by Joan London
‘Do you work at Boans with Toni, er …?’
‘I’m in business. For myself.’ A small smile hovered on Cy’s lips. Somewhere, deep down, he was amused. Something was happening to the room, it felt smaller, stuffier, it could hardly contain his huge unsuitability.
‘What line of business would that be?’ Nig ventured.
‘Real estate.’
Down the hall the telephone rang and was instantly answered. Karen. Her fiancé Bevan always rang her at this time. I have never, Beryl was often heard to say, had a moment’s doubt about Bevan.
‘Dinner’s ready,’ Beryl said, looking hard at Toni, her eyes signalling. Get rid of him.
The two men nodded at one another, Cy bowed to Beryl and Toni saw him to the door. By the time she sat down in the dining room she knew she didn’t want to be there anymore.
When the university term started Cy picked her up in the Arts carpark. She hadn’t realised how much freedom university life would give her. Now she could meet up with him between lectures, at any time of the day. His real estate business didn’t seem to have set hours. It felt strange at first that she could come and go without having to lie or ask anyone’s permission. She still looked over her shoulder before she stepped into the Citroën.
One twilight he took her back to his apartment. It was in his part of the city, on top of an old shop on the corner of Fitzgerald Street and a road that ran along a park ringed by huge Moreton Bay fig trees. The shop had been turned into a travel agency called Park Lane Travel which his sisters ran but they had left for the day. ‘I bought this building for a song a few years ago,’ he said, as he led her past the counter to a staircase at the back of the room. At the top of the stairs was a door which he unlocked.
‘Nobody comes up here except my mother when I let her clean.’
‘No guests? Not even your sisters?’
He shook his head.
A large living room with long windows overlooked the trees in the park. He’d knocked down walls to modernise the place, he explained, he liked big spaces. The walls were painted white, there was a leather and chrome couch, a glass coffee table, polished wooden floors. She’d never been in a room like this before, and she understood at once that it was something new, contemporary.
‘I really like this,’ she said.
She sensed that he was keeping an eye on her reaction, standing with his arms folded. Here he was different, private, a little shy. This was a big step for him. He was letting her in.
The bedroom was bare, apart from a high, white-covered bed under a skylight. He showed her how the skylight could be opened or closed by pressing a button in the bedside table. There was a tiny spotless kitchen in a glassed-in back porch, a toy kitchen because he never ate a meal at home.
She liked best the wooden platform built out from the kitchen, right into the arms of a giant old pepper tree. You could sit out there amongst the trailing leaves and spy on Fitzgerald Street and no one would know you were there.
‘Kids would love it out here,’ she said.
‘No kids,’ he said promptly.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I’ve taken steps. I don’t want to have ’em.’
‘Why not?’
He shrugged. ‘I never want to do what my father did to me.’
‘Why would you?’
‘Violence runs in families.’
She was silent.
‘Just one less thing to worry about,’ he said, placing his hand affectionately behind her neck as he ushered her towards the bed. Lying back she could see the first star through the open skylight. He sat on the side of the bed and took his boots off at last. Then his watch and heavy ring. His cufflinks. He smiled thoughtfully at her and started to unbutton his shirt. He took his time. Like his flat, like everything he did, he was clean, elegant, decisive.
Later in The Riviera Cy made a great show of shaking hands with everyone in the room, like a bridegroom, Toni caught herself thinking. He was in a playful mood. He sent Pino to the jukebox, and sat listening to the strains of Wilson Pickett’s ‘I’ll Be There’, tapping with his hand on her thigh under the bar. She sat close to him, peaceful, aching all over. Pino gave him a message in front of her. Something had been decided and everybody seemed to know it. She was part of the team.
