Charades (23 page)

Koenig frowns. “It comes and goes, her bouts of it. And the trial, bearing witness, it was essential for her, essential.”
He stares at the curtains, leans out of bed to feel them. He seems to expect the nubby texture to speak clues to his fingers. “Still, the agoraphobia. It's possible,” he concedes, “that some aspects loom larger in my mind than … than they would, for example, in the minds of my son or my daughter.”

He contemplates the possibility of other presents and futures. “I don't know,” he sighs. “It might have been different. If I'd imposed different questions. It's like theoretical physics. First the hunch, then the conviction, then the theory. Eventually some experimentalist, in a lab somewhere, finds the data to back you up.”

Charade contemplates the mole on her lover's neck; the mole which is not star-shaped, not really, though if she squints a little it does seem to grow points. She touches it lightly, the mole which never marked the skin of Nicholas back in his Queensland mountain-climbing days, though now it does. At least in the mind of Aunt Kay. And it is difficult, now, for Charade to blink a twin mole away from her father's neck. Could she say categorically that a star-shaped mole played no part in a fleeting erotic encounter at the foot of the Glasshouse Mountains and on Green Island? Could she categorically say it's her father she's searching for? Or is it someone or something else? And what? And why?

“The same holds when it's the other way round,” Koenig says. “You can't trust experimental evidence, you can't accept it, until you have a theory that explains it. And one of the things that stands out is the way Rachel used to work fertiliser in around the cedars. She wanted them to hide the house.” This piece of evidence is extraordinarily convincing to him. Extraordinarily pleasing. He relaxes. “After she went back to Toronto to live,” he can now concede, “she wasn't as bad. When I saw her just before the trial … she was doing very well, I thought.”

“I understand,” Charade says, “about the blur. Painful things, repression … all that.” She clears her throat discreetly. “I mean, all the nameless comfort, and so on. But still, Katherine did have a name, and you did remember … well, eventually you did.
And you claimed … you said some fairly startling things about the Royal Bank and the taxi … well, you know. I do think I'm entitled to something just a little more specific.”

“Yes,” Koenig says. The curtain, which he has been pleating between his fingers, floats back against its window. “All right,” he says. He hooks his hands behind his head. “Well, there's really not very much to tell. She was sitting in the gallery at the trial. Your aunt, I mean. Katherine. She was as obsessed with my former wife as I was. That's why I noticed her. There was something so intense, so … I don't know. It was the way she was staring at Rachel.

“You know how it is,” he asks, “if someone behind you is staring at your back? How you somehow sense it, and turn? Well, she was watching the dock, and I was watching her profile, and then she turned and saw me.

“That's all I can remember, really. She looked as though she'd seen a ghost.”

Charade thinks back to the first moment in Koenig's office, the first time she sat in on his class. Do these cataclysms — beneclysms? — mean everything or nothing? Do they speak of entanglement forever after? Or have they no significance at all? And if they are just visual or glandular spasms, why this lodging like burrs in the memory?

“I think,” Koenig says, “there might have been some kind of blue flash. I think if you'd asked around, other people might have seen that too. It seems to me that there was a crackling sound.” The kind sparklers make, he thinks. That was the way the connection leaped across the room, a licking flickering thing. “And after a while — I've no idea, really, how long — we both stood up and left. Like sleepwalkers.”

Charade ponders the meaning of the wound that opens and closes faster than the shutter of a Leica. Charade, whose generation does not believe in love; Charade who despises the possessive, the exclusive, and the very concept of jealousy (outmoded as dinosaurs, the Books of Hours, clipper ships, handwritten business letters, ice chests, flappers, hippies, marriage), asks herself: Am I tormented by one obsessive fuck? Is it Rachel, or Aunt Katherine, or all the nameless students behind these little daggers?

The daggers sneak between one thought and the next; the daggers are ridiculous; the daggers are embarrassing; Charade does not, strictly speaking, believe they exist. The daggers hurt.

“I'm sure she was the one who hailed the taxi,” Koenig says. “I'm sure of that. Because I remember how she got in first and leaned out and held the door open.”

