Everyone wants to know what I think of David’s new book, how I feel about being portrayed as that fallen beauty who broke her poor husband’s heart by having an affair. At least I assume that’s how I’m portrayed—I still haven’t read it. He keeps pushing it in front of me, where it remains unread on the table or my desk or wherever he has put it, like something crouching and menacingly alive.
How does anyone know what is in his book anyway, apart from the handful of people in his publisher’s office who have read it?
I hate being the subject of gossip. I hate the way gossip is a form of Chinese whispers. I have trusted perhaps two or three people in my life, for the rest it is silence and cunning. Even Ros has heard campus gossip about his new book and asked if I’d read it: she can’t believe I haven’t. ‘How can you stand not to?’
This from my sister who once accused me of betraying her trust for writing about a character who resembled her in my first novel. If I remember correctly, Ros said I had destroyed her life, embarrassed her in front of her friends, turned her into someone she wasn’t.‘I was never that mean to you, Kath. Never!’
‘Are you telling me that, or are you telling the character who you think is me? The character in the novel isn’t me either, you know.’
She sneered. ‘Oh, sure. You used dialogue that actually happened. Sentences I can remember saying.’
I recall arguing with her that fiction was not life transcribed, yet fiction unquestionably took life. ‘Of course you were never as mean as that character in my book—and I was never as innocent or as put-upon. I made us both more interesting. Characters in books walk around as if floodlit, Ros; you can see inside their heads like you never can in real life. Fictional characters are always meaner or crueller or more innocent—they are like figures in an allegory, far more radiant than anybody is in real life.’
She wasn’t convinced. ‘Whatever you think you made of me, I own the copyright to my life. Don’t you think it’s a question of who owns the story? Who says you have the right to use my sentences in the first place? God, the ego of writers! You think you own the whole bloody world.’
I told her I believed everyone owned the story, for all of us make it. She rolled her eyes, ‘Yes, but don’t you see that writers have an unfair advantage? Not everyone can write the story.’ She went on to say that there was something morally corrupt at the heart of fiction: we argued long into the night. Of course, now I am terrified of what she will make of the Hebe character in The Broken Book. Might that be one of the reasons I can’t finish it?
But right now it is my turn to sit on my hands while my husband ransacks his life and mine. David will chop me and gut me, fatten me up like the sweetest of fish. I will float up, newly rinsed. I will no longer be myself but will emerge transformed, for that is art’s job. But how much is art worth?
I am but a single moment, the briefest of flickers. I can only hope that when I am gone, something of that flicker will endure in art’s bright flame.
Why do I feel strangely exposed then, as if I was publicly naked? I know that his cruel mermaid is no longer me because I, too, once made the sleekest of fish from the plainest of bones. I know that his cruel mermaid is not me, but the question is, will anybody else?
And where is my own bright book? For so long, through so many failed attempts, I tried to capture the experience of felt life in a net of meaning—some glimpse, some nuance that would reveal something at the heart of life, its mysterious core. But all my words have been stillborn things, too frail to support the great hopes I held for them. For so many years now I have begun a story, a novel, and then stopped. I have begun everything with the most radiant of hopes and been disappointed again and again—I have captured nothing. Everything has fallen short of my intentions. The result, unhappily, was not correspondent with her efforts. All the labouring of my fingertips has come to naught.
Surely now is the time to ask myself whether David’s success has been bestowed because he is the better writer. I was only ever half good, a minor talent, while he has proved the real thing.
I am carrying in my pocket a handful of the poorest words, a writer of ash and air.
Thursday
Another tooth broke off this morning. The second in two months. Jagged pit in back of mouth. Tunnel to nothingness.
At night my hips ache, arthritis in the bone. I lie sleepless in my single bed between the twin peaks of pain, imagining the curved crest of each decaying hip bone, the fallow skin slung between.
The greed of the grave: so much human effort, following the wasted dead.
