Under an archway of the cloisters, she pauses and leans against a column. Golden sandstone: the very words, somehow, speak to her of a new heaven and a new earth, far from the grubby brick church with its steam of worshippers. The golden sandstone is warm and grainy; as comfortable as the lost shadow of the Almighty. No, not that. As comfortable as the shoulder of Nicholas if she can lean far enough into that horseback memory, that state of bliss, that dream.
Katherine shades her eyes, and yes, Verity is still at her window, seemingly propped there, fixed. Verity, who fixes fate with raisins. (Do Nicholas and Verity still ride together? Did they ever? Where now the horses and riders? And what is Bea doing at this moment? And where is Nicholas? And what now, at the Duke ofWellington?)
Concentrate, Katherine orders herself sarcastically. Can you pass this test? Can you get yourself up the stairs and down the hallway to room 205, can you slip into the first sentence of a tutorial for which you are running late, can you make it without sliding down a tangent of thought?
She knocks at Verity’s door.
No answer.
(“Snap out of it, Verity,” she hears Miss Warren say in the Wilston school library.)
But is this the same Verity? Katherine considers the lectures and seminars, the crackle of Verity’s mind: Verity alert, Verity ascendant, Verity Scholastica Regina. No sign has ever been given to Katherine, unless … On the first day, when the selection list was read aloud, did Katherine imagine a hesitation after her name? She had raised her hand in answer to the roll call, had waited for something. What? Verity’s eyes, meeting hers,
were neutral.
In the beginning, Katherine thought, we are frightened children. Later, we invent protectors, magic, our whole childhood. It is possible that she looked at me once, accidentally, in the old school library, how many years ago now? Ten years ago. Nothing more than that, perhaps, except for a moment with horses at the edge of the rainforest, a mere five years ago, that; a moment, however, that I may have wished into being.
Katherine knocks on the door again, and when there is no answer, opens it slightly, leans inside and says: “Miss Ashkenazy?” Very shy and formal. Since there is no rebuke, nothing to suggest that she has been brash or intrusive, she sidles in, closes the door quietly behind her, and moves to the familiar chair at the side of the desk. Soft academic noises, these will do the trick, she feels: the scuffle of her briefcase placed beneath the chair, the velvet thud of the books, papers rustled.
Verity is wearing jodhpurs and a white silk blouse and riding boots. Tossed across the armchair by the window are her black academic gown and a riding whip and her briefcase — as though she had finished with teaching obligations for the day (the afternoon tutorial session forgotten?) and was about to drive out to the country where a horse might be stabled. Out beyond Indooroopilly, perhaps; or out through The Gap to
Mt Glorious.
Katherine says awkwardly: “I could come back tomorrow.”
Verity turns from the window It seems now as though she has simply been waiting for her student, as though nothing unusual has happened, although, Katherine notes, Verity’s eyes seem unnaturally bright and her right hand is deep in the pocket of her jodhpurs.
“The Wanderer,” Verity says calmly enough in her low voice. Her accent is Australian, but espaliered Australian. There is nothing of the scrubby sound of Wilston school to it, no bush or back garden notes. “I’d like you to read it aloud in Anglo-Saxon first. I think we can touch the wayfarer in the sound of that lost tongue more than in the most thorough translation. Don’t you agree?”
Yes, Katherine thinks with a prickle of excitement, and a sense that she has always agreed, has always been waiting for this thought to be offered up for her agreement. With only a slight self-consciousness, she pushes out hesitantly into the ancient words, guttural, teutonic, thick with the spume of the cold North Sea. Oft him anhaga, she begins. She rows jerkily, and the wide dangerous emptiness of the ocean washes over them.
At Nis nu cwicra nan … she falters. It seems that a cramp, or some sort of pinching of nerves, has fastened on Verity. Wincing, she has placed a hand on Katherine’s wrist, an involuntary act, and then returned the hand to her pocket. Katherine watches the pocket, the way the fingers inside it twist and turn.
As though the reading were a psalm, Verity takes up an antiphonal refrain:
Nis nu cwicra nan
pe ic him modsefan minne durre
sweotule asecgan.
