Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  Whatever Dorothy’s concerns, she must have overcome them because she left me in Sarah’s care for a fortnight when I was nine while she and Roger were away together visiting Melanie in Perth. Sarah was meant to drop me off at Wesley then pick me up each afternoon. Instead she took me to Sydney by aeroplane for the whole fortnight, then left me in the care of an old man with an impeccably kept white beard who sat me in the corner of his studio while he painted. This was for only a part of each day. The old man—Peter somebody, he painted racehorses—gave me a canvas panel and large squares of cartridge and a table full of oil paints with which to amuse myself; at lunchtimes he fed me the first shop-bought meat pies I had ever eaten—I relished them. Sarah told me that she’d telephoned Wesley and explained to the housemaster that I’d come down with measles, which was untrue. Her story when Dorothy telephoned her was that she was treating me to an ‘advanced course in art and life’.

  Our home in Sydney was a small hotel in Double Bay. I was supposed to sleep in a cot beside Sarah’s bed, and I was happy about that, but Sarah usually took me into the big bed at night. She dressed as beautifully for bed as she did for the day—pink satin nightgowns, superbly cut, which is not common in nightgowns. Whatever strange business Sarah undertook during the day, she always picked me up from the racehorse man’s house in Glebe in the late afternoon, took me to the hotel and remained with me there. We ate in the room, listened to the radio, then Sarah would read to me for an hour from whatever she was herself reading—Life magazine, Pix, a novel by Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead, I think it was. Whenever she came to a four-letter word, she would show me the page and point to the word instead of reading it aloud, and say, ‘impolite’. The reading always took place after I’d put on my pyjamas and climbed into the cot. Sarah would lie beside me, on top of the covers, both of us propped up with pillows. She flicked through the magazines first, reading anything that she thought might suit me, commenting on the pictures, then switched to the Norman Mailer. When the hour was up, she would dress in her satin nightgown in the bathroom, then come to my cot, bend over me and tickle my face with the tips of her long hair before kissing me goodnight. After ten minutes or so, she would call to me. ‘Are you lonely, honey?’ I knew that the answer should be, ‘A little.’ She would toss back her covers and pat the bed and I would slip in beside her. She would kiss me again then turn away and fall asleep. She never attempted to cuddle me and didn’t expect anything of that sort from me, either.

  Evenings were enchanting, but it was the mornings I most wish to share with you. For Sarah took with her wherever she went enough garments for much much longer than she was away. On the first day in our hotel, she unpacked dress after dress from her three suitcases and hung them with care in the wardrobe. It was like watching a famous stage magician. She later told Dorothy that I kept squeaking, ‘Oh Sarah, they make me happy!’ She fashioned a game. Each morning after breakfast from room service she allowed me to choose what she would wear that day. Her taste in clothing was a little old-fashioned for the middle of the nineteen sixties, but sublime. She tried things on for me. She said, ‘Shoes?’ and let me pick out a pair. If I made a blunder—wrong shoes for the dress—she’d say, ‘Mister Joyce will please reconsider.’ Dressed for the day, hair arranged, jewellery chosen, she’d apply her lipstick—always the last touch, the lipstick. I was permitted to choose. I sat on a stool in the bathroom watching intently. Sarah kissed me each morning on the cheek and left a perfect lip-shape. She showed me myself in the mirror. Finally she posed in the bedroom while I studied the whole effect. All the while she offered me bits and pieces of songs. ‘Do you know this one, Mein Herr?’

  Nothing as vivid as beloved Sarah had ever come into my life. My mother was kind and clever, but Sarah was paradise. We are immortal in moments, immortal for as long as the moments last, out of the reach of all harm and disappointment. Sarah made such moments for me in our hotel room, perhaps for herself, too. I have been in my life, even as a child, oversensitive to beauty; one could almost say neurotically engaged with it. It is strange and interesting to me. At the same time, the world, where the only beauty in the universe dwells—darling, I am always backing away in horror. I grew up well loved, almost pampered, I have been wealthy all my life, I have never known hardship, yet the world horrifies me. My friend Asher, you know, shuffled out of Auschwitz at the end of the war. Everything I’d never known, he’d seen. For the rest of his time on earth he kept a notebook in his breast pocket and every time something good came into his life he jotted it down. He was a great lover of women, and he recorded kisses. A glass of wine that delighted him, a fine meal, the hugs of his children, a book, a film, especially music. My equivalent of Asher’s notebook has been episodes of transporting beauty. Beauty redeems.

