The White Body of Evening

by A L McCann

  “Use?” rejoined the doctor, still smiling. “Ondine, we all have our uses.” He might have added that he was sure he could find a particular use for her, but held his tongue, not wanting to disappoint Anna and undermine her touching attempt to create a real family atmosphere.

  Ondine drank her wine, aware of her mother’s disapproval.

  “I think you’ve had enough for one night, dear,” she said.

  “Oh, let the girl celebrate with the rest of us,”Winton said jovially.

  Ondine again fixed upon his quietly assured control of the table, his effortless authority, his neatly trimmed beard, his studs and that ring, a tiny golden claw clutching at a ball of turquoise, he’d been wearing for years. Her sense of something repulsive in Winton, the outline of something ugly and even bestial concealed in his accomplished manner and impeccable grooming, became more emphatic, until she imagined she could see a primitive wolfishness glaring back at her from across the table. The man is old, she thought to herself, yet he fancies himself young. He behaves as if he were a man half his age. How is it that my mother could love him? Was she fooled by all this finery and talk of literature and art?

  It only took her a second to piece this puzzle together, and the ensuing explanation cut right through her. That man has bought us all, she said to herself. A nice little family to put on display. All paid for in full, like figures in a doll’s house or parrots in a gilt cage. The house, the money, the polish, it all represented a right of dominion over them. It was as clear to her as the threat of overt violence.

  She regained her composure instantly. It was as if she had lived through a revolution. She knew that the world she was inhabiting had not changed. She was simply looking at things with her eyes open, and had found the clarity of her vision startling. She regretted that it had affected her and now hoped that her rudeness had not undermined their position in the doctor’s scheme, had not offended his assumption of sovereignty. Like a creature capable of magically changing its form, Ondine cast off her look of distracted contemplation as if it were a piece of old clothing, and assumed an expression of gentle bonhomie as the doctor spoke about a performance of Hamlet to which he wished to take them the following week.

  “Doctor,” Ondine said with deliberate melodiousness, “could we play Schubert Lieder on the graphophone?”

  “By all means,” he replied.

  “Thank you.”

  The girl got up and walked to the corner of the dining room, where there was a new disk graphophone positioned in an oak cabinet designed specially for it. Ondine wound the machine and the record crackled into life, filling the room with the mechanically tortured strains of “The Wanderer’s Nachtlied”.

  As she returned to the table she passed by the doctor and kissed him on the cheek, aware of his heavy scent.

  “Happy birthday,” she said.

  Anna blushed on her daughter’s behalf.

  “Thank you dear,” he said.

  After the usual round of coffee and chocolate, during which Anna presented Winton with a leather-bound edition of Dante’s Inferno illustrated by Gustave Doré, the children retired to their rooms.

  Paul kissed his sister goodnight in the hallway, realising that she was drunk from the wine. He sat on his own bed, fully expecting her to appear as soon as the light in the hallway was put out by Mrs Norris. On cue Ondine opened the door, wearing a full-length nightgown, and immediately flung herself onto the bed in a fit of consternation.

  “You know what’s happening,” she exclaimed, leaning on her brother’s shoulder.

  “What’s wrong, Ond?”

  “I hate them both.”

  “Mum and Dr Winton?”

  “Who else? The mere thought of it makes me sick.”

  “Ond, they’re married. What do you think married people do?”

  Paul thought he had already intuited what she was upset about, thought he’d seen her curious naïvety clearly written in her countenance at the table.

  “Oh, don’t be stupid. I don’t mean that. Not just that. I’m not a child.”

  She was on the verge of explaining herself to Paul as she glimpsed the difficulty of revealing exactly what she had seen. For a second she lingered over the word “prostitute”. She didn’t want to say it, didn’t want to sully them all with the thought of it.

  “We could creep in and catch them at it,” she said, diverting herself. “Only it would disgust me too much.”

  “Winton is not a bad man,” Paul said. “And he has made Mum very happy.”

