The Best Australian Stories (6 page)

‘You're catching the sun.'

Before I could say anything, Sylvia had leaned forward and was rubbing Nivea into my shoulders. I could tell that my back was red from the tender way her fingers smoothed in the cream; from her breath that she had had a nip of gin.

She lowered her voice: ‘In some ways, it was a difficult war for me too,' and looked up.

I waited with dread for her to continue when her face stiffened.

She breathed in, holding her breath. She had seen the diver looming above.

One couldn't not look at this great blond idiot. Wherever you happened to be around that pool, if you were talking to someone you saw, out of the corner of your eye, his emphasising crimson Speedo.

As he walked to the end of the board he straightened his body and gazed down on us.

‘Someone please shoot that man,' Sylvia said, but went on watching him.

His chest was like a slab of factory chocolate. He stepped up and somersaulted into the air, entering the water in a perfect dive. He reminded me in his vanity of a boy I'd been at school with, a restless troublemaker in the classroom, but out on the sports field fluent and focused.

‘Do you know him? He must be your age.'

‘His name is Jonathan,' I said. ‘He's over from Michigan to work in an advertising agency.'

‘I know that,' Sylvia replied, in her middle-class voice. She screwed the lid back on. ‘Something to drink?' I presumed that she had forgotten what she had been about to say, and our conversation petered out.

I beckoned a waiter, gave him our order, putting it on my tab. Beside me, Sylvia seemed listless. She was grateful that I recognised her husband's bravery. And, also, she was oddly unsettled by the discovery that Hugh had spoken to me.

She picked up her magazine. But instead of reading it, she was looking at the diver. Thinking of her adventurous youth maybe. Boom. Splash. And it's over.

As he kept bouncing off, I became aware of the movement of his body as a series of outlines, as in a Futurist painting. There was a lot of tidiness, at least, on display. ‘He's like a Hockney,' I said. ‘He did a splash,' and I mentioned an exhibition I'd seen in London, although immediately I did so, I felt embarrassed: Sylvia wouldn't have any idea about painting. It was then that she lay down her magazine and removed her glasses and turned to her husband.

‘Darling, may I smoke one of your … Oh … Darling's nodded off.'

She sneaked an arm under his chair and grabbed the packet, tapping one out. ‘I used to know a painter once.'

*

While Hugh had been ‘doing his heroics' in Burma, Sylvia had had an affair in Delhi with an Indian artist and posed nude for him. I don't know how many people she had told the story to. Not many, I suspect. But some of the spirit had gone out of her and I wondered if she was hoping to retrieve it by confessing a hazardous experience of her own.

‘His name was Bhero Sethi. He wasn't well known. We loved each other very much.' She found an ashtray and struck a match. Her cheekbones became evident as she sucked in. ‘He had this Indian nickname for me, the only nickname I've ever had. He called me – oh, it's gone. Infuriating at this age how a word goes. Just wait. It'll come to me.' But it didn't.

I was curious that she should be telling me this story so close to her sleeping husband, and I kept glancing at Hugh. How could she be certain that he wasn't awake? But Sylvia took it in her stride, although she quite often looked towards him in a peremptory way, checking that he was asleep, then swivelling back to reveal more about Bhero.

‘I loved his energy. That's what you miss as you get older. I won't explain the why of it. I hadn't heard from Hugh in a year. Bhero could see that I wanted intimacy. He'd say: “Where do your smiles go when you're not laughing?”'

Smoke streamed from her nostrils. I had a sense of the lines on her face melting. She looked younger. ‘First time we met, know what he said? “Do you have a portrait in the attic?” Oh, he could never hide his attraction could Bhero. Nor could I. Once, I had on a pleated skirt and he compared my waist to a Christmas cracker. Imagine!' She rested a hand on my wrist.

Again she inhaled, hollowing her cheeks. In memory she saw him.

‘Not fat, not thin – what Mother called “neat”. Slightly bloodshot eyes. Greying. A bit of black hair on his chest, a mole on his hip. He'd had meningitis as a child and wore leg-irons when young which left him with one very slightly withered leg, but he made sure he didn't limp when I was around.'

