Jonathan’s bare feet were in the water, the waves slapping, his eyes on a red-painted rowboat moored further out and on bruised clouds on the very edges of the horizon. He did not hear Bites approach, and when her wet nose swiped the back of his leg he turned around. There, like a miracle, she stood, Anna, all in white, the lady of the lake.
‘If only I could paint,’ she said. ‘The endless sky, the red boat, the lonely figure stranded in the landscape. Pity there’s no beckoning green light.’
‘Green light?’
‘I take it you’re not a reader.’
He shrugged. ‘Not especially. Are you?’
‘Not really. I prefer the cinema, or good television drama. I’m a visual person.’
They started walking along the edge of the lake, Bites trailing. Anna walked in front, with an attractive loose-limbed confidence, her stride slow and meditative, her long plait swinging gently against her back. Her form was shrouded by billowing white garments, weirdly appropriate to the dreamy, otherworldly moment she appeared to be caught in; she seemed only half present, as if her real self were elsewhere. He had not noticed before how beautiful her voice was, low and hypnotic. He did not know the first thing about her. ‘What is it that you do, Anna? I mean, your job.’
‘Oh, I don’t have a job. I leave that to other people.’ Her thin, restless hands made a pretty arc across the air.
‘To dull people like me,’ he said, smiling.
She laughed. ‘I suppose so. I never really found the thing I wanted to do.’
He let this pass. ‘Where are we going?’
‘I wasn’t heading anywhere in particular. Looks like there might be a storm.’
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Those clouds are too far off.’ They kept walking, the wind blowing, the trees bending; Anna, in floating white, her clothes a dazzling, drifting cloud in the breeze.
‘Do you think anyone ever finds the thing they want to do?’ he asked.
She looked at him.
‘Rhetorical question,’ he said. ‘It’s just that it seems to me as I’ve got older that life is one long series of compromises. Don’t you think? You’re fortunate if you haven’t had to compromise. I don’t mean you in particular. I mean “one”.’ He had better stop.
‘Oh, I never compromise,’ she said. ‘I’ve never chosen compromise, not once. I’m at my best when the house is burning down.’ Her face had a strange, wild look.
He laughed, baffled. He supposed this evidence of intransigence might go some way to explaining the four husbands. He loved the smell of burning.
They walked around the lake, or at least as far as it was possible to go, right up past the camping ground, where they reached the national park which did not allow dogs; past the mango trees, the gums, the knotted strangler figs in the old cemetery, through the screaming forest of parrots, alarmed by the approach of a storm. The blue was dimming; dark clouds blew in, great, full-bellied clouds, blocking out the sun. They began to walk back, fast, not talking now, just making it inside Gordie’s front door before the gunfire of rain came shooting down, rat-a-tat-tat, on the dry earth, on the roof, down the gutter. Whoosh, down it came, a full pail from the sky, thrown over the lot of them: the houses, the cars, the poor souls running, the squawking birds.
‘So much for my weather forecast,’ Jonathan said.
‘Pa?’ she called into the house, which was hot, muffled. ‘I’ve brought Jonathan back.’
There was no response. She walked into the kitchen, which Jonathan noticed had been cleaned, at least nominally.
‘You don’t happen to have any contacts for professional cleaners, do you?’ she asked, as if she had followed the course of his mind.
‘Talk to Sylv. Her mother does house cleaning, or at least Phil’s mother does. Phyllis. She’s not very good, though.’
‘Pa!’ she called again, before her eye fell upon a note from Gordie informing her that he was nipping around to Penny’s to see how Marie was getting on.
‘Well, you can’t go home in this. Would you like a cup of tea? A glass of something cold?’
Bites looked from one to the other, a sort of cartoon look, her eyes swinging back and forth. They both noticed her expression at the same time, and laughed.
Then Anna raised her head and her face closed in; her smile stopped.
