Lovesong (12 page)

child,
she would tell them. And who would condemn her for that? A woman with a child growing in her womb is not alone.

J
ohn was sitting up in bed listening to her footsteps as she went down the stairs. He didn’t hear the door close and waited a moment, unsure whether she had gone or not. He called out, but there was no reply. The house was silent now with the silence of emptiness. He stuffed her pillow as well as his own at his back and reached for his book. He took a sip of coffee and opened the book on his lap. He loved the peace and quiet of this hour. After Sabiha had gone to the market on Friday he usually stayed in bed and read. This morning he stared at the open book in his lap and thought of her tormented expression as she blew him the kiss when she was leaving; as if she was departing from his life forever. His throat tightened at the thought of it.

He put on his clothes and opened the curtain and stood at the window. The blossoming clouds were still pink with the dawn. Customers were already coming and going at the Kavi boys’ corner store. Life was going on out there as usual. He picked up his bowl and went downstairs. He set the bowl on the sink in the kitchen and went through into the dining room. He picked up the mail from the floor and opened the street door and looked up and down the street. André was already coming back from walking Tolstoy, the great shaggy beast loping by his side as if it was moving in slow motion, its grey eyes fixed on the bloody deeds of ancestors who had ripped wolves apart on the wintry steppes of Siberia. John waved to André and went back inside and closed the door. He put the mail on the bench in the kitchen and went into the bathroom and took off his shirt. While he shaved there were the voices of the workers arriving at the laundry down the laneway.

He ate breakfast then picked up the mail and went into the sitting room. He put the light on. A stillness in here, the smell of their evenings. The television in the corner on an upended half barrel, a red cloth draped over the barrel like a skirt over the hips of a woman. Houria and Dom’s old green two-seater couch facing the television. A small square wooden table and an
upright chair behind the couch. In the corner beside the table his own pile of books, collected from the second-hand book market.

He put the mail on the table beside the pile of unpaid bills and drew out the chair and sat down. He lit a cigarette and looked through the mail. There was a letter from his mother, his name in her familiar handwriting and the Australian stamp. He opened the envelope and drew out the two closely written sheets. There was also a postcard. The postcard was a photograph of the new road bridge at Moruya. He sat looking at the picture, smoking, and remembering the trestles of the old timber bridge, the rumble of his dad’s Ford going over on their way into town. The timber bridge had been washed away in a record flood and the town had been without a bridge for more than two years. He sat smoking and reading his mother’s neat handwriting. There was nothing much wrong with her eyes.

John folded the letter and put it back into the envelope.

Swimming at Chinaman’s all summer holidays with his friend Gibbo and Kathy and her mates. He could see the casuarinas on the bank screening them from the house and the beach of smooth river stones. Mucking around down there until the middle of the night. Loretta letting his fingers explore the inside of her thigh in the moonlight, her skin chilled and wet and goose-bumped and exquisitely soft. The softest skin
he had ever touched. He could smell Chinaman’s now, the sour leaf rot of the churned water on their skin. He could not imagine Chinaman’s dry. Where had the green water dragons gone and the black eels if the pool was dry? He felt a deep regret that his old home was no longer as it had been when he was a boy and he longed to know it again, to smell the river and the bush and to see his old friends still young, laughing at him for his shyness and calling to him. He wondered what had happened to Gibbo and Loretta and the rest of them. They must all be out there somewhere.

After he’d finished dealing with the bills he went out and started cleaning up the kitchen. He would have the place tidy for her when she got home.

W
hen Sabiha came into the kitchen from the lane John’s music was on very loud. He stepped across to meet her and kissed her on the cheek. He yelled over Carole King singing, ‘So you’ve been seeing our Bruno!’

She drew back from him, lifting her hand and touching her cheek with her fingers as if he had slapped her.

‘Sorry!’ He raised his hands in mock self-defence. ‘You smell of tomatoes, darling.’

She turned the music off and put her empty shopping bag down by the stove. She took off her overcoat and hung it in the alcove by the stairs. She was trembling. Tolstoy was barking in the lane, as if he’d caught something of her fear and anxiety. John was watching her.

She struggled to hold his gaze. She didn’t know what to say and murmured helplessly, ‘Bruno’s not the only person we know who sells tomatoes.’

He couldn’t help smiling at this. ‘Oh, come on, darling! Don’t take me so seriously.’ He tried to keep his tone light and neutral. ‘It was just something to say. Where’s the shopping?’ She seemed so down and grim. ‘Bruno’s still our tomato man, isn’t he?’ He reversed the broom and went on sweeping the kitchen floor, bending to get the head of the broom under the front of the stove. ‘Anyway, I
like
the smell of tomatoes.’

It wasn’t shame she felt. She had sat in the
métro
this morning with her head bowed and a sense of doom hanging over her, expecting nothing less than the death penalty for what she contemplated. But no shrieking fireball had shattered the walls and brought the roof down on them. They were not buried, after all, in the smoking ruins of their lives. It all stood in place still, quiet and at peace—now that Carole King was no longer wailing at them. The dailiness of their routine was undisturbed. John sweeping the floor.

