“Talk?” Her mother sighs. “Strangers were always offering you sweeties or rides or something, it was dangerous, you’d go off at the drop of a hat. We had to keep our eyes peeled. Which time do you mean?”
* *
Kay learned a year later, from her Latin teacher in high school, the word syllogism. She loved to roll it on her tongue. Syllogism. She saw mind bending backwards, turning somersaults, doing the splits. Syllogism: a game of construction and deconstruction.
She wrote on the flyleaf of her Latin primer:
Daydreams seem harmless, but they are dangerous.
I daydreamed that Bea would come to Brisbane.
Therefore Bea’s father died.
Daydreams seem real, but they are just delusions.
I daydream about Nicholas and Verity.
Therefore they might not be real.
Daydreams are dangerous and real.
At school I dreamed of someone to protect me.
Therefore I made up Verity and she became real.
I wanted to see Verity again.
I wanted Nicholas to touch me.
Therefore I made them meet.
Kay resorted, finally, to the test of fire. Casually, so very casually, she said to Bea: “Do you remember that boy we used to watch when we were still in Wilston school? That high school boy?”
“Nicholas Truman?” Bea asked.
“Was that his name? The one who used to play a recorder?”
Bea hurled herself onto her bed and shrieked with laughter. “Recorder! You silly ninny! Did you believe that stuff I used to tell you? Did you really and truly believe? Honestly, Kay, you’re such a drip, you’re the most — I don’t believe you swallowed that —”
“Anyway, I think I saw him. He was with a girl, this beautiful girl. She has long black —”
“Oh, her.” Bea lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. “Verity Ashkenazy. She went to Wilston too, so Nicholas says. Damned if I remember. She’s a bit, you know …” Bea tapped her forehead with one finger. “I’m not too worried about her.”
5
Raisins
“What would you call a hundred-sided figure?” Charade asks. She wonders: is it a centagram …?
Centagram? Katherine wonders. Centagraph? Centagon? Would that be the word? She is deep in the stacks of the university library, her carrel in a mauvely lit cave around which book spines rise like a forest. She is doodling on foolscap sheets: circles, tangents, deflected tangents; contingencies, contiguities; hundredsided figures. If one took a turning at every fork on the way, at predictable intervals and always in the same direction, then wouldn’t one eventually complete a faceted circle, more or less, clockwise or anti, depending on the consistent direction of the turns? But then suppose one turned left or right randomly,
and altered the distance travelled along each tangent …?
The page is beginning to look like a nerve-map in Gray’s Anatomy.
If we hadn’t moved to Brisbane? she wonders.
If she hadn’t been sent to the library on Mondays, if Bea’s father hadn’t died, if Nicholas had never lain down beneath a mango tree in Finsbury Park and played his recorder, (if Bea hadn’t invented his recorder?), if she hadn’t heard that word, that exotic word university, first spoken to her, oh irony, by Bea …?
Who would I be, she wonders, if I’d married Merv Watson when I turned eighteen, as asked? After the prayer meeting he’d waylaid her, on an Easter Saturday afternoon, right in front of the church. She was fingering the ragged cedars — was it just a year ago? yes — fingering the cedars and apparently watching the trams rumbling down through the Fortitude Valley and into the city; watching the trams but seeing Bea.
“The beach naturally, where else?” Bea had said. “With a bunch of friends.”
(What friends?)
Katherine pleated fronds of cedar between her fingers and asked herself: Who — apart from Bea — would believe that this is the way I spend Easter?
She saw a wave toss up the bodies of Nicholas and Bea and roll them golden up the Southport sands. She imagined Bea, her wet hair in a stream of laughter, provoking a game, getting herself chased, luring Nicholas away from the group, away away, disappearing between the dunes where pandanus and scrubby ti-tree grew in clumps.
“I believe it’s God’s will, Kay,” Merv Watson said. “Prayer … if we seek His guidance … morning and evening … prayer. Revealed to me, I believe.”
“What?” She made an effort to attend. “Sorry, I wasn’t listening.” And then slammed into an amazing possible future, looked it full in its watery eye. When she caught her shocked breath, her instinct was to say tartly: “God’s will? That’s the last reason I’d marry a man.”