  And do you know, I believe what Sarah made for me was all stagecraft. All art. In my wide eyes, Sarah may have seen the best thing her powers could ever fashion, a boy transported in every atom. Perfect love. She lasted only eight more months and I didn’t see her in that time. She hoarded sleeping pills and died in her garden under a blue sky. My mother said a decade later that Sarah had been ‘unlucky in her choice of the people she loved’. Her death was the great hammer blow of my life.

  Your further question, darling—have I tried. You must mean, have I at least let girls or boys attempt something with me, ‘get me going’. No. It would have been like trying out the possibility of eating through my ears.

  I said earlier that I was miserable for some years after puberty. But the misery wasn’t true suffering. I would have suffered if I’d wanted what I didn’t have. My misery was only to do with isolation. I was a jolly boy up to the age of twelve. Just that one terrible blow. Then I began to learn. I smiled at jokes I couldn’t fathom at first. Magazines came my way that made me think the world was mad. A boy at Wesley, abnormally beautiful, said that he would fuck me for two pounds if I liked, then attempted to do so for no payment at all. Roger took me to one of our holiday houses, this one at Sorrento, and spent hours in a mood so stern I thought he was ill, then delivered a speech about penises and vaginas and reproductive systems and masturbation. (‘What goes on, old chap, is this…’) I wanted to run down to the pier and drown myself. In the end, he actually did become ill through sheer embarrassment. Dorothy had to drive to Sorrento with his migraine medicine.

  Tess finally agreed to renew their Thursdays together, Leon meeting her for lunch then driving her to the studio. Neither talked of their correspondence. One Thursday, Leon arrived home after dropping Tess at her place to find that she’d sent a message in the twenty minutes since they’d parted. She asked if marriage had entered his thinking and if so, what was his vision of the future?

  Certainly I wish to marry you! My vision of our future? Happiness.

  Tess requested further detail. She wanted to know if she would be expected to forego ‘adventures’. And would she and Leon be sharing a bed? She couldn’t contemplate a domestic arrangement that didn’t include someone to cuddle at night. Was Leon against cuddles? He seemed to be hinting that he was, in the way that he spoke about his holiday in Sydney with Sarah. Also, was she never to be seen naked by him? Would the sight of her naked body turn him to stone, something like that? Was he repelled by womanly matters such as menstruation? Because she couldn’t for one half-second be bothered hiding packets of tampons away.

  Sharing a bed with you would be bliss. I don’t mind cuddles at all, but I never seem to initiate them myself. Would it be a burden to you if you were left in charge of cuddles? What you might have in mind about ‘adventures’ must remain entirely your business. I have no idea about menstruation. Why would it matter? I don’t understand. Marry me.

  Of finances:

  Tess dearest, there is nothing in that way for either of us to worry about. Since you ask, I would be glad to sign any document you might care to draw up. My own financial situation is absurdly plush, thanks to my great-grandfather Charles. Remember I spoke about Charles and Lucia?
When he and Lucia came to Australia, he purchased buildings everywhere. Later, he added a timber business to his furniture empire. His fortune went entirely to Jennifer, since Jennifer’s sister Kate (my maternal grandmother) had died before her. Jennifer left everything to Dorothy and I was my mother’s sole heir. If I had the decency, I would give the money away to charity, perhaps to the Wesleyans. We’re all Wesleyans in my family, just as yours is all papist.

  Finally, Tess brought up the matter of Evie and Justin at lunch. It seemed to Leon a sign that she was close to making a decision.