‘I’m not very good company. I know it’s unfashionable to say your heart is broken, but do you know what? My heart is broken. My husband, Charles, is the love of my life. He’s older than me, much older, and he promised that when he died—he always said he must die before me because he couldn’t live if I died before him—he promised he would wait for me in his grave.’ She spoke faster now, to no one in particular, her eyes not on him but out the window, at the rain, at the houses across the street obscured by its fall. Speaking in her lovely voice, her body fluid and moving, her hands restless and fiddling with the sheer white cloud of her dress, her eyes looked glazed, odd.
‘He promised he would be like Abelard, twenty years dead, his skeleton opening its arms to embrace Heloise. Love is not far-fetched, you know; love is not an abstract thing. It’s not even a myth! It what makes men murder their children rather than live without them. Or their wives.’
He wanted to say that’s not love, but he saw that she was lost in some deep, unreachable place. He wanted to look away, from the dark, from the failure of love. He wanted to pull her towards him. He stepped forward but his movements returned her to the room, to the rain, to the muffled air.
‘Oh, listen to me,’ she said. ‘The thing about a broken heart is that every day takes you a tiny bit further from the pain of it. After a while, after a very long while, you don’t feel anything at all.’
He did not trust himself to speak. He wanted to prove her wrong. He wanted to ask about the man who intended to wait for his true love beyond death, how such a mighty love could falter, but his tongue was stilled, his head drowning in unanswerable questions.
‘I’m very good at speaking the unspeakable,’ she said. ‘You might even call it a core skill. I believe that’s the correct term. Don’t ask me something if you don’t want to know. Because I will tell you.’
The rain hammered down. There was no air in the room, outside the world was drowning, and they had arrived at a point when to return to conversation about tea with milk or without, or the possibility of a biscuit, was unfeasible.
‘Look, I’m going to make a run for it,’ he said. ‘I’m heading back to Brisbane in the morning and I’ve still got things to do. Perhaps we could have dinner sometime and discuss the meaning of life? Your father’s got my number.’ And he was out the door before he could embarrass himself further, before he ran off at the mouth any more than he already had, before he fell at her feet in a pose of mercy or supplication. She believed in burning down the house and he no longer knew what he believed in. He was running in the thundering rain, his feet bare, his shirt wet.
TWENTY-SIX
Nana nap
Settled in a chair, a cotton throw wrapped around her legs, Marie tried her best not to issue a sharp rebuke to Scarlett and her blasted children. They had already shattered a glass in the kitchen and one of them—she had trouble telling them apart, even though one of them was named after her dear father—had immediately trodden in the shards. Screaming, convulsing, he was restrained by his mother as Penny extracted glass from his tiny, defenceless foot. ‘I hope that’s it,’ she said. ‘I can’t see anything left.’ The annoying child now would not be parted from his mother and sat hiccoughing in her lap, a dirty thumb in his mouth, grimly holding on to Scarlett’s bosom with his free hand.
Gordie had a look at the child’s foot, too; the second time in as many days he had called for a torch. ‘You have inadvertently become our family doctor, Gordon,’ said Marie. ‘It must be very tedious for you.’
He was admiring Scarlett’s pretty breasts, high, pert, not a sign of childbearing upon them; perhaps only the nipple turned slightly dark. Sitting with her
dishevelled locks, her blouse undone, she was exquisite.
‘I’m used to it,’ Gordie said, reluctantly removing his eyes from Scarlett’s bosom. ‘I’ve had a lifetime of people lifting up their trouser legs, boring me to tears at dinner parties with their ailments.’
‘It’s extremely bad manners,’ said Marie. ‘In my years at McAlisters I suffered from acquaintances fishing out receipts from their handbags.’
‘Indeed,’ he said.
‘Yes, many women seemed to think I was a kind of walking customer service desk,’ she said.
The doorbell rang. ‘Anybody home?’ Paul bellowed through the open door.
‘Daddy!’ said one of the children—not the one marooned in Scarlett’s lap, but the other one—and went roaring down the hall. ‘Daddy, daddy, daddy!’
Scarlett looked up, a radiant smile breaking open on her lovely face.