Midnight
What does it matter that the world lacks one more book, that some book inside myself remains unwritten? The world will not cease to roll for lack of it, there will be no cold waiting hole in the fabric of the universe.
What value has my life had—have I been brave, kind, good? Should I have been more engaged in the public world instead of caught up in the vanity of believing I was making a testament to life through writing? Have I been generous enough to my husband, to my daughters, to my friends? It sometimes occurs to me that I should have tried harder to hold onto what was mine, that I loosened my grip too easily without a fight. I let something go when I shouldn’t have, failed some test I didn’t know was mine.
Strength is leaving me, all desire to pull myself to my feet. Darkness has descended, some shadow I spent too long trying to evade.
The Island, Greece, 1964
An extraordinary night—dawn is breaking as I am writing this—have just now crept back into the house. I’ve been walking all night with Jerry Rothschild—we walked right down to the little bay on the other side of the island, where we swam in the phosphorous sea. Everything was rendered strange and magical: when I lifted my arm from the water light streamed from it as though I was some fork of heaven’s lightning. We struck out for the open sea—surprisingly Jerry turned out to be as strong a swimmer as myself, he used to swim as a boy across cold lakes in Canada—my body fell into swimming’s remembering, the hypnotic swing of arms and breath, the rise and fall of the sky and the stars. We finally stopped when we were a long way out and began to tread water: our feet cycled down upon the spinning sea, stars moving upon the surface all around us.
‘You belong here,’ Jerry said, ‘this is your home.’
His voice is deep and sonorous as if it dwells further inside him than other men’s. I floated on my back and looked up at the extravagant full moon.
‘I hope you mean the island and not the sea. I’m tired of being mistaken for a mermaid.’
He laughed, a sound rendered impossibly loud amidst the quiet murmur of the Greek sea. ‘I mean the island, madam. You belong here.’
‘Do I? I wonder if any of us do. I feel like I belong here but I doubt if Soula thinks so. Or even the island itself.’
‘The island loves you. The rocks. The stones. Thalasa.’
From my throat came a dark and bitter laugh.‘Is that remark meant as irony?’ He asked what I meant; I told him that after almost ten years David and I had finally decided to go back to Australia.
‘Why?’ he said but I didn’t answer him, diving deep instead into the waiting arms of the sea. When I came up he had already started back for shore.
When we arose dripping from the water, light streamed from us, turning us into temporary gods.‘This place makes you feel like Zeus,’ he said, handing me my dress. ‘Your clothes, Aphrodite. How can you bear to leave? Anything else will seem a half-life after this. It isn’t an easy life here but it is a vital one.’
I was slipping my dress over my head while he spoke, suddenly conscious of my nakedness. In the gleam of the moonlight I thought my body looked strong and whole, I felt again the power of my limbs. For a broken statue I felt amazingly restored.
‘Italy is beautiful, and France too,’ Jerry said, ‘but neither have the tragic majesty of Greece.’
I looked at him. ‘I know. Here you are aware of being in the cradle of creation. A p
lace of legends.’
Behind us the mountains were black and still; I could just make out a monastery clinging to the end of a bony promontory. The silence was broken occasionally by the distant clink of goat bells, the cries of unknown birds.
In the strange luminous silence that earth was revealed as immortal, I imagined I felt the breath of the divine. For a brief moment it seemed possible to perceive the outline of existence, humanity’s arc of birth, fruition, decay. We stood without speaking, rendered sober by the earth’s air and the salt of its sea.
I was only with Jerry at all tonight because I made the mistake of dancing with Peter (the homosexual painter from Sydney). We were at the little kafenion at the cove; there was a wedding party, lyra, bouzouki, dancing. I begged David to dance with me but he wouldn’t.
‘I do not want to dance with you, Katherine! I do not want to dance with a drunk woman with smudged lipstick making a fool of herself.’
‘I’m not drunk. I’m enjoying myself. Come on, dance with me. Please?’
He leaned across the table and put his head close to mine. ‘You are embarrassing me. Stop acting like a fifteen-year-old slut.’
