by David Malouf
She shook her wrist and the chain clanked against the gallery rail, as leaning forward she allowed her eye, which was sharp, to sweep the crowded amphitheatre.
Eleanor had just come in, high up in the stalls. Tall, in an emerald cloak, she was waiting for the people in her row to get up and let her through.
How like her! There was stacks of room up there, not like these gallery boxes—stacks of it! But Eleanor continued to stand, and when at last the whole row had risen to its feet, the silly woman, holding her cloak about her, moved through, gracefully inclining her head and smiling and thanking people. Settled at last, with the cloak thrown back for later, when the air-conditioning would turn the place into an icebox, she looked about; then cast her gaze upwards to the gallery and waved.
Clay immediately relented. Oh God, she told herself, I'm such a bitch. It was touching really, Eleanor's little wave—a real leap in the dark. Too vain to wear glasses, and half-blind by habit (as who wouldn't be after forty years with the dreaded doctor) she could barely see her face in the glass.
Clay produced in response one of her brisk salutes, a real one made by bringing two fingers of her right hand up to the temple and flicking them sharply away. It was her trade-mark; from the days when she had modelled little suits of a military cut for Molyneux in Paris and was considered a sport. It too was a leap in the dark since Eleanor couldn't see it. But she made the gesture just the same—as an acknowledgement to herself of the old, the unkillable Clay McHugh, since there was, God knows, so little left of her.
(She had taken to avoiding herself in mirrors and in ghostly shop windows; her eyes were too sharp; she hadn't, like Eleanor, developed the habit of not-seeing-clearly-anymore. But at some point back there she had let her attention wander, lost her grip on things, and the spirit of disintegration had got in. Well, she was fighting it—tooth and claw— she was holding on; she got tired, that's all. Your attention wandered. You got tired.)
She came quickly to the alert now. Eleanor was making a play in the air with her fingers that meant they should meet later and share a taxi home. They would—they always did—and Eleanor, who was generous and tactfully tactless, would see to it that they did not share the fare.
They were neighbours. Eleanor, Mrs. Adrian Murphy, lived in a unit-block three doors from her own, and once a week, on Fridays, they went down in the Daimler (Eleanor drove only in daylight now) and had coffee together: down among the heavy-eyed Viennese, all reading air-mail papers that were two weeks old, and those deeper exiles who had been born right here, in Burwood or Gulgong or Innisfail, North Queensland, but were dying of hunger for a few crumbs of Sacher Torte and of estrangement from a life they had never known. What a place! What a country!
Years ago, in Brisbane, where they had been at the same convent school, she and Eleanor Ure had hated one another. “That stuck up goody two-shoes" was the phrase she found herself repeating in her twelve-year-old's voice; though she couldn't recall how Eleanor, who had been mousey, could have deserved it—not then. It fitted her better twenty years later when the dreaded doctor appeared.
But that period too had passed; and now, with nearly sixty years between them and the girls they once were, she could accept Eleanor Murphy for what she was: a spoiled and frightened woman, too insistent on her own dignity, but generous, loyal, and very nearly these days a friend.
That first winter after they found themselves neighbours, Eleanor had slipped and broken her leg. Clay had gone across each afternoon to sit with her: not in the spirit of a little nursing-sister—she had none of that—but in a spirit of brisk cheerfulness, of keeping one's stoic end up, that revived the bossy schoolgirl in her. Eleanor was happy to be organised. They spent the afternoons playing cards (rummy) while the westering light touched with Queensland colours the baskets of maidenhair and the tree-orchids and staghorns of Eleanor's rainforest loggia, and Mrs. Thring, who came in to clean, and who served when Eleanor entertained, made them scones and tea.
Things had levelled between them. She was no “that Clay McHugh,” unmarried and trailing clouds of dangerous appeal. And Eleanor, with the dreaded doctor gone, was no more the gilded and girlish dependent of a Household Word. They were alone, alive (widowed or not, what did it matter?) and had no one close but one another.
