The Children's Bach

by Helen Garner

  ‘And make such a mess,’ said Athena. ‘I think of jumping off buildings.’

  ‘Jumping, do you?’ He was alarmed.

  ‘I don’t mean I want to die,’ said Athena. ‘I just get that feeling, when I stand on a high balcony, that I’d like to jump out into the air.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Do you ever think it might be true?’ said Athena.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hell, and all that.’

  He grabbed the back of her hair in a bunch and tugged at it. He looked upset. ‘No. No, I don’t.’ He kept his hand on her shoulder and then slipped it back into his pocket. ‘Will we go and walk round in Georges?’

  ‘I haven’t got any money,’ said Athena.

  ‘I can lend you some. They finally paid me.’

  ‘I’m not going to buy anything.’

  ‘Here. Just to hold. Fifty dollars to keep in your pocket till you get to the bank. So you won’t be bereft.’

  The note was new. Its surface was oily and it had a military smell, like calico. He went on ahead of her. ‘Ten minutes, at the corner.’

  She looked at some jeans, the kind Vicki wore that she had to lie on her back to zip up. She went to the bank and took out the money for the food shopping. On her way to the meeting place she planned what she would say to him when she gave him back his money. In a light voice she would say, ‘Here you are, my sweetheart, my darling, my treasure.’ She would get the tone just right. Her heart was beating. She got to the corner and stopped outside the bra shop. He was not there. The dry wind fluffed out her hair like koala’s ears.

  *

  Dexter was out when Elizabeth and Poppy came in through the back gate. Athena, sitting on the concrete step in the evening, did not think she could entertain them on her own without the screen of his noisy sociability. She had wasted half the day wandering in the city with Philip, it was late, and she should have been, she should be . . . But the girl was carrying a cello in a case.

  ‘We came to ask a favour,’ said Elizabeth. She pushed Poppy forward. ‘Go on. You ask.’

  ‘I have to go to my music lesson,’ said Poppy. ‘My father forgot. He went off in the car and I haven’t got any way of getting there.’

  ‘Do you want me to drive you?’ said Athena.

  They were embarrassed, having meant to ask Dexter.

  ‘It’s straight out the freeway,’ said Poppy.

  ‘She can show you the way,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘It’s my last one for the year,’ said Poppy. ‘It’s already paid for.’

  Athena got to her feet.

  ‘Do you want me to come?’ said Elizabeth.

  Everyone understood the meaning of this question.

  ‘Last summer,’ she said, ‘I went to the concert hall when Poppy played in the music camp orchestra. I took one look at those rows and rows of skinny legs and enormous Adidas runners going tap tap tap and I burst into tears.’

  ‘Elizabeth doesn’t like orchestras much,’ said Poppy. ‘She doesn’t like quite a few things.’

  ‘Opera.’

  ‘Cheese.’

  ‘Tracksuits.’

  They pantomimed themselves for her, struck dramatic poses and exaggerated their elocution. She watched them, and looked for the father in the child. He showed himself only fleetingly: the colour was wrong, the cheeks were rounder, but she saw his jawline and the secretiveness of the smile.

  ‘Hop in the car, Poppy,’ said Athena. ‘I’ll whip these sheets off the line before it gets dark.’

  The girl obeyed. She arranged the cello on the back seat and leaned forward to the dashboard so she could watch the two women approach the wire and unpeg the sheets. They faced each other, joined by the cloth, and raised their arms in unison, they shook the cloth and snapped it tight, they advanced and retreated until each sheet was a flat bundle in Athena’s arms. Poppy saw that they were speaking, with pauses, but she could not hear what they were saying.

  ‘Philip came to see me,’ said Athena.

  ‘To see you.’

  ‘A couple of times.’

  Elizabeth laughed with closed lips. ‘Take you for walks, did he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you like him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s always looking for new blood. Something new. A little thrill for that amusement park he calls his mind.’

  Their fingers met formally at the high corners of the sheet. Elizabeth’s relinquished, Athena’s accepted. As they folded, as they spoke, the light left the garden.

  The teacher opened the door. He had a red pencil between his teeth and his feet were bare.

  ‘The Herald’s on the kitchen table,’ he said, ‘if you want to wait out there.’

  Athena unfolded the paper. They went round the corner on to the flowery carpet and out of her sight. They left the door ajar.

  ‘What can you tell me about Mozart?’ said the teacher.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘He was a composer.’

  ‘Right. What else? How old was he when he gave his first concert?’

  ‘Six?’