“It's interesting,” he says, “how she didn't want to tell you she'd gone to the Zundel trial. We couldn't stop talking about it, I'm not sure who was more obsessed, her or me. I know I couldn't shut her up. That was why I missed the last flight back.” He makes an effort to be done with that night and says lightly: “I'm doomed to go to bed with talkers.”

We inherit plots, Charade thinks. That's the explanation. There are only two or three in the world, five or six at the most. We inherit them and ride them like treadmills.

“When we weren't talking,” Koenig says, “it was pretty torrid, I do remember that.” He covers his eyes with his hands. “But I can't remember anything much. Anyway,” he says, “she must have been the one who decided on the Bristol Place because I couldn't remember its name.”

3

A Tale of Hobnobbing with Poms

Charade reaches behind the heavy coiled radiator in the hallway and feels for the envelope that should be taped to the wall. Yes, it is there. Can this be interpreted as commitment of a sort? Or has he always done this, done it for all the nameless visitors? She removes the key and lets herself into the apartment and waits.

All day she has been promising herself that she would not come. Sitting in a dive in Central Square, the one where she works as a dishwasher, barmaid, jill of all trades (illegal, no papers, below-the-minimum cash payments, afternoon and early evening shifts), she stared into a mug of beer and told herself: There comes a point. Etcetera.

“Listen, kid, ya been great.” That was Joe Parisi, her boss, eager employer of illegal labour, no race or creed refused, an equal opportunity exploiter. “It's just getting too hot, is all. Too many Salvadorans, makes it rough all round. Immigration johnnies thick on the ground, sniffing everything down to the ice cubes.”

“Yeah I know,” she said. “It's okay, Joe. I've been thinking of —”

“And that's not all. There's other fuckers poking round too, God knows who and I don't plan to find out.”

“Joe,” she said, “it's okay. I've been thinking of heading on home anyway.”

“Well, great. Beer's on the house,” he said. “Listen, I got a friend is a lawyer. Let me know, huh? A kid like you, straight, clean, no complications” — he holds her arm up to the light as though it were a bolt of cloth, as though he were quality control foreman on colour — “ya know what I mean? Shouldn't be no trouble at all to go legal.”

She considers that: a student visa, a legal life in the dorms where she camps (not that she's the only one moving from room to room: a black market service, covering for absentees, filling cracks, keeping parents happy;
dormies
, they call them.) But then again, she tells herself: There comes a point.

So she sat at Joe's counter, finishing the drink that was on the house, and wrote to Bea.

Dead ends in all directions
,
she wrote.
Just as you promised, Mum. And another thing you told me a long time ago, about love, that women's disease. Have one bad bout and then you're cured, that's what you told me. So I'm coming home for the cure. Don't worry, no baby. See you soon. Love, Charade.

She walked past the Central Square Post Office and mailed her letter, then she told herself: I'll hang around the dorm tonight, pack my things, spread the word that I'm leaving. I'll say goodbyes. Or maybe I'll take the
INBOUND
subway to Boston and browse the bookshops one last time. Maybe I'll have a final splurge on remaindered books.

Yes, that's what I'll do, she tells herself as she drops her token into the slot on the
OUTBOUND
side of the tracks and, preoccupied, stares down the smoky tunnel and waits for the train to come snaking its way out from the city. Or else, she thinks, I'll spend the night holed up in the Humanities Library, nowhere near Building 6 or Physics. I'll start working my way out of science and back into history. Yes, definitely, she decides, as her body from sheer habit walks itself onto the car bound for Harvard Square, takes the escalator up to the street, walks through the Yard, past Mem Hall, into the region of elegant old Cambridge houses gone condo or turned into apartments. Faculty Row. It is as though she were being dreamed.

Enough is enough, she says to herself as she feels for the key and listens for the sound of Koenig's car.

Koenig, as he pours two brandies, comments on the importance of meandering discussion as a prelude to breakthrough. He waves a hand, summoning up analogies: like stretching exercises, he suggests, to the long distance runner who will break a record. If she sifts enough family anecdote, the answer that lies waiting to reveal itself will surface. He talks and talks. Consider Heisenberg, he says, on the eve of the matrices thing, a mathematical breakthrough … Koenig cannot stop talking. He is weak with relief, but dares not say he is glad she came for fear of raising the issue of departures. Whenever he pauses, a sense of endings rises through the silent cracks between words.