Not one is now living to whom the wanderer dares to express himself openly — though Katherine, holding her breath, has a sense of impending revelation.
“It’s the anniversary,” Verity says in a low voice, “of the last time I saw my parents. May 15, 1943.”
Katherine thinks with a slight shock: And I was a few months old, knowing nothing. Safe.
She waits.
“I was at school,” Verity says. “We lived outside Le Raincy, I’d just started that year.” She goes to the window again and speaks so softly that Katherine has to stand close behind her to hear, and even then she has to strain and at times only the tips of phrases reach her. She has the impression that the words insist on being spoken aloud, that they push up with seismic force through a fault line in the thin crust of Verity’s present, but that Verity does not wish the words to be heard. She has, too, a fleeting vision of Verity standing at the curved prow of an ancient boat, a boat without a crew, a boat that has left a ruined city behind it; and it seems to her that Verity sings her lament in the alliterative lines of a language that cannot be translated.
“I was six years old,” Verity says. “I can smell the headmaster’s tobacco. He has yellow teeth.” She is speaking very fast now, very low and fast. “He comes to the kindergarten classroom. Vérité! Vite, vite! you have to hurry! The others think I’m in trouble again.” She turns slightly toward Katherine, explaining: “I wear the star.” She turns away again. “Other
children … do things.”
Katherine waits.
“That morning I hid, but Maman gave me a handful of raisins and made me go.”
Katherine senses, more than hears, the rest: the headmaster perhaps pushing, perhaps dragging a little girl down the hallway, soldiers in the grounds, the headmaster hurry down the back stairs, the tradesmen’s entrance …
“He pushes me. I can’t move. It’s so far to the fence and the trees, the pine trees. Run! he says Run! So I run.”
There is a long long silence. Verity’s hand is convulsive in her pocket. At one point she half turns and says distractedly in a flat voice only just barely inflected into a question: “Pine needles?” But Katherine is afraid to answer.
“It’s dark and I’m frightened,” Verity says. “I rip off my star and walk out from the trees and go home. There’s nobody there.”
She turns around suddenly and demands of Katherine, astonished: “I was six years old. How did I know to do that, to rip off the star?” Her cheeks are feverish, her eyes glitter, and Katherine does not answer. Verity turns back to the window and looks out at nothing.
The silence goes on and on. “In the convent,” Verity says, but never finishes the sentence. “Je ne parle jamais français,” she says at another point. “Jamais, jamais. Je l’ai perdu absolument, une langue morte.” (Is it true? Katherine wonders. Does she never speak French any more? Or is she never aware when she speaks it?) Verity begins to shiver, at first slightly, hugging herself, and then more and more violently. An ague, Katherine thinks; the lost word is the only one that comes to her. Helpless, she picks up the academic gown and drapes it over Verity’s
shoulders.
It is as though a curtain has been dropped and raised. New scene. Abruptly the shivering stops.
“There is a certain cultural milieu,” Verity says in a clear professorial voice, as if someone has wound her up, or pushed a button, “that the student
of Anglo-Saxon must make an effort to enter. For instance, in 781 when Alcuin went from Britain to the court of Charlemagne, the Christianised Anglo-Saxons touched their own past again.” She says suddenly, arrested by a thought, “There must have been Jews in Aachen even then” — but it is as though a rogue radio wave, or stray shortwave static, has pushed through her larynx without her knowledge. For a moment she looks at Katherine vaguely, frowning, her head cocked, listening for something. Then she pulls books down from her shelves and resumes her clipped impersonal lecture. “The Anglo-Saxons from Canterbury fanned back into darkest Europe. We have Alcuin’s homilies; and Aelfric’s, much later.” She is looking for something, but can’t find it. She sits at her desk again, and indicates the chair for Katherine.
“Well,” she says, “anyway, there was a British bishop who was about to baptise a pagan chieftain somewhere east of Aachen. His own contemporary ancestor, you might say. The chief made profession of faith, but then, on the very brink of the river, one foot in the baptismal water, he paused to ask: ‘My ancestors? Will I meet them again in Heaven?’