She started to spend more and more time with him, whole days if she had no lectures, in the apartment, or in Park Lane while Cy did business in a small backroom office. His sister Felice was always in the travel agency, a short, lively girl in her early twenties, quick and light on her platform heels, with a constant trill-like laugh. Her skirts were just above the knee (her mother wouldn’t let her go higher), her dark hair was back-combed, her eyes ringed with white and black like a possum, but fashion couldn’t disguise her good nature, or the friendliness of her gaze. She was obedient to Cy as if he were her father.
She treated Toni like a sister straight away. We are in this together, her laugh, her batting, clotted lashes and glowing black eyes seemed to say. They made strong black coffee in a fluted aluminium coffeepot on a hot plate – the cafetière, Felice called it, no Nescafé for this family – and ate pastries from the Lebanese cafe. Later in the morning the older, quieter sister Sabine came in. Sabine had domestic responsibilities, she was married to a Mauritian man in the building trade, very traditionnel, Felice said, laughing.
Upstairs Toni spread out her books on the coffee table, started to make notes for an essay, crept into the warm bed beneath the skylight, slept and slept. Her double life was exhausting.
She was always home for dinner, but Beryl was suspicious.
‘Do you still see that chap …?’
‘Sometimes we have coffee.’ One of Beryl’s friends’ kids at uni might have seen her getting into the Citröen.
‘What nationality is he?’ Her face was screwed up, as if there was bad smell around the subject.
‘His father was Australian. His mother is Mauritian French.’
‘Daddy picked up some information about him in the city. Apparently he’s a pretty shady customer. Some sort of racketeer.’
Toni started to clear the table.
‘Lucky for you I’ve got my hands full right now.’ Preparations for Karen’s wedding filled every hour of Beryl’s life. Her voice was high-pitched with tension. Nig was a charming man, everybody liked him, but his job had never amounted to much. As he said, and Beryl quoted to her friends, you can’t predict the country sector. It was a struggle keeping up appearances. ‘We will deal with this after the wedding,’ Beryl told Toni.
‘Come and live with me,’ Cy said.
‘I can’t just leave.’ For Beryl it would be as if the earth had opened up and swallowed her daughter in tongues of fire.
On the other hand she hated the idea of Cy thinking she was a coward.
‘That’s all you can do. Leave and don’t look back.’
He knew this was the only course of action. He had no illusions about the wiles of the middle classes. Every group strives to keep its own level. The question really was, how long till she ran back?
‘What about my degree?’
‘You can still go to lectures.’
‘My parents would send the police after me.’
‘They can’t. Not after you’re eighteen.’
‘They’d die if I lived in sin. They’d see it as social ruin.’
‘Then we will be married.’
On the night of Karen’s wedding, after the speeches and the bouquet throwing, after the bride and groom had driven off to the rattle of bumper cans, Toni slipped out of the reception in the Bowling Club and ran in soft rain, her yellow crepe bridesmaid’s dress clinging to her legs, down the street to the waiting Citröen. The car was filled with the fragrance of the frangipani blossoms stuck in her damp, lacquered hair. Cy Fisher’s eyes shone as he looked at her. He was enjoying himself.
They drove to her parents’ house nearby where she had a suitcase packed and hidden beneath her bed. She also
had a letter ready which she had written at Cy’s flat. In the letter she said that she wanted to be independent. She was going to study part-time and work in a travel agency. Please don’t worry about me, she wrote, I will be in touch. In an earlier draft she had written ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Never apologise,’ Cy said, ‘for something you must do.’ In the next draft she wrote: ‘Please don’t be hurt.’
‘What’s the point?’ said Cy. ‘Of course they’ll be hurt. But they’ll get over it.’
She didn’t turn the lights on in case the neighbours thought a thief was after the wedding presents. Moving through the dark house, clumsy with panic, she kept bumping into chairs and doors, as if they were trying to hold her back. She’s Leaving Home … It’s the times, she told herself, it’s happening everywhere. Did she want a future like Karen’s?
She couldn’t change her mind, Cy was waiting for her. As she stood at the kitchen table, it was suddenly clear to her that it was he who had made all this happen, step by step as if according to a plan. She went to peer through the dining-room curtains at the long black silhouette of the car and his profile in the driving seat, not moving. He would be hard to get away from. Whose thought was that? Hers or Beryl’s?
