One evening, she arrived early at the park and took a novel from her bag. She wanted to appear occupied, not waiting for Matt. Having read a page or two self-consciously, she grew absorbed and didn’t see him arrive. He slipped his hand into her hair—his fingers lay coolly against her scalp. Intense feeling caused him to smile. He glanced down and sideways, which made him look cagey.
After that, Pippa had to find somewhere else to live. Matt, who happened to be between houses, was back home with his parents. But at once he came up with a place for them both. He was a Sydney boy: he had friends or at least mates or at least phone numbers all over town. Someone gave him the keys to a flat at Kurraba Point. The flat was on the ground floor: the living room window was twenty-two inches above the harbour. The bedroom was uninhabitable, and everywhere ponged of drains and damp. Work on the flat had been delayed, and Matt and Pippa lived there, paying almost nothing, all summer. The wiring was sus, so they made do with torches and candles. The white shirts Pippa needed for waitressing had to be ironed in batches at a friend’s house. In the mould-stippled bathroom, her toothbrush went mushy. She and Matt rolled about in bed, as lively and purposeful as lions. Whenever they touched, a horizon widened. Pippa dreamed that she had drawn the night into their room: looking up, she met the cold, mineral gaze of stars.
No matter how late they fell asleep, Matt would wake before it was light, shut himself into the kitchen and play his violin. He would soon be auditioning for music schools in London and the States. ‘No one’ll come right out and say it, but an overseas qualification’s still the royal road to a permanent gig with a professional orchestra here,’ he told Pippa. Each audition piece was a problem he needed to solve: that was how he thought of music, as something strict and technical stripped of the fuzzy notions about self-expression that people brought to art.
There was always a breeze licking out that flat. About a week after they moved in, a storm swooshed water up past the tidemark to the level of their sill; they had to drag their futon away from the window. The building, white-painted and curvy, had once been a house and was now three flats, set one above the other. It suffered from subsidence and was a little lopsided—that, and the curving walls on the upper storeys, gave it the air of a ship that had been scuttled and was slowly sinking. They told each other, ‘It’s just like Venice,’ where neither had been. Italy was suggested also by the white colonnade that stood at a right angle to the building. It must have been designed for vines or flowering creepers, but its pillars were bare.
There was something vaguely dodgy about Matt and Pippa’s presence in the flat, and they were under instruction to say, if questioned, that they were related to the owner and visiting Sydney for a short stay. As it turned out, they rarely saw the other tenants, and no one spoke to them. On the first night, Pippa had woken up, certain that a dinner party was taking place upstairs at three in the morning—she could hear cutlery against plates. The next morning it was still going on. Matt said, ‘It’s that chinking sound made by wind in rigging.’ He had—of course—a friend with a boat. They watched the fireworks from it on New Year’s Eve. Long pink lilies of light swooned over the harbour, and they drank bubbly from a bottle as big as a baby. By the end of the display, they were alive in a new century, and the word ‘Eternity’ was flowing across the bridge.
Matt knew why a clothing store in Oxford Street displayed only three identical white dresses in its window from time to time, and the significance of the modernist apartment block on Balmoral Beach. He could tell Pippa where to find the ghost platforms at Central Station, and which lane to take when driving over the harbour bridge. All through their first year together, Sydney concertinaed out before Pippa. Matt had visited mythological places—New York, Delhi, the Greek islands—and believed in glimpses, in the unexpected view. He said, ‘Anything memorable should take you by surprise.’ Strolling to a restaurant in Balmain, he touched Pippa’s arm. She slid her eyes sideways and found herself looking down a street that seemed to rise directly from the harbour. Thickset trees stood like guardians between the land and the water. Spring came around again, and Matt drew her attention to a Newtown cul-de-sac where freshly green plane trees led the eye to a blue mist. The jacaranda and the seagoing street found their way into the stories Pippa was writing when waitressing hadn’t left her exhausted. They were stories about growing up, part record-keeping, part revenge, but Pippa set them in Sydney. She could remember her old ambition to bring the city to heel, but not exactly why she had felt that way: Sydney before Matt was the view from a car speeding through fog. By the time he and Pippa had been together a year, even that memory had faded and vanished from the sky. It amazed her how quickly everything had fled into the past. The white flat beside the harbour, the park with its spotty, eucalypt shadows were already as remote as photos. It was as if, not having much common history to carry into the future, they needed to stock up fast.