(Eleanor in fact had a son whom she doted on, worried over, and never mentioned; a forty-four-year-old hippie and no-hoper called Aidan, for God's sake!, who wore beads, wrote unpublishable poetry, had two broken marriages behind him, and lived in a rainforest—a real one—on sunflower-seeds, bananas, and old rope. Eleanor's bedroom was full of photographs of him when he was an angelic six-year-old. Clay knew all this, but was meant not to. There were days when all Eleanor had to say in the long silences between them “Aidan, Aidan, Aidan, Aidan.” It was hard then not to cry out, "For God's sake, Eleanor, I thought we were friends, why can't we talk about him?” "About who?” Eleanor would have said. “Who can you possibly mean?")
The Year of Eleanor's Leg had been followed by The Year of the Rapist. For five months their Point was at siege. The rapist specialized in high unit-blocks and only assaulted older women (they had shared, she and Eleanor, a phone code that made Eleanor at least feel safe) and had turned out to be a twenty-two-year-old cat-burglar, so round-chinned and mild-looking that nobody believed it was really him.
Clay did. Standing at the glass door to her balcony, with her old dragon-robe about her, she had come face to face with him. He was spreadeagled against the wall, his cheek flat to the bricks. There were only feet between them; he in the cold air, high up above the fig tree and its voracious flying foxes, she safe behind glass. Below, the whole Bay was lit. The police were on to him. Their searchlights crossed and re-crossed the fern-hung balconies.
Let me in, his eyes had pleaded. He was blond, with a two-day growth that made a shadow above his lips. She shook her head.
He had smiled then and nodded; as if she were some silly old girl who could be fooled by a soft look and didn't know he was a tiger, a beast of prey, and these tower blocks were his jungle. Nervously his tongue appeared, just the tip, and slicked his lips. He was perplexed, he was thinking with it.
If she hesitated a moment then it wasn't because she was fooled but because she saw his animal mind at work. They were a pair. She too had “out there.”
She didn't let him in. Another night she might have, it wasn't final; but not that one. She stood and watched the searchlight play across the balcony; go on, back-track, then stop, isolating him like an acrobat, an angel, in its glare. He had his eyes closed. He was pressing his body hard against the wall, pretending, like a child, to be invisible.
Being more vulnerable than ever at that moment she had turned quickly away …
So there was Eleanor, safely settled in the stalls. And there, in their box, were the Scarmans, Robert and Jeanette, who always appeared for the first half but seldom for the second. Cool ash-blonds, very still and fastidious, they tried again and again but real players never came up to what they were used to on Robert's equipment. Robert had been Karel's favourite student (that was how she knew them), but he was fonder now of Jeanette.
She caught their eye, and Jeanette made little window-cleaning motions that meant See-you-later-in-the-usual-place. (That was the Crush Bar on the harbour side.)
All this was ritual. She watched Jeanette wave to the Abrams, and the Abrams a moment later caught her own eye, and Clay gave them her salute. Then Doctor Havek, whom she had known in Paris before the war, then in Cairo, and who was now her doctor at Edgecliff, shuffled to his seat in the third row—down in Middle Europe among the garlic and ashes; but before he was seated, he too waved to the Abrams and then leaned over and shook hands with the Scorczenys, whom she had also known in Paris but had nothing to do with here.
She began to tap her foot. Karel hadn't arrived. They had spoken on Thursday—no, Friday, and he had said yes, he definitely was well enough, he would be here.
It was just before eig
ht. Downstairs the last bleeps would be sounding, like a nasty moment in a beleaguered submarine. But the seat between the blond woman and the couple who hummed, Karel insisted, through all of Mozart and Beethoven and most of Schubert (though they were pretty well stumped by Bartk) was empty, the only one in its row.
“Would you like to see the programme?” the young man on her right was enquiring. He was a sweet rather effeminate boy who had struck up a conversation at the start of the season and chattered on now whether she answered or not. She thanked him, turned the pages politely and handed it back.
