Had she been kind enough? Had she listened hard enough or well enough? Oh, too late, too late! She was ready to give herself up to the practice of love just as her body was dying!
She wrote to Ro in Sydney, who wrote back advising her to have another test. Has anyone ever told you you’re a fuckwit? Ro wrote. Don’t be an idiot, Deb, just have another test. Honestly, you are the most neurotic woman I’ve ever known. It’s lucky I’m fond of you. Here’s my diagnosis, free of charge: you haven’t got AIDS.
Steph did not yet know about the Suspicious Wanderer’s AIDS hysteria. By chance she wrote to the Suspicious Wanderer to tell her that a mutual friend, Vanessa, a heterosexual woman, had just been diagnosed with HIV. She contracted it during a one-night stand, having sex without a condom.
By the time Ro spoke to Steph, and Steph called the Suspicious Wanderer in Paris, she was nearly out of her mind. ‘You do know that Vanessa slept with the man in Zimbabwe, don’t you, where half the population carries HIV?’ But nothing Steph said could convince the Suspicious Wanderer that she was not dying because, like all irrational fears, they were the hardest to eradicate.
One of Horatia’s oldest friends was a distinguished doctor and she introduced him to the Suspicious Wanderer. They liked each other at once, for Bertrand had an outrageous sense of humour which appealed to her, as hers appealed to him. He worked out of a famous teaching hospital, the Pitié-Salpêtrière, and at a dinner party at Horatia’s one night she managed to ask him a few questions about AIDS. A gay man himself, with a partner of some thirty-five years, Bertrand was of the opinion that it was a most interesting disease, the progress of which was impossible to predict.
‘There will be growth, then decline, peut-être,’ he said. ‘This is normale. It will possibly destroy parts of la population africaine.’
‘How long does it take to manifest itself in the blood?’ she asked.
He looked at her, hard. ‘Come and see me in my clinic, ma chère fille.’
The Pitié-Salpêtrière was a beautiful building, possibly used in earlier days to display the fallen heads of kings and queens. Paris’s proud history was beginning to strike her as too proud, too overbearing. She was beginning to hate buildings with a history as long as your arm and starting to think fondly of Australia and its puny buildings with no collective memories.
Bertrand was behind his desk, smoking a cheroot. At least she assumed it was a cheroot because it was not a cigarette. The ne pas fumer laws were only just starting to come in, and bars were still full of smokers, with a reserved section at the centre of the bar for non-smokers. She had sometimes stood beside a small ne pas fumer sign in a bar, smoking her heart out. ‘Death by pleasure,’ Bertrand said and smiled at her.
‘Sorry,’ she said in English. ‘The bus was late.’ She appeared to have forgotten her French.
‘Paris used to be inhabited by citizens,’ Bertrand said. ‘Now it is an office. Philippe thinks we should move to Algiers.’
She smiled at him. She no longer knew what she was doing there and what it was that had once seemed so urgent to say.
Bertrand did not speak further but continued to smoke. She had seen Frenchmen break for cigarettes between tennis sets, and once she had seen two women smoking in a public swimming pool, their legs and torsos immersed in water, their shoulders and arms resting against the ledge of the pool.
‘Think of me as a tin opener, ma chère fille,’ Bertrand said. ‘You cannot tell me anything that will shock me. I already know that the most extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. I know that ordinary people have the most extraordinary lives.’
He offered her a coffee, and when she accepted he picked up a beautiful little bell on his desk, some kind of antique, and rang it. A secretary came in, a middle-aged woman who looked like she might have been a French actress, with a big sultry mouth and hair in her eyes.
‘Pourrais-tu nous apporter un café, s’il te plaît, Celestine?’ he said.
‘Thank you so much for seeing me, Bertrand,’ the Suspicious Wanderer said when Celestine had left the room. ‘I know how busy you are. I know you must have a million and one more urgent things to do. I really appreciate you taking the time to see me. How do you do it? How do you keep yourself sane? All the horrible stories you must come across, dealing with the sick and the dying every day, with the very worst things that can happen. A friend of mine has a brother who’s just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and another person I know—’
‘Arrêt! Enough!’
