brushes back off his forehead the long hair of the father’s boy who is turned towards the drama of his parents’ faces; though he is holding his father’s hand, he is separate from the group, and light shows between his tightly buttoned torso and his father’s leg.

  Dexter stuck this picture up on the kitchen wall, between the stove and the bathroom door. It is torn and stained, and coated with a sheen of splattered cooking grease. It has been there a long time. It is always peeling off, swinging sideways, dangling by one corner. But always, before it quite falls off the wall, someone saves it, someone sticks it back.

  *

  At night, when they had put the children to bed, Athena and Dexter walked. They were ruthless about going, and would barely even check that the boys were asleep before they set out. They gossiped and reported to each other the day’s residue.

  ‘See that house?’ said Dexter. ‘Outside there this morning, on my way to work, I unwisely engaged in a conversation with a senile know-all. I’m glad you think it’s funny.’

  Dexter walked with a bandy, rapid gait. They kept pace easily, not touching. They covered miles each night in the dark, sometimes heading east along the creek across the parklands to where it joined the Yarra River, sometimes north-west as far as the huge upturned saucer of Royal Park where the wild dogs in the zoo howled at the moon and monkeys gibbered behind the wall. Dexter pursed his lips and whistled a curly tune. He was an old-fashioned joyful whistler who loved merry trills, and as he approached the climax of the melody he stopped walking, turned to Athena and raised one crooked forefinger to alert her to his impending triumph.

  ‘And now,’ he announced at the crossroads outside a bank, ‘I shall sing the catalogue aria from Don Giovanni.’ He had once been told by an egalitarian friend of his father’s that he had a fine voice. He fancied himself a dramatic baritone in the Russian style, but could also turn out a creditable version, word-perfect, of ‘The Vicar of Bray’ or ‘Jerusalem’. Dexter wanted to live gloriously, and on the night walks he did, making families turn from their screens, trumpeting through the dreams of children, setting dogs to roar and scrabble behind tin fences.

  ‘You never sing!’ he cried, all aglow, to Athena.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said, but he had already struck up another chorus. She loved him. They loved each other. They were friends. They lived in a sparsely furnished house near the Merri Creek: its walls were cracking, its floors sloped and its doors hung loosely in their frames. There was a piano in the kitchen and during the day Athena would shut herself in there under the portrait of Dexter’s father and pick away at Bartok’s Mikrokosmos or the easiest of Bach’s Small Preludes. Preludes to what? Even under her ignorant fingers those simple chords rang like a shout of triumph, and she would run to stick her hot face out the window. There were days, though, when her approach to the music, under the portrait with its yearning, nineteenth century look, was so unrhythmic and lacking in melody that she was ashamed, as if she had defaced an altar, and she closed the piano and went out into the back yard with a broom. Over the back fence, nearer the creek, lived an old couple whom Dexter and Athena had never seen but whom they referred to as Mister and Missus Fuckin’. They drank, they smashed things, they hawked and swore and vomited, they cursed each other to hell and back.

  *

  How strange it is that in a city the size of Melbourne it is possible for two people who have lived almost as sister and brother for five years as students to move away from each other without even saying goodbye, to conduct the ordinary business of their lives within a couple of miles of each other’s daily rounds, and yet never to cross each other’s paths. To marry, to have children; to fail at one thing and to take up another, to drink and dance in public places, to buy food in supermarkets and petrol at service stations, to read of the same murders in the same newspapers, to shiver in the same cold mornings, and yet never to bump into each other. Eighteen, twenty years may pass! How strange!

  Had Dexter and Elizabeth thought of each other during this time? Of course they had, Dexter more than Elizabeth, not because of any imbalance of affection, but because Dexter was mad about the past. He believed in it, it sustained him, he used it to knit meaning into the mess of everything. He recited it in anecdotes told always in the same words. He even recalled in detail dreams that other people had had years before. Elizabeth disliked the past. It was full of embarrassment. She and Dexter had never been in love, but once she lay on his bed, in college, a whole Saturday afternoon waiting for him to come back because she wanted to fuck somebody and at the time there was no-one else. She lay there all hot and impatient for hours but he didn’t come back and he didn’t come back, and she got up and leaned out the narrow window, through which a warm wind was blowing, and she heard shouts from the university oval and realised he must be out there playing cricket. She got off the bed, straightened the blanket, and went back across the garden and through the gate to her own room in the next building. She was cross. And she never told him about it. The victories she scored against his voracious memory were small.

  *

  In her wallet Elizabeth had a photo. On a bare wooden verandah stood a two-handled tartan overnight bag. The bag looked stable; it was packed solid. The top zip was undone. Out of it, between the two curved handles, stuck a child’s head. The face looked straight at the camera, round and unsurprised. Its hair was tangled, its skin was dark, the whites of its eyes were bright white. On the back of the picture, in their mother’s loose, frightening hand, were the words: ‘Vicki: precious cargo’. Their mother had dropped her bundle, and died. What is possible between two sisters born twenty years apart? Is the elder one to be sister, or mother?