Anger rushed at my throat. ‘At least I haven’t been sitting there all night like a bloody corpse!’
For a moment I thought he was going to hit me. Instead he rose from the table and promptly left. Stephanie, who was sharing our table, politely looked away but Jerry Rothschild looked me full in the face.
‘Is he always like that?’ Jerry said.
‘Not always,’ I said, ‘he’s having a bit of a hard time. You’ll have to excuse him. Anyway, I probably am embarrassing.’ I sat there, mortified by my stupid behaviour.
He looked hard at me. ‘Do you always defend him?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘as a matter of fact I do.’
He said nothing, but went on looking at me. Jerry Rothschild is handsome in a faded, effortless way; he has what I think of as Jewish good looks—a Roman nose, brown eyes, a curly, intelligent mouth. He has dark, tightly sprung corkscrew hair, greying at the temples, and looks vaguely Italian. (‘I’m a Rothschild,’ he says by way of introduction, ‘from the poor side of the family.’) He is tanned, sexy, confident with the ladies—in short, exactly the kind of man of whom I generally disapprove—too sure of himself, too proud of his reputation as a roué. Apparently the only thing he takes seriously is his work: he has already published two well-received volumes of poetry and is hard at work on another.
‘What are you frightened of, baby? Your old man? Or being alone?’ he asked.
I let the ‘baby’ pass; it was late, it was true that I had probably had too much to drink. ‘Oh, Jerry. What business is it of yours?’
‘I dig you, Kate, I really do,’ he said.
I laughed. ‘Oh, please. You make me sound like a garden.’
‘A beautiful garden,’ he said, placing his hand over mine. He picked up my hand, raised it to his mouth and kissed it.
‘I am a married woman,’ I said, snatching my hand back.
‘Spoken like a true professional,’ he said, leaning forward to kiss me. His mouth felt odd, strangely shaped; it felt like my first kiss.
I tried to break away but I felt myself falling towards him, my nipples swelling. I was kissing him but trying not to; I suddenly felt fully awake, fully aroused.
‘Come for a walk,’ he said, pulling me up from the table. ‘I promise to behave like a gentleman.’
I followed him out blindly, without thinking at all of where I was going. I was pretty drunk actually, drunk enough to be past caring.
It was only when we were outside in the air, in the night smells of the island, that I properly awoke. He was walking back towards the harbour, no doubt towards the tiny whitewashed house above the church he has rented for the past year, next to Pan and Rita’s.
‘I can’t go home with you,’ I said, stopping.
‘I know. We’re going for a walk.’ He continued up the path, turning off to take the narrow trail that led up and over the hills.
‘It’s at least five miles this way,’ I said, following him.
‘We can swim at the bottom,’ he said.
I was already cradled in alcohol’s sweet forgetting so I kept walking, turning up my head to that full and bony moon. I felt again the island’s mysteries, I felt my drunken soul begin to grow.
We walked and walked, mostly in silence, until we came to the swimming cove. Jerry stripped off and dived straight in; I hesitated only briefly and then followed.
The walk and the sea and the moonlight have completely sobered me. Sitting here writing this in the soft pink dawn of the morning I am claiming a moment’s happiness before I turn back into a mother and a wife.
The Broken Book
All Angels Mother and Baby Home.
Lauriston Road, Scone, New South Wales (Tel Scone 141). Before and After Care Home. Accommodation: 24 mothers and 12 babies. Length of stay: 6 weeks before, 6 weeks after confinement. Age of mother: 15 years and over. First pregnancies only. Extra-marital cases considered. Controlling body: Scone Moral Welfare Association. Application to: The Matron.
Is this not the place of cream teas then? The place of pretty thin cups and slices of lemon and whipped fluffy cream balancing on scones? Is this the other scone, the capital S Scone, the finest place in the whole of New South Wales for morals? Citizens of Scone, be on the alert: loose women are walking the upstanding streets of your town!