  ‘Kazi’s seeing a girl younger than his daughter,’ she said. ‘He brought her to mass last Sunday and sat with her, reeking of testosterone. Everyone looked at me as if I’d driven him to it!’

  ‘To mass?’ said Leon. ‘That’s brazen.’

  Tess drank down a scotch in a single swallow then glared at Leon as if stating the obvious might get him a slap across the face.

  ‘He fetched her to Australia after his last visit to his ancestral village, or city, whatever it is. He quite likely has some sort of breeding program going on over there—his clan rearing pretty little brunettes for his delectation. Justin thinks it’s funny but it can’t be good for a boy to see his father salivating over teenage girls. He and Evie have to live with us, I would insist on that.’

  ‘You would like Evie and Justin to live with us? With you and me?’

  ‘Yes. Well?’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more.’

  ‘You’re perfectly sure?’

  ‘This makes me so happy. I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Dearest, I’m still thinking. Can you stand it? But it’s good we’re not going to bicker about Justin. And Evie, of course. Anyway, Kazi wants a divorce. It means we’ll both go to hell, but I imagine that I’m fairly much booked for that journey in any case. You know if we are to marry—big, big “if ”!—it can’t be in church.’

  ‘Not in any Catholic church, no.’

  ‘It hurts, actually. Very much. Kazi can do what he likes, of course, he’s taking that child to some derelict place where a priest will marry you for a thousand dollars. It’s so like him to trample on things that are sacred like that! Oh Leon, it’s so squalid, so squalid! My life is a swamp!’

  Tess began to cry softly, looking out the window to the gardens. The waiter, an alert young man from Beirut whom Tess had undressed mentally on more than one occasion, arrived with a worried frown and a fresh scotch.

  =

  A Thursday marriage took place in St Michael’s, the old Congregational church on the corner of Russell Street and Collins in the heart of Melbourne. The huge interior of the church housed just the twenty friends and family Tess had invited, together with Leon’s half-sisters, Janet and Melanie; two of his Thomas Hardy Society friends, Martin and Tony; Paul Weisz, an ancient man, the last surviving friend of beloved Sarah; the bride, the groom, the organist, the verger and the minister.

  A year and four months had passed since Leon had wrung from Tess an agreement to marry. For most of that time, Leon had chosen what Tess wore on formal occasions. He didn’t dress her from his collection (that was kept for private sessions in the upstairs room at Moore Street) but instead purchased whatever attracted her and pleased him. Tess always deferred to his judgment. For the wedding, Leon surprised her by suggesting not an elaborate gown but a simple Helmut Lang lace dress with an above-the-knee hemline.

  The wedding day was the happiest of Leon’s adult life. His cheeks were damp from morning till evening. He walked down the aisle to the foot of the dais with the deep burr of Bach rolling from the organ pipes. The sun behind the stained-glass windows cast the crimson and blue of the saints’ robes across the carpet. He turned at the first note of Lohengrin to see Tess standing at the head of the aisle in the Helmut Lang, a posy of daphne clutched at her waist. She smiled and waved to him then stepped forward with her friend Margaret behind her as matron of honour—Margaret also in a Helmut Lang chosen by Leon, as simple as Tess’s but not identical.

  The language of the service moved Leon in a way he had only ever experienced reading Spenser and Milton.

  The honeymoon was brief, due to Tess’s commitments—just a week in Paris and a further week in Italy. Most of the holiday was devoted to wandering about contentedly; a little of it to the purchase of clothes, shoes and jewellery. Tess loved the shopping, but only for a short while; she was not quite the costume fanatic that Leon had bargained for. But not to worry. He was a happy man. He had already shown himself that he could sleep beside Tess comfortably, so there was no awkwardness there. It was a blissful time until the second-last day.