She took a breath. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t keep saying sorry. It’s— how do you say it?—irritating.’
She let out an undignified sound. ‘Sorry,’ she said, sobbing. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
Bertrand was very kind. He asked a colleague to join them, a specialist in SIDA. How did she come to be so lucky as to have an expert advising her? Her whole life was a fluke, a chance, preposterously fortunate, as well as clumsy, ruined, made up of failures and blind compulsions.
‘Everybody’s got one fate,’ said Bertrand at one point during that kind hour, as if he was a woman at the village well and not a leading Parisian neurologist. Did neurologists really believe in fate? Did dealing with tragedy every day cause you to throw up your hands, as humbled as the rest?
She left the Pitié-Salpêtrière more composed than when she went in. While she did not entirely believe that she would live, she was willing to entertain the possibility that she might. In her pocket was a note from Celestine. It read: Au fil des années, les grosses grossissent, les maigres maigrissent, les vieilles vieillissent et meurent. Vous n’êtes pas encore vieux. As years go by, the fat get fatter, the thin get thinner, the old get older and die. You are not yet old.
Wasn’t it a breach of protocol or procedure or privacy for secretaries to slip private messages to patients?
Was she even a patient? She would never, ever work the French out, not even if she lived in France the rest of her life.
SEVENTY-ONE
Roses
BLACK BACCARA, AS DARK AS shiraz, gothic, almost sinister under moonlight. The flower that a witch might chose to give to the beauty.
Albertine, opening out from the curled pink bud into riotous girlishness. Flowering but once a year, a rose that does not behave itself, climbing walls, fences, window frames, its abundant petals dropping carelessly in pink profusion.
Tea roses, yellow, creamy or ivory, barely brushed with colour, hardly perfumed, loved equally by Victorian cottage gardens and by stout matrons and ageing men in sandals and socks.
White, white roses running all around the bower in Sissinghurst’s White Garden, as fragrant as spring, spilling above your head, drowning you in perfume. Intoxicating, going straight to the head, making you drunk.
SEVENTY-TWO
The bird lover
HOW SMALL THE WORLD GROWS as the long day closes, how the map shrinks to birds in flight outside the window, to the rush of wind in the trees, to the push of the single bulb through the soil.
The swoop of birds in flight, singing on the wing, a chatter of bells. Rushing by the window, chimes in the wind.
Measuring the days by the poetry of birds, by the bells from the church on the hill. This small world, intimate, domestic. This crowded world, infinite, immense, bounded by the walls of this house, by the unfurling of leaves, by the customary walk to the café by the fountain, where I sit, recalling the days. Everything connected with this body, my personal memories, cancelled with the end of my corporeal existence. My hand on the cup, my feet in their shoes, my breathing heart, remembering.
SEVENTY-THREE
Marché aux puces
SLOWLY THE SUSPICIOUS WANDERER’S IRRATIONAL fears became more rational. Slowly, on the scale between madness and sanity, the hands came to rest at a balanced point, that point recognised by therapists and counsellors and other practitioners of the mind and heart as being a reasonable one from which to practise living. In truth, this accepted scale i
s often disregarded by the minds and hearts of men and women living according to unwitting impulses. In truth, the mind and heart is often off the scale and only murder, suicide or unlawful acts bring this truth to our attention.
On weekends the Suspicious Wanderer frequented the marché aux puces. She noted the detritus of life, the remains, the favourite vases, the baby boots, the photographs. The vanished person captured in the frame, the photograph all that is left after the vanished person and everyone who knew her have left the earth.
She wasn’t lonely. There was this world, and the next. There was this world of physical objects and people she loved, croissants and houses and wine and her own feet to hold her up, and a long line of women preceding her, stretching back before disappearing into time’s wondrous vanish. She was always accompanied.