“ ‘Ah no,’ the bishop said. ‘They cannot enter heaven, they died without Christ.’
“And the pagan chief withdrew his foot from the water. ‘Then neither shall I enter heaven,’ he said, and not all the threats of hellfire or eternal damnation could sway him. He died heroically, without Christ, believing himself to be damned, rather than set a rift between himself and those he honoured.
“That is the tragic sense at the heart of the Wanderer poem,” Verity says. “Was the poet Christian or pagan?” Her eyes, this time, require an answer: from student to professor. But Katherine cannot speak. Verity gives a small smile, approving, as though her student has come up with the only proper response. “He was both,” she says. “Both.” And then, her voice suddenly dropping so low again that Katherine has to strain to hear, “I was brought up Catholic. In a convent. The nuns saved me.”
Saved, are you saved? comes a ghostly echo. If ever, Katherine thinks, dizzy, falling into the terrifying well of Verity’s eyes, if ever I should see a lost soul, this is she. But Nicholas, she thinks. Since it has such power to restore order, to right all wrongs, she blurts it out. “Nicholas,” she says.
Verity stares vaguely at the word that floats between them. She frowns a little. The word has a meaning she should know but she cannot remember it. She looks blankly at Katherine.
Katherine knows that the gaps in this story will never be filled out. Not by Verity.
She will never know how long they sat there. It was dark, she thinks, when she found herself on the university bus, alone, riding into the city. She can replay the smell of grass in the quad, the sight of Verity from the cloisters, the sound of Anglo-Saxon intoned, but not the moment of leaving that room.
She thinks she remembers this, however. She thinks she remembers that Verity held out a handful of raisins and that she took one. They both partook and ate.
6
Bee in Her Bonnet
Once upon a time, Charade tells Koenig, Bea made a telephone call from a pub called the Duke of Wellington …
“No,” Katherine says. “I won’t meet you there. Why don’t you come here? Or out to uni?”
“Prude,” Bea taunts.
“It’s got nothing to do with that. I just feel … conspicuous, that’s all. I feel alien. I can’t go there.”
“Oh, conspicuous.” Bea slides into her exaggerated imitation of educated Australian; pom-talk, she calls it; or uni-talk. ‘Too la-de-da alien for the Duke. What the hell does alien mean? Well, uni is too la-de-da for me, Lady K, and I can’t come home.”
“Why not? Oh come on Bea, don’t be silly. We haven’t seen you for months. Mum and Dad aren’t —”
“No. You’ll see why. The kiosk at the Gardens, then. Two o’clock, I’ll be waiting.”
And at the Botanical Gardens, Kay does see why, and feels suddenly faint. She has broken into a run at the sight of Bea’s unkempt curls through the latticed arch of the arbour beside the kiosk. Arms outstretched, she has the sense of running toward a missing part of herself. She stops short. She reaches for the kiosk railing and slides onto the bench. “Oh my God, Bea,” she whispers.
Bea is pregnant.
(Down at the Duke of Wellington, a voice plays itself in Katherine’s ear. Roistering. Playing Villon.)
The pregnancy is in the early stages, but still, given Bea’s flamboyant body and her taste for tight clothes, there can be no mistake.
[“How can I explain to you, Charade?” Kay asks decades later. “That time and that place, it’s not possible to … How can I convey the impact? If you wore a placard saying AIDS around your neck perhaps, you’d have some equivalent idea.”]
“Thought I might shock you,” Bea laughs, blowing cigarette smoke between them.
“You don’t shock me.” Katherine means to seem blasé, but sounds prim. Her lungs are sealed off, black motes dance in front of her eyes. (Down at the Duke of Wellington he’s mine, he’s roistering mine, and after I finish grade eight we’ll be playing Villon.)
Bea is watching her closely. “Father’s nobody you know,” she says. And Katherine’s breath comes back, stumbling on its way in. She turns away and breathes slowly, counting two three four, calming her jerky pulse. “A farmer from up Tamborine way,” Bea says. “He’s okay. Got a place up on the mountain, so I’m going.”