“Martinu,” the boy said with excitement. He had apple cheeks and a great deal of fluffy bronze hair.
Martinu too she had known for a time. She did not say so. She was too puzzled.
Down in the hall a character in a double-breasted suit had paused at the end of Karel's row, and after turning his head this way and that to examine the ticket, was pushing in towards the empty seat. It was a mistake—he had the wrong row; she leaned forward across the tense air to inform him.
Short, fair, balding, he pushed his way along the row, pausing frequently to excuse himself, and seemed unaware of his error. When he reached the seat at last he stood flicking it with a handkerchief, then settled. But uncomfortably, sitting too far forward, and went to work now, with the same handkerchief, on his brow. He mopped, consulted his watch, mopped again—all the time in the wrong seat; then sat with the handkerchief crumpled up in his right hand like an unhappy child, and sitting too far forward, as if his legs would not reach the ground.
It was this vision of him as an unlikely middle-aged child that gave her the clue. She saw a plump nine-year-old with sloping shoulders in front of a row of newly planted poplars. The poplars were meant to civilize a wilderness, and the child, who wore khaki shorts and sandshoes, was bearing a spade. It was a snapshot. He squinted into the sun. Well, those poplars now must be sixty-, seventy-feet high, sending their roots to block someone's drains. And the child would be—Nicholas. Nicholas!
Her heart thumped and she half rose to her feet. But the hall was ringing with applause now and the chamber group was trooping on, the lights were fading. Too late! There was a scraping and plucking as they tuned up, and she joined them with a hiss of desperation at her own slowness. It was loud enough for the boy who was her neighbour to swing his head in alarm. She made violent motions—no, it's nothing, nothing—and subsided into noiseless gloom.
That Nicholas. He had sided against his father, turned clean against him all those years ago, and now here he was occupying his father's seat. “Traitor,” she wanted to shout down at him, "you broke his heart!”
But on an abrupt and sickening change of key, old injustice and indignation gave way to alarm. Why wasn't Karel here, that was the real point. What had he said—on Friday was it?—no, Saturday. What had they talked about? What did they ever talk about, these days, these days! The music kept switching pace. She couldn't fit his voice to it. The violins were doing impossible things, leaping about off key, scraping below the bridge; no voice could be fitted to that! Oh my God, she thought, my God. The music was approaching a violent end. It ended. And the boy beside her held his hands clasped a moment, with his head thrown back and all his hair electrically tingling, before he joined the applause. “Wasn't that terrific?” he breathed. Then, when she clenched her jaw at him: "Are you all right?”
No, she was not all right! Where was Karel? Why hadn't he rung if he wasn't coming?
She got to her feet again, determined this time to rush down and call; but her head was filled with the sound of a phone ringing in an empty room, and she sat down again, plump, just like that, and covered her eyes. There was a hush. She steeled herself. Terrible Tchaikovsky bloomed all over the hall.
She managed to push her way through the harbourside bar without encountering Robert and Jeanette, or Eleanor, or the Abrams, and after an eternity of searching (Where was the man? He couldn't spend the entire interval in the loo) she found him pacing up and down under the sloping panes that gave on the dark; nervously consulting his watch and looking so like the child of thirty years ago that she immediately felt thirty years younger herself.
“Nicholas!" she accused.
He looked startled. His hands jumped and opened. There was no need to introduce herself.
“Where is he?” she demanded.
The man frowned and lowered his gaze.
The worst, she thought, it's always the worst. Damn him!
He was looking desperately about for a place they could slip away to that wouldn't be loud with people, all standing too close and with glasses in their hands, shouting.
For God's sake, she thought, why doesn't he get it over with? I know already, it's only words. The stoop of his shoulders and his look of pained, concentrated concern was too irritating; she would have preferred him to be cruel. (It struck her then that all the bad news she had ever heard had come to her in public places: in railway stations, hotel foyers, bars, or over public address systems in crowded squares. It was a mark of the century.) Go on, damn you, she thought now, say it, shout it why don't you?
