by A L McCann
Somewhere in the darkness of the still house he heard a giggle. It was Ondine, he was sure. He put the oil lamp down on the kitchen table, took off his shoes, and walked quietly across the kitchen to the back door and out into the yard. There was a light on in the children’s room. Through the crack in the curtains he could see an oil lamp burning on the top of the chest of drawers, casting a pale, yellow glow over Ondine’s naked body. The girl was staring at the ceiling trying not to laugh, holding her hand in her mouth while Paul crouched over her, examining her genitals with a magnifying glass, pushing gently at the fatty skin with the rounded end of a lead pencil. Albert drew back a little, careful to conceal himself at the edge of the frame, his blood coursing through his veins, his breath shortening as it did every time the whore on Little Lonsdale Street stepped towards him out of the squalor of his imagination. He watched Ondine writhe under her brother’s careful examination. The whole scene was bathed in the eeriness of hallucination: deep shadows and slithers of light filled the room like entwining serpents that might have been thrown up by a swirling magic lantern. For a moment the girl seemed to be looking right at him, her eyes twinkling with shamelessness.
At least that was what Albert remembered as he put on his boots and walked out into the street, his body shaking. A moment later the whole thing seemed like an intoxicating dream. The night filled him with its poisonous possibilities and he walked towards the river, thinking that he’d find his prostitute again. But when he imagined what she would look like all he saw was Ondine laughing at him, calling him an idiot, confident that he wouldn’t plumb the depths of her secret life. What was he, after all? A nothing, a mere cipher, a bit of clay barely conscious of itself.
As he walked, he knew with increasing certainty that he would never return to that warped house with its crooked floorboards and its sinking foundations. And he knew that his wife would be indifferent, perhaps even relieved. She had never really loved him. It was comical even to contemplate. He thought about the day he stabbed himself, in a moment of perfect sanity and clarity, because he desired to the point of madness. Now his wife and children were strangers and he was going to find his Angelique again and follow her to the end of him. Only she could bring him back to life.
It was an unseasonably warm night, and as Albert walked he became hotter, until the sight of the river was a balm and he watched a single light on the opposite bank winking at him in its inky surface. On Princes Bridge he paused and gazed down into the water.
A soldier staggered past him, drunk.
“Been to fight the Boers?” Albert said, in a voice that he didn’t recognise as his own.
“Been – to – fight – the – Boers,” the soldier repeated, not even bothering to raise his eyes from the pavement.
The city in front of him was dead. Nothing moved. The entire place was completely still, like a vast graveyard. He couldn’t bring himself to disturb its solemnity, and realised how thoroughly inconsequential he was to the sleeping mass of brick and stone and mortar.
Barely conscious of what he was doing, he climbed up onto the bridge’s railing. Only thirty-five, he told himself, and this filthy river will be here forever. As the town hall clock chimed some ungodly hour, he let himself drop into the darkness below.
PART THREE
CHAPTER SEVEN
Three years after her husband’s death, Anna Walters dashed her brother-in-law Robert’s earnest hopes when she turned her back on months of gentle courting, married Charles Winton and moved into his opulent residence on St Vincent Place South. There was only a civil ceremony, which took place in a registration office in William Street, with Winton’s housekeeper, Mrs Norris, and a quiet but chagrined Robert, as witnesses.
Winton made it clear that Paul and Ondine would be comfortably accommodated. He promised Anna that he would treat them as his own, and had legal adoption papers in place almost before the marriage certificate was signed. To make the transition easier for them all he had arranged that Anna and the children would move into the house while he was on a lecture tour of country Victoria, where he was scheduled to speak about various aspects of social hygiene in the gold towns of Ballarat, Bendigo and Castlemaine. It was a tiresome trip for Winton, who as a city-dweller showed no affection for what he liked to think of as the provinces, and who looked forward to the arrival of his wife with the excitability of a much younger lover. Since he had made his fortune out of prudent investments in the area twenty years earlier he felt he owed the goldfields some sort of debt. But with his one-time hope that success as a popular medical authority might pave the way for lecture tours to Europe and America long since abandoned, the opportunity to let Anna and the children relocate unfettered and at their leisure was the only thing that justified his absence. He was gone for eight days, and when he returned Anna had tentatively assumed control of the house. A picture of the Rhine hung unobtrusively in the sitting room that she had appropriated as her private retreat.
For Paul and Ondine, then thirteen and twelve respectively, the affluence of their new home far outweighed the inconvenience of having to move. For the first time they each had their own bedroom, side by side along a wide hallway on the second floor. Winton had made sure that both rooms were lavishly furnished so that the two children fancied themselves royalty as they leapt onto each other’s deep, soft beds and unpacked their meagre belongings.
When Winton arrived home he appeared happy to see them both. They feared he would be an old-style tyrant, the sort of demented aristocrat they had encountered in the fairytales and Gothic romances which their mother had read to them when they were younger and which they both still avidly consumed, frequently reading out loud to each other at night before they fell asleep. When Anna first mentioned moving to St Vincent Place, Ondine wondered about tombs and crypts where she might be locked up as punishment and imagined that Winton, a doctor after all, might try to hack out their eyes like Coppelius in “The Sandman”.