Celestine rang her on a Sunday evening after she had been to a market. Her English was as clumsy as the Suspicious Wanderer’s French but she managed to make it clear that she was inviting the Suspicious Wanderer to a soirée.
She was going to attend, out of curiosity. She was going to attend, despite the fact that she still couldn’t believe Celestine’s breach of the rules. How did she get her phone number? And would Bertrand be there?
Celestine’s apartment was in a curved building on a corner, so that all its rooms curved too. It was like being in the prow of a ship, except that the beautiful curved windows looked out over a square in an expensive quartier. She didn’t know anyone in the handsome crowd, expensively attired. Waiters circulated with drinks, and she quickly downed two glasses of champagne. Bertrand and his lover Philippe were in a corner and she waved. Bertrand lifted his glass.
Two women standing nearby were speaking English.
‘Are you friends of Celestine’s?’ she asked when they smiled at her.
‘I am,’ one of them said. ‘Andrea. Pleased to meet you.’ The woman held out a hand. She was in her mid-fifties, rich-looking. The Suspicious Wanderer introduced herself; the woman explained that she lived in the apartment directly below Celestine’s and introduced her friend, who was visiting from London.
‘Amazing building,’ said the Suspicious Wanderer.
‘Owned by Celestine’s father,’ said Andrea. ‘He owns half of Paris.’
She knew it would be rude to ask why Celestine was working as a secretary. Maybe she wasn’t a secretary. Maybe she was a doctor who also happened to serve coffee.
‘Where is our hostess?’ asked the Suspicious Wanderer.
‘Over there,’ said Andrea. ‘She’s just come in.’
Celestine was standing by the door, smoking a cigarette. She looked cross, as if she would rather be somewhere else. She was in a knot of people which included Bertrand and Philippe. The Suspicious Wanderer could not detect any boss–employee body language.
The Suspicious Wanderer was coming out of the bathroom when she ran into Celestine.
‘Vous n’êtes pas mort,’ Celestine said. ‘You are not dead.’
‘Évidemment,’ the Suspicious Wanderer replied.
‘Bon—good.’ Celestine smiled and walked off.
The Suspicious Wanderer could not have explained how she found herself in Celestine’s bed later that night. It might have been the champagne or the fact that she was in Paris, detached from her former shape, that outline drawn in by her family, her friends, by everything that had previously described her. It might have been the same impulse that caused her to climb into Claudette, that car she loved, with a dissolute lover who had just placed a tab of acid on her tongue. It may even have been a buried longing to close the space between her mother and herself.
Whatever it was, the Suspicious Wanderer felt a little scared and a little embarrassed, but also fabulously brave.
SEVENTY-FOUR
Song of Songs
THE SWOOP OF MY VOICE rising up from my lungs, swelling with song. The ‘O’ formed by the open mouth, the body opening into joy, making music with the breath, the tongue, the palate, the reeds made of flesh in the throat. Anyone who can speak can sing, anyone with a tongue in their mouth and a heart in their chest.
Singing my heart out in Claudette, the windows wound down, with Steph in the back seat playing her guitar. We sang duets, her soprano dipping in and around my contralto, seamless, unpractised, effortlessly beautiful.
Singing with Steph on a summer’s day on the Pont Marie, the song and the bridge and the beauty of the day marrying above our heads, rising to the sky.
The old man singing at the concert in the nursing home just before my mother died. Too frail to stand, sitting collapsed in a chair, balancing on his walking stick. In the history of the world, ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ never sounded lovelier.
The church choir, soaring, in the sacred dome of the White Chapel in the Tower of London, where a queen went to pray before she lost her head. Was it silent that cold morning or were there remnants of songs caught in the bricks as she prayed?
SEVENTY-FIVE
Celestine
CELESTINE WAS A MYSTERY. CELESTINE was surly lips and a sudden outbreak of laughter, bursting from her, loud, like a bark.
Celestine was dinner for two at Balzar, where, after dinner and cigarettes, every waiter knew to bring her a small glass of a digestif made from Normandy apples.
