The White Body of Evening

by A L McCann

  Dear H,

  You have here the fruits of my labours. You deserve a good deal of the credit. Already the book has attracted a readership among critics and other literary types. My father is a minor revelation. Laura is here and has inveigled her mother into setting up house. She has grown up, thank God. And I’ve written a play, which will soon be performed, though it’ll be away from the glamour. Not sure whether to send the book to St Vincent Place. What do you think? P

  The familiarity, as if the two of them were involved in a conversation across a table at Fasoli’s rather than one conducted from opposite ends of the world, left Hamish feeling warmly towards his friend. He opened the book and summoned what he remembered of his rudimentary German to find that poems literally unearthed from his own childhood had become impenetrable, foreign things that he couldn’t read for the life of him.

  Hamish envied Paul’s adventurousness and his audacity. He imagined a golden city and the iconoclasm of an Ibsen, while he toiled away in the same dull Melbourne that Paul had left behind.

  But only a few months later the news from Europe cast everything in another light. Hamish would never forget that first week in August, 1914. Fevered crowds gathered outside the offices of the city’s major newspapers, expecting a cable at any moment declaring that Britain and Germany were at war. The entire city seemed to be twitching in anticipation of a call to arms. Men waving Union Jacks were hoisted onto the shoulders of the undulating masses and bounced along to the strains of Rule Britannia or Soldiers of the King. After a while the enthusiasm would ebb away and frustration would set in, sometimes spilling into petty scuffles over the details of one’s patriotism. When it finally became clear that there was nothing new to report, the crowds would dwindle away, only to re-form in full voice that evening or the following morning. On the fifth of the month Point Nepean fired a shot over the bow of a German steamer, ordering it to stop before it left Port Phillip Bay. Later, patriotic Australians, eager for a place in history, would claim that this was the first shot fired in anger by British forces, forces in fact which had already been at war with Germany for the better part of an hour.

  The shot was audible across the southern suburbs of Melbourne. At least people claimed to have heard it. When talk of it reached South Yarra, Ondine wondered if the war had already come to their doorstep. For two years she had resisted Ralph’s desire to move back to the Monaro. Now with war a matter of course she was only too happy to leave the city and take refuge in the remoteness of the country. Already the atmosphere had begun to turn ugly. Louts had thrown a brick through the window of Spielvogel’s pawnshop on City Road and politicians talked about passing a War Precautions Act, which would provide for the instant imprisonment of Australians of German descent. She knew that Ralph wanted to join the Light Horse and she couldn’t bear the thought of him leaving her to fight on the other side of the world. He had already dropped all talk of the Monaro, in preparation, she suspected, for the moment in which he’d appear before her dressed in khakis and brown leather. It was pointless child’s play to her, child’s play turned into a grotesque reality that had men marching through the streets in step, swinging their arms and their rifles for the most abstract of possible causes: the British Empire.

  When she had married Ralph three years earlier, Ondine had experienced a moment of liberation as she left Paul behind for the unpretentious liberality of her husband’s family. Ralph was a fine husband, a sensitive lover and had a constructive vision of a future in public life. He was working towards a career in politics. It didn’t interest her in the slightest and for this reason his increasing involvement with it seemed to free her into a space which was entirely her own. But what to do with this space? She wasn’t really sure. She could feel something gestating in her, though its fruition seemed a long way off.

  Despite his political and military ambitions, Ralph remained committed to the land, at least in principle. He took her to his family’s vast property and Ondine was overwhelmed by its immensity and the grandeur of the landscape, though the thought of staying there filled her with dread. When Ralph went out on the muster or inspected the place on horseback, leaving her alone in the huge sandstone homestead, she felt lost, swallowed up by another existence that was not her own. She knew she would never arrive at herself in such a place. It was too gigantic, too monumental, and she felt like an inconsequential speck cast against its enormity. She always returned to Melbourne with a sense of relief, instantly recognising the ground on which her own potential might unfold.

