Forty-Seventeen

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘The Austrian idea of a rest day,’ he said, ‘up an hour earlier than usual to be bussed out of the city.’

  He avoided her eyes, as a guilty dog. But she spoke brightly to convey to him, he thought, that nothing was amiss, all was to go on as before.

  She stayed with him throughout the visit to the art exhibition although he tried to disengage from her, to be apart from her for a time. But she’d said, plaintively, ‘Would you mind if I clung on to you? – I’m feeling a little off today.’

  He realised that she was exploiting his impropriety of the night before, taking a compensatory payment.

  As they moved around the galleries together, she would say, ‘But is this really art?’ She’d been happier at the Kunsthistorisches.

  After a while he said to her, ‘I suppose art is what you find in art galleries.’

  Some of the material was displayed in the Orangerie of the old summer palace and, while looking at this, Edith said, ‘Maybe, then, this isn’t art but oranges we’re looking at.’

  He turned to her smiling, it was her first joke with him. ‘Very good, Edith,’ he said.

  They stopped at photographs of the OM Theatre.

  ‘Art or oranges?’ became a running joke with them.

  ‘Orgies and mysteries,’ he said, reading from the programme notes. Edith peered, uncomprehendingly, at the photographs.

  ‘You’re looking at the entrails of a freshly slaughtered cow.’

  She screwed up her face and with delight he saw again the girl’s face, his girl was there again in the subdued lighting of the gallery, but it came too from the frowning face of puzzlement and the resistance to what she was seeing.

  She stepped back and the girl was gone but she said, this time mocking herself, ‘Is that really an orange? Or are we in the Orgierie now?’

  He was trying to hold on to the image of his girl, even though it was accompanied by the hurt of separation, but Edith’s humour interfered with his privacy and he let it go.

  After the opening of the exhibition the director, R.H. Luchs, said that the older artists should not pursue the splendid rashness of youth. To desire only the new and the young was a state of mind which bred nervousness and distorted one’s personal history.

  Sure did.

  At breakfast back at the Hotel Stephanplatz he asked her.

  ‘Edith, there’s something I want to ask of you – a favour.’

  ‘Of course – you’ve done lots of things for me on this trip – you’ve been really very considerate.’

  ‘This is an unusual request – outside the boundaries of our mission.’

  ‘Well, you can but ask.’

  ‘There is a girl in London – I need her address and telephone number – I’ve lost contact.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I want you to help me get the telephone number. She won’t give it to me.’

  He looked at her defencelessly.

  ‘Where do I come into it? – it’s rather odd – if indeed I do come into it.’ Her voice guarded.

  ‘You could telephone her home in Adelaide – and ask for it – you could say – this is a cover story – that you found her wallet here in Vienna and wish to return it to her – you could say that’s where you found her home address – in the wallet. Something like that.’

  She sat silently, eating. Her hand trembled a little.

  ‘By “cover story” you mean “lie”,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I could carry that off – or that I should. Never any good at lying.’

  ‘Come on, Edith – you’ve been in intrigues before surely – lovers’ intrigues.’

  She paused and thought. He hoped that ‘lovers’ intrigues’ made it sound more acceptable. A small smile came to her face.

  ‘But I’m a grandmother now … not an accomplice of …’ Her words petered out.

  ‘And you’re a poet too.’

  ‘Pshaw – one small book many years ago, which I may add has received more attention than it deserves, and what has that to do with anything?’

  ‘Poets are …’ With a gesture he gave the occupation of poet its traditional alliance with love. ‘Poets are traditionally in alliance with lovers.’

  ‘I suppose there is a small part of me which is still the poet. Aren’t you a little old for these games?’

  He pretended to wince. ‘Point taken – but she’s young and I’m obliged to play them, it’s her world I wish to belong to.’

  ‘Although it surprises me,’ she said, carefully, wiping the crumbs of bread roll from her mouth, frowning, ‘and I don’t know how to say it, and maybe I shouldn’t say it, but I will – I don’t know that I don’t feel a little jealous.’ She then smiled, embarrassedly. ‘After all, you are my consort on this trip – in a way of speaking. Please excuse the double negatives.’

  He raised an eyebrow, caught by this unexpected declaration, claim, or whatever. He leaned across, touched her old hand. ‘Edith, I am your consort.’

  They both gave a little laugh at their declarations. Declarations of a valueless intimacy.

  ‘Let me think about it then,’ she said.

  The Cameroons invited him to breakfast. They spoke English and expressed pleasure at his speech given at one of the unofficial functions. He felt irritated by guilt in the breakfast room because he was aware of Edith sitting at the other table on her own, not looking at them in a deliberate way. He absolutely rejected the guilt.

  The Cameroons laughed about the behaviour of the German chair the night before. They seemed to have a taste for conference mischief-making. They laughed also about the work of Jonathan Schell and shook their heads about his thesis which had been often referred to.

  ‘It could have been written only by an affluent American living in a leafy street with a swinging settee on the porch,’ one of them said.

  One of them said something in French and they giggled.