  “And of course you’re happy, going off to the Gallery School,” she said. “Oh, I don’t care a damn about him anyway. Not really. It’ll have to be us against them. A secret alliance.”

  Ondine turned to face him, leaning back on her elbows and pulling her legs up around her brother’s waist.

  For a moment he was surprised by the frankness of her body and he blushed. Her thighs tightened around him. He slid his hands over her shoulders, resting his palms on her ribs, just touching her breasts with the tips of his thumbs. Years of longing welled up in him. All the lascivious detail he had accumulated in his mind, the seething carnal mass that spilled over onto his sketchpad, now blinded him in a moment of dazzling possibility. He put his arms around his sister and kissed her playfully. Ondine seemed to melt into him as she kissed him back, gently biting his lower lip.

  “Do you love me, Paul?” she asked with a contrived coquettishness.

  “Who else would I bother loving?”

  At that very moment, in another part of the house, Anna looked at herself in the mirror. She was thirty-eight years old, still pretty, but the weight of years had begun to etch itself around her eyes. Her face, she fancied, had a hardness that reminded her of worn stone. She turned over in her mind the image of her daughter kissing Winton. She was ashamed to admit that it made her jealous. Ondine was beautiful, more beautiful than she had ever been. What’s more, she was going to have all the advantages of Winton’s money. The doctor had already willed the house and nearly two-thirds of his portable capital to Anna, who would see that her children lacked nothing. It was a vague and petty anxiety, she knew, but she imagined she’d be happier when her daughter was married and securely settled.

  A part of her knew that she was being trite clinging to this fiction of domestic tranquillity. When Albert was alive she read novels about marriage, domestic romances and the like, partly as a way of seeking refuge from her own situation. She was never really taken in by them. She always saw through the optimism of the fairytale. And she wasn’t foolish enough to take her own good fortune with Winton as proof of anything more universal either. Still, the thought of Ondine happily married was one she harboured for all their sakes. Though Anna didn’t credit theories of hereditary madness, the fact that her daughter shared her father’s blood still made her anxious. Ondine’s stateliness and her occasionally condescending air put Anna on edge. There was the hint of excess lingering in her capacity to parody the conventions of family life, and Anna was convinced she’d sooner see Ondine happily reconciled to these than up in arms against them. She hoped that her daughter would not need reining in.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  St Vincent Place was a wide crescent bordering pleasantly sculpted gardens of winding paths, flower beds, Algerian oak trees, palms, lilly-pillies, and, in season, apple and cherry blossoms. Before Federation the outer rim of the street, divided into St Vincent Place North and South by the gardens, housed some of the most prominent and well-to-do families in the colony. This was not Toorak wealth mind you, not a matter of stately mansions or of antipodean aristocracy built on vast pastoral leases, rather it was what Australians respect far more – the modest opulence of professional classes and shrewd investors. But just as the new rich of the colonies were never far away from reminders of their humbler origins as opportunistic settlers, St Vincent Place was only a matter of blocks from places like Brooke Street. It was a vagary of South Melbourne’s early design that a street of such soli
d middle-class prosperity could coexist side by side with a tangled nest of lanes and alleys that might, without much chance of melodramatic exaggeration, be described as squalid.

  Hamish McDermott was increasingly aware of these differences. The miraculous social elevation of his childhood playmates had been a bitter lesson in the awkwardness of class distinction, one that he bore with moroseness and resentment. Some afternoons, if he had an early shift at the Homoeopathic Hospital where he worked now as an orderly, he concealed himself in the gardens opposite Dr Winton’s house and watched as Ondine arrived home from Albert Park Ladies’ College, wondering at her lithe, graceful beauty and the way in which she had assumed the mantle of her new position with such theatrical imperiousness. She learnt the piano and was taught French and German by expert tutors. Sometimes Hamish would stay out in the gardens until well after dark, gazing at the faint orange glow emanating from within the house. On rainy days he wore his thick, black overcoat and imagined, without a trace of humour, that he had become a sad, Quasimodo-like figure, a lumpish young man with thick worker’s hands, unkempt red hair, freckles and an awkward gait, waiting forlornly to dash his hopes at the feet of an Esmeralda corrupted and made cruel by money.

