Kay is stunned into speech. “Nicholas talks about me?” She means: Nicholas notices me? Of all the students in his seminar, I am actually more than a name on French assignments? Nicholas actually notices, knows, links me to …? Oh God oh God, does that mean it is so embarrassingly obvious that I … ? Does it show when I look at him?
Katherine would like to die quickly and neatly of shame. “Do you mean —”
“He’s got a thing about brains. You and the Ashcan, that prissy sheila. Don’t catch her getting caught with her pants off.”
This coded and convoluted piece of information hits Katherine like a football in the soft hollows of her obsession. She thinks, winded: And your cock-and-bull story about the farmer from Tamborine …?
“Oh for God’s sake, stop staring at me like that,” Bea says, sending up smoke tornadoes from mouth and nostrils. “It’s not his. I know that for certain, worse luck. He was away with the Ashcan woman.” Smoke floats in a screen between them. “Uni holidays, you should know. Three bloody weeks at the crucial time, so that’s that.” She makes another circuit of the carved central pole and comes to a halt in front of Kay. “Believe me,” she says, jabbing at the air with her cigarette in emphatic punctuation, “when it’s his I’m gonna have, I’ll tell you.”
Katherine might as well be on the Big Dipper at the Brisbane Show, so many waves buffet her, so many peaks/troughs/peaks/troughs giddily passing, so many slivers of hope and anguish. She kneels on the bench and leans over the latticework to face the tangle of lantana, the sweep of lawn, the distance noisy with exotic botanical colour. She is afraid she might actually be sick. She feels foolish.
“Kay,” Bea says. “Kay …” She hooks one arm over the lattice and puts the other roughly around Kay’s shoulders. “Look at me, you silly ninny. Look at me.” But Kay, resisting, brushes her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Oh Kay,” Bea sighs. “You can’t have everything.” And when Katherine, startled, turns to face her: “You can’t have everything, Kay.”
* *
Katherine stares at the note that is paper-clipped to her French assignment. It is possible that the entire morning has swum by, she cannot tell; it is possible that if she were to surface from her carrel deep in the stacks, there might be stars above the cloisters and the quad. The note is in red ink from a ballpoint pen, the same ink that has made marginal comments on her assignment and that speaks in a stylish scrawl and clipped Brit accent (pom-talk) from the lower half of the last page of
her essay:
An unequivocal A. Nice work, Katherine — though I’m not sure your evidence is conclusive for the link between Molière, Act I, sc iii, and the incident in Madame de Sévigné ’s letter. Provocative, nevertheless. And since you’ve discovered the letters, you might consider doing your next major assignment on them, instead of on the set topic. See me about this.
See me about this. Wouldn’t that have been enough? That alone could have sent her into a trance. And then in addition — would you call this afterthought or forethought? — there is the paper-clipped note.
Katherine:
We seem to share an obsession with Verity and I thought perhaps you could help me. I’d be interested in knowing what your sharp and perceptive mind brings to bear on the problem. I understand from Bea that you don’t care to frequent the usual student joints. The refectory then? A dinner for your insights? Thursday at six. Let me know if that doesn’t suit. Nicholas.
PS. Trust you’ll forgive this unorthodox request.
Your sharp and perceptive mind, Katherine thinks, dazed.
I understand from Bea … Your sharp and perceptive mind.
Bea says you don’t care to frequent …
How dare Bea talk about me like that? she fumes; as though I were one of her beers on tap at the Duke.
Then she thinks: Nicholas asks her about me.
Because of Verity, of course. Still. Your sharp and perceptive mind. Why does he link me with Verity? Does Bea tell him that? Is it possible that Verity herself … that Nicholas and Verity actually discuss …? No. Not possible. Put it down to tattletale Bea.
When Katherine finds herself dreamwalking along Coronation Drive toward the Adelaide Street trams, having got off the university bus one stop too early, it is mid-afternoon. But is it still Tuesday? — because she knows time can bolt — it has happened to her over and over — while she merely stops to pick a wayside thought. Here’s something new, however, the reverse, an Einstein knot: the way time can baulk in its tracks, the way the spinning world slows, takes a smoko when heavy business is afoot, buggers off for a day.
