Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  ‘Do you want Lisa?’

  Lisa was asleep, probably, in her little room down the hall. It was three in the morning.

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  The room was dark but for the dim illumination of the lamp on top of the Steinway. Leon gazed back at his wife, since that seemed what she required of him at this moment.

  ‘How you’ve loved me,’ said Tess. ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, always.’

  ‘Even if we didn’t have everything.’

  Tess meant sex. Leon made no reply.

  ‘But we had all the other things. All the other beautiful things.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The beautiful things,’ said Tess. She was smiling. Her teeth were a little bit awful, the side-effect of a medicine that had done her no good at all. For a time after the ruining, she had covered her mouth when she spoke. Now she didn’t seem to care.

  ‘Now I want to rest,’ said Tess.

  ‘Shall I leave?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Once in bed, Leon couldn’t sleep. The bed had really been Tess’s; she was its true friend. Leon thought of his wife returning home from parties, the theatre, recitals, and sinking onto the bed as if into an embrace. And her sigh of pleasure, like a song, as she turned an arm around her pillow.

  He tried to read but couldn’t; even Hardy seemed a fruitless labour. He’d become accustomed to his wife’s satirical disdain for the books he read and couldn’t do without the teasing. ‘Ooh, what a daring Leon it is, he’s dipped his toe into the twentieth century!’ That was her comment when he’d tried Auden. Tess would read nothing that wasn’t written a week before she picked it up. South Americans, writers from Eastern Europe; Australians of course. She would look in briefly on meetings in the apartment of Leon’s various literary groups—the Hardy Society; Australian Friends of Henry James; the Diarists—and call merrily, ‘Ah, the firebrands!’ They adored her, all of Leon’s friends, the men especially.

  And Tess’s music was gone. Working each day in the shop below without the music from upstairs—it was intolerable to Leon. His well-heeled customers had stood with him by the shelves and tables, smiling as they listened.

  ‘Debussy?’

  ‘Debussy, yes.’

  ‘Is that Tess or a student?’

  ‘Tess.’

  ‘I thought so.’

  Leon lay still, hands folded on his chest. The pain gripped and tugged at him. When he could bear it no more, he let out a cry and lay panting in the heat. The windows were open; it seemed wrong to use the air conditioner when his wife was doing without its comfort for the sake of quiet. The lighting on High Street made a hazy moon in the left of the two silk curtains that lifted and lapsed with the motion of the air.

  He thought of Tess’s ‘Even if we didn’t have everything’. The everlasting ‘everything’! He thought of the psychiatrist who had placed in his teenaged hands a picture of a man in big lace-up boots and nothing else. The doctor, a woman of some reputation (he later reflected), might have been expected to employ props more sophisticated than a picture of a naked man. But no. Leon had said, ‘I am not homosexual,’ and that had concluded his only medical consultation on the business of his sexuality. His father had urged the visit on him in an agony of embarrassment, having noticed certain things. Loving Roger as he did (a man to whom fatherhood was page after page of the most baffling book on earth) Leon said, more than once, ‘Dad, don’t worry.’ But nothing more. Nothing about beloved Sarah. Nothing about Psychopathia Sexualis, where his situation earned no mention. Nothing about his ecstatic response to a certain form of beauty, infinitely more rewarding than any conventional arousal he could imagine. He’d once told Tess, ‘I can be thought of as a freak of nature,’ but that was because she needed to know. He could never have said such a thing to Roger. In any case, he regretted having explained himself to Tess in that flippant way. Everything he’d said then had given the impression that he understood himself quite completely. ‘Oh, darling Tess, you shall have your lovers, tra la la, I am content to be your harbour, and always always your beauty is mine, tra la la, your heart is mine, free as I am of vulgar green jealousy.’ Not quite those words, but others as untruthful.

  The rattling of the first tram of the day disturbed the slow, exhausted cadence of Leon’s misery.

  =

  He spent as little time in the shop as he could manage, and then more to ease Susie’s burden than for the sake of commerce. Certain transactions—such as the one he was completing now, the sale of a two-volume 1908 edition of Crewshaw’s Tropical Birds of New Ireland to a client who had flown down from Brisbane so that he could receive the books into his hands—called for Leon’s touch, Leon’s gravity. For his eleven thousand dollars the client, a barrister, well-off but not wealthy, craved the fullest possible indemnity against buyer’s remorse.

