There was a hunger to equate the woman he had seen with Nelly. All those years later, Tom felt it quiver under the surface of tabloid prose. It would have been so neat. Perfect solutions make perfect stories. This one foundered on a paradox: the solution required Morgan, but Morgan undid the solution.
An interview with Carson Posner appeared in a Saturday supplement. The photographer had posed him against an early Howard Arkley abstract, and there was much obsequious filler about the dealer’s reputation as a talent-spotter, his unwavering, unfashionable devotion to painting, and so on. But the real subject of the feature was never in doubt.
Posner said he had been devastated to learn what Felix Atwood had done. The evidence against the broker was overwhelming. Nevertheless, Posner felt sure his friend was not devoid of conscience. Atwood would not have required the certainty of punishment to suffer for what he had done. When they were both boys, he had spoken of drowning; that it was the way he would like to go. And so he, Posner, believed that his old friend had chosen to end his days in the southern waters he loved.
His interviewer raised the subject of a note. Wasn’t the absence of one a serious flaw in the suicide theory? Posner’s disdain was superb. ‘Art exists because there are realities that exceed words.’
If it was plain that Posner’s portrait of Atwood had been airbrushed into smoothness, there was admiration, in the days that followed, for the loyalty that had produced it. Mateship: the Australian male’s birthright. Even stockbrokers were worthy of it.
Above all, Posner’s opining added weight to the idea that Atwood had taken his own life. Perhaps not having really made a decision, merely going on swimming; the continent receding, and with it, the braided pull of life itself.
The most satisfying conclusions are bodily: a corpse or a coupling, death or its miniature. Tide patterns had already been verified, currents monitored. Felix Atwood’s body was never recovered. Still, the story might have ended as the larger one is said to have begun: in the huge, slow roll of the sea. But there was the feeling that had built up against Atwood’s wife. In time it would find the outlet it required.
I
N
A
UGUST
, Esther Kade asked if Tom would like to meet for lunch: a small, proprietary pat to check that he was still in place.
She arrived with amber and Mexican silver bound about her wrists and said at once, ‘So, Tom: what’s all this about Nelly Zhang?’ It being Esther’s habit when faced with a closed door to turn the handle and walk in.
Tom, chary of the scorn of Esther Kade at amateur trespassing on her art historical terrain, repeated the hazy half-truth he had devised in his email to her: that he was considering writing about literary and artistic controversies. ‘Nothing academic, of course. You know how the vice-chancellor’s always saying we mustn’t shut ourselves off from the marketplace. So I’m thinking along the lines of feature articles. Eventually, maybe a book. The kind you see in real bookshops.’
Esther rolled her bright brown eyes, dismissing their vice-chancellor’s idiocies along with Tom’s rigmarole. She had the face of a friendly monkey and was much feared on committees.
In the course of their affair, she had said, ‘I’m like one of those cities that people go, Oh it’s great for a day or two.’
Now she produced a manila envelope from her bag. ‘Not exactly my field. But I asked around the department.’
Tom took out a thin sheaf of photocopies: reviews, catalogues, the bibliography of a book called
Contemporary
Australian Art
in which entries had been marked in fluorescent pen.
Esther said, ‘A starting point.’
When he thanked her, she replied, ‘I saw the famous show, actually. The one that caused all the fuss.’
‘I’ve read what the papers said. But I was PhD-ing in the States at the time.’ A tiny irrelevant shard of history was rising to the surface in Tom’s mind, the memory of walking with a visiting Australian friend down an avenue of lime-green leaves in Baltimore. The tourist had fashioned silver tips for his shirt collar from foil in parody of current fashion.
A waiter dropped cutlery on the table. He made cabbalistic passes with a pepper grinder and commanded them to ‘Enjoy!’
Tom said, ‘Tell me about those paintings.’
‘How well do you know your Ernst?’
‘
Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale
. It was one of Nelly’s sources, obviously.’
Esther said drily, ‘How very clever you are.’ Then, as she scrutinised him over mushroom soup, her tone changed. ‘You know, I couldn’t stop thinking about them for ages. You could see where that Nelly’s Nasties tag came from. There were these day-glo colours and a sense of pure evil.