  But now the war was threatening that sense of belonging. As the nation mobilised, issued edicts and drew thousands of young men into its armed ranks, violence, it seemed, had ceased to be an exceptional state. It had become universal, and sickeningly banal as a result. She couldn’t understand how Ralph could be so eager to join up, how he could allow himself to be engulfed by it, obliterated as an individual and resurrected into the grinning masses arranged arbitrarily into nations and forced to march at the command of alien powers.

  “You’ve always said you’re an Australian, not a British subject,” she remonstrated. “What does a war in Europe have to do with us? It’s a million miles away.”

  “We’re still British,” he said. “At heart, I mean.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “Nor is my mother. And Paul, for all I know, will be fighting for the Austro-Hungarians. Perhaps we’ll all be locked up.”

  He took her hand. “Nobody is going to lock you up. You know that.”

  “Do I?”

  For Ralph, in fact, enlisting was not a matter of loyalty to Britain or its empire. It was much simpler than that. The thought of other men, ordinary men like the ones who worked on his father’s property or went to office jobs in the city, the thought of these men in the uniform of their country while he remained a civilian was mortifying. It was tantamount to being naked before them. He didn’t dwell on abstract political ideals. He simply wanted to maintain his dignity. Nothing was more important to him. The ease with which he had taken Ondine away from her craven, degenerate brother and asserted their equality as the basis of their love would all count for nothing if he turned his back on that. But he hadn’t reckoned on her resistance.

  “I just don’t see what this has to do with us,” she said again.

  “We can’t simply stand aside when it’s going on all around us, while others are sacrificing themselves. I couldn’t live with that.”

  It meant nothing to her, the pride and the idea of sacrifice. She looked away from him, afraid of what was before them – the drab khaki terror of war, her mother sick with worry for her brother, the triteness of a women’s campaign on the home-front, launched against all those brave enough to refuse the madness.

  “We have to step up, both of us, as man and wife,” he said.

  “Well, why not step up for sanity? What good are you to me dead?”

  “What good am I to you if I don’t live up to myself?”

  Her resistance didn’t make him angry. He had made up his mind and was impervious to her arguments. He only wished he could articulate the imperative to fight, the imperative he felt so clearly, but could not explain.

  In the August of 1914 Winton was sixty-six, but he looked like a man ten years older. He had grown gaunt, his hair had thinned and his skin had sallowed. He had arthritis in his knuckles and the beginnings of it in his knees, such that his cane was now no longer a piece of dandyish affectation, but a necessity for even for the briefest stroll about the gardens of St Vincent Place. His wife, then forty-four, was also much changed. Anna Winton was still handsome. In fact, in another context she may have been nearing her prime, demonstrating the calm self-confidence of a woman in control of her fate and capable of exerting a degree of influence on those around her.

  But she hadn’t heard from her son for almost six months, and with the outbreak of war, feared that he had been incarcerated in an Austrian prison. The uncertainty of the situation had eaten away at her. She lay awake at n
ight imagining him caught in a firestorm or lined up against a wall. And, surely enough, the mood in Melbourne had turned against Germans. She heard stories about plans to build a detention camp at Langwarrin for internal dissidents, and the fear this aroused in her brought her back to her first days in Melbourne when she dreamt of leaving Australia for good.

  One morning, a woman in her late-fifties paused on the corner of Montague Street and St Vincent Place South, trying to match a house number with the one she carried jotted on a calling card. She edged down the street, peering into each house until she found the right one, then marched onto the verandah and rang the doorbell. Mrs Norris answered.

  “I’m looking for Mrs Charles Winton,” the woman said in a stiff, formal voice.

  “You’ll find her opposite on that park bench,” said the housekeeper, pointing across the road to the gardens where Anna and Winton sat in the warm morning sun.

  The woman looked behind her into the deep shadows of the palms and oaks that lined the edge of the park. The pair was lost in forgetfulness, the woman thought, but she had no doubt that she could relieve the melancholy of the scene, so thanked the housekeeper and promptly strode across the road.