“Hubris?” she asks Charade years and years later, different country, different decade. “Did I catch it from Bea? Or else …
I don’t know … it takes such energy to rebel against people you love, you have to crank something up. God was grandpa/ grandma/father/mother, I couldn’t move. It seemed to start then and got addictive.”
“Hubris?” Charade asks.
“What?”
“Did you mean you got addicted to hubris?”
Katherine frowns, poised above several possible landing strips, getting her bearings. “The … where was I? Merv Watson. Not hubris, perhaps, but certainly a taste for rebellion, it seems to date from him. Just wave a flag like This is God’s will or These are the rules and you’ll see smoke. You’ll smell it. It’ll singe my hair.”
But Merv Watson. How was she to swim free of the tentacles of prayer and God’s will? Constraints: they were everywhere. It is hard, so much harder than fighting dragons, to defend oneself against the innocent; and Merv Watson was an innocent, a hopelessly shy man, though (stiffened by the Holy Spirit) an earnest and fearless preacher on street corners, an expert with carburettors and spark plugs, a garage mechanic and a saint. The soul of goodness, impossibly gentle. Quite, in point of fact, impossible. Oh help! she telegraphed to Bea, and an answer came, a Bea answer, kindness-coated of course, but effective; a dishonourable, but oh so brilliant cheat.
“Will you marry me, Kay?” Merv Watson asked.
“I’d have to pray about it,” she said demurely, trumping his ace …
“Though that gambling metaphor, Charade, didn’t come to me then, or even in the university library,” Kay says at a different point on her time graph. “I knew as little about trumps and card games as I knew about the Melbourne Cup. No, it’s only now that it strikes me what a clever little cheat I was. Oh poor Merv. I’d taken no more notice of him, ever, than if he’d been a hymn book. But he had to respect God’s will.”
“And you told him —”
“Oh yes, it seemed kinder. Lied gravely and sweetly through my teeth. Though really …” They are pacing up and down the shoreline of a lake somewhere east of Toronto. Katherine picks up a handful of pebbles, starts skipping them one by one. “Really, was it lying after all? It couldn’t possibly have been the will of … Could it? But then, you know, he looked so forlorn …” One of her stones takes seven show-off steps before the water swallows it. She laughs. “He looked so deflated that I stood on tiptoe and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.” She skips another stone: five bounces. “I can’t explain, I simply can’t convey what a wicked thing that was, Charade. In that place, at that time, to that person. He looked so shocked that I did it again. I couldn’t help myself. It was cruel, really.”
But if she hadn’t been cruel?
In the university library in 1961, Katherine Sussex — lucky undergraduate on a Commonwealth scholarship — closes her eyes and sees herself scrubbing car grease from Merv’s shirts, hears several toddlers crying, hears the Gospel Hour on the wireless. She opens them again and reaches out instinctively to stroke the spines of the nearest books: Late Roman Empire, histor
y, the wars, the divisions, the turning of the faceted circles, third level below ground in the stacks. She takes a deep breath of the musty air, reassured.
But what saved me? she wonders, amazed, shivering slightly. (Are you saved? Merv used to demand of passers-by on the streets of Brisbane. Are you saved? he would ask through a megaphone on Friday nights. A beacon fixed at the corner of Adelaide and Albert streets, in front of the Commonwealth Bank, he would call to the lost teeming by: Brother, sister, are you saved?) What saved me? Katherine asks herself. Where did it come from, the force that jumped me from Merv Watson’s orbit? Was it Bea juice or Verity’s raisins? Who was dreaming me? Thinking me out? What quantum-leaped me?
“Oh my God,” Bea had shrieked, rolling on their bedroom floor and kicking her feet in the air with glee. “Merv Watson. Oh my God, that’s hysterical.” Suddenly sombre, she sat up, fingers like granny glasses round her eyes. “Well, maybe you should. Yes, I think he’s your type. You could pray together for virgin births. You could read the Bible in bed. You could have three kids without fucking.”
Katherine pelts the water with stones, a fusillade. “Sometimes, Charade, your bloody know-it-all mother …” (Was that where the rift had begun in earnest?) “Your mother and her fantastic claims …!” Jets of water spurt up like accusations.
