by A L McCann
When the women were out of sight he went back inside, leaving the door open. He slowly climbed the staircase and dragged himself into his study, where he sat down at his writing desk and took a small revolver from the bottom drawer. As he stared at the gun he very deliberately thought the whole thing over, balancing his wife’s horror against the pale face of the girl as her life bled away; his vision of her limp body hauled out of the river; Les Collins’s rotted mouth accusing him and, lastly, his public humiliation in front of the woman he loved and depended upon. Sixty-six, he told himself, an old man with a young wife. He had already transferred some capital to Anna, and most of what remained was willed to her and the children. All his affairs were in order. Yes, he had done well by them. Nobody could complain about him. He had done well. All in order. As he put the barrel of the revolver into his mouth and slowly squeezed the trigger he wondered how Albert Walters could have plunged into the river with his house in such a state of disarray. But the man was mad, he told himself.
Charles Winton was buried with the terrible secret of his past. Everything else he could live down, but the thought of that one revelation was something he could not endure. The unsolved mystery of his suicide left Anna inconsolable. Its impenetrability was worse to her than anything she could imagine accounting for it. She remembered Sid Packard once said that the doctor reminded him of someone. Or was it that he recognised him from somewhere? The implication, the sense of the unknown, sapped her of her strength. She worked over everything she knew about Charles, and found no decisive answer, though behind the secure, scientific assumptions of social hygiene and sexual pathology, she glimpsed a dark form moving in and out of view, without betraying any of its detail.
During the war people in the area talked from time to time about poor, pale Anna and her two dead husbands. What had she done to them? There was something not right about it. Even Robert Walters stayed clear of St Vincent Place. The house developed a sickly, funereal calm, as if it were a mausoleum. Only Ondine came back, and after Ralph left for the fighting in France, the two women lived there like nuns attending the cult of their solitude.
PART FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ondine could never quite imagine the war in Europe. She was conscious of this as a failure. Years after it was all over she’d lie awake at night and try to picture it. Trenches propped up with bodies, entrails spilling over the mud. She wanted to understand what had happened to Ralph and how he had died, but her need to evoke the horror went beyond that. She wanted to see if she was still capable of feeling.
The war had seemed unreal right from the start. The images of bitter, inveterate enemies, so prevalent in home–front propaganda as the conflict unfolded, bore no direct relationship to her own experience of people. She wondered if ordinary men, once they became soldiers, really felt that hatred, or whether they were simply and mechanically obeying their orders, running blindly out of the trenches at the command of something more remote than their own sense of injustice. They said it was the first war in history in which death had been thoroughly depersonalised. Did that mean that soldiers fought with no sense of themselves or that they were killed by machines? What had happened to the actuality of death? She couldn’t imagine any of it. What had the war been but a vast puppet show in which individuals performed their roles in a largely unconscious fashion, with no sense of their own being realised in the terrible killing? There was no greater travesty, she thought, than to deprive men of their sense of self as they were killed, to turn them into automatons. It was as bad as leaving bodies unburied or desecrating graves in order to show that a man is simply the crude sum of his parts.
When she saw Ralph in his khaki Light Horse uniform before training camp in Broadmeadows, the foolery of military dress struck her as a sign of the impersonal death awaiting him. She’d been expecting it for weeks. It was as if the living soul of her husband had already been smothered under the khaki, the brown leather, the glistening gold buttons and insignia.
Eighteen months later Ralph was killed, along with almost two thousand other young Australians, in an overnight battle on a piece of French farmland. Not a single British soldier fell. The Australians were the front line. Dawn broke and the commanding officer surveyed the mess of broken bodies on the battlefield. Death, on such a scale, had already become routine, and the war was to drag on for another two years.
When it was over the soldiers who had survived returned to Melbourne and marched through the streets to the frantic cheers of the crowd. The city was festive and Ondine hoped the jubilation would begin to dissolve the impersonality of the war, as soldiers marched together, then one by one shed their uniforms and resumed their roles as people with homes and families, with loyalties and animosities so much more real than the obscure motivations and fantastic chimeras that had flung them out across the battlefields. She wondered what it meant to talk about “a national triumph” in that light. That’s what the newspapers and politicians called it. What would triumph now was something far smaller and more intimate than the nation, which was nothing but a vast image-making machine, a magic lantern throwing up shadowy images on a wall, generating a hypnotic trance that could have millions of men going to meet their deaths as if they were zombies. She hated the nation, hated its cold, murderous malice. Its collective dream was the nightmare of modern times, and she had lain awake through it, eyes fixed on the darkness, while others around her restlessly tossed and turned at its bidding.
But in another sense her refusal to be drawn into the collective hysteria of the home-front also had something dreamlike about it. After Winton’s death, before the war had even really caught on, her mother sank into a mild state of catalepsy. She continued with her routine of rose pruning and her sedate walks through the gardens, but now this domestic rhythm had the quality of a kind of ghost-seeing, serving not to distract her from her sorrow, but to bring her closer to it.
