by Joan London
Grete stared at him. ‘Why would he do that?’
He shrugged. ‘To start a new life.’ Too hard to explain something so shadowy, based on the length of a verandah between his parents in an old photograph. On the shadowiness of his own memory.
Two men came, noisy, enormous, the house was filled with deep voices, heavy treads, he was picked up and thrown in the air, but by whom? His father or Uncle Bob? In his memory it happened only once and was as exciting as Christmas. He didn’t want to go to bed but Arlene shut the door. She never showed any grief or nostalgia for Anton. Far too hard to explain Arlene.
‘I can’t believe that.’ Grete shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t have walked out on you. He was – how can I explain? – he was like his father, a sensitive boy.’
‘Do I look like him?’ More than once in the streets of Amsterdam he’d passed an older man and saw, in his build and colouring and features, his own future.
‘Perhaps in your expression …’
‘What?’ He had to persist. This was his last, his only chance.
‘The look in your eyes.’
For years he and Grete exchanged Christmas cards. Then one year hers stopped coming.
To start a new life. To jump ship. The moment of decision. The plunge into cold waters. Because you had no choice, you couldn’t stay any longer, you were dying. Then the new shore, starting again, knowing there was no going back. Did you sometimes wake up thinking you were in your old bed? Did you carry a shadow-life with you, the smell of a hot country twilight, your wife’s face when she was sad, your little children wanting to play with you and not go to bed?
As soon as he opened the door by the fishpond his thoughts turned to Cecile. He stepped down into the conversation pit and everything about the room spoke so strongly of her that it was like a face with an expression. Even though he knew she was going straight to work from the cafe, he moved swiftly, compulsively through the house, checking out the food in the fridge, the cups on the sink, the CDs that had been played. He saw what he was doing, but he couldn’t stop himself. He was always waiting for her. He never knew when she’d be home. Sometimes in the early morning he woke to hear the toilet flushing, the discreet rush of the shower. Her footsteps were too light to hear. If he didn’t leap out of bed at once, all he’d find would be a warm teapot, an open newspaper, a load of clothes swirling in the washing machine.
He didn’t check her bedroom. Since the night she’d rescued him from the balcony, he’d never entered her bedroom or opened her laptop again.
He went to the bathroom (her towel was dry) and looked in the mirror as he washed his hands. Why had this happened to him now, at the end of his life, just as his jaw was sagging, his gut loosening, his hands turning red and knobbly? Just as he really knew how to love. Toni and the children had taught him.
Meanwhile Beech, arch-seducer, had, according to occasional brief despatches, retired from the field. After years of living the expat life in different cities in Asia, drink, drugs and women, he had caught malaria and nearly died. Now he lived at a different pace. He was married to a wealthy Thai business-woman and had three children. He drove them to school and helped out in the business. ‘It’s a family tradition,’ he wrote. ‘Asia suits us. It’s anti-romantic, anti-guilt.’ A photo fluttered out from his last letter, of three bright-eyed little Eurasian kids. On the back of the photo Beech had written ‘The Golden Birdcage’.
He hated this prowling obsession that had taken him over, like an old man in a boarding house. He wondered if their daily, unspoken intimacy was driving him mad. It recalled the climate of his mother’s house, the haunting presences, the scents and voices, the women in the lounge room taking off and putting on their clothes. He fell in love from afar, over and over again. That was the real story of Glad Rags. The making of a voyeur. The dressmaker’s son going mad.
He marched downstairs again and stood in the empty kitchen. Enough of this, he was hungry, soon he would go out and buy some noodles, double-serve. Meanwhile he poured himself a glass of wine. He stood drinking, staring into the dark living room lit only by the spotlight over the fishpond. His mood grew sombre. He felt the shadow of Maya’s boss creeping back. Meeting Tod seemed to make Maynard Flynn all too credible. He could almost feel Maya’s fingers tapping a reminder on his arm. As if in some way this stubborn absence of hers was telling them something. What?