Her fears, which she had deliberately nurtured as a way of giving rein to her melodramatic temperament, were almost immediately allayed. They met the doctor in his new capacity as stepfather at dinner the evening after his return, and though he was evidently tired, he was in such good spirits that his warmth succeeded in melting the children’s reserve. They ate a meal of roast lamb and vegetables, which Mrs Norris had prepared, had a glass of wine from fine cut-crystal, which made both children a bit tipsy, and finished with spotted dick. The doctor politely inquired as to the children’s interests, talked about painting with Paul and the possibility of him studying it in a few years’ time, and chatted about novels with Ondine, who was delighted to find that he had read the writers she adored – the Brothers Grimm, Tieck and Hoffmann. She suddenly felt very grown-up.
Anna was quiet, but glowed with secret satisfaction, confident that they would all be secure here and that her children would benefit from the advantages of wealth and education. She and Winton were careful to avoid explicit displays of their amorousness, and this cult of secrecy lent their interactions a coyness that charmed them both when they were in public and heightened their passion when they were finally alone together.
After dinner, as the four of them retreated to a sitting room of leather-upholstered couches arranged in a semicircle around a fireplace, Winton presented each of them with a gift. He had bought Ondine a gold necklace and Paul a new set of paintbrushes and oils. Both were thrilled. Ondine put on her necklace immediately, shivering at the touch of the cold metal on her skin.
“She is quite a princess,” the doctor said softly to Anna as they watched the girl sit very upright and throw her blond locks over her back so that she could more easily link the chain.
“Haven’t you anything for Mum?” she asked.
“Ondine!”Anna said.
“Why of course,” the doctor said. “But she’ll have to wait a little while to receive it.” Anna looked at him. She was self-conscious about the prospect of her children confronting the fact that a new husband
was also a new lover.
But before Paul and Ondine had time to ponder the implications of this mysterious deferral, Mrs Norris brought in a tray of coffee, tea and chocolates, which they lingered over with feigned reserve until Winton urged them to help themselves, waving them on towards the sweets with his ringed hand which, Anna remembered, had once seemed so menacing.
In the week or so before the doctor’s return the children had made a habit of creeping into each other’s rooms after they were supposed to have gone to bed. The size of the house and the rugs running along the hallways made it easy to walk around at night without the slightest fear of detection. They sat up together and read stories or ate the sweet food they had hoarded during the day. It was a marked contrast to their old house, especially when their father was alive. In Brooke Street rickety floorboards shifted with every footfall, and the thin wooden walls carried a ghastly range of effects. Mattresses would squeak, doors slam and muted groans of pain or deep, troubled breathing would sometimes reach the children in the dead of night, putting them in fear of an intruder stalking around the yard. Their old house was a claustrophobic shanty of trapdoors, secret panels and peepholes, presided over by a clownish father in a conductor’s uniform. It was a place to be ashamed of and neither of the children looked back on Brooke Street with any nostalgia whatsoever.
Nevertheless, they had both cried when their father died. Two policemen had knocked on their door around midday. Paul heard them tell Anna that Albert’s body had been fished out of the river near Yarraville. The children were shaken, but their tears were as much a response to the grotesqueness of the situation as an act of genuine grief. The whole thing seemed so strange, ugly and, in an intangible way, demeaning. Afterwards the shame of their father’s death hung around the Brooke Street house like the unwholesome odour of rising damp. Ondine dreamt repeatedly of the bloated, blue body floating under the water’s glassy surface and both children imagined they could still hear their father’s footsteps outside their door. The house would creak in the night and they’d both start, almost simultaneously, and listen to the troubled silence around them. It was only now, in the comfort of this new home, that they were completely free of this haunting. The sense of relief they both felt as they stretched out together on Paul’s bed the night of their arrival was enough to obviate the unease of living in a stranger’s house. A week later, when the doctor turned out to be so genial and solicitous, their apprehensions were banished altogether.
Neither of them suspected that their mother would have been capable of betraying their dead father, though this faith was born of idealism and a sense of convention, rather than an understanding of the distance and sometimes the hatred that had existed between their parents. They were both young when Albert had died, and the enchantment of childhood had been strong enough to protect them from the thorns that entangled them. What they remembered as unpleasantness they now attributed to the weird powers of night, the melancholy of childhood, the spectres of the imagination. They could dismiss these easily enough as they grew older, whereas the starker realities of disintegration, breakdown and adultery would have been so much more intractable had they ever managed to displace this half-remembered realm of shadow and light.