She had been seeing him for six months before he asked her to pose. ‘He couldn't get a model who wasn't a prostitute, so I said OK. I had a body then. It was no problem taking my clothes off. Never was. Funnily enough, it was when my glasses came off I felt naked. You hide behind them if you're a shy child, which I was. But I was determined not to be what Mother wanted me to be.'

‘What did she want you to be?'

‘Oh, nice. Nice girls keep their clothes on. When I met Hugh, I thought:
Eighteen – get rid of my cherry now.
'

Her voice was light, but there was a seriousness in her gaze. Next thing I knew, her description was guiding me up uncarpeted steps into an artist's studio in west Delhi. She conjured a little veranda. A dividing curtain of yellow shot silk. I looked over at Hugh.

‘I loved the smell of gesso in the curtain. Just loved it.'

He had done a few preliminary sketches, with pencil and crayon – and in different poses. ‘Some standing, some lying, some sitting in the middle of the room, on this chair, his bed, whatever he said. Do this or that … Oh, what did he call me?' A worm of hot ash dropped to the grass when her hand tried to summon it.

‘Names, names, they come back at three in the morning.'

Her small blue eyes had ignited and widened. She was catching one after the other the images that her past was eager to toss at her. And one image she held fast to with a passionate ache. Of herself – propped up on her elbow on a ramshackle divan. The sketches were for a single voluptuous oil painting.

‘Bhero had this ambition for it to be his “magnum opus” – the work by which everyone was bound to remember him. He struggled with it for over a year. This one painting! He kept telling me it was his chance to “break through”. I suppose all artists say the same.'

Sylvia smiled, animated, before her seriousness returned. She needed an accomplice, to escort her, without stumbling, beneath that gesso-scented curtain, into the small back room where she had posed for him.

‘I felt very special,' she said moistly. ‘He wanted me to pose like that woman, you know, with her back to you, in London.'

‘The Rokeby Venus?' I nodded.

She half smiled, but without a smidgen of humour. ‘Only, I was to lie facing the artist …'

Two yards away, Hugh fidgeted in his sleep.

She leaned further forward, her chin almost to her knees. ‘Like I said, we loved each other very much – well above a passion.' Her voice was growing softer and softer. I moved my head closer. We were breathing the same air in front of her face. ‘It wasn't anything to do with sex. Oh, it was in a way, but also not part of it at all. When you pose for people, you're sharing with them. Bhero never talked while he worked, but afterwards he'd say: “When I'm painting you, I feel I'm touching you. I know what the texture of your skin is like. I know the texture of your hair in the way your husband does. I feel the bone under your forehead, I'm running my fingers over it …”' Her hand mimicked the motion. ‘He taught me that turning someone into art is one of the most intimate things you can do.'

‘How did it end?'

‘Horribly.' Her arm fell back slowly. ‘Hugh came home and it was only with great difficulty that I returned to him. But he had been in the war …'

‘Did you see Bhero again?'

She shook her head. Her face had taken on a painful, obscure look. She stared down at her gleaming shins, then at her husband – before hoisting her eyes up to me. ‘But I saw his painting.'

*

Some years after the war, the Billingtons had been guests at a military club in Delhi. After dinner, they went into the officers' bar. ‘It's totally Indian now; at the same time, more British than the British – wood panelling, regimental colours and the rest of it. Hugh was offered a whisky, I had one too. Conversation normal. The CO was pretending to speak to Hugh – the smallest of small talk – but I could see from his eyes that his mind was on me, doubtless hoping for some luck if my husband was away on a long business trip. Then he said: “I've got much better stuff. Black Label! I keep it in my bachelor quarters over the yard.”'

‘I was slightly reluctant to go to with this whiskeyish man to his “bachelor quarters” – we knew perfectly well he had a wife in Poona – but couldn't see a way out of it.'

Sylvia's voice had grown bleak. I sensed that everything she had told me was a prelude to this journey across the courtyard.

‘We went through a room and into a locked room tacked on to it. He said, opening the door, “This is my den where I prepare military campaigns.” Eyes glowing, he added in a mildly lascivious way for my benefit: “What secrets it could tell!”