He picked up the phone and once again tried M&D Flynn’s number.
After Glad Rags, he didn’t write anymore. He had a feeling of emptiness that stretched into the plains around him. There were times of a free-ranging hunger, a sense of missing out. It was probably only the extremely limited field in Warton that had restricted his passions over the years, shallow crushes in comparison with this. There was Lisa, the Norwegian physiotherapist in Tumbring with the severe, polished planes to her face that made him fumble for similes with ice floes, fjords, northern light. He emerged from her graceful but efficient ministrations into the waiting room and there was Forbes Carpenter grinning at him. ‘You too?’ said Forbes. ‘A lot of guys are having back problems right now.’ It wasn’t long before Lisa’s enormous Latvian husband got a transfer and whisked her away.
Once when the kids were small, he nearly stayed the night at an English and drama teachers’ conference in Perth with a Canadian exchange teacher, Hilary Mosel, who had spent a term in Warton. She was in her mid-thirties, short and dark and buxom, passionate about her work. The whole school fell in love with her. Warton in spring erupted around him, magpies carolled in gleaming trees, the wattles were heavy with blossom. As soon as he walked out the door in the morning, he started to whistle. Each class Hilary took erupted into laughter, shouts, crashes, thumps, songs. He was aware of exactly where she was at any given time around the school. After a while they could hardly meet each others’ eyes. She was a serious woman in spite of her bright jokiness, honest about her emotions. For years they talked in Warton about the play Hilary’s students wrote and performed on her last day there.
But then at the conference he found himself drawing back. Away from her work, there was something anxious and intense about Hilary that was like a warning to him. She reminded him of Kitty! Why hadn’t he seen this before? Her professionalism covered a yawning loneliness, a lack of self-esteem. He was overcome by a shameful archaic terror of being swallowed up. One more step and he would feel responsible for her forever.
He still remembered the look in her eyes when he said he had to leave, made some excuse and drove home recklessly through the night, half-hoping he’d be hit by a kangaroo.
He decided to ring Magnus.
‘How are you, matey?’ Strange the comfort that the sound of your child’s voice could give.
‘Good. Kitty made soup out of beetroots for lunch. It’s Russian.’
‘Bortsch.’
‘Yeah, that’s what Kitty called it. Tonight we’re having duck cooked in a Chinese way.’
‘I didn’t know you could buy ducks in Warton.’
‘Carlos knows someone who raises them.’
‘How is Carlos these days?’
‘Good. He’s coming to dinner. Right now he’s giving Kitty a driving lesson at the lake.’
‘Sounds like you’re all having a great time.’ Jacob was surprised to feel a little pang. ‘Heard from Maya?’
‘No.’ Magnus hesitated. ‘Kitty answered the phone the other night and she heard beeps but then the person didn’t speak.’
‘Was it Maya, d’you think?’
‘Kitty could hear cars, like when Maya calls. Now I always answer the phone.’
They both went silent.
‘How’s Winnie?’
‘Getting fat. Kitty gives her snacks all the time. She follows Kitty everywhere.’
Occasionally he and Magnus forgot themselves, Jacob as life-coach, Magnus as son always fending off the threat of advice, and for a few minutes they talked freely in a way they couldn’t quite do with anyone else, which might be the poor fo
rm of the Dockers, the politics of the Olympics or their deepest feelings about a piece of music or a film. Magnus’s revelations, the maturity of his insights, always surprised him. They never spoke of school: neither of his kids had ever allowed him to discuss their school work with them.
He was just about ready, Jacob thought, as soon as Magnus finished school, to drop the parental role altogether, and reveal himself, his doubts, his truth, his past.
Along with his fear that he was going to die, or almost as bad, become a tracksuited, impotent senior citizen, was the fear of dying without ever having been able to give expression to what it meant to live.
It had got to the point when, if he woke at night, he knew at once whether or not she was in the house. Subliminal signals, the click of a switch, a faint luminescence beneath his door, seeped their way into his dark room and alerted his sleeping consciousness. He must be waiting for her even in his dreams.