She went back to the kitchen, propped her letter on the table and left.
A certain light rain – at night, in summer – would always disturb her, make her feel sad, even when she’d forgotten the reason why.
Park Lane Travel was only a few blocks away from Arlene’s – Toni browsed occasionally amongst Arlene’s creations with Felice and Sabine – but in those years she and Jacob never caught sight of one another on Fitzgerald Street, nor at university. Jacob mostly went to evening classes after college. Toni went to lectures in the day. She didn’t make friends or join in student activities. Sometimes, shopping in the city, she heard the drum beats and chants of an anti-war rally, like a dream of another life. She watched them march past and never noticed Jacob in their ranks. She felt vaguely disconcerted, left out, as if she hadn’t been invited to a fashionable party. They were all around her age, and they were having the time of their lives. It must be fun to believe in something together and shout your head off about it in the street. But standing there on the footpath, a young housewife with parcels and a manicure and a whole intricate set of new relationships she had to sustain, she knew it wouldn’t make anything change. Vietnam was never discussed in her world, nor politics, nor belief of any kind. That was not how the real world worked.
When Jacob was about to graduate from teachers’ college a girl called Nathalie Maguire died because of him. Not out of passion – he and Nathalie had never been more than classmates all through their school years, and then for three more years at college. The Maguires lived a few streets away from Arlene’s, and Nathalie often gave Jacob a lift to or from college or social events. She drove an old white Cortina that used to be her brother’s. Like all the Maguire tribe, she was large-limbed, outspoken, freckled, with a mass of wiry brown hair. Their mother used to be a schoolteacher and their father was a union man on the railways. She died instantly one night when the Cortina was hit by a runaway semi-trailer soon after she’d dropped Jacob home from a party. The whole district was stunned by the news. Everybody knew Nathalie, she babysat for neighbours and coached tennis and had been a popular head girl. Kitty was in assembly at the high school when the news was announced, and a lot of the students started crying. The truck’s brakes had failed just as it came to the intersection. It was all to do with split-second timing, Kitty said when she came home. Nathalie had incredible bad luck.
And then it hit Jacob. He had caused her to be at that intersection at that particular moment. He had kept Nathalie waiting for him at that party, even started up another conversation after he’d agreed to leave with her, until she came up to him in her straightforward way and said: ‘Jacob, come or stay, but I’m leaving now.’ After which he cut short his farewells and they left.
A minute – half a minute – earlier and she would have missed the truck.
He broke out in a sweat all over his body. The Tolstoy factor again, only this time it had been fatal, not to him, but because of him. He went into his room and rolled around on his bed, groaning under his breath. What was this evil fit of perversity that took him over from time to time, paralysing his will, casting him into hell? What angel of destruction had whispered in his ear?
Darkness descended on him from the moment he opened his eyes in the morning and for days he hardly left his room. He longed to die.
He forced himself to catch the train with Beech and Kitty to the funeral at Karrakatta. There were her parents, the noble lion-maned Maguires, grown old and bent overnight, and her ashen-faced siblings, their arms around the little freckled brother who couldn’t stop crying. For the first time in his life Jacob heard the hollow tramp of footsteps marching behind a coffin.
He forced himself to concentrate on the Reverend Beecham’s slow English voice droning the words of the service. It was all about sin and punishment. He hadn’t known that Christianity was so punitive, though Beech had warned him. (Guilt! Guilt! And More Guilt! was how Beech described it.) For when thou art angry all our days are gone: we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told. It was grim, beautiful stuff, spot-on for his frame of mind. But what had Nathalie, that good, kind girl, done to deserve this? Why had God cut her down like a flower? And how did all this retribution stuff make the Maguires feel? In the midst of life we are in death … Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts. Forgive me, Jacob prayed, for the first time in his life. The school choir sang ‘Morning has Broken’ and even Beech cried. Jacob couldn’t allow himself that relief, nor could he line up to shake the family’s hands.