At last, in desperation, he did. He tipped his balding head towards her, and with one hand cupped to his mouth, bellowed softly: "My father died this morning. I tried to ring you. He collapsed while he was out shopping. I'm very sorry.”
The vision of spilled parcels hit her harder than she expected; and Nicholas, made bold by the fear that she too might be about to fall down in a public place, took her, not quite firmly by the elbow, and kept up a dismal muttering.
They had become a centre of concern. The crowd about them had drawn back. People were staring, she must have cried out. Nicholas, deeply embarrassed, was making little gestures towards them. He was explaining why he was clutching her, that it was not this that had provoked her cry. Meanwhile, to her, he was offering more complex explanations. “You see,” he stammered, "I found the ticket—and I—well I just didn't want the seat to be empty.”
His soft eyes appealed to her for understanding of his pious but perhaps foolish sentiment.
She did understand, and suddenly felt sorry for him—for his awkward emotion and the need to explain it, but also for his grief. But it hurt, that. They must have been closer than she had guessed, Karel and this grown-up Nicholas; who would be, of course—why had she never let herself think it?—the father of the grandchildren: of Elsa and Ross. She had known about the grandchildren—she even knew their birthdays, but had thought of them as having come to him without intermediaries. And now here he was, one of the intermediaries, thin, distressed, too formal, with the sweat breaking out on his bald crown—the bearer of a weight of filial piety that she did understand and which did after all do him credit, but which she felt like a knife in her bowels.
“Listen,” she said harshly, "do you think you could find me a drink? Something good and strong. I'll be fine till you get back.”
She swayed a little but recovered. How odd it was after all the turmoil they had created—the promises, threats, curses, the real and imaginary violence—to have reached in a public place in Sydney this moment of utter aloneness: Elizabeth gone, that devout vindictive woman, now Karel also gone, and nothing left but this numbness before the brute fact. Karel! Tipped out on the pavements of a town he had never meant to live in, let alone die in, and the hot sky pulsing overhead as the angel zoomed, found his easy mark—there under the ribs—and pushed. She too felt it, the knife; and the closeness of his breath.
She looked up sharply at a gentler touch. Nicholas, with a double cognac and nothing for himself.
She smiled, thanked him, and playing the tough old girl, threw her head back and tossed it off. Then stood with the balloon resting lightly on her palm.
She looked at it—it was so fine. Tough but delicate. If she closed her fist and pressed hard enough it would splinter.
He must have felt the thought pass through her; she was surprised. He took the glass in his own pudgy fist, but had nowhere
to put it.
“I'll see you home,” he was saying in that heavy, Middle-European way, all breathless gallantry, that she had found absurd even in his father and which thirty years in Australia, the rough example of contemporaries, and the half-mocking acquiescence of women like herself, had done nothing to change.
“No,” she said. “The seat. You must stay.”
He looked down again and was embarrassed. “The seat doesn't matter.”
“Oh but it does!" she said firmly. “You've been kind enough already— Nicholas. I'll get a taxi.”
He did not insist. “Then I'll find you one.”
Still holding the glass in one hand, and with the fingers of the other just pinching her elbow, he led her down the shallow steps. When they came to the foyer he made a wide arc towards one of the bars, and reaching in between packed shoulders, fumbled and set the thing down, grinning a little for the awkwardness of it.
At last they were in the open air. Out here she had no need of support. The night was fresh, and the sky, beyond harbour-rails and fig-trees, an electric blue. He stood with his hands clasped behind him, rocking gently on his heels.
“It seems a shame,” he began, "that we've never—that we had to wait so long. I'm sorry.”
She shook her head. No good going into all that. Too late, too late.
But he was determined she saw, in his discreet, passionate, pedantic way, to deal with it, an image of her that must have been, like her own picture of him as a slope-shouldered child in shorts, a stereotype: the flashy homebreaker and Jezebel who had stolen his father and left him to be the little man of the house, the resentful mother's boy. Or perhaps what he was dealing with was his father's nakedness. Well, either way, either way, he was too late.