I must be out of my mind, she thinks. You can't pry anyone loose from an obsession. He belongs to Rachel and his guilt and always will, the way I belong to loss and absence. We all go round in circles, we're doomed.

What can she say of the effect that is produced by his hand and his wrist as he gives her the brandy? It is just a hand, after all: veins cross the back of it like small bunches of string, light catches a few hairs beneath each knuckle and at the wrist. It is just a hand. The fact that certain regions of her body respond extravagantly; that she wants to put the hand against her cheek, her breast, her belly; that she wants to taste it and stroke it: all this is just one more convoluted, arcane and ludicrous game.

As for me, Charade thinks, I'm bailing out.

“… and Bea,” Koenig is saying. “She has to have answers, it stands to reason. It is Bea you should be talking about.”

“Bea's difficult,” Charade says. “It's hardest with someone who's too close. Bea's a patchwork. I'd have to cobble her together from other people's talk, Michael Donovan's mostly, who got it from his dad. And from Babs, who used to be a barmaid at the Duke. I tracked her down. But Bea's difficult. I'd be very unreliable on Bea, we'll have to skip her.”

But she will tell him what happened in England.

Koenig raises his eyebrows in surprise. “England? What has England …?”

“I told you that, early on, when you never paid attention to me. It was England I went to first, before Toronto.”

Koenig's relief is so visceral he can taste it in the brandy. She is talking again, she is wound up, she is off and away.

“It was Aunt Kay's advertisement that started this whole wild goose chase. The ad for Verity, you remember what I …? Right. But I didn't write to Aunt Kay, I'm not sure why.”

Koenig watches how she clasps and unclasps her hands.

“Well, I suppose I know why.” The hands are clenched, keeping boundaries clear. “Mum and Aunt Kay … there was a final rift, I guess.” When the knuckles uncramp, Koenig notes, and come to rest against the dimple in her chin, at these moments she has the air of someone at prayer. “It was round about the time I was born,” she says, and the knuckles turn white again. “I seem to have been … It appears there were multiple explosions.” She laughs briefly. “Yours truly,” she says, with a self-deprecating flourish of her hand, “was the
efficient cause,
as the philosophers would say. And when the fragments settled, pouff! Nicholas and Verity had vanished. And Aunt Kay and my mum have never spoken to each other since.”

In a burst of nervous energy, she pulls a football jersey over her head. (Football jersey? Whose football jersey? With whom does she stay in the dorms? An uneasiness settles on Koenig's mind. What does she do with her days? But he is too nervous, or too superstitious, to ask.) The jersey is much too large and hangs almost to her knees.

“I wish you wouldn't do that,” he says.

“Do what?”

“Perch on the windowsill like that. It's not safe.”

“What you have to understand,” she says, “is the way that ad affected me. In black and white in the
Sydney Morning Herald.
It was like … God might as well have spoken in thunder. I thought: My God, they're
real
! They're real people, those two, they're not just legends. It was like a … I don't know. A conversion. Suddenly nothing else was as important. I had to know everything.”

Sometimes, because of the slightly matted mass of curls, Koenig cannot see her face at all. “Mum was upset.” Her voice comes muffled through the curtain of hair. “Let sleeping dogs lie, that's all she said.”

Charade snaps her fingers. “But I was obsessed.” She taps her forehead gently against the window pane: idiot, dreamer, naive fool, she implies. “I'm still obsessed,” she says. “What I am is an editor of my own past. I collect versions of my pre-history, arrange them, rearrange them, and then tell them to you.”

“Aha,” he risks joking, “if you hadn't met me, you would have had to invent me.”

She misses that one, and describes at a breakneck pace how she combed the records at the University of Queensland. Musty boxes are invoked with vivid gestures, piles of them, mountains of them, crammed in storage rooms off the registrar's office, personnel and employment records smelling of the Second World War and the fifties. He half closes his eyes, watching the ballet of her talk, the fizz, the animation, her garrulous hands. He is waiting for the blaze, the
grand jet
é
,
and here it is: the moment when she found some terse and impersonal entries under those fabulous, those mythical, those perfectly real and ordinary names: Nicholas Truman and Verity Ashkenazy. They had both resigned, within days of each other, at the end of the academic year of '63.

