Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  It’s nice, the Hollandia. The reception area is in black and gold; there’s black buttoned leather suites facing the second storey windows from which you can look down into the shopping mall. Guests at the Hollandia don’t call out to each other just to draw attention to themselves, or laugh loudly. You can hear the businessmen folding their newspapers when they have finished reading, or when their clients and acquaintances have arrived. Gordon told her that a lot of those at the Hollandia were on delegations, or teams from government departments.

  There was no embarrassment of hanging about in the corridor after knocking, or being turned away because of visitors in the room. Gordon would ring through first and Ruth would go on up if it was okay. It was okay right away for 309. So she stopped looking down at the people in Stabey’s examining the silver bracelets, and sapphire and diamond cluster rings which are the thing right now, and she went up. There’s a sense of discreet privilege at the Hollandia — private and select. After ten o’clock only guests with keys can use the lifts to the accommodation floors. Ruth was of a mind to appreciate the bold hachures on the lift carpet, and the photographs of Leiden and Haarlem.

  She was interested to see what her client was like, even if it was business. Many of them put themselves out to be pleasant and entertaining. The man in 309 was impressive to look at in an ordinary sort of way, but Ruth thought he became less ordinary as she noticed things about him, for he dressed well and spoke well. He had an ease of presence which she found relaxing. His name was Hamish Green, and he thanked her for coming and poured drinks. They sat by the drapes partly drawn across the window, and Ruth looked down at his shoes. She knew that a man’s shoes spoke of his place in the world. A man might splash out on a shirt or a jacket, but shoes gave the consistent picture. Hamish Green’s shoes were European, probably German she thought. The uppers had double stitching and leather toe caps with punched whorls.

  ‘I hope you don’t have to dash off?’ he said. Ruth warmed to that: the courtesy which made it sound as if their purpose was social, which perhaps it was, and her presence a favour, and that he would miss her company if she had reason to go.

  Yet when they finished a second drink, sitting by the window with the Friday night passing below them, there were times when he didn’t talk, as if he were thinking of some other place. Yet it was an easy silence, and he spoke well when he wanted to. He talked wryly of his fear of flying which never seemed to abate he said, and the petty humiliations it caused him, comparing the sensation to that he had in a dentist’s chair. Even in his humour there was an unemotional tone which suggested a lack of affinity with the things he spoke of, or a belief in the final triviality of any subject that could be named.

  ‘Are you warm enough?’ he said. ‘Would you like something to eat sent up?’ The view was quite different to that which Ruth had in the reception area. The lights and the traffic made colours and angles of competition, and as the shoppers came closer they seemed to dip below until briefly they were reduced to a bird’s-eye view of heads, hair, parcels, before gaining a length of body again. Ruth had become accustomed to observation, to waiting, to her own thoughts during the time which could otherwise bring boredom. Most professional people develop the skill and habit of maintaining a social presence quite successfully while all the time another enquiry of experience or reflection is underway.

  It suited Ruth to change in the bathroom. On the folded towels was an envelope with two hundred and fifty dollars inside: left privately there, with no need for either of them to mention it. She put in her bag also the small hotel pack of hair conditioner, for she knew men didn’t bother with it, and she turned her head in the mirror’s reflection as a check without vanity. She had a three pack of condoms for the hand-sewn pocket of her nightdress. She admired the small, well set tiles of the shower, the heated rail, the sheen of new fittings. She remembered her first flat in the city, with a scornful califont over a bath stained dark yellow like an old tusk. She had learnt how to live better.

  ‘Are you coming through, Ruth?’ said Hamish Green, and as she did so he turned from the bedside table, and put down the hotel’s black and gold biro. ‘Very glamorous,’ he said. ‘I love to see lace on a woman’s skin.’ It was said with calm admiration, and as Green hung up his suit he talked about doilies as an extension of the topic of lace. He described them without knowing the name, and Ruth supplied it. He said he remembered in his grandmother’s house all these things on dressers and polished wood tables. Ruth imagined him as a rather stolid, obedient boy, visiting his grandmother, and then leaving early so that he would be home in time to do his homework. He went into the bathroom in his turn to wash and change. He had large feet with expansive, milky nails on big toes. He came back in navy blue, with his large, soft feet like the paws of a bear across the carpet. ‘It’s not up to the lace is it,’ he said.