Matt didn’t get a place at the Juilliard School, the New England Conservatory or the Royal Academy of Music. It was the end of his dream of a performance career. He said, ‘That was my mother’s dream, not mine.’ His mother had instructed Loreto nuns to offer up prayers for his success. Matt’s hands, shapeless and full of music, plucked at the shoulders of his T-shirt—the hands, the gesture, these too belonged to his mother.
‘There must be other schools,’ said Pippa.
‘Not for me.’ At the time, Pippa didn’t realise that this meant, Not for my mother.
Meanwhile, Pippa had sent her three best stories to magazines; they were all rejected. It was her night off from waitressing, so they got dressed up, went into town and drank vodka shots at a harbourside bar. Matt said, ‘I’m not afraid of teaching. It’s something I do OK.’ Pippa leaned across the table and kissed him: a slow, open-mouthed kiss to show that she trusted to whatever might come. ‘We’ll have kids, won’t we?’ he said. ‘Beautiful kids.’ She took this, like her kiss, as a statement of faith rather than intent. When Pippa thought of motherhood, she saw something like a swamp. She saw heavy, veined flesh, worn-out women enslaved by miniature despots, a barnyard functionality in which every ideal mired and drowned. Each woman was wrapped in a large apron on which was embroidered ‘For Daily Use’. It was a vision that originated in observation but drew its power from slippery, frightening, invisible things: the passing of time, the thinning of possibility.
When she rose to leave the bar, Pippa teetered on her strappy red shoes. Matt took her arm. She folded her hand over his. Around them, people went on drinking in tight, laughing circles. Matt and Pippa strolled away, a couple in the balmy, iconic evening, backed by an opera house and a bridge. Each was aware of space, its milky vacancy, swinging around them. This was how it would be, Pippa decided, they would hold each other and step out as if there was nothing to fear.
The floating world of student parties and share houses had detached Matt from his context. It was obvious that he had been ground out by a private school; for the rest, he was just another guy in cargo pants smoking a joint with his long feet up on some girl’s balcony. They didn’t sit in chairs, those boys, but lay in them, like children, with glasses, bottles and ashtray within reach.
It turned out that Matt belonged to a family as hierarchical and splendid as an army. He had four older sisters. One was a partner in a commercial law firm, and one was an architect in Chicago, and one was in Cambodia with Doctors Without Borders, and the fourth did something amazing and digital the exact nature of which Pippa could never pin down. They were girls with ponies in their past. All four took after their father, a whippy, sparrow-coloured ophthalmologist. The family home in Bellevue Hill had a music room that held the gleaming, concentrated presence of a grand piano and, in a shadowy corner, an angel without a head. Closer inspection revealed a dust-sheeted harp. It had belonged to Matt’s grandmother, who once played it at the Albert Hall. She was half Irish, Matt confided—Pippa was never to let on that she knew.
Two remarks defined the Elkinsons for Pipp
a. Over her first Christmas lunch with the family, the conversation led to the beach house in Jervis Bay where various Elkinsons would be spending time in January. Ronnie, the digital sister, looked up from her portion of colourless, flavourless turkey breast and asked Pippa, ‘Where do your folks have their beach house?’
‘We don’t have one,’ said Pippa into the sudden silence. She added, as if it were an explanation rather than a non sequitur, ‘My parents are divorced.’
Talk flowed on around the table, over the dismal food. All the Elkinson girls had their mother’s searching face, but Ronnie’s gaze was the most intent. She was the first middle-class person Pippa had met with serious tattoos. From elbow to wrist her arms were the exquisite green-blue of mould, except for an uninked heart shape on each. When introduced to Pippa, Ronnie had kissed her at once on both cheeks: hard kisses, like knocks at a door. And here she sat, smiling and doing her best to make Pippa feel welcome—it wasn’t possible to hate her, realised Pippa, with dismay.