  Winton gave a start as he noticed the woman marching towards them.

  “Mrs Winton,” the woman said, thrusting out her hand. “I’m Eleanor Thomas.”

  “Yes?” said Anna vaguely.

  Winton sat up straight.

  “I take it your son hasn’t mentioned me,” the woman continued.

  “No,” said Anna. “I’ve not heard from my son for a long time. Do you know of him? I’m very worried.”

  Winton stood up belatedly and shook the woman’s hand.

  “Charles Winton,” he said, eager not to alienate her with a display of apathy or bad manners.

  “I’m Laura’s mother,” Eleanor Thomas added by way of clarification.

  “What of my son?” Anna asked, trying to rein in her impatience.

  “Your son has seduced my daughter, Mrs Winton. Utterly ruined her.”

  “So he’s alive?”

  “Oh yes. Very much so. A little too much so.”

  “But where?”

  “Zurich. They’re living in sin in Zurich, where your son runs an outlandish theatre performing obscene plays.”

  Anna leapt up and hugged the woman.”Thank you. Thank you for the news.” She embraced her again, tears of relief in her eyes. “Come in and have some tea.”

  Eleanor Thomas relaxed her manner only slightly when she realised the torments Anna had been put through on behalf of her son.

  “Switzerland? Will he be safe in Switzerland?” Anna asked Winton.

  “Armed neutrality, as I understand it,” he answered. “He might be safe there if nothing changes.”

  “Come in and tell me everything,” Anna said, turning to Eleanor once again and taking her arm, leaving Winton to hobble on his own.

  Eleanor Thomas had come ready for a confrontation. She distrusted Paul and believed him to be a libertine at heart, though perhaps not a malicious one.

  “Now I won’t pretend I wasn’t appalled, Mrs Winton. Imagine. Flaunting decency like that. It wasn’t like Laura, not one bit.” That said, she softened her attitude. “Is Paul a stable sort of chap?” she asked. “He’ll do the right thing, won’t he? By Laura, I mean.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t reassure you,” Anna said. “He’s not the most stable son a mother could wish for.”

  Eleanor winced, sucking air in through her teeth as Anna dragged her enthusiastically across the road and up the steps to the door.

  Winton made his own way, lagging behind a bit. The two women were on the verandah before he’d made it across the road. Anna deposited Eleanor on the doorstep like a parcel and motioned back towards him.

  “No, no. I’m all right.” He waved her on inside, but it was to no avail. Anna came back down the stairs and took her husband by the arm. She couldn’t contain her happiness and the doctor smiled as well to see such lightness of spirit for the first time in weeks.

  A figure moved in the park behind them.

  “Who’s that?”Anna said.

  A man was looking at them from quite close to where they had been sitting a moment earlier. Winton turned awkwardly and saw a ragged-looking fellow moving into a patch of sunlight. He squinted, the better to make out the matted hair and brown, sun-worn skin.

  “No idea,” Winton said. “A beggar sleeping in the gardens perhaps.”

  Inside, Eleanor Thomas finally dropped her guard when she realised that Paul Walters was a well-provided-for young man. She now came to recognise, too, that her daughter was fortunate to be out of Austria. As she drank her tea she even got a bit carried away, regaling them with her dry gallows humour. She told them stories of Vienna, the outlandish Grand Guignol Paul had worked out with Bressler, and her daughter’s stubbornness. She could not abide their life of sin, but she did acknowledge that there was a certain glamour to being a bohemian and that perhaps it might ultimately stand her daughter in better stead than a marriage to a Western Districts farmer.

  “He’s even tried to make Laura wear ghastly white paint and scream at the top of her voice,” she said, seeing the humour in it. “Though the day my girl makes a goat of herself on stage will be the day I turn up my toes and die of shame. If you’d seen one of these plays you’d understand why. All screams and fainting fits they are – lunatics, killers, wife–beaters, a whole cavalcade. Should be banned of course, but the Europeans are so much lower in their moral standards.”

  “I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that,”Anna said.