She said, ‘I’m going to have a lie-down for a few minutes.’

John straightened and looked at her.

She felt sorry for him. ‘I just need a few minutes to myself.’ She smiled. She had betrayed him. Or what
is
betrayal? What jury of wives would not condemn her? What she felt, she decided, was guilt and fear. But she did not feel shame. The distinction was important to her. She would plead guilty: Yes, I did it. But there would be no remorse or regret for what she had done. I would do it again. If I need to I
shall
do it again. She was thinking of him now. She could
smell
him on her clothes. It wasn’t
just
the smell of tomatoes, it was the smell of Bruno, his man smell. It was a wonder John hadn’t smelled it. When Bruno’s hands touched her naked thighs the pleasure had been searching, sudden, imperious, driving a shot of electricity into her. At the first touch of his hands a wave of exquisite dizziness had swept through her and she thought she was going to faint. She closed her eyes now and turned away from her husband’s puzzled gaze.

John leaned lightly on the broom as if he were a boatman about to delve for the bottom with his punt pole. She was unreachable.

‘You’d better go and lie down then,’ he said.

When she had come through the door a moment ago there was some fine and heightened preoccupation in her dark eyes. It had claimed his attention at once; the flame of an extraordinary excitement. Something fleeting—the last of her youth, was it? She was more beautiful and more sad than he had ever seen her. But
at this moment she was no longer his woman. She was too deep and too alone. He thought of the girl who had lain in his arms on the bank of the Eure that summer day in Chartres, and for an instant the transformation of the years bewildered him.

‘I just need a moment to myself,’ she said again, and turned and went out.

He listened to her footsteps on the stairs, waiting for the creaking of the boards as she crossed the bedroom overhead, imagining her sitting on the side of their bed, her head in her hands. Was there in her sadness, in this change, a sense of their eventual end? To age, and then to die. The futility of it all. It was there in her songs on Saturday nights, the knowledge of death and nostalgia. He had seen men weep for her singing, reminded of their exile and their mortality. He had seen a tear slide down Nejib’s dark cheek more than once as he plucked the sweet strings of his beautiful oud in accompaniment to her melancholy songs.

John was still listening for her footsteps but the boards had not creaked. She must be sitting at the dressing-table looking at herself in the mirror, taking her hair down and looking into her own eyes. His beautiful wife, Sabiha. What strangers they really were to each other. Strangers to each other’s language. To
each other’s childhood. Strangers to each other’s tribe. He loved her helplessly.

He went on sweeping the kitchen floor. He gathered the dirt in front of the broom, turning the head of the broom sharp-edged to get the bristles into the wide cracks between the old tiles. He swept the dirt out the back door into the laneway, pushing it to the side over the top of the drain, scrubbing the broom head back and forth until he had forced the last of it through the grille. It was raining, the cobbles black in the cold grey light. He stood at the open door breathing the smell of the rain, remembering the vivid smell of rain when the first drops splashed onto the dry leaf litter of the stringybark forest in summer and the wonderful scents stored there throughout the dry were released into the humid air, rich and heady for the first minutes of rain. He longed to smell that smell again. It was the smell of everything that had once made him hopeful about his life. He and his father dancing around stupidly in the rain, yelling,
It’s rain-ing, it’s pour-ing, the old man is snor-ing …
His father telling them,
It’s raining money.
So they all jumped in the car and drove down to Moruya and went shopping and then to the pictures. That rain in summer, it was the smell of happiness.

She lay on her back on the bed, her blue woollen blanket covering her, shaping her, the rain pattering softly against the window. She was calmer now, listening to the familiar sounds of the street, the comforting rain tapping on the window. She was not sorry for what she had done. She was glad she had found the courage to do it. But she was a changed woman. She had become the woman who had walked alone into the desert night under the stars and killed the lion.

She was going to be a mother.

She was going to hold her child in her arms. The little baby would look up at her here on this bed. It would sleep and cry and be joined to her breast. Its little body would be warm and vulnerable, delicate, soft as clouds and yearning for its mother’s touch. She put her hand under the blanket and placed her open palm over the pad and she thought of the potent abundance of Bruno’s astonishing seed. She cupped her mound with her hand and the tears ran down her cheeks. She was exhausted.

She woke from the dream with a start.

The room was cold.

It was a dream of the smooth sweet pleasure of sex. She still
felt
it. She had woken thinking not of her child but of her regret that if she really were pregnant then she would have no reason to go and see him ever
again. She was awed by her response to him. She sat up, waking from the feeling of the dream. Had she destroyed him? Bruno, the loyal father and husband. The image of him kneeling on the floor of his van weeping frightened her. She wanted him to stand up and smile at the great pleasure of what he had done. Not cringe on the floor weeping!