The second remark dated from a party thrown by the Elkinsons to celebrate a great-aunt’s ninetieth birthday. The old woman had translucent green teeth and a doddery spaniel. The spaniel lay on an antique rug and was fed cake. When Eva, Matt’s mother, stepped too close to the dog, he snapped at her ankles. ‘Isn’t he sweet?’ said Eva. She added hazily, ‘You hear such sad stories. Most old dogs drown in the family pool.’
When Matt announced that he was going to train as a teacher, Eva said that she wasn’t surprised. ‘Becky was always the musical one.’ Becky was the doctor. Matt had his mother’s wavy hair, blocky torso and secretive smile. Eva was Polish, spoiled her fortunate Australian children and forgave them nothing. Her way of punishing Matt for failing to become a professional musician was to behave as if the mere mention of a violin now affected him like a fatal wound. Music came to Matt from his father, Keith. Arranging Matt and Pippa’s wedding, Eva announced that Keith would play at the reception. Keith looked at his son. ‘“Légende”? Or shall we treat them to Bach?’
‘Obviously I meant just you, my love,’ said Eva, her voice creamy with inner meaning. ‘It’s Matt’s day—he doesn’t want to do anything upsetting.’
Pippa said, ‘But you’d love to play, wouldn’t you, Matt? It would be great. I’m counting on it.’
Matt smiled at a corner of the floor. Eva’s eyes, widened at her husband, said, How could you be so insensitive! At the wedding, Keith took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and sat at the piano. The notes seemed to run up through his elbows. If not for Keith, the lowest step on the family pyramid would have been reserved for Matt. Keith filled the role of a pet: tolerated, even loved, and of no importance. One of his daughters confided, ‘It’s so embarrassing going out with Dad—he smiles at everyone.’
Keith drove a rackety, powder-blue Beetle in defiance of his wife and children. The cry of ‘Carbon footprint!’ arose whenever it roared up the drive. Eva said, ‘When that man wants something, he wants it violently.’ Her surfeited smile, angled at the rug, informed her audience that she knew what it was to be wanted like that.
Pippa put the Beetle down to a rich man’s infantile tastes—what was a Beetle if not an egg laid by a Ferrari? Then Keith told her, ‘Pretty much all other cars look aggressive. This one seems defenceless, don’t you think?’
Pippa said that the Beetle looked more human than most humans. Her own car, an ancient Peugeot, refused to start in wet weather. ‘It’s ironic, isn’t it,’ said Pippa, ‘a car that won’t go when the weather’s bad?’ The Peugeot had belonged to Aidan, her brother, dead at twenty on a surfing holiday. Keith and Pippa were allies, although it was an alliance with no outward sign. On parting, he would grasp Pippa with the firm, unsmiling embrace of a man about to go into battle or to the scaffold. His hands, always chilly, were shaped like the heads of snakes.
There was a history of heart in Keith’s family, said Eva, so he had to watch what he ate. Keith obediently made his way through pale, boiled potatoes—he wasn’t allowed baked—and a piece of skinless chicken. Pippa believed that food should smile on a plate. When her parents-in-law came over for meals, Pippa made salads that contained radishes and pomegranate seeds and dark red leaves. There was chicken cooked with yoghurt and golden raisins and spices. There was fish and seafood garnished with fistfuls of herbs, and spiced honey served with fat purple figs. The first time Pippa cooked for him, Keith said that he had never eaten so well in his life. A while later, Eva remarked that nowadays people seemed to make a cult of eating. ‘It’s considered normal. I was raised to value things of the spirit.’