At least this one is, the one with the uncurled hair and the swollen belly, me, Cressida Morley, Clever Clogs. Yes, me, on a rare afternoon out, two weeks to go and still counting. Is that a twitching curtain I see before me? Or is it my imagination that allows me to suppose more righteous eyes than mine have looked upon me and found me sadly wanting? Perhaps it is my own shame which allows me to suppose people are exchanging covert glances as I pass, whispering to each other, ‘Look, there goes another one.’
I am learning to walk with my head down, looking up only when I must. Is that a car coming? Shall I cross the road anyway without looking? Sometimes I do this, make a vow with myself: I am going to cross the road without looking and if a car happens to come, So Be It. It is a kind of dare, a challenge to God, a test to see whether I am alive or not. I suppose I must be: I eat, I walk, I am a kind of ship, a cargo ship who used to be a girl. I am alive because the cargo I carry is alive too, a twisting, nervy, elbowing presence beneath the engine of my heart. ‘You’re doing very well,’ the doctor said this morning, listening to the cargo hold, a cold trumpet against my warm skin. ‘All this will be like a bad dream one day,’ he said kindly, patting my arm. ‘Now get up, there’s a good girl.’ Doesn’t the kind doctor know that bad dreams end with the coming of the morning? Doesn’t he know that every morning when the light comes into the sky I am still here?
I am still here, alone in my bed, alone in the room with those other four ships. All of us have turned our faces to the wall except for the other Cressida, the other girl who shares my name. The other Cressida is trying to pretend we are on some jolly lark, that life hasn’t stuck out its malicious foot to trip us. She is resolute in her black humour, always cracking jokes despite the fact that none of us finds being alive particularly funny. ‘Oh, come on, we’re not dead yet,’ she will say with a gimlet smile, ‘don’t let the bastards get you.’
O, but I am dead, you see, that former girl of teeming stone is gone and in her place is fossilised rock. I am nerveless and bloodless, I will never cry again, I am renouncing happiness forever. There is a fossil where once there was flesh, there is the shape of my former self recognisable in the rock. But do not mistake me for a living thing, do not mistake me for a beating heart.
I am gone, away, look, there in the rock is a net of bones, a veil of finest carving. Tooth, fingernail, bone, the pearly shells of my once fine ears. Silvery, frail, fleeting as a shadow, the faintest mist of my former breathing life.
The life of a once-teeming girl, the new life of the roc
k. Your job will be to make tea for the staff, to help with the washing of dozens of sheets, the pegging out of nappies, the sweeping of floors. Your job will be to get down on your knees and polish the new linoleum. Sore back? Should have thought of that before, my girl. Your job will be to keep away from the nursery where all the new babies are kept before they are given away. A new baby anyone? Only one previous careful lady owner! Your job will be to block your ears in the night from the new babies mewling, to stop yourself being so surprised that the crying does not all sound the same. One cries like a kitten, a scratchy mewl; one bellows as if he were cross. Your job will be to make your face as impassive as a piece of cloth, as bland as a row of regulation white nappies. Your job will be to look away when you stumble across a former girl crying on her knees, and to drink up your milk to help your baby’s growing bones. Your job will be to smile when your mother Dorothy Morley and your sister Hebe Morley come to visit you, just the once. ‘You’re a good brave girl,’ your mother will say, patting your hand. The kind doctor said that! Or a variation on that theme: what a good, kind girl I must be! Then why do I believe myself to be in exile from all decent citizens? Why do I believe that if I took myself back to the streets of the Blowhole my mother would drop dead of shame?
Cressida, it is about time you understood that there are two worlds: the public and the private. The public world is the important one, missy, the only one that really matters. (You know, the one that organised the current war, the one that men run.) This is the world with the rules you must follow, the true world that decides what is important. Girls and their love affairs are not important matters of state; girlish first person narratives are not what the public world wants. The public want heroes, men of history and action, real men on which to hang a proper myth.
The Broken Book Page 17