How has Katherine arrived on lower George Street, beyond the reach of the tramlines, when she has a tram to catch? She walks past the Duke of Wellington, round the block and past it again. If she does it one more time, Bea might see her, and what are her motives for consulting Bea? On the third circuit she keeps going and gets a tram at the corner of Adelaide and George.
How will the time pass until Thursday at six? Will it pass?
The time does pass, mirabile dictu, and here they are at a corner table. Beyond the window, allamanda and bougainvillea, brash siblings, clamour at the sun from trumpet throats, and the lawns fall down toward the river where the racing eights come and go in a bright flash of oars.
“Has she ever talked about it?” Nicholas has asked. He means Verity.
And Katherine, silent, has gone on staring out toward the river. I can never speak of that day, she thinks.
“I’ve pieced fragments together,” Nicholas says. “I know her parents. I mean the ones who had her brought out here in ’46, the De L’anneau family, the ones who adopted her. No one knows what happened to hers. The De L’anneaus have a document: Believed dead, Auschwitz 1943, but that’s all.” He leans over to the next table. “Mustard? No? I find I have to douse refectory food with something.
“Yes,” he says. “That’s how I met her, through the family, when my father absconded and brought me out with him.” He looks out the window, reflective. “I still remember that night, the midnight train to Dover. It seemed like a huge adventure.” He laughs. “Younger sons, you know; gambling debts and whatnot. My father, who continues to cut a somewhat shady swathe through Sydney these days, thought it was a kindness to his older brother, the seventh earl. I don’t know what my mother might have thought. She was left behind with a baby. Anyway, one of the De L’anneaus married a second cousin of mine at three removes, or some such thing.”
Katherine’s memory, dizzy, is tossing up random images: Gene the Sailorman; the blue stripes on Patrick’s legs; Merv Watson with the megaphone in his hands; Nicholas under the mango tree in Finsbury Park. At last, she thinks, the notes of his recorder are reaching my ears.
“These days, the De L’anneaus have a finger in plenty of pies,” says Nicholas. “Along with my father. Very hardheaded and pragmatic, people like the De L’anneaus; well, no more so than your average Catholic aristocrat, I suppose, especially the recently impoverished, especially the ones with Parisian connections, especially the ones who are Jewish if you go back far enough.” He surveys the almost empty refectory. “Katherine, my dear, cafeterias are frightfully depressing, don’t you think? Next time, anywhere but here. Agreed?”
Next time, Katherine thinks, swallowing hot tea and not trusting herself to speak. Katherine, my dear.
“Anyway, I’ve known her since we were kids. De L’anneau’s her legal name by the way. I expect she’d told you that?” Absent-mindedly he picks up his knife and begins tapping its blade very lightly against Katherine’s forearm. He could be doodling on a piece of scrap paper for all the awareness he bestows on this, but the nerves in Katherine’s body realign themselves at dizzying velocities. She watches the piece of metal that connects her with Nicholas. “She was Vérité Acier when she came to them,” he says. “That’s the name the nuns in Le Raincy gave her. She’s the one who ins
isted on Ashkenazy again, as soon as she got here, right from the start.” He stops tapping with the knife and leans forward. “My father got that from her parents. Amazing really, when you think about it; that kind of determination when you’re nine years old. Has she talked about this?”
Katherine, eyes on the unfocused allamanda distance, shakes her head slightly.
Nicholas sighs. “Of course she’s had the best of medical … the best of psychiatrists. The De L’anneaus have been able to see to that,” — he gives Katherine the kind of wry smile that assumes complicit knowledge of the business world — “in the wake of recent real estate deals in which my father had a hand. Anyway, we assume that’s helped. The psychiatry, I mean. But she’ll never speak French, it’s a kind of hysterical muteness.” He begins tapping with the knife again. “And the absurd thing is, you know, she’s the reason I decided to study French — as a callow but lovesick Churchie boy.”