  “Oh it is. Worse. You’ve never seen anything like it. I’m as forward thinking as the next woman, but the scandal of it, Mrs Winton. Really. They’ve even written up one actress because she screams so well when they murder her. Deafening it was.”

  They laughed.

  “It’s funny to think how delighted I am to hear that my son has disgraced himself. But with the war none of it seems that bad. Just as long as they stay clear of it.”

  “I’m pleased we met, Mrs Winton. In normal circumstances I don’t think I’d be taking all of this so lightly. But I’m pleased we met.”

  “Call me Anna.”

  “All right then. Anna. You will write to Paul and urge him to do the proper thing by my daughter, won’t you?”

  “Of course. I’m sure he will.”

  In response to her careful questioning, Eleanor gradually gave out enough information for Anna to get a sense of what had happened. Paul’s play was popular with a certain class of people, but as war seemed inevitable Bressler thought they’d have a hard time keeping the crowds. And in Zurich they’d also be out of danger.

  “That’s when Laura made her stand,” Eleanor said. “And I put my foot down. Of course, what chance did I have? She told me flatly that there was no use me being angry, because it was too late, if you know what I mean. So we all went to Zurich and I put up my white flag.”

  The doorbell rang. Winton insisted on getting up, moving towards the door with the aid of his walking cane. He shooed Mrs Norris away and opened the door himself to find Les Collins standing before him.

  Winton thought the man looked abysmal, though in fact the vagabond author looked at least as robust as the doctor. Collins was brown with the sun but his eyes were bloodshot and his teeth yellow. His smell, moreover, was intolerable, and when he opened his mouth Winton could see, alongside the golden, misshapen stubs, shockingly ulcerated gums, as if his entire mouth had rotted out.

  “Sorry to bother you, Doc,” he said.

  Winton’s blood boiled.

  “Could have come a lot earlier, mind you. It’s a last resort.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve come to talk about the Bunurong?”Winton said.

  “No.”

  “You can’t come in.”

  “How we gonna negotiate, then?”

  “I’ll call the police,”Winton said.

  “So will I,”
Collins replied, grinding his teeth.”I remember that poor girl. I remember what you did to her.”

  At that moment Winton cracked. Fighting off the confused memory of darkness, blood and the filthy brown water of the river, he struck Collins with his cane, sending the man stumbling back down the steps into the yard. Collins steadied himself, clutching his forehead just above his eye.

  “Are we clear then?” Winton said, hobbling forward with his cane raised.

  “You’ll fucking well regret that,” Collins sneered at him and took off down the street muttering recriminations.

  Winton already was. It was a foolhardy thing to do. The man held his fate in his hands. How hard would it have been to pay him off, Winton asked himself. He cringed at the thought of the bleeding girl dumped in the river and the headlines trumpeting the resolution of the mystery thirty years later. In an age of sensationalism he’d be hung out to dry, if not hanged quite literally in Russell Street’s grim old gaol. He propped himself against the wall and caught his breath, wanting to crawl away to die like an old cat.

  As he moved back down the hallway he could hear his wife’s joy as she soaked up the detail of her son’s fortunes and made the best of Laura Thomas’s transgressions. She was truly happy for the first time in months. The contrast with his own situation was intolerable. His hands shook and he pictured himself as one of the madhouse neurotics in the play that Eleanor Thomas had just described to them.

  After struggling to compose himself, he resumed his position in the sitting room, declared it was a charity worker at the door, and politely pursued the details of Eleanor’s story. He sat stiffly, listening distractedly as they decided that when things settled down in Europe the two women would travel to Zurich to see their children.

  “You’ve always wanted to go to Europe,” Winton said, holding his wife’s hand.

  “And now we will.”

  Eleanor Thomas sat there for an eternity, drinking her way through two pots of tea, describing one city after another and still finding plenty of time to lament her daughter’s lost innocence. When she was finally ready to leave Anna urged her to come again and then decided to walk her to the tram on Park Street, leaving Winton on the verandah searching the street for signs of Collins.