Charade, about to skip a stone, stops. “What do you mean, her fantastic claims? What do you mean exactly?”
“Nothing,” Katherine says. “Nothing at all really, absolutely nothing. It’s just … I’m still angry with her.” (Is she still angry?) “Sometimes, anyway.” (Though at others, she misses Bea so intensely that …)
“Get out,” she had yelled at Bea, hurling pillows, books, shoes. “Get out of my room and don’t come back. You’re not my sister, you’re not even … get out get out get out.”
“Pleasure!” taunted Bea. “B’lieve me, Lady Muck, Lady K, a pleasure. For your info, I got a room at the Duke of Wellington, I been more or less living there for weeks. You could visit, Lady Muck, except I don’t serve morning tea.”
“The Duke of Wellington!” Katherine was aghast, titillated, enthralled. “I don’t believe you.”
“I’ve been working there part time for years, you dumb ninny. You and Merv Watson can bring tracts and Gideon Bibles.”
“I wouldn’t be caught dead at the Duke of…. That’s cheap, you’re cheap, you — you barmaid!” A cushion flew by Bea’s head. “You whore!” But Katherine, who knew this word only from the text of a seventeenth-century play by John Ford, pronounced it “wore”, causing Bea to double up in a fresh bout of helpless laughter.
“Oh you should, you should,” she gasped. “You should marry Merv Watson. You should.”
“I hate you,” Katherine shouted.
“Lady K, Lady K, Lady K,” chanted Bea, throwing things into a knapsack, “she doesn’t know B from A, she doesn’t know prick from pray.” She laughed wildly, ducking a shoe. “Lady Muck, Lady Muck, Lady Muck, she doesn’t know faith from f —”
Katherine put her hands over her ears.
In the morning she read the message on the wardrobe mirror, whitely scored with a cake of soap.
K: You can visit at the Duke if you want. You have to ask at the bar, they’ll show you where. I didn’t mean the stuff about Merv, I was joking. B.
“You know, Kay,” the pastor said in a kindly voice. “I think you should give our dear brother Merv the most prayerful consideration.”
“Katherine,” she’d insisted tartly, caught somewhere between guilt and amusement and cold fury. “My name is Katherine, not Kay.” But where would she have gone spinning to as Mrs Kay Watson, K the Unknown, Mrs Curbside Evangelist, Mrs Garage Attendant, Bewildered K?
“You know, Kay,” the pastor said, unctuously patient, “if we —”
“Katherine.”
“Yes. If we close a door in the Lord’s face, He’ll just come back in through a window. You can dodge all you like, but He’ll get you in the end. There’s no escaping God’s will.”
“What about Bea?” she demanded. Free-flying Bea. What pastoral nets could touch her?
“Ah Bea, our lost sheep. Bea least of all. You can be sure God has special plans for Bea.”
(— who will give God a run for his money, Katherine thought. Will God go pubbing at the Duke of Wellington, keeping tabs, waiting and watching for his chance?)
“There’s no escaping,” the pastor said again. “I do not believe it is God’s will, this university bee in your bonnet. You are tempting the Holy Spirit, he may have to break you. You can’t get away from God’s will, Kay.”
But Kay has escaped into Katherine, and who will Katherine become while she dodges nets and the network of wills?
Who would I become, she asks herself in the university library, if I were to major in … say, history? or one of the sciences? instead of English/French honours?
She is majoring in English, veering into the Middle Ages, because Verity Ashkenazy is the graduate tutor. She is also majoring in French literature. The French department’s junior lecturer, a dazzling, a brilliant, a most European young man with whom every undergraduate girl is in love, is Nicholas Truman.
“Will he play Proust today, or Villon?” a student in Katherine’s section, Richard St John, asks with archly raised eyebrow
“Pardon?” she says.
“He plays both roles to the hilt, wouldn’t you say? Depending on the day of the week.” Richard St John has published poetry in two university quarterlies, one of them edited in Sydney. He has written a letter to Stephen Spender in England and has had a reply. He has written to W H. Auden. He knows everything, and sooner or later, it is certain, like all good little Australians, he will be rewarded with Oxford. Katherine believes that he thinks her stupid: she trusts his judgment.