  Elizabeth was sitting up in bed at one o’clock in the morning doing her crochet and watching ‘Designing Women’ on TV. The telephone rang just as the dog was about to make its appearance carrying the husband’s shoe. Elizabeth heard the pips.

  ‘Vicki. Is anything wrong?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘What’s the time over there?’

  ‘Ten o’clock in the night.’

  ‘I can’t come over again,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I don’t know why you’re ringing me. The phone bill must be colossal. Have you been going
to school?’

  ‘Sort of. Not all that much.’

  Elizabeth kicked the cooling hot-water bottle off the end of the mattress. The top sheet was stolen, the bottom one paid for. They made a pair.

  ‘You swore you were old enough to look after yourself. I warned you. I told you I couldn’t keep on coming over. Do you know what that air fare costs?’

  ‘I don’t want you to come over,’ said Vicki. Her voice was dull. ‘I made a mistake. I want to come over there.’

  ‘To live?’

  ‘I’m only seventeen.’

  ‘Last time we had this discussion, seventeen was adult, remember?’

  The girl said nothing. The line hissed and sang. Their mother was dead and they were making a mess of things.

  *

  Philip did not turn up with the car. This did not surprise Elizabeth. She took the bus to the airport. Vicki’s plane was late.

  Elizabeth walked up and down on the shiny tiles. She did not like people to observe that she was being kept waiting, and at least one girl was smiling at her in that shy, dawning way which meant she had seen Elizabeth on TV; but there was no decent coffee to be had, and no civilised place to sit. She measured her pulse on a tin machine outside the chemist shop. The reading she got was so low that she thought the thing must be out of order. She strolled into the shop, stole a twenty-five dollar Dior lipstick and a cheap plastic-covered address book and tried again: the adrenalin rush of petty theft showed. The address book would do for Vicki, if she hadn’t missed the plane altogether. She transferred the stolen items from her sleeve to her bag and went into the cafeteria for a bottle of mineral water.

  A man was sitting with his back to her, just inside the row of plastic potplants which fenced off the cafeteria. She had to narrow herself and slide sideways to get past his inconveniently placed chair. Which of her senses recognised him first? She was close enough to smell his unwashed hair, to see the way his shirt collar stuck up stiffly round his ears, to hear the cheerful slurp of his mouth at the cup. She was right behind him, poised on her toes. Could it be? And if she spoke, would she be sorry afterwards?

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said.

  He turned his head. It was Dexter.

  Oh, her awful modern clothes, her hair spiked and in shock. He saw the fan of lines at the outer corner of her eye and his heart flipped like a fish. He pushed back his chair and stood up in a clumsy rush.

  ‘Morty,’ he whispered. ‘Morty, look. It’s me.’

  ‘I thought it might be,’ she said, ‘I thought it was.’ She heard the warmth go out of her voice and the dryness come in, and wanted to cry for something lost. Why isn’t he roaring? Why isn’t he making a fuss? Isn’t he glad to see me? Don’t I look all right? But we never used to hug. Why should we start now?

  ‘You look very – you look –’ He could not find a polite word, he was so full of feelings.

  ‘That’s the same coat,’ she said, stepping back and pointing. ‘The same smelly old khaki coat.’

  ‘My father’s here,’ said Dexter. ‘Look, Dad! It’s Morty!’

  Dexter’s father had a paper serviette tucked into his collar and a fork in one hand. He moved his hat off the extra chair and dithered with it. Beside him sat a small boy with pale eyes and a Prince Valiant haircut. Dexter was recovering, was beginning to prance about in his great brogues with his arms out in a curve. Elizabeth slid past him and into the seat.

  ‘I’ll go for some cake!’ shouted Dexter.

  Doctor Fox looked at Elizabeth as he chewed, and nodded and smiled. She must be nearly forty now, like Dex. Thank God they were never foolish enough to marry, though no doubt Dexter had poked her when they were students. He felt like laughing. She was quite plainly not the marrying kind. Children out of the question. He saw her wide open eyes, her nervous nostrils, her desire to impress, something fancy and successful about her, and yet he felt sure she was the kind of woman who’d throw round terms like theorthodox feminist position. He washed down the crumbs with a swig of coffee and waited for her to speak. He guessed what she would say. She did. ‘Isn’t Mrs Fox here?’

  How sociable. He remembered her at nineteen. She made him an omelette for lunch when his wife was out, a clumsy act of duty, and called him to come and eat it, but he was upstairs nutting out a score and neither answered nor came till the food was cold and flat. She glowered at him from the scullery. The young women liked his wife more than they did him.

  ‘No. My wife’s at home. And that’s where I’m going.’

  His cultivated vowels: mai waife. She longed to whip the serviette out of his collar.

  ‘Is that Dexter’s little boy?’

  Doctor Fox jumped. ‘Yes. One of them. This is William.’