At once, without thinking, he pulled on his jeans and went out towards the light below the stairs. In spite of his resolutions, he was flooded with happiness as he looked down on her, the slight black-clad figure at the desk, sitting very still, intent on something on her screen.
‘I can’t sleep,’ he said as she looked up at him, though he was instantly aware that he must be the image of someone just woken, blinking and puffy-faced. ‘Still at work?’ he said throatily, descending. ‘Aren’t you tired?’
She turned back to the screen, but not before he noticed that her eyes and cheeks were wet.
‘I never finished this piece on Clarice.’ Her voice was very flat and quiet. There was no music playing a soundtrack for her. ‘I had an email from her tonight.’
‘She wants it soon?’
‘She doesn’t want it at all. She doesn’t want anything more to do with me.’ To his horror he saw a small tear roll over her cheekbone. He stood behind her, clenching his hands.
‘A cup of tea? I’m making one for myself.’ As quietly as he could he filled the kettle, sprinkled the green leaves into the black pot in the way she’d taught him, all the time alert to her every move. Years in a pastoral role had taught him to approach on the oblique. He stirred a loaded teaspoon of honey into her cup, the way she sometimes liked it, and put it on her desk. He pulled a chair up, not too close, for himself. She was slightly shaking.
‘Are you cold?’
‘No. It’s shock.’
He went to turn up the heating. Cecile sipped her tea and after a while she sat back and looked at him.
‘How’s the script going for The Prodigal?’
‘Without Clarice, it isn’t going.’
‘How come?’
‘I began to see I had to go back to the roots of it all. To the personal. My true passion is the story of my mother, an unmarried Chinese girl, a double outcast in her own society. Which of course leads to the story of Clarice and me. I planned to use everything to tell this story, interviews and photos, archival footage from the KL anti-Chinese riots in 1969.’
‘How does it start?’
‘With a return to the orphanage. My mother left me there when I was born. She had no choice. I remember a beautiful young woman who used to visit me sometimes before I was adopted, and of course it would have been my mother. And I loved her, I remember loving her with a passion. Her name was Phyllis Wong. I think my adoptive parents paid her money to let me go. About the same time that I came to Australia, she bought a little hairdressing business. She would have thought it was for the best, for me. A few years later Clarice was born. But this time she was married and after her husband left, there was Auntie to look after Clarice while she worked. In a way, Clarice was raised on the money paid for me.’
‘How did you meet Clarice?’
‘When I came to Melbourne I started to try to find my mother. I went to KL and found out she had died three years before, and that I had a half-sister. We met. Clarice’s English wasn’t good, but she told me she lived with an old aunt of her father’s and worked in a department store to support them. She’d left school young and wanted to work as a model. She had photographs of herself. Last year I finally persuaded her to fly out here and live with me. I enrolled her in an English course and a drawing course and promised her that next year she could try out for fashion design. I sent money to KL for Auntie.’
Cecile sat with her shoulders hunched, her hands clasped in her lap, like a little old lady herself. ‘But she hated it here! She was so homesick. She hated the English classes and the weather and she thought the people were rude. She missed Auntie and felt guilty for leaving her. She missed her friends and their outings. I couldn’t make her happy. In fact she was angry with me. I saw her getting thinner and paler like a dying plant. I told her of all the opportunities for her here. I told her that I couldn’t bear to live without her. She was brutally honest and told me that I’d done to her what had been done to me. For selfish reasons. I put her on the plane home. A few weeks ago I went to visit her, as you know. I thought we were building our relationship. I felt hope. Then tonight, this email.’
She sat shivering, not looking at him.
‘You talk of her as if she is a lover,’ Jacob said.
‘Because I do love her! Apart from that tiny memory of my mother, I’ve never loved anyone before. From the moment I met Clarice I loved everything about her. I feel I understand her, that no one else sees her as I do. Isn’t that how a lover feels?’