  ‘About that. He was a bit crazy. Did you know that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yeah. He was a bit crazy. Too clever. Too bright. Have you practised?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘A bit. We’ll see about that. We’ll start with this.’

  ‘Oh. I didn’t know I was going to play that for you. But I’ll play it anyway.’

  ‘I don’t want any honkytonk, understand? I want ’em all smooth. Hold up that hand nicely. Bend that thumb. Away you go.’

  Athena opened the glass door and sat on the kitchen step with her feet on the gravel. The big back yard was dark, but women were talking in quiet voices, perhaps in the garage, or on the verandah of the house next door. Somewhere in the garden there was a large bush of daphne. Over there must be Essendon. A plane was coming down, too far away for her to hear.

  She was cold. She slid the door shut and went back to the table. Now the teacher was playing too. His vibrato was steady and confident. Poppy wavered, but kept going. She was game. He bellowed at her.

  ‘Scrub at it a bit more! Get a nice meaty tone! Go back to B. B, ya sausage! Not B flat! Sounds like you’re swinging a cat round by the tail. Don’t just throw in the towel! You gotta keep going!’

  ‘Where am I? I don’t know where I am!’

  ‘Strike a light. Look, Poppy. What does it say here? What’s written here? Dolce. What’s that mean? Sweetly. Not like a monster. Flat! You’re flat as a tack.’

  ‘It’s wrong. I’m playing it wrong.’

  ‘It’s riddled with mistakes, like a piece of cheese. It’s never all right. There’s always something wrong.’

  ‘Well what’s the use of playing, then?’

  ‘Hmmm. At the stage you’re at, there’s always something wrong. Later . . . that comes from experience. You must have some patience. Do you know what patience is?’

  ‘Yeah. Not being in a hurry. Waiting.’

  ‘That’s it. Take your time. Don’t get worried and upset. Take your time and work it out. Look at each individual trouble spot and analyse why it’s giving you trouble. See? There’s an explanation to it, isn’t there?

  Don’t think I’m not pleased with you. I am. Now we’ll play together. You do the bottom line, OK? Lightly, sweetly – two three four.’

  *

  Like many women of her age whose opinions, when they were freshly thought and expressed, had never received the attention they deserved, Mrs Fox had slid away into a habit of monologue, a stream of mild words which concealed the bulk of thought and knowledge as babbling water hides submerged boulders. She was the kind of private-minded, endlessly good-humoured woman whose sons, even in their twenties and in fact until they married, had brought home from other states suitcases full of dirty clothes for her to wash; the kind of woman who, when Doctor Fox, almost tiptoeing with reverence, put on his record of the
Goldberg Variations, could cheerfully whisper to the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth, working beside her at the sink, ‘Variations? They all sound the same to me!’ Arthur, who reminded her of the young Dexter in his garrulous social confidence, his unsinkable all-knowingness, loved to make up wondrous tales of her adventures.

  ‘Vicki,’ he said in the kitchen, ‘did you know that Iris used to be an interpreter in Germany during the war?’

  ‘Did she?’ said Vicki. Rapid mental arithmetic would have reassured her, had she been more certain of the dates of the second world war, that this could not be true: Iris was having children in Melbourne during the war.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Arthur. He curved his clever scissors in and out of a sheet of paper, cutting out helmets. ‘She was an interpreter for the Germans. She used to question people.’

  ‘Question people?’

  Arthur saw her face drop and went on smoothly, ‘There were no executions, though. They were all found to be farmers.’

  The blades opened and closed, crunched through the paper.

  ‘I might go out,’ said Vicki. ‘People’s parents never like me.’

  ‘My parents do,’ said Arthur.

  ‘Older parents, I meant,’ said Vicki.

  ‘They might wonder exactly what you’re doing here,’ said Arthur. ‘In our spare room.’

  ‘What do you think I’m doing here?’

  He bent his smiling face over his work. ‘Well – you have to live somewhere, don’t you.’

  ‘Don’t you like me living here?’

  He pulled the box of Derwents towards him and flipped back the lid. ‘I’m going through a period of self-conscience,’ he said. ‘I haven’t really thought about it.’

  They came in carrying things: a bunch of flowers, a tin of anzacs, a parcel in brown paper which Mrs Fox handed to Athena. She began to unwrap it. The sticky-tape popped.

  ‘It’s an iron,’ said Athena.

  She pulled the cardboard and the packing off it and took hold of the pale plastic handle. The cord was brown, flecked with blue, and was tightly wound in a rubber band.

  ‘We’ve already got an iron, haven’t we dear,’ said Dexter.

  ‘This is a good iron, though,’ said Athena. ‘Ours is old.’