  ‘Dark blue is nice.’ Actually, he was too pale for it. It drained him.

  ‘I’ll get it off soon enough,’ he said.

  ‘So you’re beginning to feel hot-blooded?’

  He continued talking about clothes as he made himself comfortable in bed, saying that because of his work he wore suits almost all the time, and had few sports clothes. His hands smoothed her breasts, and then Ruth massaged the back of his neck. ‘That’s it,’ Hamish Green said. He took his navy blue top off. Their talk ambled from massage to tension to headaches to acupuncture. Ruth was interested in acupuncture after reading an article in which migraine sufferers had claimed relief with its use. Sometimes she had a bad head herself. While Green explained the theory behind acupuncture, Ruth thought of the times when her migraines had caused her embarrassment with men. Clients didn’t expect a woman in her position to have a headache. There was even humour in it, although on each occasion neither she nor they could see it. Ruth imagined that Hamish Green would have enough detachment to appreciate such a situation, but she didn’t mention it. She joined instead his game of finding improbable anatomical points for acupuncture.

  A phone call interrupted them. It was about his work, for he listened for several minutes just saying yes, and hmm, with his eyes on the ceiling, and Ruth looked there also, noticed the nozzles of the automatic sprinkler system which marred the even surface. Each floor of the Hollandia had its own colour scheme, right down to the covers. The bed in 309 had a pattern in black, pink and lilac, and the pink was picked up in the drapes. Green said hmm once more, then he had his turn; talking of the next day and how he expected things to go, and it was the other person who did the listening. ‘We don’t want to get into the question of funding at all tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Surely at the moment we’re concerned only with agreement in principle. Discussion on funding is another thing again, and for another meeting.’ And so on. Twice he made mention of paschal lamb, and Ruth didn’t understand what he meant. He ended the conversation by laughing in his deliberate way and saying, ‘All right, but I wouldn’t prepare the paschal lamb just yet.’ Ruth lay beneath the black, pink and lilac and her lips shaped the syllables of paschal lamb so that she would remember to look it up in her son’s dictionary.

  Green had a good deal of grey chest hair, yet on his arms the hair was black and straight, lying the same way across his wrist and forearm. The cabinet above the small fridge was open, and the miniatures stood in ranks like the contents of a doll’s cupboard — whisky, gin, brandy, liqueurs, red wine, all the things which didn’t need to be chilled. ‘I wouldn’t prepare the paschal lamb just yet,’ Hamish Green said.

  As he had talked, sitting half-turned towards the table and the phone, for a while she had knelt behind him, continuing to relax his neck and shoulders. Next to the phone was the envelope on which she had seen him write when she came to the bed. It was addressed to him, and she felt satisfaction that he had told her his real name. In the corner he had written her name — Ruth. She imagined he had done it to save the embarrassment of forgetting her name, having to ask again perhaps in the midst of their loving. There were things she l
iked about the man, not his middle-aged neck and bear paws, but there were things, she thought.

  ‘Sorry about that, Ruth,’ he said when the call was over. Maybe he looked at her name on the corner of the envelope before saying that, maybe not. She herself never forgot a client’s name until business was over, and never once had a man complimented her on that consideration. On the other hand she had been honey to a hundred men, darling or nothing to more. She had been Wilma, baby, hot pants, sister, Chattanooga Choo Choo even. For a weekend in Sydney it was an auctioneer’s sense of humour to call her his opening bid.

  Hamish Green talked of how tired he’d grown of staying in hotels, despite knowing that as he had no dependent family anymore it made sense that he was often his company’s choice. But hotel room after hotel room, he said. ‘Well, there’s no dishes to do,’ Ruth said. She could find little reason to pity the life he led. She had to bite her tongue sometimes when men complained about such things.

  ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘I suppose it sounds absurdly indulgent to complain about living in hotels. You’re quite right.’