She wrapped the blanket tightly around her shoulders and lay down again. The woman who killed the lion had not feared the living lion, but had feared the lion only after it was dead. It was her defeated victim the woman had feared, when the beast’s nobility had become the carrion of the scavengers, the yellow-eyed hyenas and the ragged vultures that dropped from the sky like evil dreams. It was only then the woman had begun to see that she had brought herself to the notice of these shifty-eyed gods.

How could the modest routine of their lives at Chez Dom survive what she had done? She still
felt
him inside her. She still heard his moans. What of his wife, Angela, and his eleven children …

She lifted the blanket aside and got off the bed and put on her shoes. She was going to be late with the men’s midday meal. John had turned his music on again. She had never learned to like his music. She would not think of him. Not yet. The time would come
for thinking of Bruno and for thinking of John. She would deal with the need for thinking when it was time for her to settle with them both. Now she must prepare the meal or the men would go hungry and then they would go to another café for their midday meal and she and John would go broke. Then what would they do? Without Chez Dom they would have nothing.

She went downstairs into the kitchen and turned off the music. She took her apron from the hook beside the stove and wrapped it around her waist and tied the strings in a bow at her back. She called, ‘Are you there, darling?’

Her kitchen! For the moment she was safe.

She called, ‘Did you get Saturday’s meat?’ There was no answer.

She stood at the bench, sharpening the big vegetable knife with the stone.

André's cat came in from the lane and sat inside the open doorway and watched her. She saw its shadow and said coldly, ‘I’ve got nothing for you.’ She turned and looked at the cat. It blinked. Would her grandmother have recognised in this cat one of the old scavenger gods? The masked gods of her old people? Sabiha herself knew only the most faded remnants of her grandmother’s ways. Tones of suggestion so weathered, so neglected, so distant they held only
shreds of meaning. Their richness lost even to someone like herself, instructed as a child where she must look for them; in the yellow eye of the hyena at evening, in the black rags of the vulture in the morning. Sabiha had never seen a hyena or a vulture in real life. Waiting was what cats did best. Waiting and watching. Growing invisible in their stillness. Until the moment came for them to pounce. Yes, she decided, and she turned back to the bench and got on with her work, cats are of the family of the old gods.

Twenty minutes later she heard the van coming down the lane. She had not noticed it was missing. John must have gone out while she was asleep upstairs.

He came into the kitchen and heaved two heavy bags of meat onto the bench, then stood back easing his shoulders and rubbing his arms.

‘It’s getting heavier,’ he said. ‘Or I’m getting weaker.’

She was glad to have him home with her. She smiled at him. ‘I was wondering where you’d got to,’ she said. ‘You left your music playing.’

They looked at each other.

He stepped forward and held her against him.

She relaxed into his arms and rested her head on his shoulder and whispered, ‘I love you so very much, my John Patterner.’

‘And I love you too,’ he said. ‘You smell wonderful.’

‘So do you,’ she whispered. ‘You smell like home.’

He was moved and he laughed and held her away and looked at her. ‘You’re crying again.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He held her close, his voice muffled by her hair. ‘As long as we can hold each other like this, my darling, you can cry as much as you like.’

They remained in each other’s arms for a long time. John closed his eyes and breathed in the smell of her hair and her neck.

The tears ran down her cheeks as she sliced the onions. She wiped her tears with a corner of her apron. John was singing the Carole King song in the dining room while he set the tables. How would she ever be able to tell him what she had done? She picked up the board and with the thick edge of the broad knife she swept the chopped onions into the pan—it was exactly the action Houria had used. Sometimes she felt as if she
was
Houria. She gave the onions a stir then leaned and took a stick of celery from the basket under the bench and broke it apart and washed the earth from it under the tap. The lovely smell of the wet earth on her fingers. She remembered her surprise when she first discovered
that French earth did not smell the same as her father’s earth. Her surprise that
all
earth did not smell as the earth of her home. No matter how long she lived in France, she would always be a stranger here; she and John, strangers both of them. Yet Houria had not been a stranger here. Why was that? How was it, she wondered, that Houria had made Paris her home? She had begun to realise that once this child was born she and John would no longer be able to go on living in Paris. And for John, Tunisia was an impossibility. For
herself
Tunisia was an impossibility. For the first time in her life Sabiha admitted that she no longer expected to go home one day to live. It had always been in her mind, this idea that Paris was not her permanent destination and that one day she would return and go on with her life in El Djem. But of course she wouldn’t! How could she? Once her father had seen the child she would be free and her time at Chez Dom finished. She had not
emigrated
to France, after all, but had come over to help while her aunt recovered from her grief.

Chez Dom had never really belonged to her and John. The café had never become theirs. John, especially, had not believed in Chez Dom as his life. The café should have quietly died with Houria’s death, and she and John should have closed the doors and gone away and made their own lives. They had made
nothing of their own. It was clear to her suddenly,
today,
that after this child was born she and John must go to Australia and make a new life there, the three of them. In Australia they would be a family. The muscles of her forearm were aching with grinding the spices in Dom’s old mortar. She straightened and eased her forearm, flexing her fingers. Before today I knew myself to be a good woman, she thought. Now what can I say of myself?