“Going?” Katherine echoes faintly. Away from the Duke and Villon?
“Oh stop looking at me like that. And there’s no need to tell Mum and Dad,” Bea says. She lights a cigarette from the one between her lips, and tosses the butt into lantana bushes. Instinctively Katherine flinches and half moves to pick up the litter. Bea laughs noisily. “Jesus. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, and always pick up after yourself.” But she stubs out the new cigarette on the bench and walks across to the rubbish bin. “There!” She tosses it in. “Got to quit anyway, I guess.” She pats her stomach, then asks, looking out over geometric swirls of begonias: “Mum and Dad ever ask about me?”
“You are mentioned every night at family prayer.”
“I’ll bet.”
“They love you, Bea. We all do.”
“Yeah, I know.” Compulsively she lights another cigarette, sucks greedily, three, four puffs. “Oh hell.” She stares at the Camel (no filter) as though it were a parakeet that has somehow alighted and got itself caught in her fingers. She drops it and grinds it with her heel. “Oh for God’s sake,” she says, “you don’t have to look at it like that.”
“Like what? I wasn’t … Sorry, I wasn’t even conscious …”
“I know you weren’t, you ninny.” Bea makes a gesture of helplessness with her hands. She picks up the smashed cigarette and sends it on a long slow arc into the bin. “Oh Jeez. What a mess-up eh?”
“It’s kind of exciting,” Kay offers awkwardly. “A baby. Getting married.”
“Jesus, I’m not getting married. I’m not that stupid.Just shacking up, that’s all. You can’t have a bun in the oven at the Duke. Not proper, is it?” She laughs. “I’ve been fired.”
“Oh Bea.” They stare at each other. For a crazy second Kay thinks of Gene the sailorman from Tennessee. “Remember that sailor?” she asks inanely. “In Melbourne. When we were kids.”
“What sailor?”
“The baddleship man … Don’t you remember? In the buttercup patch?”
“Jesus. The buttercup patch. When me dad was still …”
“And a sailor came. He was going to take you to Tennessee.”
“Sounds like one of your tall stories. Or one of mine. The stuff I made up, that you believed! God, Kay, I could tell you anything, you were so stupid.” Bea laughs. “Oh Jesus, I gotta be getting back to work. I got till the end of the month, and we need the dough.”
“Do you have to rush off?” Kay bites her l
ip, hesitates, then says, “Oh heck, you dreadful woman, I miss the mess in my room,” and throws her arms around Bea. “I’ll be an auntie,” she says. “Just think.”
“Struth,” Bea says gruffly. “Poor little bugger. He’ll be shanghaied for Sunday school if he doesn’t watch out. He’ll have to mind his Ps and Qs.”
“And his Bs and Ks.”
“And now a word of prayer …” Bea flutters angelic eyelids, mimicking familiar rituals.
“For our wayward sister Bea,” Kay intones.
“And the child she conceived in sin. Hey, what is this? Are you laughing or crying or what?”
“Yes.”
“C’mon, Kay, it’s no big deal. Just another bee in my bonnet. Jeez, I gotta have a smoke. I’m sorry.”
“Bea, as if I care.”
“As if you don’t, you ninny. So. How’s uni then?” She sits beside Kay on the bench.
“Oh Bea, I love it. I have a carrel of my own in the library — well, it’s not mine, but no one else uses it, down in the stacks … and I just read all the time.”
“Yeah. So I hear.”
In one instant all the nerve threads in Kay’s body are tugged tight, but something is pushing up up and through her like a geyser. Her voice bleats itself out, as proper and vinegarish as Sunday: “From whom do you hear?”
“From whom do you hear,” mimics Bea, exaggerating, sticking her tongue plummily into her cheek. “From who’d ja think, you brainy K-storm?” She begins to pace around the octagonal latticed arbour, sucking hard on her cigarette, smoke dragoning out of her nostrils. She says suddenly, offhandedly, passing on dubious information, “Nicholas says you’re bloody brilliant.”
Charades Page 15