Early in 1915 Ondine tried to convince her mother to accompany her to the Matthews’s property in New South Wales, but Anna was reluctant to leave and eventually Ondine gave up. After Ralph had left for the war, she moved back into the St Vincent Place house where she assumed the responsibility her mother had relinquished. Pruning the roses became more important than regular meals for Anna and her walks through the gardens continued even through torrential rain, such that she was frequently fighting off chills and fevers while her daughter fretted over her neglected and increasingly bedraggled appearance.
In this state of virtual isolation the two women were like a couple of ascetics inhabiting the still centre of a maelstrom. All around them the world swelled and burnt in constant, tumultuous anger. Whenever Ondine opened a paper she was confronted with it. The leaders had gotten suddenly bigger and threatened to outgrow the size of the broadsheet, and photographs of light and shadow and fire occupied entire pages. Her mother would sit down, glance negligently at the front page and then cast the paper aside, as if she were tired of reading or unconvinced of the reality. Ondine felt as if they were both being bleached by the lethargy of this static existence.
“You’re white, Mother, white as a ghost,” she said one day as they were reading on the upstairs verandah.
“Am I, dear?” Anna said vaguely.
It was too much for Ondine, the resigned indifference, the inane formalities of their conversation, the sense of slowly wasting away. She dropped her book on the bench beside her and went back inside, determined to assert herself against this vacuum of loneliness and protracted grief.
When the news of Ralph’s death finally reached her, months after the battle of Fromelles, it was as if he had been dead since the beginning of the war. She chided herself for this lack of feeling. What had happened to her? The moments, years earlier, when she was so in love with him and felt her heart beating faster at the thought of meeting him at the opera, were like scenes coloured by the giddy lightness of childhood. Now her body had shut down. She saw her mother already existing in this almost vegetative
state and, fearful of the same numbness, dreamt of flailing herself open to the world, letting her body be hacked at until the nerves tingled anew.
In 1916 the city was already full of casualties from the early years of the conflict. In the pubs, hotels, arcades and markets, one could see men with canes, crutches, prosthetic limbs or empty sleeves and trouser legs limping through their tragedy in various degrees of drunkenness and stupefaction. The first time Ondine walked through the city after Ralph’s death she was struck by the motley collection of war veterans shuffling about the city.
She had walked towards the Yarra and over Princes Bridge with the vague intent of reanimating something in her, of escaping the moribund atmosphere of St Vincent Place. But the city was not made for a single woman out on her own. It was a grey, drizzling day in October, the kind of day when winter rain and summer humidity seem indistinguishable and the city sinks into its own foul atmosphere of sweat and steam. Shop interiors had fogged up and beads of condensation ran down the insides of the windows. Stepping into the Block Arcade Ondine felt as if she were entering a hothouse. Her blouse was wet, whether from rain or her own body she couldn’t tell. Some women in Red Cross uniforms were sitting in the window of the Hopetoun Tea Rooms. There was a poster for the All British League on the wall. A walrus–moustached officer gazed at her approvingly as he leant back smoking a cigar. For a moment she felt affronted by the frankness of his stare, but quickly collected herself and walked off towards Block Place.
She didn’t really know where she was going. She was just walking aimlessly. She imagined the officer in the tea rooms following her, accosting her and offering her money for sex. What would she have done? Perhaps she would have refused the money and given herself to him just the same in some greasy alleyway. At that moment it would have been of no consequence to her. She felt nothing except the thin film of moisture on her body. In an effort to provoke herself she imagined squatting like an animal on the wet cobblestones in front of him, performing a parody of desire aroused by the squalor of the streets. Could she excite herself by walking with the dead, by giving herself to the low-life of the city? The thought didn’t disgust her. It simply came down to the choices one made, and these struck her as a matter of indifference. Several times she walked through the arcades, or through the Eastern Market, glancing at the men loitering outside the peepshows. She wondered what she was capable of doing in her numbed state amidst the smells of rotting vegetables and the ragged, vagabond characters that gathered about these parts of the city like creatures homing towards the shadows.
And still, when she tried to picture the horror of war all she could grasp was horror in the abstract. She imagined the carnage of modern times reduced to the sordid comedy of stagecraft, histrionics and special effects engineered by her brother. The letters and cuttings Paul sent back to South Melbourne from Zurich described his success in the theatre. Even while the war was still being fought, while men were being slaughtered across Europe in their tens of thousands, Paul wrote plays about a military asylum overrun by its inmates, and a shell-shocked maniac unleashed on the home–front to seek a terrible revenge upon his adulterous wife. The plays struck her as vulgar, turning horror into farce.
Paul also sent her photographs. There was one of him looking contemplative as he smoked a cigarette and edited a script, and another of him and Laura, soon after they were married. Paul wore a dark suit and a tie, Laura a long, striped frock. They both smiled with a self-assurance that Ondine found disingenuous. Behind them were some tenements with shops along the street. The background was tranquil. No people, no traffic, no sign of the war. It was as if they’d found their way into an idyllic place safely beyond its reach, as if they’d managed to escape from history. Ondine didn’t believe it. She threw the picture down on the table with a fit of temper, and once again tried to conjure the nightmare of her husband’s death.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
In the chambre séparée they didn’t say a word to each other, just as she’d insisted. Laura closed her eyes. Paul leant over her. His hands were on her hips. She could tell he was fumbling, trying to be considerate, so she moved her legs apart to help him. She wanted to get it over with, but it all happened more easily than she had imagined. The movement of Paul’s body and the rhythm of his breathing prompted her responses. When he was finished she covered her body and looked at him as he lit a cigarette. He was heavier than she’d imagined. His stomach had a thickness to it and his chest sagged.