“Villon?” she echoes cautiously.
“Those Churchie boys,” Richard St John says, shaking his head. (He himself went to Brisbane Grammar.) “Dreadful poseurs. Mope, mope, that’s the usual, n’est-ce-pas? Sonnets to the Dark Lady in the English Department, Office 205, pale and wan and lonely proustering, yawn yawn yawn, madeleined out of his mind. Or else it’s down at the Duke of Wellington. Roistering. Playing Villon.”
The Duke of Wellington. Bea can’t speak French but doesn’t need to, and is much less confused than Kay. Bea knows what she knows. Bea knows everything she needs to know as she pushes glasses across the counter. Amber foam, like the off-coloured wrack on the seashore, braids her wrists, stains the cuffs on her sleeves.
“La broue,” Katherine tells her, delivering a final washload left at the house, looking around nervously, severely ill at ease. “Beer broth, it’s called in French.”
“You don’t say?” Bea, doing something disturbing with her tongue, blows circles of smoke in Kay’s face. I call it head.”
“How can you live here? How can you? Why don’t you come home?”
“Come home,” mocks Bea. “Where’s that?” She blows a corkscrew of smoke that spirals itself around Kay. “What for?”
I miss you, Kay will not say. Who’s going to translate the world for me? she wants to cry. Please, she wants to beg. She says neutrally: “You know I didn’t mean it.”
“You don’t say?” smiles Bea and lets her eyelids droop low and heavy.
Katherine, who knows less and less, breathes the tranquil and musty air of the university library, reaches up and strokes the dimpled cliff face of the bookshelves, the fort that protects her, and turns back to her translation.
Wyrd bi ful aræd!
She translates: Fate (the fate of the seafaring wanderer lost in the late eighth century) is fully fixed.
Fully fixed? Who fixes fate? Who’s the racketeer? Can a bad fate be fixed?
The wanderer stirs up the rime-cold sea with his hands. Katherine scribbles across the tangent routes and circles of her life, a
rough draft. She grimaces over the literal translation, feeling for smoothness, reaching for the old mellow lilt of the noisome pestilence and the wings of the Almighty in the feathers of whose cadences she trusts. She writes in her notebook: … though, troubled in heart, he rows through the rime-cold sea. How unbending is fate!
And then, on the scrap paper, adds a question mark: How unbending is fate?
To the serried ranks of books, she murmurs sardonically: “How unbending is fate?”
Can it be outwitted? Does it lie in wait, gloating, like the will of God?
When Katherine, translation of The Wanderer in hand, taps on Verity’s office door for her tutorial, there is no answer. Strange. She checks her watch.
Ah well, there is still so much to be done, how does anyone keep up with all the reading? She hears of students who go to parties, to college banquets, on hikes and trips. When do they study? She decides to sit in the grassy quadrangle, soaking up sun, working on her French. When Verity walks along the cloisters — she will be, surely, coming from the library where she must have been detained — Katherine will see her. But what makes Katherine glance up from the quad to Verity’s office window? What sixth sense?
In any case, Verity is there, standing still as a question in the spotlight of Queensland sun.
Puzzled, Katherine splays her hands open in the warm grass, pushes them into earth, testing for something. Laying her cheek between her hands, she smells not just couch grass and mud, a sweet mix, but chlorine, the school swimming pool, the concrete steps, the musty Mondays in the old school library. No, she says, no. Meaning: not here, no; that has gone, the old stink of Wilston school. Gone like Kay. I can do what I like with the past; it is easy as plasticene; it only exists now and then.
She is sprawled full length, her Oxford Book of French Verse lying open in front of her, the working sheets of a Verlaine translation fluttering, threatening to dart off toward the refectory with a passing cluster of students. Uncertain, Katherine stares up at the window again. Did she pass Verity on the stairs? It’s just possible. She has become aware of an alarming tendency within herself to be lost, literally lost, in thought. Concentrating, she folds the rough drafts of Verlaine and closes her book, her eyes on the students: the way they laugh, the way they bump into each other comfortably as they walk, the way their eyes scan the quad, expecting pleasure. What would that be like: ordinariness? the yearned-for unattainable gift of being like everyone else?
Charades Page 14