  ‘Two other sets exist, neither in Australia,’ Leon told his client. ‘I’ve seen both. The set in Baltimore is inferior to yours in the registration of the last two plates. The Sheffield set has smeared print on four of the captions—only slightly detectable, a printing error, possibly a tiny bubble in the ink. Yours, Rowan, is the only perfect set.’

  ‘You excite me, dear fellow. Alas, this will be my only purchase for the year.’

  ‘The best employment of your funds I could imagine.’

  ‘And your good lady?’

  ‘Not doing well. No.’

  ‘Ah, dear. My most sincere good wishes to her. And to you.’

  ‘I’ll tell her. She will remember you very fondly, Rowan.’

  Rowan left the shop. But before Leon could return to the many visitors keeping vigil upstairs, Father Bourke entered. Leon gave him a brief, agonised glance. He had made dozens of visits in jeans and Blundstones and unironed shirts but on this occasion he was dressed in professional black. Tess was to die today. The priest knew.

  Leon tried to say, ‘She’s not ready,’ but couldn’t manage his voice.

  Father Bourke said, ‘Easy does it,’ and placed a hand on Leon’s cheek. His authority was magnified by his height and handsome bearing and the mane of silver hair. Leon shrank down to fit the role that had been fashioned for him: a strange little man attending a drama of princes and queens.

  =

  Leon, Justin and Evie stayed by the bed for the last hours of Tess’s life. Justin sat for the entire time with a straight back revealing a stoicism no one would have predicted. Evie rested her hand on her mother’s bare ankle. Leon stood by the Steinway, his gaze fixed on his wife’s face. Tess’s breathing became more distressed with the passing of each hour, but she wouldn’t let Lisa fix the oxygen mask, somehow finding the strength to wrench it away angrily. Voiceless, she made it understood that she wished to be laid on her side facing the window. With further impatient gestures, she demanded the window be opened. From High Street came the rumble of a tram and the roar of traffic. The gauzy curtain lifted and fell.

  She died late at night. It was Terence Bourke who declared her gone. When he’d made the sign of the cross over her, as Justin and Evie sat in an embrace on the bedside, Leon kissed his wife on the forehead, on the lips. He lifted her hand and covered his own face with it, then from his pocket he retrieved the wedding ring that she’d been unable to wear these past months because it slipped from her finger. He put the ring in her palm and closed her fingers over it, then left the room.

  He shuffled about the flat without any sense of a destination. He passed pairs and groups talking quietly of things that had nothing to do with dying and cancer and morphine. Maurice, Gary and Kath from the ABC, exhausted after a fifteen-hour vigil, slept snuggled together under a blanket on the living-room floor. All the armchairs and the two sofas were occupied by people gone unconscious in the manner of travellers on a long-haul flight, mouths wide open, heads lolling, limbs awkwardly arranged to suit the shape of the space available. The two television sets, the sound turned low, flung the colours of an irrelevant world about the living
room.

  part two

  Daniel

  chapter 5

  River

  THREE OF the four eulogists at Tess’s funeral failed to mention Leon Joyce at all; the fourth, Evie, included his name in a long list of people who had ‘loved and cared for my mother in her illness’. The slights and neglect didn’t touch Leon. He lived in a blizzard of unhappiness, only raising his eyes to glance at the white expanse ahead before trudging on. Suicide no longer seemed any sort of a remedy. His living mind harboured the resource of memory, and now that his wife had disappeared, he couldn’t bear the idea that the only evidence of her love for him should also vanish.

  =

  A month after Tess’s funeral, a special memorial service was held in the west wing of the old Exhibition Buildings in Carlton. The funeral congregation had been family and friends, but the memorial service was a production. The invitations spoke of it as a ‘celebration of our Tess’s life’, suggesting that a season of relatively cheerful grief had succeeded the bitter grief of thirty days earlier. Seats were set up around a stage where Tess’s piano teacher from her university days, Catherine Tyler, now in her early seventies and crowned by a superb cloud of pure white hair, played a selection of her famous pupil’s favourites, concluding with Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse.