The bright day
is done, / And we are for the dark
. Isn’t that how it goes? Only the darkness was already there, inseparable from the bright day. But only implied. In one sense, it was all in your mind,’ said Esther. ‘That was the worst thing, in a way. It made you part of it.’
When they said goodbye, she kissed Tom; on both cheeks, with a little pause in between to convert affection into irony. ‘Good luck with Nelly Zhang.’ Another beat. ‘I’m so pleased you’re pursuing a non-academic line there.’
N
ELLY, THE
least intimidating of creatures, could summon great aloofness at will. Her marriage, the events surrounding Atwood’s disappearance: these remained virgin stretches in the map of their friendship. Once, when speaking of Karen, lightly sketching the ways he had failed with her, Tom mentioned Atwood. Nelly went on with whatever she was doing. The subject dropped between them like a stone.
Sometimes Tom suspected that she understood the fascination of taboo. That her silence was a way of ensuring his ongoing interest. Or they might be talking about anything at all—politics, TV, the perennial weather—and slowly there would grow in him the certainty that the real subject of the conversation was Felix Atwood. The very fullness of their dialogue was shaped by his absence. A string of banal observations seemed to contain him, in every sense. Tom’s consciousness of the man would swell until it seemed that Atwood’s name must burst from his tongue. Once or twice, at these moments, he thought Nelly was looking at him with something like dismay. He would make an effort, would force himself to say something entirely trivial. The danger was skirted. Once more, there would be nothing but ease between them.
Now and then a fragment of information came Tom’s way, maddening in its incompleteness and particularity. When proposing that he rent her house, Nelly warned him of its inconveniences: hurricane lamps, tank water, a stone fireplace for warmth. Then she said, ‘Felix didn’t want somewhere cosified. It was before everyone went postmodern. People were still big on authenticity.’
‘It can’t have been easy, weekends in a place like that when Rory was a baby.’ Tom was thinking, The selfish prick, no running water for his wife and kid so he could feel authentic.
Across the road from the bar in which they sat, a window displayed bra and knicker sets in shell pink, vanilla, peppermint. Tiny satin bows signalled the gift-wrapping of female flesh. A few doors away, a chandelier-hung lighting shop that specialised in
Never To Be Repeated Bargains
went on closing down.
Nelly remained silent for so long, staring into her glass, that Tom’s mind drifted to a DVD he had rented. Then she said, ‘I didn’t go up there so much. It was really Felix’s place. His retreat where the city couldn’t get in.’
Tom waited.
She lit a cigarette. ‘But it’s beautiful. You’ll see, if you go. I think about living there one day.’
His heart dipped. That she might speak so lightly of a future in which he had no part.
He always pictured her framed by the city, he said. Seeing, in his mind, her red parka blocky and vivid against a blur of traffic, or suspended in a plate-glass door.
She exhaled clove-scented smoke in his face. ‘The Chinese is a creature of alleys.’
But afterwards, in the street, she spoke of watching shooting stars over the paddocks. Of the daffodils a woman long dead had planted around the house, golden and cream and orange-centred, hundreds of flowers quaking in cold August. She said she nurtured a dream of planting trees all over the property. ‘All the different trees that belong there, blackwoods, gums, wattles. I’d like to see it start to turn back into bush.’
People were coming out of restaurants; a woman lifted her hair over the collar of her jacket. There was the scrape of metal on concrete as waiters began packing up the pavement seating.
A voice said, ‘Remind me again who you are?’ Nelly and Tom made their way through a stream of stills, a beef-pink face mounted on a pearl choker, two girls in studded denim turning away from each other on a corner, a taxi flashing its lights at a man with his arm raised.
‘A perfect city is one you can walk out of,’ said Nelly.
Tom pictured the pair of them on a road striped by tree shadows: towers at their back, a mountain in the space between their bodies.
Nelly often sought his advice on what to read. She would quiz Tom about literary history, borrow his course readers. She studied his bookshelves like museum cases, hands behind her back. She squatted to peer at shelves where neglected volumes gathered, and fished out treasures: Kafka’s diaries, an anthology of Victorian poems,
The Man Who Loved Children
.