‘The man himself,’ Gordie said.
Paul walked in, his loud tread resounding down the hall; tall, broad-shouldered, wide of girth, a triumphant child atop his shoulders. Penny trailed behind him, her mouth a little downturned at each end.
‘Come on, team. Home time,’ he said. ‘Hello, beautiful.’ He bent down to kiss Scarlett on the top of her head, while ruffling his second son’s hair. ‘Been in the wars, mate? G’day, Gordie.’
Gordie was shot through with admiration at the sight of the big, lucky fellow surrounded by youth, beauty, by the evidence of his own virility. He looked like a man in the very peak of health, at the very crest of happiness, a man with everything he wanted. It must be true, Gordie thought, that old joke about being as young as the woman you feel. Why, the fellow was a veritable poster boy for bad behaviour! He looked pleased with himself, insufferably so, gathering up his young girlfriend with her high, pretty breasts, his baby sons. How had he told his grown daughters that he was starting again, that he was having another crack at life and love? Gordie did not know the fellow well enough to ask and was drawn from his reverie by the sight of Scarlett, relieved of her child, standing up. For a moment she stood exposed, displaying the natural womanly flow of her youthful form, her naked breasts. Then Paul caught his eye, and winked. The impertinent fellow!
Penny retired to her bedroom. Perhaps it was the sight of Paul or the sight of Scarlett or the constant demands of small, undisciplined children. She looked exhausted, dark rings forming around her eyes.
‘You do not look well, Penny,’ Marie told her. ‘However, I will refrain from asking Gordon to oversee yet another patient.’ ‘I’m just tired,’ Penny said. ‘I’m going to have a little nana nap. Do you need anything before I go?’
‘Nothing, thank you,’ said Marie. ‘I am a nana and I am not napping.’
‘Sleep well,’ said Gordie, who made it a principle never to sleep during the day. He reasoned that shortly he would have no choice but to enter into that other dreadful sleep from which there would be no waking.
When she was out of earshot, Marie said in a loud whisper, ‘She is much too fat. If she lost a little weight she would not be so tired.’
Gordie thought it prudent not to respond to this remark and, instead, enquired if Marie would like him to make a fresh pot of tea before he went home. She was an interesting woman, intelligent as well as unusually handsome for a woman of such advanced age; she carried herself in a way that indicated she was used to male attention.
‘You are most kind,’ she said. And then, when the teapot was brought back and the teacups filled, she told him about her plan to build a granny flat underneath Penny’s house.
‘Does your daughter know?’ he asked.
‘Not yet,’ she said, as if this was only a minor detail, and possibly the most inconsequential detail of all.
PART
IV
TWENTY-SEVEN
Musical chairs
For many days, for weeks, months following her husband’s death, Marie was returned to that alternative world known only to the sick, the bereaved, the suffering. Turn the world over and there is a shadow world, a place of hurt. In this place, all the terrors of the soul live and there are no windows, no doors. Marie found no breadcrumbs, no thread leading the way and—most heartbreaking of all—no Sydney McAlister.
Many people came to the funeral at All Saints’. By then the small wooden church had a new shiny brick front; by then—like Brisbane itself—there was a brick carapace, the beginnings of a new modern self. A new priest officiated; Marie noted from the deep that he was one of these self-congratulatory types, who somehow turned around the unpalatable fact of a relatively young man dying of a heart attack on a sunny day at the beach into one of God’s unknowable mercies. Marie was alone, cast out, stranded again in the dark.
Many people pressed her palms, kissed her cheek. Many people ordered flowers for the coffin and lifted up their voices in song. The mystery of life, of death, was upon her once more, the box open. Where are you, Syd? And the cars continued to drive down the road, the sun rose and the sun fell, day after day.
Was it then that Penny’s life, and her sister Rosemary’s, were fixed for good? Was it then that Rosie slipped the net? Perhaps this was the moment Penny’s fate was sealed, some vital oxygen sucked from her forever. Perhaps she never had a chance after that, perhaps the deepest part of her knew she was intended to be the human sacrifice meant to atone for the insufferable pains heaped upon her mother.