  ‘But I can see what you mean. A hotel’s not a home.’

  He moved a hand to her thigh. ‘Where’s home?’ he said.

  ‘Right here,’ Ruth said. ‘You don’t mind wearing a sheath? It’s better these days.’ He stroked her shoulder, and enjoyed slipping the strap of her night-dress up and down, and when he started he was content with the usual missionary position. It was fairly practiced and fairly long, but the earth didn’t move for either of them. He then lay on his back with his eyes closed, and began to talk to her again. No confidences or revelations, just his half-serious complaints of the effects of travelling long distances, and how to work effectively despite them. He talked also about those interests and ambitions that he had been obliged to slight for the sake of his work and family. Commonplace topics in most respects. As Ruth listened she sensed that behind the even tone of his indifference, and despite his influence, education, his German shoes, he felt headed in a direction not of his own choosing. She responded to that feeling in two ways natural to her, a selfish satisfaction that he had his problems as she did, and a greater sympathy towards him because of it.

  He asked her opinion about diets, said hmm and yes when she was talking, and soon fell asleep. He had moved while she was talking, and slept with his hand on the rise of her hip as if it was a posture he had been long used to. He snored, but not in a way exaggerated enough to disturb her as she lay thinking. She wondered if she could keep her son interested in school, so that he could go on and get a degree in law or accountancy. Then surely he would be able to have a job like Harnish Green’s: a job that allowed confidence, self-respect and freedom of choice in little, day to day things even though powerless against the general pattern of life. That way her son wouldn’t have to be like her, and she didn’t see that in the narrowest sense, for she knew from experience that there were plenty of people of both sexes in the same situation, even if their barter was not so direct or categorical. Later, quieter, when Green’s light snoring was as regular as the noise of the sea at a distance, Ruth calculated her income and expenses for the week, and was comforted by the outcome. Yet at the back of her practical mind she posed a question as to how many years she could continue to make the sort of money she did, and how far away was the time when Gordon at Reception would begin to call her less and less.

  Almost asleep herself, perhaps even woken by it, Ruth heard Green talking in his sleep. He slurred a few words, then clearer and louder through urgency he said, ‘Is that you, Dianne? It’s you at last. Don’t stand on ceremony.’ The words were startling not for themselves, or because uttered in sleep, but rather that the voice was so apart from any tone he had used before. The voice was vibrant and full of sudden appeal, as if another man lay there. Green said nothing more, and continued sleeping, but without any snoring for a long time. Ruth was left to wonder. She thought that Dianne must have been his wife’s name, and she moved her lips to remember, don’t stand on ceremony, the way she had with paschal lamb. She wondered about his voice and what special world of imagination, memory or emotion was its source. Ruth was interested in patterns of speech, the individual differences helped her in her work to pass the time. When the subject of men’s conversation was most predictable there was still the variety of expression. Words, like shoes, she considered useful clues, but the words had interest in their own right too. Thinking of Hamish Green’s sleep-talking she smiled, and began to sleep herself.

  Ruth woke first in the morning. She found that she didn’t sleep in when she was working. Green had moved away in the night towards his own side. He still lay on his back, his jaw dropped somewhat, and his breathing a small gasp on the indrawn air and a sigh on the outgoing. Ruth renewed acquaintance with his face, and noticed most the growth of bristles, so that what had seemed one piece the night before had become two faces; pale above, flint grey below the cheeks. A pirate combination. And on the angle of chest exposed, amongst the ash of curled hair was one incongruous nipple like the wasted kernel of a nut. Yet he had a good head. The face although not handsome suggested reason, and wasn’t completely animal the way some men’s faces were in sleep.

  Ruth went from the bed quietly to have her shower, and when she returned, Green was shaving. ‘I’ve asked for some fruit to be sent up,’ he said.

  ‘It’s time I was on my way.’