Celestine was Saturday mornings sitting on the sofa with the sun streaming in the curved windows, trying to read Le Monde with her feet on your lap. A French singer you have never heard before played on the sound system behind your heads, mournful, low, filling you with happiness.
Celestine was languor personified. She did not appear to have worries, or cares, or problems. If she ever had any, she must have decided long before to shrug them off, so that nothing settled. She resembled Catherine Deneuve in her later years, a less formal version, more disarrayed. Celestine’s hair was always in her eyes, there was ash on her blouse, ink on her fingers.
Celestine was mordant wit; ‘mordant’ from the French mordre, to bite. She bit off the heads of shop assistants and anyone she considered foolish. Because she did not often smile, she sometimes appeared forbidding. She often looked cross.
Celestine was a neat, compact body with muscular legs. Every morning she jogged twenty laps around the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Celestine was evenings in bed, not entirely abandoning yourself in her arms. You were too self-conscious, too aware of the strangeness of kissing a woman. Throughout, part of you remained off to one side, observing like an anthropologist the sexual habits of the bisexual French woman. She loved both men and women, youths and maidens.
Celestine was the surprise of finding out what one woman did to another in bed.
SEVENTY-SIX
The legs pumping
THERE IS SOMETHING TO BE said for the legs pumping the pedals of a bicycle, for the thrill running up the ankles, the calves, the thighs. There is something to be said for the feeling of life moving through the body, the press of the powerful muscles of the leg on the downward pedal. I have known the sensation of flying through the air on a bike, my hair streaming, pushing into oxygen.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
A pencil
I AM AN ARTIST OF the fingers, of the hand sweeping across drawing paper, the shush shush sound of the edge of the hand shuffling across a page, and the small scratching of a soft lead pencil. I am an artist of the journey between object, eye and hand, of bringing to the page what the eye sees.
What I put on the page is usually a clumsy rendition of what my eye sees. A tree, a chair, a sleeping dog, a passing face, none of it technically correct or rendered well, none of it the work of a trained artist. And yet my eyes and hands have been schooled by life, by the shape of the clouds, by the branches of trees, by the face of my baby son. I drew him sleeping, a milk blister on his upper lip, still part of that great cloud of unknowing, unfurled as a bud. Object lover: a new Faber-Castell 5B pencil, fresh from the shop, the pointed steel-coloured tip emerging from the smooth blond wood. The softest leads make perfect d
ark lines across the white of the page. Holding a new pencil gently between the thumb and the forefinger and pressing it for the first time against the page.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
Brasserie Balzar
IN TAKING UP WITH CELESTINE, the Suspicious Wanderer was granted entrance to the set behind the film that was Paris.
She discovered curious things, such as the fact that the average Parisian married at around twenty-two and had two point five children by twenty-five, which possibly accounted for all the beautifully dressed young families she saw about the place. Unlike her own country, unlike England and America, where women supposedly kept one ear cocked to the ticking of their biological clocks and at the age of thirty-five rushed off in a panic to have a baby, French women calmly birthed their babies while their flesh was still firm, before going off to a clinic to have their cellulite dealt with and their bodies massaged. All the while, rich or poor, pregnant or not, they still flirted expertly with men as if they had never heard of feminism, as if Simone de Beauvoir had never existed.
Even behind the film, Paris still maintained its mysteries. It was a mystery seeing Celestine at a party full of young things, her chic abandoned, clicking her fingers to that embarrassing French idea of a rock star, Johnny Hallyday. All the young men and women dancing to Johnny were conservatively dressed and worked as accountants or as civil servants (fonctionnaires). What had happened to the soixante-huiters who plucked the cobbled stones from the streets to hurl at police? Where were the artists to épater le bourgeois? The young danced old-fashioned rock-and-roll-style too, with partners, as if they were at a 1956 high school dance wearing bobby socks and petticoats. ‘C’est le roc,’ said Celestine, snapping her fingers.