  Daanya Delli found Leon after Catherine Tyler had finished playing and held his hand against her heart. She had come down from Wangaratta without her husband, the professor. She apologised for his absence. ‘He bears the loss of our daughter painfully, as you know.’

  Leon said, ‘Yes,’ but all that he could remember of the professor was an aloof man at a couple of Tess’s dinner gatherings. Since it was right that he should say more, he mentioned the son, Joseph, who had died well before Sofia. ‘It was political trouble, was it not? I hate to hear of people dying for their principles. Such changeable things. I am so sorry for you, Daanya. And for Emmanuel.’

  Daanya looked away for a moment. Then she said softly, ‘Joseph was killed by his lover’s father. In Istanbul. Outside a cinema. It had nothing to do with politics. Emmanuel prefers people to think otherwise.’ Then she said, just as softly: ‘Our passions.’

  Because Daanya didn’t move away, Leon asked why Tess had turned her and Emmanuel out of Joyful. It was an unresolved question; something that troubled Leon in a slightly queasy way. Daanya lifted her eyebrows and turned her head slightly to one side. But she made no reply.

  =

  Susie now ran the shop and the online business. Even the shop’s oldest clients were happy to put their needs into her hands. If any decision-making was required of Leon, he listened long enough to work out what answer was sought, and gave it. This system of applied negligence yielded Justin free tenure of Moore Street and Evie the loan of a large sum of money to prop up her partner’s health-food business.

  The dressing room of the apartment where Leon’s collection was stored became the widower’s cell. He listened to tapes and CDs of Tess’s interviews over the fifteen years of her program, pacing up and down and smiling at the forays into the vernacular that had made him wince when she was alive. Listening to the famous interview with Daniel Barenboim, he found himself defending her against the criticisms of girlish flirtation that had flooded in from listeners. ‘No, no,’ he said, shaking his head and waving his hand, ‘that was natural to her, it was her manner.’ The recordings of Tess’s occasional stints on a television arts show were the treasures of Leon’s hoard. He sat on one of the Saarinen chairs with a television perched on another and, leaning forward, watched his wife running through her wonderful repertoire of gestures and smiles.

  The interviews were mostly with men and it was even more apparent on the screen than in real life that Tess, despite her politics, did not really like women. She was courteous to her female interviewees, but anyone who knew her well could tell from her painted-on smile that she was bored. With the men, she was embarrassingly vivid in her engagement, reaching across the space between the two green armchairs to touch a knee just briefly, seizing every opportunity to flatter. She knew precisely how far she could go and always found a way, at least once in each interview, to go just that tiny bit too far.

  The camera’s preoccupation with the interviewee was a problem. Leon sat through the tedious replies of these cosseted pianists, flautists, conductors, strummers of the classical guitar in an agony of impatience. ‘Next question, for heaven’s sake!’ Then he realised that he could hasten Tess’s appearance with the fast-forward button, pause, rewind, watch his wife asking questions again and again, and he blessed the name of Sony and began to look on the television as the most important possession that had ever come into his keeping. Books! Books were not in the same league.

  It was not a life, but that didn’t bother him. He didn’t want a life. He belonged to some odd species designed to walk the earth in small numbers without leaving footprints, without altering anything. What exactly was a big crowded human life when you looked at it closely? A strenuous project that people roused themselves to each day, coaxing their muscles to drive themselves forward, flailing at anything that impeded them. They marked everything they touched. Did they ever understand the beauty of having no influence, of making nothing happen? A room, a mind, memories, pictures and words—this was all he required, particularly the pictures. He was an enemy of going forward; a friend of remaining. Only let there be Tess where he remained.

  =

  Unwilling to leave his cell, Leon nevertheless agreed to go along with Evie when she turned up one winter’s day with an urgent plan for the disposal of her mother’s ashes. Leon didn’t associate remnants of cremation with the Tess who had once lived and breathed, and hadn’t given a thought to any further ceremony. But the ashes had apparently been preying on Evie’s mind. She said she’d been waiting for Justin to commit himself to a time and a place but had given up on him. Now, on this sleety Wednesday morning, she wanted to act. She wanted it finalised. She’d decided on the Yarra River, below Princes Bridge, with the life of the city going on all around.