She was a good child. She studied hard. She did not smoke joints when everyone else smoked joints; she did not dispense her body to anyone who asked for it, like many of her friends. She was beautiful, she knew, but she was hoarding her beauty, keeping it in a safe place for when she would need it. She would need it when her real life began, when she unravelled the knot, when she learned how to express the many marvellous things inside her. In the Louvre, aged nineteen, she stood transfixed by beauty, tears streaming down her face, imagining that one day she might touch its hem. She was small and inconsequential, but she also carried within her immeasurable possibilities; at nineteen, they stretched endlessly in every direction. The years carried her away from her father’s early death, from the loss of him, and she did not know her moment had passed. She was nineteen years old, beautiful; her life resplendent, unfolding.
Unlike the celebrated students enraptured by conceptual art, video installation and multimedia performance, she was enthralled by figurative painting. She loved the human body and wanted to reveal in her work something new, unquestionably her own. She did not feel she had truly seen a body until she had tried to paint its exact contours, its movement in differing lights, the precise way it was an individual human body, unique, differentiated from the rest. She was dogged, determined, but alarmed when a renowned visiting American artist told her art could no longer heal, it could only bleed. ‘A good student is not necessarily a brilliant artist, babe,’ he said. She was offended and had no idea what he meant.
Marie assumed, always, that Penny would become an art teacher. ‘She is studying to be a teacher,’ she said, no matter how many times Penny insisted that she intended to be a full-time artist. ‘How can you study to be an artist?’ Marie said. ‘Did Michelangelo get a degree from the Italian College of Art?’ Marie understood culture all right; she understood Europe had culture, great paintings, great buildings, great art, and that Australia did not. An Australian artist was an oxymoron; Aboriginal art did not count and the paintings of Nolan and Drysdale and Boyd were pale imitations, faint echoes. For years Penny tried to rid her mother of her prejudices, taking her to shows and galleries, to an exhibition of new paintings by Wendy Sharpe and William Robinson. ‘I don’t understand what I’m looking at,’ she said.
Like a curse, like some logical, inevitable fable, Penny grew up and turned into a teacher. She made one last, honourable effort to become a full-time artist, but nothing she made satisfied her, nothing seemed original or bold or magnificent enough, everything was only half good. She strove for an aesthetic perfection she could never reach, and every day sh
e did not reach it was a misery, the febrile pressure she placed on herself impossible to bear. She could not transfer to the canvas the perfect illuminated world inside her head; she was her own harshest critic and could not accept work she knew was not first rate. In the end, art had to be wonderful or nothing; there was zero in between. That was the faltering year she was twenty-five and trying to get a French passport, trying to be French, and obsessively, neurotically trying to paint perfection and turn herself into an artist. She did not believe it was a bad thing to be a teacher, not at all; she believed there were charismatic, gifted teachers who changed lives, teachers for whom teaching was a vocation. She had seen such teachers in action, teachers capable of changing the direction of a human life, like God altering the direction of a river, but she was not one of them. Penny was a teacher because she was not going to be an artist. Art was not going to repair what living had wrecked and now she could not find a way to live her life as if it were her own.
She was almost thirty when she met Pete. She had survived being thrown over by the most handsome man in college, a lecturer, growing famous for his art. She had survived seeing one of the college’s minor talents being taken up by Sydney collectors and Melbourne galleries, then the National Gallery of Australia and then on to international acclaim. She had survived coming back to Brisbane to become a teacher instead of an artist, only to see her sister move first to London and then to Perth. She had witnessed her mother’s transformation from society hostess to businesswoman. It was her aunt Evelyn, who sat on the McAlisters board of which Marie was a director, who invited her sister-in-law to take a more active role, not realising that Marie’s native intelligence was so formidable and that she was once the mathematics champion and dux of a girls’ school in a desolate windswept corner of Sussex.