“Weib oder Frau?” Klessmann’s voice followed her now. It was like a tune she couldn’t get out of her head. The next day, when Paul showed her the play he was working on, she knew straightaway that the main character was Klessmann. She was certain of it. The image of the skull pushing through his skin was indelible.
When the play opened she could hardly bring herself to watch it. The man at the door raised his cap to her. The theatre was a run-down firetrap: smoke, hot lights and bodies jamming in, one upon the other. Afterwards, they went to the American Bar to celebrate with Bressler. She found it difficult to be her usual bright self, but she made a good fist of it. She wondered how Paul could write such a horrible play and still be the same person she’d fallen in love with. She suspected him of hiding behind a façade and imagined she had seen beyond it in the dreadful violence of the Hamburg maniac on a killing spree across Europe. When they got back to his apartment he kissed her neck and eyes. He was trying to make her feel comfortable, but it felt false to her.
“Do you love me, Paul?”
“How can you doubt it?” he said.
“Because your play is about Theodore Klessmann, isn’t it?”
“What makes you say that?”
Paul was sure she hadn’t seen the poster of Klessmann in Wedelkind’s “Theatre of Derangement”.
“I just have a sense of it.”
At the mention of Klessmann Paul was overcome with guilt. He wondered, as he’d often done since the night of his death, whether he had said anything to Laura about the book. Paul would have given anything to wipe that bird-face from his mind. It haunted him. It accused him. It gnawed away at his resolve.
“You didn’t like the play, then?” he asked.
“It was frightening. That’s what you wanted though, wasn’t it?” She kissed him. “I think you’re very clever.”
She decided to leave Paul’s play alone. She was happy with him as long as she could keep at arm’s length the disquiet she felt at the thought of it. After all, the press had written the play up and people had paid money to see it. Moreover, she liked Herman Bressler a great deal. He struck her as avuncular, not the sort to go about compromising himself.
It was Bressler’s idea to take them all to Zurich. He was being prudent, she thought, and had an eye for their welfare. Paul married her six months after they arrived there. Her mother had already left Europe and her absence was a huge relief for them both. They were settled together, at last.
Laura liked Zurich. She met unusual people there – artists and eccentrics who’d come to avoid the war. Paul was often with Bressler, writing scripts and building sets, so she had time to wander about on her own. She met a German woman – Hilda Meyerhold – who took her to a cabaret tucked away in a basement under the Spiegelgasse. The two of them went there often. People wore outrageous costumes, read nonsense poetry on stage, played imaginary violins, rambled on about the end of art and generally played the fool. It was bizarre, but beside Paul’s plays she found it all very innocent. She felt civilised now, urbane. It pleased her no end and for a while it gave her a feeling of security that she hadn’t known before.
Still, when she yielded, as she occasionally did, and went to see one of her husband’s plays, she was deeply troubled. They seemed to threaten the stability of their life together, to mock it in a way that she didn’t fully understand. Paul talked about being part of the avant-garde. He took it all very seriously. She didn’t understand how he could keep this seriousness up amid howling lunatics and hacke
d-up bodies. Next to the horror of his plays everything else looked two-dimensional.
One night she decided to test him. They’d come back from a café and both of them were pleasantly light-headed from the wine. She waited for him to get affectionate. She knew the formula: hands in the hair, kisses on the neck, a deliberate, gentle stroking of her arms and back.
“No, Paul,” she said. “Don’t treat me like a piece of porcelain. I’m not about to break.”
But that night he made love to her with more restraint than ever before. It was as if her demand had tamed whatever she sensed lurking within him, and for a while at least she felt relieved, though it left her still empty and unfulfilled.
It took months before the formalities of their marriage really began to drop away. At first, Paul merely paid less attention to her pleasure and got through with his more quickly. It made little difference to her. Then he began to change. It was around the time he began to translate his father’s book back into English. He was more erratic and impetuous. He made her do things she’d never dreamt of doing, guided her to them in a way she sometimes found thoughtless. At first it shocked her. She couldn’t believe it was her. Sometimes she felt ill. Sometimes she found the theatrics curious, even laughable. The question Weib or Frau had ceased to matter to her. She was neither. She was something else entirely, in her own chambre séparée, the place she went to when she needed to be free of him.
She thought about Hilda Meyerhold, who sometimes wore trousers and a jacket. She thought about the first time she saw Paul on board the Abendstern and imagined he was the height of sophistication. At the cabaret she had a cigarette, her first, but when the war was finally over Hilda went back to Berlin and Laura’s world began to contract. One by one people left Zurich and filtered back across Europe. Paul and Bressler hung on for two more years. Laura felt like the last girl at the dance, hanging around after everyone else had left. She knew she’d missed her chance.