Anna seldom retired before her children. On the rare occasion she did, she retreated to the room that preserved the half-fiction of her celibacy, which she carried on with an almost superstitious insistence, though she knew she was being old-fashioned. It was an austere but comfortable chamber that she in fact only ever used as a place to dress. It opened into a bathroom, which in turn opened into Winton’s own room. The second floor of the house was laid out so that the hallway connecting the children’s rooms was entirely sequestered from the other rooms on the floor, which were accessible along another hallway running off at a right angle, and usually closed off by a locked door. The house had two staircases. One was attached to each hallway so that the top floor was in effect divided into two discrete sets of sleeping quarters. This suited everyone. Paul and Ondine, as soon as they became familiar with the layout, moved about their own part of the house with an increasingly careless freedom, while Anna and Winton could carry on with no fear of being intruded upon.
When the doctor turned sixty, a few years after his wife and the children had moved in, Anna arranged a lavish birthday dinner. She wanted to preside over a bigger, more public function, but the unusual circumstances of her relationship with the doctor made this awkward in a society still labouring under a morality that had survived the previous century and that, despite its moribund character, seemed destined to survive her as well. Winton didn’t care in the least. As he concentrated his attention on his wife, he’d also shed many of his old acquaintances. A private celebration was entirely in keeping with his own inclinations.
When the four of them sat down at the table, Ondine couldn’t help but notice her mother’s devotion to the doctor. She had never seen her so radiant in his presence. Anna glowed with satisfaction and Ondine felt uneasy in their midst.
At twelve, when they’d first moved to St Vincent Place, she had an inkling of what it meant to live as man and wife. But back then her sense of this was abstract, innocently astray. She still looked up to adults as if they were faultless, semi-divine creatures unsullied by the elements. Her own father, of course, was an exception, but even there the mystery of a grown-up’s motivations, unfathomable to a child, preserved her idea of adulthood as an unassailable state. Now, at fifteen, she had begun to see her mother and Winton quite differently. There was nothing in particular that she could put her finger on, no one thing that could account for it. Rather it was the slow accumulation of detail that revealed to her intimations of their sexuality – intimations that were increasingly graphic and estranged.
It was not merely the thought of Winton being so much older. It was her awareness of his calm, confident possession of her mother, his easy command of the dinner table, and the rich, overpowering smell of his cologne. She imagined that such a pungent, artificial scent could only be used to mask the hot, musky odour of bodies frantically groping and pawing like animals. She imagined them languishing, swooning in each other’s arms, or rutting away at each other like the dogs she’d seen behind the Punch and Judy show on St Kilda beach. Her vision of their enjoyment might well have cast the familiar dinner gathering in a changed and disturbed light, but it couldn’t explain her sense that she was being pushed away from herself. It was a surreal feeling, as if the self she were used to was falling away, leaving her exposed, vulnerable.
For a moment there was an awkward silence. Anna smiled sweetly at Winton. The flickering candles cast a warm reddish glow over the room. The polished oak table, the chairs upholstered in Utrecht velvet, the gleaming silverware, the crystal glasses and the decanter imparted a heaviness to the proceedings which pulled against her mother’s incongruous lightness of manner. Ondine was startled by this contrast. It was as if the room, which had become so comfortable and familiar, were suddenly foreign, hostile even, as if it were questioning her presence in it. Her mother’s attention concentrated around the doctor, who seemed intoxicated by it and proud of the little gathering. For a second, an expression, partly of anxiety, partly of loathing, disturbed Ondine’s serene demeanour. Paul noticed the change and when she saw him staring at her she immediately resumed her customary prettiness, sipping the half-glass of claret she was permitted in the interests of cultivation and breeding.
After they’d finished the first course of watercress soup, Mrs Norris served a dish of glazed duck, the preparation of which Anna had supervised that afternoon.
“May I have some more wine, Mother?” Ondine asked after she had finished her ration. It was the first time she had referred to Anna as “Mother” instead of “Mum”.
“As it is Dr Winton’s birthday, you may,” she said, determined not to be put off by the hint of disdain in her daughter’s voice.
“Might one inquire as to the doctor’s age?” Ondine returned.
Ondine, of course, knew very well how old he was, but thought she could embarrass him by drawing attention to the twenty-two-year gulf separating him from her mother. Her attempts, for now, came to naught. Anna and Winton carried on the atmosphere of geniality, and Winton again broached the topic of Paul attending classes at the Gallery School, which was now only a year away.
They’ve bribed him with all that art school nonsense, Ondine thought to herself, as the doctor talked enthusiastically about his connections at the academy and his acquaintance with many of the city’s leading art critics and reviewers, some of whom divided their time between medicine and the press.
“James Smith, in fact, was a close friend before he went off the boil and became religious,” the doctor said with a smile.
Ondine looked at Paul, who was evidently going to pretend that he knew who James Smith was. Thinking that she could deflate the doctor a bit she said, with an air of affected nonchalance that sounded childish, “And who exactly is James Smith, Doctor?”
Winton answered her in his stride. A girl of fifteen, he told himself, was not about to ruffle the feathers of a man who had been reinventing himself, across virtually the entire social spectrum, for the last forty years.
“Smith was the critic who tried to sink the impressionists. Streeton, Roberts, Conder and the like. A conservative really, but very influential for a time. I suppose history has run on ahead of him, poor chap.”
“So what use would a poor chap like that be to my brother?” Ondine said.