  The child had vague eyes. Elizabeth, who was not good with small children, bent across the table and tried to get her face into his line of vision. The boy’s gaze drifted, but not towards her. It was like looking at him through water. A smile of blessedness warmed his features and was gone; a little knot of thought bulged between his brows and smoothed itself again. She could not get his attention.

  The old man cleared his throat. ‘I’m afraid Billy’s not quite . . .’

  Elizabeth sat up.

  ‘They didn’t realise for quite a . . . He never spoke. He does sing. His voice is very . . . Dexter and his wife thought for a while he was some sort of musical genius. They can be toilet-trained, taught to keep themselves clean . . .’

  Dexter came charging back. He had one arm above his head, holding a plate with cake on it. He plunged into the seat beside her. ‘Shithouse cheese cake,’ he roared. He reached across and wedged a piece of it into the little boy’s mouth.

  Doctor Fox would have got on the plane with the paper serviette still sprouting from his collar. Elizabeth whisked it out. He stood in front of her with his eyes closed like a child waiting to have its face wiped. She remembered a reference he had written for her when she went for her first job: ‘an intellect of quite a high order’. Now it seemed comical, even a compliment; but then she had wept over the reservation. She screwed up the serviette and stepped back.

  ‘I’ll be forty soon,’ she said.

  Doctor Fox opened his eyes and let out a peculiar cry. ‘Ah! Then you will be out of the fog. At forty you can no longer harm anyone, and no-one can harm you.’

  ‘What?’ she thought. ‘That can’t possibly be true.’ But it was exactly the kind of answer she had wanted.

  He laughed and pulled a long face at her, then turned to kiss the child goodbye, but the boy’s face was suffused with sudden bliss, and he flung open his arms as if the vision splendid had shimmered into view over his father’s shoulder. Elizabeth too recoiled, as we do in respect and fear before the ecstasy of someone tripping on acid, to whom we are nothing more substantial than a liquid blur of light.

  Elizabeth did not want to tell Dexter about her mother. Although the news was more than a year old, he would be so portentously and profoundly sorry for her that she would be embarrassed into making some smart crack, which would shock and grieve him and then he would rebuke her and she would not be able to prevent herself from blushing and hanging her head. She wanted to say, as well, ‘Don’t call me Morty. Nobody calls me that any more.’ But that would sound snotty and he would laugh at her.

  ‘Mum died,’ she said. ‘And don’t you dare feel sorry for me.’

  ‘She died.’ He did not stop walking, or even turn his head to look at her. He had the weird boy slung over his shoulder like a saddle bag. He held out his arm to her. ‘Take my arm, Morty,’ he said. ‘We’ll go together down. Who wrote that?’

  ‘Browning. “My Last Duchess.”’

  ‘Dear Morty,’ said Dexter.

  ‘Also,’ she said, ‘I think I am about to get stuck with Vicki.’

  He shook his head. He was still not looking at her. ‘Morty. Morty. I know what it means to be stuck with someone. You mustn’t think about it like that. It’ll only make you miserable.’

&n
bsp; They stopped at the gate lounge. The door opened.

  ‘Here she comes,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘Which one is she?’ said Dexter.

  The man walking behind Vicki was talking to his friend, he had a faint stammer, not much more than a hesitation. ‘ ’Mazing guy, Gaz. Always thinking about his mem, mem, member. There was something in his brain that just went sprong. He’d see a good looking chick dancing in front of the stage, he’d go down between sets and find her, and he’d be back five minutes later doing up his fly.’

  His story was bodyless. A mosquito might have been whining it next to her ear. The footsteps of the hastening passengers beat light and fast. Either the windows were tinted or Melbourne was already dark.

  The hostess at the open door showed her teeth. Vicki came out into the world. She saw the man beside Elizabeth and slowed down. That couldn’t be Philip. Philip couldn’t possibly look like that. Philip played in a band. She whipped off the rhinestone ear-rings and shoved them into her pocket.

  The freeway was dark. Vicki’s toes were so cold that they felt like rows of marbles inside her shoes. The strange boy was strapped into his car seat beside her. He mooed and murmured to himself. She stopped trying to listen to the conversation in the front, and stared out the window. Low down on the sky was a narrow band of apricot, all that was left of the daylight. Dexter threw back his head and laughed at something Elizabeth said. Vicki experienced the small prickle of power that comes to the one who rides in the back seat. She saw her captors as they would never see themselves: two silly heads of hair, two sets of shoulders, two unsuspecting napes. She hated them. She closed her eyes with hatred. Dexter saw her in the mirror and thought she had fallen asleep. Unresisted now, his tenderness for the whole world rushed to envelop her.

  *

  Athena flung in broken briquettes and clanged the door shut. The pot-belly stove began to roar, then settled into its long single note. She spread out the Herald on the kitchen table. In the sports section there was a picture of a footballer with his baby. She hastened to turn the page. Now every baby photo reminded her of the famous one of Azaria in its oval frame: the blurred form, pupa-like in swaddling, the wrinkled brow, the head turned sharply from the light, the fists and eyes squeezed shut. Athena kept her pointed scissors packed away, up high.