‘Your breath’s horrific,’ Kitty muttered, squeezing a PK into his palm. His inner putrefaction had begun to seep out through his pores.
Nobody blamed him. Nobody knew that he had kept Nathalie waiting. But it was clear he would have to do penance, he would have to pay for this. He wondered if he should confess to the Maguires. Then at least they would have a reason, a cause for why their daughter was at that intersection at that time. They would have someone to blame. The truck driver would have to stand trial but he, Jacob, was the true culprit. Surely it was the least he could do. He made a numbered list, for and against telling them. What he had done wouldn’t, he supposed, put him in jail, though punishment would be a relief. He wished he had a Great Inquisitor to point the finger at him. Or a priest to confess to. At least a wise person he could talk it over with. He couldn’t tell Beech, who would seize on his guilt as an existential proposition and chew it over like a dog with a bone. Besides, Beech could never be trusted to be discreet.
Beech was surprised at Jacob’s grief, even faintly admiring. Had Jacob been in love with Nathalie? he wanted to know.
Jacob realised that his storm of guilt had obscured Nathalie, the girl whose living presence he had taken for granted for most of his life. He couldn’t bear to think of her. His sorrow was all for himself.
Beech was too preoccupied to pursue Jacob on the matter. He was saving every cent to go overseas, partying furiously, drinking other people’s booze and smoking their dope. The Last Days, he called them, in this war-mongering cultural desert. He’d booked a cheap passage on a Russian ship to Singapore. From there he was going to make his way overland to London, where he’d his sights set on a job with Oz magazine.
Jacob was waiting for his first posting, probably to a country school. After he’d paid off his bond to teachers’ college, the plan was that he would join Beech in London, for the sophisticated life they’d always dreamt of, at the centre of the world. The nature of this life had changed over the years, from being vaguely French New Wave – writing novels in cafes, pursuing elfin girls on motor scooters through narrow streets – to something much more radical, carnivalesque, a movement so seismic it was hard to define.
But now Jacob would have settled for the simple happines
s of a clear conscience. For life not in the future but as it was before. He knew he was shut out forever from the radiant world. He lacked the energy, creativity, self-belief it required. Guilt ran like poison through his veins, undermined his every thought or word. He felt sick most of the time. His face in the mirror, heavy-jawed, dull-eyed, the hopeless droop of his mouth, repelled him. Apart from his holiday job with Vito Capelli, selling olives and cheese to old ladies dressed in black, he avoided all social activity. He lay stiffly on his bed with the curtains drawn, and thought of Nathalie in her coffin. Music or reading failed to distract him. Everything led back to the same point. Obliteration. Futility. The tramp of hollow footsteps echoed in his ears.
Even Arlene remarked that he looked peaky, suggested a haircut and a run on the beach.
One hot Saturday night some instinct propelled him up from his bed. He felt he might stop breathing if he stayed another minute in his room. He went into the kitchen where Kitty was reading at the table, eating baked beans on toast. It was as if he were watching everything from a great distance. Kitty has no social life, he thought. She eats because she is depressed.
‘You look terrible,’ Kitty said. ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight.’
He filled a glass of water at the sink and stood drinking. Just the two of them again, as always. They never spoke unless she was telling him off. She was his harshest critic. It occurred to him he should use this. She wouldn’t let him off the hook.
He sat down at the table and laid his case before her. He asked her whether she thought he should tell the Maguires.
Kitty listened, munching on her toast. Jacob waited as she considered her verdict, brushing the crumbs from her mouth.
‘What if,’ she said at last, ‘it was, sort of, her fate? Maybe the good do die young, like everybody said at the funeral. Maybe it was her fate to be going home with you. Like you were part of the plan.’
‘Whose plan?’ He’d had no idea that Kitty had a metaphysical bent.