“I was born,” she says, with a carefully timed theatrical leap down from the sill, “that October. And they resigned in early December. And over here,” she says, as she settles in the armchair and hugs her knees, “JFK was shot in November, which came, believe it or not, to have a bearing on my first month of life.”

“What is curious,” Charade says, “is that there are plenty of people still teaching at U of Q who were there when Nicholas and Verity were. And not one of them knows where they went or why. Or so they claim. Now that strikes me as more than passing strange.”

And then there was Nicholas's father, Charade's grandfather, the younger brother of the Seventh Earl of Something, who was supposed to be a real estate swashbuckler in Sydney.

There were tales, Charade says, in every pub from Bondi to Parramatta, but they all petered out into haze. No one knew what had happened to the flamboyant Pom. According to one version, he'd been so drunk at a yachtboard party one night that he'd fallen overboard and drowned in Sydney Harbour within sight of the Cremorne ferry dock. According to another, there had been shady deals, too many quick speculative turnovers of waterfront property, and he'd left the country post-haste just ahead of the law.

The only thing, she says, the only clue that struck her as grazing against possible truth instead of legend, was dropped by an old-timer at the Rigged Ship, a pub on Circular Quay.

“Alfred, his name was,” the old-timer said. “We used to call him Alfred the Great. He had a kid, a smart little bugger, young Nicky.” Charade felt pins and needles run along the full length of her arms. “Chip off the old block, young Nick was. Always reckoned that kid would get himself in and out of trouble as many times as his old man did. Should have placed bets on it.

“He came in here, Alfred the Great did, he came in here one day and drank five whiskies neat.

“
‘Struth
!' I says to him. ‘You trying to croak?'

“ ‘Jesus, Jesus,' he says. ‘It's Nick. Gotta ship him back to England fast.'

“Had to bugger off fast himself then, he said. Perth, I reckon he said. Or Borneo, was it? Somewhere like that, some bloody place at the edge of the world.”

And then? And then? Charade asked.

But the old-timer cadged another beer and drifted on to grievances against horses and jockeys, certain winners, who had let him down.

And apart from that, Charade says, there was just that one afternoon in the staff club at the University of Queensland … For the umpteenth time, she'd gently removed the hand of a professor from her thigh, and this time, from deep in the fog of his third beer (and an unrelated bitterness over an article rejected for publication) he'd taken offence.

“A bit up yourself, aren't you?” he'd demanded. “Like your father, the bloody Pom. There's always someone to watch out for you lot, isn't there?”

“How do you mean?” she'd asked quickly, alertly. “In what way, watch out?”

“Always someone to pull strings. Keep things out of the papers.”

“What things?”

“What things indeed.” He had smirked, bending close, and Charade sensed a sharp appetite for nastiness. Instinctively she leaned away a little and something ugly showed in his eyes. For a second she thought he was going to strike her but he stood and bowed sarcastically and said with soft menace, “What things indeed.”

Turning to go, he swayed slightly. A barstool rocked, paused, crashed over. “What things indeed,” he murmured, leaving.

“I was frightened then,” Charade tells Koenig. “I knew I was tracking down an answer I wouldn't want to know.” (
Let sleeping dogs lie, Charade.)
“But obsessions …” She gestures helplessly. “Anyway, I reckon that whatever happened was hushed up quick and clean, and the records were laundered.”

And what was the sum total of the evidence in Verity's file? Almost nothing. Reason for resignation:
personal.
Forwarding address: left blank.

And this was what she found on her father. Reason for resignation:
Offered position in UK.
Forwarding address: c/
Alicia and Penelope Truman, 36 St Ann's Mews, Twickenham. London. UK.

“They're his aunts,” Bea told her. “His father's sisters. You're not going to get anything out of them, from what I heard. There's another sister, married, and she's worse. Let sleeping dogs lie, Charade. I had a good time with your father, what more do you want?”

In Koenig's bedroom, Charade muses on that.
“There was good sport at my making
,” she says. The football jersey bounces lightly at her thighs. “That's something. That's definitely something. I don't know why it isn't enough.”

“Why did he go back?” she'd asked Bea.