  Dr Kum’a Ndumbe then gestured at them to stop. ‘Enough giggling about Mr Schell.’ He turned to him, ‘You are from your government?’

  ‘In a sense, yes, I carry a green passport – but not a red passport.’

  ‘We thought perhaps there should be closer links between our countries – I don’t have good reasons for this – it is purely impulsive.’

  He agreed. He listened to Dr Kum’a Ndumbe talk and drifted into a fantasy about the Cameroons – maybe they had their fantasies about Australia, beef steaks, good dentistry, golden beaches.

  His fantasy was to flee to another life for good. He called it his Mexican Feeling. He realised as he sat there in the Austrian hotel, playing this fantasy, that it didn’t involve the girl. It was a flight from all known connections.

  Outside Hermosillo once he had waited for a train, having been warned to be ‘early’ for Mexican trains. He had arrived with hours to wait. In a nearby bar he’d drunk with some comradely Mexicans. When they left the bar some drinks later they’d invited him to go with them. ‘Come, amigo, come with us.’ He’d gone out of the dark bar into the sunshine and looked to where they gestured, up the hill about five kilometres away to a mud village sculptured into the hillside at the end of a rough track. He could see smoke curling from the chimneys, he could see the goats. The Mexicans had bought some tequila and they said, ‘Come with us, amigo – we’ll eat and drink some more. Mucho talk, mucho drink, mucho musica.’ He looked away up to their village and felt the hot sun and the creeping relaxation of the alcohol.

  If I go up to that village, he thought, I shall stay there.

  He looked to his top-opening leather travelling bag with affection. It was all he needed. Pick it up and go with the Mexicans. To reduce his world to that one good old bag with the brass buckles.

  One day a private detective sent by his relatives would come to the village and show his photograph but he would not be recognised and the village would protect his secret.

  They would gather around the private detective saying, ‘No hombre, nix. No.’

  Sitting now in the cool Austrian
hotel talking with the Cameroons he could feel the Mexican sun again and could taste again the Mexican Bohemia beer, he could see the beckoning village, smell the goats.

  ‘Come, amigo, Mister Kangaroo, we’ll eat and drink. Musico.’

  Maybe he would marry one of their sisters – they could live well on his Australian income even after he had been filed away as ‘missing’ in the Department.

  ‘Si, musico, tequila.’

  ‘No, el tren, mucho gracias,’ he said, smiling wistfully, clapping them on the back, ‘mucho gracias. Another time.’

  There in the Hotel Stephanplatz, Dr Kum’a Ndumbe talked of scientific and cultural exchange. He would go to the Cameroons and live high in the mountains amid the occasional cries of unidentified brilliantly coloured birds and the occasional growl of a wild cat, and at night, the incessant talking of the village drums, the village singing. Cold gins and tonic. Ice? He came back then to the breakfast room of the Stephanplatz to see a miffed Edith leaving the room without gesturing or speaking.

  He made it up to her by taking her to see some Max Ernst paintings, thinking that he wasn’t required to ‘make’ anything up.

  ‘Max Ernst’s father painted a picture of his garden and left out the bough of a tree which he considered spoiled the symmetry of his painting. When he completed the painting he went and cut the bough from the tree to make the garden conform to the painting.’

  Edith said that Ernst’s paintings struck terror in her.

  ‘He’s really too strong for me,’ she said, ‘too many bad dreams in his paintings.’

  ‘Ernst used what he called “optical provocateurs” to produce his visions.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes, he manipulated his eyesight and field of vision to cause new images to appear to him.’

  ‘I should have thought the world strange enough as it is without resorting to distortion.’

  ‘… Yes, by fortunate accident. I found it at the airport. I too am an Australian which makes it all the more remarkable. Instead of taking it to the Embassy I thought I’d make direct contact – your name and number are in the back of the passport as next of kin.’

  He could not hear the replies Edith was getting from the voice back in Australia.

  ‘… Yes, in the ladies room at the airport. Very fortunate. Yes.’

  He saw Edith write down an address and telephone number in the UK.

  She finished up the call.

  ‘I don’t mind saying that I feel guilty about having done this,’ she said turning to him. ‘I don’t feel good about it at all. And they will eventually find you out. And me. Obviously the girl does not want to communicate with you and perhaps you should respect that. But I suppose it is all too late now.’

  ‘Sometimes you’re quite formal, Edith.’

  He stared at the address, trying to decode what it meant about her life arrangements. A good part of London. A college? An apartment? Youth hostel? Squat?’

  ‘Thank you, Edith – you’re a good sport. A messenger of Eros.’

  She made a dismissive noise but was pleased with herself.

  ‘I can only hope that it brings you joy.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘I’m so glad that all this sort of thing is behind me.’

  He looked up from the address at her with curiosity. ‘Is it really – all behind you?’

  He had sometimes thought about when ‘it’ might all stop.

  ‘Well,’ she said, almost coyly, ‘almost. Allow me some illusion.’

  ‘I thought that now at forty, I wouldn’t be vulnerable. I am.’

  But to himself he couldn’t define what it was he wanted from this girl.

  ‘Oh the forties – they are the desperate years.’