‘
I only read about five books when I was growing up.’ But one day a chance remark revealed that having come across
Crime and Punishment
at the age of seventeen, Nelly had read her way through the nineteenth-century Russians. What she found there had stayed with her as a series of images. She might speak of a man striking a woman at a window with his riding crop as if describing a page in an illuminated missal. In Nelly’s distillation of a famous story there was a woman dressed in grey and an inkstand grey with dust; one day the woman’s lover looked in the mirror and saw, from the colour of his hair, that he had grown old.
Tom would have spoken of the formal qualities of Chek-hov’s tale, its understated, almost offhand treatment of love, and evasive resolution. All this Nelly omitted or missed in favour of detail and implication. But years later, when Tom himself was old, he would discover that what remained, when the sifting was done, was a dress, an inkstand, a man whose hair was the colour of ashes.
What he missed in images, said Tom, was the passage of time. ‘Stories are about time. But looking’s a present-tense activity. We live in an age where everything’s got to be
now
, because consumerism’s based on change. Images seem complicit with that somehow.’
Then he said, ‘Sometimes I think I’ll never really get what’s going on in a painting.’
He had never admitted this before. It required an effort.
‘Is it so different from what you do?’ Nelly said, ‘Reading a book, looking at a painting—they’re both things that might change you.’
Tom noticed that where he spoke of knowledge, Nelly talked of transformation. It confirmed his sense that pictures exceed analysis. Art was ghostly in a way, he thought, something magical that he recognised rather than understood.
He said as much to Nelly. Who argued, ‘But you can see a painting, touch it. Fiction’s the spooky thing. The thing that’s not there.’
She stirred in her ugly vinyl armchair as she spoke. The movement caused her shirt to ride up; there was the glimmer of a bare hip. It was an intensely erotic apparition. Tom looked away. He thought there was nothing more present, more material, than her flesh; and nothing he found more disturbing.
When he told Nelly that he was thinking of writing about her work, she looked doubtful. ‘Yeah, right, that’s good, I guess.’
Next thing there was Posner, lying in wait for Tom at the Preserve. ‘Dear boy, this is tremendously exciting. The serious attention Nelly’s attracted so far has been rather outweighed by sensationalist dross. The hour is ripe,
ripe
, for a scholar.’ He brought out his version of a smile; cautiously, like a man exercising an alligator. ‘Oh, I know you’re not an art historian. But as I’ve been saying to Nelly, one must think over and through mere categories. The specialist is a contemptible modern creation. I consider the fact that you come to us from literature a veritable
atout
. Art and text: an illustrious association.’ A shirtfront loomed vast as a snowfield. ‘If I could help,’ said Posner, ‘I would be honoured. Resources, contacts, suggestions . . . We could start with dinner.’
Tom murmured that the project was in its infancy.
Nelly said, ‘You’re scaring him off, Carson.’
‘But it’s quite the other way around. I’m entirely awed.’ Then he was pressing something into Tom’s hand, the bloodless fingers surprisingly warm. ‘My card. Whenever you’re ready,’ crooned Posner.
‘Tell me a story,’ Nelly would say.
It was oddly disquieting. The childishness of it:
Tell me a
story
. It rang through their encounters like a refrain. Tom was unable to resist it, of course. Soon he was going to meet Nelly stocked with stories like charms.
He told her about April Fonceca, who sang in the last row of the choir and was a living example. When April was a little girl, she had lit a candle and placed her dolls around it. Afterwards, she said she was only playing birthday parties. Afterwards, who could tell exactly how it happened? But there was a golden flame and there was a celluloid doll, and then the doll was the flame. And there was April, reaching to save her pretty doll, and the flame reaching for April. April wore high necks and long sleeves, but there was nothing to be done about her face, and that was what came of playing with matches. Whenever Tom looked at her, he saw the girl and her doll flowering into light, a big candle and a small one. He didn’t want to look at April, said Tom, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
He told Nelly about a widowed Englishwoman his parents had known. She kept a little dog called Chess: tight white body, black ears. ‘The Civil Service terrier,’ said Arthur. One day Chess was bitten by a snake and died. Soon afterwards, the elderly Indian couple who lived next door to the widow acquired a dun-coated mongrel and promptly named him Chess. This greatly amused Sebastian de Souza: ‘The fools! A brown mutt called Chess!’ Passing their compound, he would call out, ‘Here, Magpie! Here, Domino!’ Or, ‘I say, Prasad, how’s Zebra today?’