  ‘I knew you had a lot of clothes to iron,’ said Mrs Fox. ‘I saw this in Myers. I was on my way through to the layby department and I saw it there and I thought I’ll get that for Athena, I know what it’s like when the shirts pile up, not to mention tablecloths and so on, so I bought it. There’s a guarantee card in the box, you should fill it out and send it back to them straight away, just in case there’s something wrong with it.’

  ‘Athena doesn’t do all that much ironing,’ said Dexter.

  Athena held the iron at arm’s length, raised it and lowered it as if to test its weight. ‘It’s a very good iron,’ she said.

  ‘I love to see the creases in their little pyjama pants,’ said Mrs Fox.

  Dexter took the iron. ‘It’s so light!’ he said. ‘How could you make things flat with that? Irons should be heavy.’

  The women looked at each other. Athena folded the brown paper and put it away in a drawer.

  ‘When I was at boarding school,’ said Dexter, ‘there was a boy called Robert, a miserable kid with no friends – spots, pimples, bad breath, hopeless at sport. One day it was his fifteenth birthday, and a parcel came for him from his parents. For once people were interested in him. We gathered round to watch him open his present. And in it there was a safety razor and a packet of blades.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Arthur.

  ‘It’s not meant to be funny, Arthur,’ said Mrs Fox.

  ‘Is there someone out in your back yard?’ said Doctor Fox. He was not able to sit still in a room, but must always be pacing about peering at things, riffling through bills on the shelf, staring for an unnecessarily long time at a postcard tacked to the wall. Now he was pressing his face against the window and squinting into the afternoon sun.

  ‘There is someone out there,’ he said. ‘Behind those bushes.’

  ‘Probably one of the Papantuano kids,’ said Dexter.

  ‘No. It’s a girl. Good lord. She’s half naked. She is naked. It’s a young savage.’

  ‘It’s Vicki,’ said Athena. ‘Sunbaking.’

  ‘Who’s Vicki?’ said Mrs Fox.

  ‘Remember Morty?’ said Dexter. ‘Her sister. She’s living with us. At the moment.’

  Doctor Fox came away from the window and sat down with his back to the piano. ‘ “This is the present Mrs Harris’’,’ he said with a naughty look at Athena. ‘ “My first wife is up there.’’ Who wrote that?’

  ‘James Thurber,’ said Dexter.

  Arthur squeezed in beside Doctor Fox on the piano bench. He turned up his face and said in a fond voice, ‘I love sitting next to you, Grandpa.’

  ‘Do you?’ said the old man. He was surprised.

  They all walked out on the summer afternoon. The men took Arthur to bowl and bat, deep in the park near the drinking fountain, but the women kept going, with Billy between them, as far as the big cemetery and in through the turnstile. Billy’s hands sweated in theirs. Inside the railings the world opened out. The horizon widened and dropped away, and the sky rose until there was nothing above them but dry air: they crept along a plateau that tilted slightly to the southeast, in which direction lay many suburbs and a low mountain, very far.

  Mrs Fox’s discourse ceased while she took account of this immensity of air, lowness of ground, distantness of landmarks. Then it began again, and wound on and on through the afternoon, stupefying in its pointlessness and yet as soothing, as voluptuous as the murmuring of a dressmaker, the warm-handed whisperer who kneels in contemplation before the hem, who pats and strokes, bunches and gathers, in whose presence nothing is required but perfect passivity.

  Cars were parked on the curving bitumen roads inside the walls. Their boots were open, and dark teenagers, obedient but blank-faced, trotted to and from the taps with plastic buckets of water, serving their parents who worked slowly and silently at the graves, sweeping, polishing, decorating, making ready.

  ‘Some of those graves haven’t even got anyone in them,’ said Athena.

  ‘You never know,’ said Mrs Fox. ‘You never know what’s going to happen.’

  They walked to tire the boy. He was quiet, and kept up easily, clumping along in his heavy shoes. From time to time he swung his head back and let out a whinny of laughter.

  They wandered for a long time. When they got back to the gate through which they had entered, it was chained and padlocked. The turnstile was high and crowned with barbed wire. The flower seller had closed her kiosk and gone home. The path was empty of cars. The bins were stuffed with paper and dry flower stalks.

  ‘You’d think they could at least ring a bell,’ said Mrs Fox. ‘Like they do at the Botanic Gardens.’

  ‘There are always a few railings missing,’ said Athena. ‘Let’s walk round the edge till we find one.’