  Despite the amount of time he spent furtively lurking outside it, Hamish was in fact no stranger to the interior of the house. Paul frequently invited him to peruse Winton’s library and study, which had a marvellous collection of the Romantic poets and some fine pieces of early colonial art. The two of them still kept up a healthy friendship. Paul craved Hamish’s company after putting up all week with the sons of financiers, bankers and, worse, the squattocracy, at Wesley College. Anna too was happy to accommodate Hamish, treating him almost as one of the family.

  Still, the finery of the place put him on edge and he never felt able to relax in the way that he had in the old Brooke Street cottage. Winton’s library seemed an uninviting place to him. There were volumes of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson and a complete set of Sir Walter Scott, as well as Australian authors like Harpur, Kendall, Gordon and Clarke. There were, of course, other obscure tracts on medicine, social hygiene, sexual pathology and tribal customs, but none of these books, not even the most familiar of them, seemed to Hamish as if they were meant to be read. He was afraid to take the books off the shelves and didn’t want to borrow any of them for fear of damaging or losing them.

  The sight of these books, so elaborately bound and preserved, with their gilded spines, reminded him just how much he actually disliked reading. The thought of sitting down in a comfortable study to read one of these volumes was deadly. When he first began reading in earnest he hated the way the sentences, paragraphs and pages strung out meaning interminably. He was too impatient and wanted a book to reveal itself straightaway. He imagined himself cutting up the lines until he was left with a mass of words that he could consume in one intoxicating act of understanding. He had turned to poetry for that reason. The dreamlike brevity, the condensation of meaning, the concentration of multiplicity in a single, primal word, were correctives to the lethargy he felt when reading larger works. The order and authority of Winton’s library seemed to mock this need for spontaneous revelation. It was like a tomb built out of books by comparison.

  When he was asked to stay for dinner he often felt pushed to the margins of the conversation despite the doctor’s attempts to draw him out. He hadn’t seen any operas and his family didn’t own a graphophone, so he was unable to comment intelligently on the quality of this or that performance, or debate the relative merits of German and Italian music. He imagined that Ondine must be sneering at his vulgarity and lack of refinement. Like an expert mimic she had learnt the rules of taste and conduct that distinguish the upper classes from their inferiors. She sipped wine like a lady, held herself perfectly erect and touched her brother’s hand affectionately every so often as if, in proper aristocratic fashion, she had assumed the gestures of a subtle decadence. In public she and Paul had even begun to speak to each other like two characters in a contrived comedy of manners. When they carried on with this kind of talk, so artificial and pretentious, Hamish felt excluded and cut off, lacking the intangible quality they so greedily hoarded between them. If Ondine still spoke to him in her old familiar way, everything else about her had changed so visibly that he knew he couldn’t place any stock in this intimacy, which he was sure she would soon forget as she distanced herself even further from her past.

  After these evenings Hamish threw himself into what he now saw, mockingly, as his own milieu. Instead of the opera, he watched vaudeville and fairground entertainments at the Mechanics’ Institute with workers from the wharves who knew his father, or other orderlies and cleaners from the hospital. Hamish hadn’t been an outstanding student at the state high school, but he had only narrowly missed out on a scholarship to university just the same. He hadn’t given up the idea of attending university, but knew that he would first need to save some money and so he hastily took a job at the Homoeopathic while he waited for a public service position to open up. He bridled at the way in which wealth seemed to translate into cultural attainment and didn’t doubt that Paul would eventually become the famous artist he had always dreamt of being, while he’d be stuck as a drudge in an office or a factory.

  Galled at the thought of his own mediocrity, Hamish would drag himself along to the popular theatre at the Mechanics’ Institute and howl disingenuously at the juggling clowns, applaud the man doing bird whistles and feign wonder when a ventriloquist made a dog read Shakespeare. Once he saw a professor, claiming descent from the great ghost-seers of Europe, project a lightshow of spectral polyps around the walls of the hall. It pleased him to think that he was doing something that would so thoroughly debase him in Ondine’s eyes, and he imagined that the next time he dined at St Vincent Place he’d shock them all by describing these wonders.