  Leon parked his car on St Kilda Road and ushered Evie down the steps to the riverbank under the bridge. He held his umbrella over her head all the way. The plastic box of ashes was crammed into the pocket of his overcoat along with a tablespoon. The wind was bitter and the fine rain cut his face.

  ‘Here?’ he asked when they’d gone as far as they could along the embankment towards the iron arch of the bridge.

  Evie nodded bleakly in her strange remorseless mood and accepted the plastic box and tablespoon. She picked away the adhesive seals with her fingernails, pushed the drawer of the box open and leaned out over the bubbling surface of the river. She didn’t bother dispersing the ashes by the spoonful but simply upturned the box. The wind carried the dust and grit in an upstream direction before depositing it on the water. It disappeared instantly. Perhaps in frustration at being robbed of the sight of her mother’s ashes floating under the bridge past Southbank, she tossed the plastic box into the river. It was borne away like a tiny barge battling a storm in a channel.

  Her fair skin flushed by cold and distress, Evie stood shuddering on the bank. At the flat, she had turned down Leon’s suggestion that she wear Tess’s big winter coat from Finland, trimmed with marten, but she now accepted the offer of Leon’s own overcoat. Unsure of what he was doing, but glad to have the gesture welcomed, Leon stood close to his stepdaughter and held her around the shoulders. He pressed a handkerchief to the glossy snot trail below her nose.

  ‘She was a frightful mother, but I loved her,’ said Evie, taking over with the handkerchief. ‘I truly did.’

  ‘I know,’ said Leon.

  ‘I wish Justin had come. Now I feel awful not waiting.’

  ‘This isn’t really Justin’s thing, I suppose.’

  ‘No. But what is his thing? Except pussy.’

  ‘He’s still young.’

  ‘Yes, and he’ll never grow up.’

  ‘Oh, come.’
>
  ‘He won’t, Leon. He’s a narcissistic shit. Oh God, Mum, I loathed you at times. I did, Leon. I so did.’

  ‘You’re young, too.’

  ‘For what she did to Dad—that more than me.’

  Leon waited a full minute before responding. ‘I’d been led to believe it was fifty-fifty so far as that goes. Kazi and Tess?’

  Evie shook her head. ‘Hardly, Leon. You know what she was like.’

  ‘Ah, somewhat. Have I underestimated her?’

  Evie snorted softly. She was sobbing. She opened the white handkerchief and waved it in the direction taken by the plastic box. While she was waving, a dark cloud moving rapidly over the city from the west cut the morning light in half. Heavy rain began to fall, churning the river white. But it was clear that Evie had no intention of leaving the riverbank for the time being. Leon held her closer still, tilting the umbrella to protect her. She was talking but he could barely make out what she was saying. More about the strain of being Tess’s daughter, more sympathy for Kazi, it sounded like, and something for him, for Leon, too. He made out the words, ‘the shittiest thing’ and the name ‘Daniel’, but not much else. He strained to catch her words through the drumming of the rain on the umbrella and the clatter of the trams passing on the bridge above. What was she saying? Daniel—what about Daniel? Who was he? Something ominous settled near his heart.

  =

  Great fan though he was of Hardy’s novels and poetry, Leon was not himself interested in antique deities toying with the passions of little people. He believed that the cosmos was broad enough and round enough to throw up a billion coincidences each hour without design playing a part. When he arrived back at the shop from the ashes ceremony and found a letter from Bobby Keddie telling him that Tess’s files at the station had been copied to disk, he thought those files might tell him something about this Daniel. But nothing more. Bobby was a charming little man who’d liked Tess. He might unwittingly hand over something coded to wound, but if it were not Bobby who revealed more about Daniel, it would be someone else. ‘So here’s an idea,’ Bobby’s letter concluded, ‘come to dinner this Friday. I’ll have all of Tess’s stuff for you.’