Churchie: and Katherine is hurtled back to Finsbury Park when Churchie was just an exotic word and the golden boy lay in the grass with his recorder. So constantly accessible in dreams. Churchie. Church of England Grammar School. Katherine’s heart sinks; she withdraws her arm from the tapping knife; the refectory table widens and widens, it is wider far than Finsbury Park. She stares across unbreachable distances. Private school people, she thinks, are given something very early on, perhaps it is something they eat, something that tells them they are always right, and even if they are not, it doesn’t matter.
State school people are always afraid they are wrong; they worry about it.
“I thought she might talk to me then. In French.” Nicholas shakes his head, amazed at his own life. “The reasons for doing what we do!”
Oh yes, Katherine thinks. The amazing reasons.
Her eyes still on the middle distance, on the haze above river and racing eights, she asks: “Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because I’m afraid. Because she seems to be getting further and further away.”
Katherine, studying his profile (since it is Nicholas who now stares into the bougainvillea), asks herself: Who fascinates me more, he or she?
But how does one choose among gods?
“I don’t understand,” she says awkwardly, nervously, “why you think that I … why I could possibly be of any …”
“Nine years old,” Nicholas says. “Of course, the weeks in the forest living by her wits, and then the convent years. All the daily deceits required and the never knowing when … But still, amazing.”
“I don’t know …” Katherine stumbles over words. “I mean, yes, it is, it is amazing, only it …” In another way, she feels, it is quite unsurprising. “There’s something …” But can she translate into words her sense of the rime-cold prow of the boat where Verity stands? And of the way that Verity will always stand, undaunted, unflinching, the worst already known. Is it possible to express this? She would need to speak, she thinks, in Anglo-Saxon. “The lighted hall,” she begins clumsily, inanely. “Once it’s lost …” But she gives up and says in another kind of voice altogether. “I don’t think you need to be afraid for her.”
“Moving further away from all of us,” Nicholas says, his barque sailing in other waves. “Other people have noticed. Not I alone.”
Not I alone. The private school syntax snags in Katherine’s mind. She flinches, scanning backwards for possible errors committed, the grammatical gaucheries of state school speech.
Nicholas leans forward and catches hold of her wrist with a sudden urgency and demands: “In her seminars, do you notice …? Is she always coherent?”
“Yes,” Katherine says, looking at his fingers on her wrist. “Absolutely lucid. Always.” There will be a bruise, she thinks.
A permanent bracelet of some kind, a sort of pressure scar.
“Charade,” she says at the shoreline of a much later chapter, “I’ve thought and thought but I’ve never accounted for it. From almost any perspective, it’s neurosis. Viewed even from the next table in the refectory, it’s pathetic. Or just silly. That poseur, was what someone used to say about Nicholas, another student, a Richard St John, who teaches at Oxford now.
“Do you know, Charade, just last year I finally spent a day in the library looking for traces of brilliant Nicholas. Not a book, not a single article, going back twenty-five years. What does this mean?
“And yet that day in Toronto last year … The mere sight of him … I felt as though I’d been shot. Traffic screeching, horns, I could have been killed. And then when he —”
“Wait,” Charade says. “Wait, that’s a switchback jump, I can’t … How did we get to Toronto?”
“I thought I’d lose him, I went careening across the street between cars —”
“My father’s in Toronto? You found him?”
Katherine blinks. “Nicholas,” she says faintly, leaning back against the limestone cliff of her lakeshore. “Even the name, you know, after all these years …Just saying it.”
“He’s here in Canada?”
“Here?” Katherine looks about her uncertainly. “Where are we?” she asks, as though a fog has settled around them.
“Kay! Kay!” Charade is pounding with her fists. “Aunt Kay, don’t do this to me. We’re in the refectory with my father, and then suddenly you’re —”
“The refectory,” Katherine sighs.
In the refectory, Nicholas is asking: “She doesn’t … drift off? Lapse into silences?”
“Verity? No. Not in lectures or seminars.”
“But at other times?”
“Don’t …? Don’t we all?” Katherine ventures.
“Ah,” he says, letting her wrist fall back on the table and rubbing his temples with his fingers. “What lapses. What silences may come.”