  After one such evening in the Mechanics’ Institute, where he’d witnessed an unconvincing display of telepathic communication conducted by an enthused and excitable spiritualist who claimed to have lived as a Roman slave in the days of Nero, Hamish walked over to St Vincent Place, where he intended to wallow self-indulgently in the frustration of his unrequited devotion to Ondine. In good romantic fashion he hoped that this might galvanise him in one direction or another, jolt him towards some sense of resolve or purpose. He sat down on a park bench in the middle of the garden. It was a cold, cloudless night, and he could see the steam of his breath in the moonlight. He fell into a trancelike state in which, but for an awareness of his own misery, his mind was empty. In this stupor the garden came alive with the mystery of its stillness. He felt that he was being watched, that other forms moved in the night, that the garden was peopled with shadows come to lose themselves in darkness. Then a figure glided past him, oblivious to his presence. It paused, almost in front of him, gazing at Dr Winton’s house. At first Hamish doubted his own eyes, then wondered just how many other suitors were troubled and pursued by the thought of Ondine.

  He didn’t have to wait long for the mystery to be resolved. As the figure turned despondently away from the house, the moonlight betrayed Robert Walters, Albert’s brother. Hamish remained motionless, hoping against hope that Robert hadn’t noticed him. He seemed to be looking straight into his eyes, but registered nothing, slowly dragging himself off in the direction of Clarendon Street. It was a moment of awful self–recognition. Robert looked pathetic, as if he’d been sapped of life and left to wander as a kind of human shell, a hollow vessel. Was the man pining after Anna? Hamish got up and walked swiftly in the opposite direction, confident that his lonely vigils in the name of thwarted love were over.

  He was, however, to allow himself one final act of remembrance. The house the Walters family had lived in on Brooke Street had been rented for a few years after their departure, but for the last two had been vacant, a home only to the occasional drunk or vagabond. Anna eventually sold it and the place was about to be demolished by its new
owners, before it collapsed of its own accord. At the hospital the next day Hamish decided that he would walk through the place one last time, drawn by the mystery of his childhood and the hope of rekindling some of its enchantment.

  He thought about the house the whole day, the better to forget the corpse he had wheeled towards the undertaker’s van almost first thing that morning. An old bloke he had pushed around in a wheelchair from time to time had died of a cancer that had eaten its way into his lung and finally through an artery wall. He drowned in his own blood during the night, coughing up a horrible clotted mess. By the time Hamish arrived in Brooke Street he had spent almost eight hours wrestling with the image of the dead man, the bloody evidence of his dreadful death rattle, and the memory of the cold, cancerous coughs he had heard as he pushed the breathless patient around the wards.

  The Brooke Street cottage had fallen into such a state of disrepair that Hamish feared he might fall through the rotted floorboards. The place smelt like urine and was littered with old newspapers, rags and odd pieces of clothing – a single worker’s boot, a pair of football shorts, some soiled underwear. In the living room there was straw scattered about and the blackened remains of a makeshift fire. A few empty bottles had been tossed into one corner. In the kitchen the linoleum had been torn up and many of the floorboards had decayed, leaving a view of the dark underside of the house, the moist, swampy soil of the bay that looked as if it had been coated in treacle. In the front bedroom there was only a mattress with the stuffing leaking out of its side. Hamish recalled the sight of Anna’s naked body that afternoon and how it had been twisted out of shape beneath Albert’s. But it was not Anna that he saw in his mind’s eye, it was Ondine. And in the scenario he now pictured to himself it was he and not Albert humiliating the girl on the piss-stained mattress before him. He felt himself go hard and wondered if he had it in him to masturbate over the mingling of fantasy and memory that now overwhelmed him. He foresaw himself spraying like a tomcat into the mattress and then anticipated the shame he’d feel walking back out into the light of the street, wet with his own semen.