Eva was the kind of woman who could carry off a fine knit. She referred to herself as ‘a citizen of conscience’ and was in favour of sculpture in malls. Twice a week, she attended mass in a hat. Unbelievably, she had a tame priest, a Jesuit who could be found murmuring with her on a couch. The Jesuit was breezy and soft-shoe, always dressed in jeans and a creaseless dark shirt. He had a loose, manly laugh that made Pippa fear he was about to drop into a boxing feint. ‘I suppose it all seems very Brideshead Revisited to you,’ said Eva to Pippa. ‘Or Graham Greene, perhaps? This hut and so on.’ Eva’s English, an artefact polished to a high sheen, was not altogether free of cracks. For ‘hat’ and ‘heart’ alike she said ‘hut’. She had returned from mass minutes before Pippa and Matt arrived for lunch, and was standing before the hall mirror, removing her hat. Her dress, a dreamier blue than the hat, bloused over at the waist. Hydrangea bush, thought Pippa. She said cheerfully that she had never read Graham Greene. ‘But I loved Brideshead. Anthony Andrews—where are you now?’
In the mirror, Eva’s eyes rested on Pippa’s reflection. She raised a hand to her hair. Her spongy fingers glared with a sapphire, a band set with turquoise and pearls, and an aquamarine the size of a swimming pool. ‘I am one kind of Australian,’ said Eva to reflected Pippa, ‘and you are another.’
The Elkinsons were well informed about kinds of Australians. Pippa learned that Bondi was favoured by South Africans and Russians, Rose Bay by Jews. Chatswood had gone over to the Chinese: ‘It barely qualifies as North Shore these days.’ Bellevue Hill, where the Elkinsons lived, was another Jewish stronghold. ‘Very decent people,’ said Keith, as if reassuring someone. He had a light, deliberate way of speaking that Pippa associated with judges in British television dramas; she was pleased when she learned that his father had been on the bench. She had thought of Matt’s connections as silvery spider threads webbing Sydney but was discovering that they were stout cables attaching the Elkinsons to politics, banking, the judiciary, the upper reaches of the public service. Caroline, the lawyer sister, was married to a man whose cousin played cricket for Australia. At Caroline’s wedding, this cousin had followed the bride into a bathroom and groped her. She swiped out at him, causing his nose to bleed. Blood ran down the front of his shirt and onto her dress when she tried to staunch it. ‘So there we were, blood all down us, and the dickhead goes, “No need to mention this, doll.”’
Something not immediately apparent about the Elkinsons was the way they picked up and echoed one another’s remarks. When Ronnie was refusing to fall in with one of Eva’s schemes, Caroline told her, ‘You only have one mother.’
‘Thank God for that!’ cried Ronnie, startling Pippa, who had once heard the same exchange between Matt and his father. What she had thought singular and noteworthy was merely recurrent. She began to hear the repetitions that looped through Elkinson conversations. ‘You’re making my life dark.’ ‘White flowers are the most beautiful.’ ‘What this situation requires is a fresh pitcher of martinis.’ It was a form of birdsong: communal, serving to identify and bind.
Caroline’s older boy was at the piano, attacking Bach’s ‘Minuet in G’. He played the way the Elkinson women went at life: with great verve, disregarding wrong notes. His little brother lay on the floor, alternately sniffing the pianist’s feet and lightly chewing a rose.
In the living room, Keith was saying, ‘Did you see the local pape
r on Australia Day? That photograph of a Greek got up like Byron. What do they think is the point?’
‘I’m amazed they could find a Greek in Bellevue Hill. Must’ve been someone’s pool guy,’ said Matt.
‘Please, Dad,’ said Ronnie. ‘You’re being a pig and a bore.’ Ronnie had fallen off her Birkenstocks and fractured an ankle. She had moved home to recuperate and was lying on a leather day bed with her foot in a cast.
‘So you say, Veronica, but can you tell me why a newspaper would choose to display a picture of a man in fancy dress smashing a plate on its front page?’
Eva and Ronnie spoke together. ‘It’s multiculturalism, darling. You know that perfectly well.’ And, ‘Because there are plenty of fascists in this country who think only Anglos have the right to be here.’
The Life to Come Page 17