Katherine says hesitantly, “Aren’t there necessary silences?” What she is striving to articulate is this: she believes she has the sorcerer’s stone in her hands, she believes Verity pulled it from the pocket of her jodhpurs and gave it to her. She believes henceforth she will know what to do at the batwing touch of harm, of fear, of loss. Mute, she holds her cupped hands out towards Nicholas by way of explanation.
“Raisins,” she says.
“Raisins?” Nicholas frowns. “What do you mean, raisins?”
“In Verity’s pocket. You know the way she is always …’’ Nicholas, quizzical, is looking at her as though she is reading from the wrong page. “You do know,” she says, confident in her tiny area of specialisation (minor contribution, perhaps, an esoteric footnote, but significant), “you do know why she always has raisins in her pocket.”
He lifts an eyebrow, bewildered, perhaps even politely amused. “Hmm. Raisins. I’ve known her a long time but I can’t say I’ve ever …” He asks suddenly: “This isn’t one of Bea’s stories, is it?” He conveys benevolence, affection, the very mildest of discreetly patronising smiles. “Bea claims you believe
anything she —”
Panic. Inner vertigo. Also anger and humiliation fuel Katherine’s powers of invention. “I meant it as a figure of speech, actually. Synecdoche.” She taps astonishing reserves of irony. “Certain things, of course, she has discussed with me, especially hunger as both a literal and symbolic issue.” A whole prior life for Verity balloons up in Katherine’s mind like a dandelion puffball, lodging seeds of event, putting out details, growing yellow as the sun and at least as flamboyant. “But I don’t think I should violate her trust.” Dizzy now with power, seeing the clouding of his eyes, the quick wince, she turns the knife: “Of course, she’s grateful to you, Nicholas. That goes without saying.”
Nicholas is in disarray, both his Proust and his Villon hats askew. “Katherine,” he says, looking at her differently, “I had no idea you …”
And nor did she. It is as though she has discovered a dagger in her hand, or a steel backbone running through the middle
of her body. Bemused, she rubs the nape of her neck where it might perhaps protrude. And a part of her frantically signals Miss Warren, dragonlady of the library on Mondays. Is it possible Miss Warren is still living? Daydreaming, perhaps, on the terrace of an Eventide Home in Brisbane? And if Katherine were to write her a letter?
Dear Miss Warren:
On the occasion of your irritation with Verity Ashkenazy, our Dark Lady of the Others, what did aforesaid defendant place on your table on the Monday of unremembered month inst., A.D. 1951 or thereabouts?
(“Charade,” Katherine sighs, kneeling on the limestone shingle and splashing her face with lake water. “I still don’t know the answer to that question. Were there raisins, or weren’t there?”)
* *
Nicholas says: “I knew there was something between you, some connection, I sensed it.” He pauses, weighing risks. “I’ll tell you something a little odd, Katherine. You could say I became aware … You could say I was warned of you in a dream.” He makes a graceful gesture of ironic self-deprecation with his hands. “It’s, ah, quite exotic in its way. In the dream, Verity and I were riding up near the rainforest somewhere. And then I noticed she had a child in front of her saddle. When I drew alongside” — he gestures again to indicate the illogical nature of dreams — “it wasn’t a child, it was you. And I said: What are you doing with one of my students in front of your saddle? And Verity said: She’s not your student; she’s mine.”
He pushes his cup of tea away from him with distaste, and looks around restlessly as though whisky could be tapped from the air by wishing. “Odd, n’est-ce-pas? But I must have known, unconsciously, that she had talked to you about me.”
Katherine averts her gaze, trusting to the bougainvillea.
“I hope,” Nicholas begins. “It’s not a question of prying or violating trust, it’s just … Well, I hope we can talk again.” He reaches out and touches the tip of Katherine’s finger where it rests on the table. “You’re a fascinating little puzzle-piece, aren’t you?” He runs his finger lightly the length of hers, crosses the plateau of her hand, explores her forearm. “You’re coming on the arts picnic, I hope? To the Glasshouse Mountains?”
Charades Page 16