‘Yes.’ Jacob stood up and went to the cocktail cabinet. Over the weeks he’d familiarised himself with its contents and now he poured them each a shot of ancient saki into little green porcelain cups and put one down on the desk in front of her. He wanted to put his arms around her and brush her hair with his lips. He could feel her small sad body tucked into his. He sat down again.
‘You’re good at looking after people, Jacob.’
‘Am I? Years of living in a family.’
‘I have friends whom I understand, like Dieter, but I don’t have intimate attachments. I’ve tried, but I lose concentration.’
Was she warning him off? If so, he was almost flattered.
‘When I visited Clarice and Auntie in their little house, and saw how close they were, I envied them. But they don’t want me. Clarice has made that very clear. If it was just about the film, I’d gladly give it up. She said some pretty nasty things. She told me to leave her alone, called me a lesbo – she must have picked that up in Australia.’
Jacob sat back, sipping his saki. He was suddenly on safer territory. Saving a woman again.
‘In my experience – as a teacher – some young women, especially pretty ones who want to be models, are extremely interested in celebrity, in the lucky break, in being noticed and given their chance.’ He wondered if it would be obvious to her that he had peeked at Clarice’s poses and fantasies on her computer.
‘If I were you,’ he went on, ‘I’d mention contracts, agents, publicity, Cannes and Venice, Sundance, LA … It’s a gamble of course, but I’d hint you had a beautiful young actress who was begging to play the half-sister.’
Cecile sat very still. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
‘All this is not, after all, outside the realm of possibility. It may very well come to pass. Isn’t the Prodigal story about redemption? Doesn’t it have a happy ending?’
16
The Vision on the Highway
She was growing accustomed to a simple, regimented life. She would have done quite well in the army. Five o’clock reveille. Tidy barracks. Assemble on parade ground. The ashram regime, so quiet, so calm, was no less authoritarian. Life arranged around fixed points. Tasks. Practice. The covert pleasure in small things: meals, walking alone. But the strict rhythm of the days was doing its work. She was no longer missing Maya or anyone. The outside world seemed very far away.
Each of the evening talks had a title. The Four Noble Truths. The Six Perfections. The Seven Point Mind Training. The Eight Steps to Happiness. Buddhists were very numerical. She’d become
fond of the young Venerable, his black horn-rims, his shawl thrown casually across his broad shoulders. His Aussie voice intoning Tibetan words was rather pleasing, like the promise of some cross-cultural fusion.
But when the old Tibetan Geshe, with his small round head, bright eyes, and crooked, haunting smile arrived to address them one evening, his words opened up vistas of peace, like long avenues in a garden. Happiness was very simple, he said, a transformation in the mind. She felt dazed, on the verge of making that transformation. Afterwards, crossing the melancholy courtyard back to her room, it was hard to remember exactly what was said. All the lights in the house went out. The moon was very high, a moving glow behind the clouds. She watched it, lying awake in her little cell.
To be happy, the Geshe said, you have to break attachment to life. I know, she thought, lying in her little moonlit cell, I’ve always known what that meant. It was how she felt looking out her bedroom window at the cold lonely beauty of the paddock running down to the creek. Pushing her babies along bumpy country roads, she had heard the wind run through the trees like a parallel energy rushing past her. It was the strange, intense satisfaction of observing something quite ordinary, grass along a wire fence, the weeds around the broken-paned projection booth, the gravel back lane behind the shops on Cannon Street with their clusters of rusting iron sheds. As if for a moment a light came on inside the scene. And when it happened she was reminded that these little fits had been part of her since childhood. Then she forgot them again.
For many years she had forgotten the moment on the highway, when she was a schoolgirl waiting for a bus, just before a storm. Yet now it seemed to her that all the other experiences were mere precursors to or aftershocks from this, the defining moment. What had happened? First the silence, the stillness, the unhooking of the everyday. Then came the will-less spaciousness of it, the calm understanding that everything was in its place.