‘We walked in. Everywhere the usual swords and daggers on the walls and an inlaid Afghan rifle. There was a sofa with a blanket tossed over it. And in pride of place, on the wall at the end, this quite large painting in an ornate frame. I looked up and to my horror – there I was. Horizontal. Me with my red hair.'

She held my gaze, to see if I would understand.

‘I kept walking, but in fact I froze. My heart pounding, my face on fire, this chill spreading through me …

‘Our host pointed at the painting with the bottle he'd opened, eager to know our opinion: “Well, what do you think? I bought it in Nangloi – off a decrepit sort of a fellow with a limp,” and he laughed. “He didn't want to sell it, but he had to.”

‘I saw Hugh looking at the painting and with every cell in my body braced myself for his response.

‘He looked at it and remarked in that jocular way he has: “I'm not the one to ask about modern art.”'

I imagined Sylvia's relief – and said something to this effect. But her smile was very slight.

‘By then, I was fifteen years older,' she said eventually. ‘That can be quite a long time sometimes.'

I looked at her, puzzled.

Her voice had gone ragged and she had tears in her eyes.

Sylvia's expectation that I would understand lasted no more than a few seconds. She spoke in a fierce whisper. The heat of her breath was on my face. She no longer seemed tipsy. ‘It's hard to explain … but it went through me like a dose of salts to feel that nothing in my pose connected us. Not a hint.' Her mouth was trembling.

I reached out, touched her arm. I was able, now, to picture the scene: her terror that Hugh would recognise her in the naked figure, and then, almost instantly, her greater sorrow that he hadn't. And behind the fear and sadness, her concern for Bhero Sethi and the circumstances that had forced him to part with his magnum opus.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, covering my hand with hers, squeezing it. ‘I don't know why I'm upset. I get this decent, good man, my treasure …' She picked up her towel and wiped her eyes, doing it quickly so that she could put her hand back.

I shot a look at the slumbering hero. ‘You're positive he didn't see you in the model?'

‘I didn't think so at the time – you have to realise how out of context it was. Then as the years passed, I decided he had recognised me and was being protective. Now? To be honest, I have no idea. I've lived so long with the uncertainty, I've come to accept it.'

Bogogogogoinnnngggg!

We both tightened. To our left, the diving board reverberated with a terrific judder, like a ruler twanged in the flap of a school desk.

Afterwards, I couldn't help feeling that he had bounced higher to regain our attention. Sandwiched between distinct sounds, the silence was intensified by being prolonged. I remember my hand incongruously beneath her hand, and Sylvia looking sharply up. But not at the diver.

‘Neelam!' she exclaimed. ‘That was it.'

Whooooshhh
.

He smashed through the surface of the water at a loose, untidy angle, jetting spray onto the lawn, onto us.

Behind her, Hugh started. He rose into a sitting position and looked around, blinking.

‘It's nothing, dear,' said Sylvia, and moved away.

‘Blasted Americans.'

‘Don't panic. All is well.' She towelled the drops from her forehead, her swollen blue eyes. ‘Our nice young friend has ordered you a
nimbu-pani
.'

Hugh relaxed. He turned in my direction. ‘Has she forgiven me?'

But he had seen her face.

‘Syl?'

‘It's nothing, Hugh,' she said in her cross voice. ‘He was telling a silly story that made me cry.'

Love and Honour and Pity and Pride
and Compassion and Sacrifice

Nam Le

My father arrived on a rainy morning. I was dreaming about a poem, the dull
thluck thluck
of a typewriter's keys punching out the letters. It was a good poem – perhaps the best I'd ever written. When I woke up, he was standing outside my bedroom door, smiling ambiguously. He wore black trousers and a wet, wrinkled parachute jacket that looked like it had just been pulled out of a washing machine. Framed by the bedroom doorway, he appeared even smaller, gaunter, than I remembered. Still groggy with dream, I lifted my face toward the alarm clock.

‘What time is it?'

‘Hello, Son,' he said in Vietnamese. ‘I knocked for a long time. Then the door just opened.'

The fields are glass
, I thought. Then tum-ti-ti, a dactyl, end line, then the words
excuse
and
alloy
in the line after. Come on, I thought.