  On that second-last day, Leon and his bride stood hand in hand on the Palatine at evening watching clouds of starlings swirling in the sky. Tess wore a black cashmere cardigan and grey woollen slacks. The breeze turned strands of her fine hair about on her forehead. Leon moved away a half-dozen paces to take a picture, and when he looked back, Tess smiled and blew him a kiss. There was, for once, no theatre in her smile. She had softened throughout the day, abandoning the satire that was so much a part of her regular expression. Her relaxation extended to the power she exercised over him, the casual, unpremeditated manipulation of his emotions. Her carnality had taken a holiday, too. Facing him, happy to be in the picture he was composing, she seemed for once free, the glow of her skin more explained by sound sleep and a wholesome diet than the tension of desire. Leon knew that the love in her heart for him came and went, came and went, but now, at this moment, surely there was a pleasure in being with him on a hill above Rome, a larger liking of him?

  It was there on the Palatine, the camera raised to his eye, his wife framed in the viewfinder surrounded by digital script and numerals and dots of green and red that Leon’s dread began. He betrayed nothing; he held the camera steady, made adjustments and took the picture, but a claw like the talon of a pitiless bird gripped his heart and squeezed hard.

  He could lose her. He could lose her.

  When he lowered the camera, Tess frowned and took concerned steps towards him.

  ‘Dearest?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘You’re as white as a sheet. What’s wrong?’

  ‘Me? Nothing.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Nothing, no.’

  =

  Within weeks of returning to Australia and to Moore Street, the pattern of Leon’s torment had established itself. Tess colonised Sunday as if it were an island off the mainland of marriage. As each weekend approached, Leon tried to quarantine the grief of anticipation to Saturday night, leaving as much of the week as possible to enjoy being happy. But the grief inevitably leaked, infecting the whole of each Saturday and spilling backwards into the Friday before it. One Saturday, Leon walked out of the shop and down High Street to a lane where he’d some weeks earlier noticed half a house brick lying on the cobbles. He picked it up and struck himself on the forehead with it. He told Tess later that afternoon that a book, a very heavy book, had fallen on his face while he was trying to fetch it down from a high shelf. Susie, busy nearby, raised her eyebrows.

  Tess had no reason to believe the story, but she did, nonetheless. Her persistence in holding Sunday sacred to her needs was backed by potent reserves of willpower, and the knowledge that she was morally in the right. It had been agreed she would roam. Her husband had conceded the necessity.

  Seven months into the marriage, Mandy notified Leon of her intention to leave. ‘It’s too different,’ she said. She didn’t add that she detested Tess, leaving it to Leon to note that her manner in resigning was calmer and more courteous than ordinary dissatisfaction could possibly explain. Leon dropped his weight into an armchair and stared at nothing.

  Mandy sat herself on the footrest before him, leaning forward with her arms folded on her knees. ‘Evie’s a sweetie, but the boy’s a bit of a revelation to an old pheasant like me,’ she said, with kindness. Justin and one girlfriend or another were sometimes to be found in the vacant bedroom of the
master and mistress of the house as late as ten in the morning—awkward for Mandy.

  ‘Tess has her own ways,’ she said. ‘Dorothy’s ways suited me best. And yours, of course.’ She reached and patted Leon’s cheek, her creased lips pouting as if to coo. ‘You’ve done the right thing, sweetheart, for sure. She’s a stunner.’ By which she meant, as Leon understood, ‘Fool!’

  =

  Tess wouldn’t compromise on sleeping naked. She had always slept naked, and that was that. Leon had always slept in pyjamas, but was required to change his ways.

  ‘It’s the loveliest feeling,’ said Tess. ‘Snuggle up. Hold on tight.’

  Leon snuggled, and found the experience tolerable. With practice, he came to like it. He was not asked to fondle if he didn’t wish to. Tess’s nakedness wrapped around him made him think of desserts; of custards, of creamed apples; foods fit for babies and among his favourites. He was never aware of the bones of her body. The spread of her breasts against his back and the slight forcing that settled them was pleasant in its way. The richness of the sleep four days of the week crowned the luxuries of Leon’s life. Waking in the morning before his wife, as he always did, Leon listened with the contentment of a cat to Tess’s shallow snore and studied the mysterious drama of frowns and half-smiles that played across her face. He watched her lips shape themselves as if for speech, then issue the one-syllable murmurs and sighs of a sleeping infant.