  ‘Me too,’ he said. ‘A quick shower and then to work whatever the day.’ She knew to be putting on a little make-up, out of sight in the bathroom, when room service came, and then she sat close to the window while Green made coffee. They talked of what a city had to offer in a weekend. They weren’t completely at ease. She found it more difficult with an intelligent man, once the object of the exercise had been accomplished, and rarely stayed the night in any case. She had her son to consider. She half-regretted having stayed, but then it wasn’t fun getting up and leaving the hotel at two or three in the morning, demeaning even. Ruth wished she had some better experience to draw on in her conversation with him. If the feeling had an outcome it was only that her comments became knowing, sharp, even at the expense of people they could see in the Saturday street, or issues of mild interest raised between them. ‘You’re no fool, Ruth,’ he said. She had an answer to that too, but didn’t make it, just took her bag and prepared to leave.

  ‘Goodbye, Ruth. I’ll remember your lace night-dress. Lovely.’ He held out twenty dollars. For a taxi he said.

  ‘Oh, I can walk, I can find my own way all right.’

  ‘No friend of mine walks home alone from the hotel,’ he said. That was the right thing to say, Ruth thought, and she didn’t find any sarcasm in it. Yet behind all he said she felt some malaise, some lack of expectation. She thought of his sleep-talk in the night; the voice of a different man she had heard just that once.

  On impulse she said, ‘I won’t stand on ceremony then,’ and Hamish Green smiled at the phrase, but there was no sign it meant anything to him. She had a last glimpse of him and 309, with the black and pinks well caught in the low morning sun, the envelope with her name on the bedside table, Green’s quiet suit and the silver watchband on his wrist.

  It was nice wasn’t it, the Hollandia. The carpet was obsequious beneath her slingbacks, making no distinctions. Even in the mornings at the Hollandia there was a sense of ease — as if all had been paid for, and quality given for that payment. It was nice, she thought, the Hollandia, with photographs of Groningen and Emmen, Amsterdam, Hilversum and The Hague.

  The Rose Affliction

  Myra was using the orbital polisher in the staff cafeteria at Proudhams when she first saw the rose. She had been working for five hours, her asthma was bad again and her shoulders ached from hauling the polisher from side to side on the brown and yellow mottled lino. The first rose was in the extreme upper left of her vision, and as her head moved with the polisher, so the rose moved, skimming over the cafeteria lino, or rising up the pale walls w
hen she lifted her eyes. At first Myra thought it just a temporary continuation of the patterned whorls on the floor, or of the enamelled manufacturer’s crest on the central boss of the polisher. But it was quite clearly a small rose. The petals were flushed pink with the packed effort of escaping the green bud capsule.

  Myra took one hand from the polisher to rub her eyes and then blinked several times, but although the rose blurred for a moment, it reformed perfectly. She could see the slightly crimped ends of the small petals, like a delicate, miniature clam, and the deeper tonings of colour towards the centre of the rose. She turned off the machine and opened her mouth to call out to Ruby, who was doing the executive suites not far away. As the whine of the polisher vanished down the empty night corridors, Myra thought how silly it would sound to complain of a rosebud in her eye, and how impossible to prove. She didn’t know Ruby all that well, or trust her with personal things.

  It was just that she was tired, Myra told herself. She would come right after a good sleep, and at fifty-nine she had experience of the tricks that body and mind could play on you, though menopause couldn’t be blamed any longer. Her knees, for example, after all that wear in commercial cleaning, rattled like dredge buckets if she had to get down on to the floor, and her left ankle on a hot day would swell over the rim of her shoe if she had to stand a lot. She had a frozen shoulder, found it an agony to have to work her right arm above the level of her head. Not that she mentioned those things to the supervisor.

  But nevertheless, to see a rose was an oddity: like a transfer, or a logo, high left in her vision and superimposed on anything that she looked at there. Even in the bucket of water, milky with disinfectant, that Myra used for the urinals, the pink rose could be seen, and as Myra had a lift home with Ruby, because Wayne was out in her car, the imposition of the rose continued. ‘We’ll get double time if we do the two extra hours on Sunday at the Super Doop Market,’ said Ruby. As Myra looked at her to answer, the pink rosebud glowed in Ruby’s straight, brown hair.