  She went to the window and seemed to be watching her past in procession out there in Stephanplatz.

  She said, ‘Oh, things are still glimpsed but the exhausting ardour is gone.’

  She turned. ‘I do hope that it brings you some joy.’ Her voice quavered.

  He thought how the attachments of travelling mimicked in some ways the attachments of domesticity, replicated an emotional attachment.

  She moved and sat at her writing table and began to fiddle with papers, put on her reading glasses, acts of termination.

  ‘You are a splendid consort and travelling companion, Edith.’

  It was a little more than he felt but it was a payment of gratitude, and as he said it he also realised that it was on the way to becoming true. He was liking her.

  She didn’t say anything at first, busying herself with her papers, but she coloured a little and then did say, ‘Thank you – be off now you silly boy and play your games – I know you must want to ring that illicitly obtained telephone number.’ She waved him away.

  He brooded about ringing the girl’s number in London now that he had it. Almost certainly she was still ‘in love’ and still did not wish to communicate with him.

  He was not obsessed with her in an operatic sense. He told himself. Firmly. She did however visit him daily as a recollection or when something appeared in his life which he wanted to share with her, when he wanted to try to explain things to her and by so doing, explain them to himself, and to give her gifts and to accept her gifts. She quietly insinuated herself into his mind when he was making love and at other times he conjured her to his mind when making love. The more he thought about it the more he felt he could make her an offer to compete with ‘being in love’, offer her feelings superior to it, with two or three cognacs he could successfully argue that what he offered her was of value at least equal to that of ‘being in love’. Which state would he choose now at his age if offered? The romantic had lost its dazzle. Or was he fooling himself? Did he really want to see the girl again to be smitten with passion?

  He rang her.

  ‘How in fuck’s name did you get my number?!’

  ‘By detective work.’

  ‘No – how? It’s important. You were not supposed to get in touch with me.’

  ‘I got it. Ardour.’

  ‘Crap. Did my brother give it to you? The weak shit.’

  ‘I got it. But I take it you’re not overjoyed to hear my voice and that you are presumably still “in love”?’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t mind hearing your voice. Now that it’s done.’

  ‘And you won’t be coming on our Great Expedition to Spain and our homage to the Spanish anarchists?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. No.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes – why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘If you come I promise you a great time.’

  ‘You always gave me great times.’

  ‘You sound changed.’

  ‘I have changed – you haven’t seen me for two years.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘I’m no longer your archetypal Young Girl. I’m all grown up now.’

  ‘I know that.’ Did he know that?

  ‘Grown up and worse.’

  ‘You weren’t bad to begin with,’ he laughed.

  There was a silence. ‘Or how do you mean “worse”?’

  ‘I’m a world-travelled young woman now. I’m no longer so fresh and innocent. We should leave what we had as something quite nice.’

  ‘“Quite nice”?’

  ‘Yes, it was quite nice the way things were. But I’m, well, not like that now.’

  He sensed then she had more to tell, wanted to be pursued with questions.

  ‘Why are you not “like that anymore”? I know you’re “in love”, that’s fine, that’s quite OK.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that. I’m not the same girl. I’m older. I’m definitely not the sweet young girl. I’m older than I should be.’ She gave a laugh which was amused – at his expense – but with a regretful ending – at her own expense.

  ‘Have you been through some sort of tribulation?’

  ‘You could call it that.’

  ‘Stop being mysterious.’


  Amputation? Drugs?

  ‘As they say – “a girl has to eat”.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Well, don’t sound surprised. I used to think you were inducting me into it.’

  ‘How so?!’

  ‘All those expensive hotels, clothes you bought me when I was just a teenager – gifts. You showed me how it all worked.’

  He decided to let that statement cool.

  ‘Why don’t you go home, go back to Australia? I’ll send you money.’

  ‘So that I work for you exclusively.’ She laughed.

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ he said faintly.

  ‘Why should I go home? I like London. I like it over here. You taught me the good life. And you taught me …’ again she laughed, the same laugh, at both their expense, ‘about pleasing older men. I may be less romantic now but I sure am more proficient.’

  He had trouble receiving this statement. ‘I’m not an older man. In the stereotyped sense. And I find this a little erotic.’ He was trying not to react morally, to not show dismay, to be light, urbane.

  ‘I would have expected a more interesting response from you.’

  That hurt.

  ‘My more complicated reactions will follow. How about your boyfriend – the one you’re “in love with”?’

  She gave her hard-edged laugh.

  ‘Your voice sounds odd all of a sudden,’ she said acutely, ‘oh, he’ll be home soon and he won’t be happy if he finds me talking to you. That I know.’

  ‘What does he think … about what you’re doing?’

  ‘“Whoring” is the word you’re looking for. Naturally he enjoys it. He’s full of whore-fantasy shit too.’ She laughed. ‘But in his case it’s no fantasy. And he likes the money. And he doesn’t suffer from having a higher education or a higher sensibility.’

  ‘I want to see you. Maybe we could have a drink. A martini. Paris? London? I’m coming through that way.’

  ‘No. Let’s just say goodbye for now.’