  They set off at a brisk pace. They walked so smartly that the cast-iron railings rippled in the corner of their field of vision. Cyclists outside, free to pedal home for tea, flickered by like subliminal suggestions.

  ‘They must have mended the fences,’ said Athena.

  They passed nuns’ graves, hosts of flat grey slabs under cypress trees. Nut-like things had dropped from the trees’ bony branches, and lay in clusters where a slab had shifted and made a hollow. Other graves were quite abandoned; their headstones were weathered wordless, their slabs split and tilted as if cloven by lightning or from beneath by some minor, unpublicised resurrection. Insects hung in the floods of late sun that came striped through the endless fence. They could not get out. They walked fast and in silence, they panted, they dragged the boy. They hid their anxiety from each other because to panic would be ridiculous, surely they could squeeze out under the turnstile, they could beg the caretaker to unlock the gate for them, they could call out to a p
asser-by, give him their phone number, Dexter could come to save them. They hurried round the corner near the chapel and saw oh! the big gates still open! the caretaker pushing the first one to! the wonderful street outside! They broke into a run. Hey!

  After they had gone, Dexter stood at the kitchen window and peered between the potplants.

  ‘She’s brown all over,’ he said. ‘Come and look! She is a young savage.’

  Athena was not listening. She squinted at the page, her teeth were bared in the rictus of the sight-reader.

  ‘Athena! Look!’

  G octave, then up and down in thirds she went, taking no notice. He tramped over to the piano in his stockinged feet and stood behind her. Her straight back, her shoulders square with concentration, her ankles crossed under the bench, her whole posture drove him to distraction. Without taking his hands from his pockets he shot out his foot in its holed sock and thumped it on to the upper keys.

  *

  The edifice trembles.

  Athena stops eating, though she still buys food and prepares it. Her clothes hang off her, but her husband’s and her children’s are still clean and ready. She starts to walk by herself at night, she can hardly wait to be out of the house, they cannot seize her attention once the sun has set, her eyes will wander away to the open door, and Dexter knows he is not invited. She comes back after they have gone to sleep, and yet wakes before them. Her sexual life is solitary: she comes to visions of meadows full of flowers, white ones floating like a cloud above tangled green stalks, or to visions of great machines, or of galleries, endless, with high deep windows and velvet curtains and noble pieces of furniture, leather-trimmed, Florentine galleries along which her disembodied consciousness progresses to a stately pulse. She lies on dry grass in parks, she falls asleep for seconds and wakes thinking she is in her bed and that the wind on her face has come in through the open window. On breathless summer evenings, when men in white trousers loll in doorways, she goes alone to the Paradise, and to the throbbing of the strange music there, the tangos, stern, passionate, intellectual music, the waiter kisses her on the mouth and glides away. In some other stifling bar at midnight the Italians set down their cues and turn in mid-breath to the TV set high above the doorway: ‘Oh! ah!’ she cries with them, watching the Olympic skier flash, lime-green, alone and perfect, over the whiteness, somewhere on the other side of the world. She passes a lane in which a pale disc shimmers, a man’s face, her stomach oozes; he lunges, he takes hold of her, she smells his breath, she opens her mouth to scream and yes! she screams! It is not a woman’s dream where she stretches wide but cannot utter: she kicks him, her foot meets bone, she throws his arms back, she screams so loudly and so well that a car stops, doors fly open, people run shouting to her aid. She opens the back gate, can it be still the same summer night? and finds they have dragged their mattresses out into the garden for the heat and are sleeping under the dimming stars, heedless of dew, with sheets drawn over their heads against the mosquitoes. She chooses Arthur, finds him, fits herself to the hard beads of his spine, smells his stalky neck, hears from under the fig tree the tireless scraping of a cricket. The first train, a row of lit boxes, clatters empty over the Merri bridge. Arthur stirs, flings up one arm, shrugs her off. The early wind brings a branch crashing down off one of the elms along the creek: she hears it rustle and thump. The same wind moves in the hall and turns over a page of the telephone directory. She sits at Dexter’s table. An orange rests on his papers to prevent them from blowing away. Under the round beam of the planet lamp she mends with stickytape a torn dollar note. At dawn Dexter stumbles in and stands looking at her. She thinks, I can’t be bothered fucking if it’s going to be obscure. But she does, they do, and the familiarity of his breathing by her ear brings up a rush of violence in her like vomiting: she pushes at his face with her flat palm, seizes a handful of his hair and drags at it, beside herself; but their torsos continue to move smoothly, their habit imperturbable, and just as she comes she sees a coin of sun on the puffing bulge of the lace curtain and bursts out sobbing.