The Point (23 page)
She told Flora that she’d do some thinking about their book while she was here but it doesn’t work. The castle with its heavy weight of grim old stories is become a historical exhibit, safe, tidy, under control. You can no longer fall in the well or off the wall-less towers and down the cliff. In one of the empty shops of the old town is a display of pictures, illustrations for a comic strip of Gloriande’s adventures. It looks like a vampire comic, heavily black and white with lots of red gashes in clothes and cloaks and wounds, and evil men with fangy teeth in a Transylvanian decor of coffins and castles. Gloriande has become a hectic gypsy, with wild black hair and mouth in a permanent soundlessly screaming 0.
She reads in
La Nausée
:
The past does not exist. Not at all.
Neither in things nor in my thought.
The Gloriande comic seems evidence of that. She remembers her argument with Christophe, when he said that if the castle was useful for people to pave their pigsties or burn in their fireplaces that was a good thing, and she’d insisted that preserving it as a piece of history was more important than people’s convenience. Neither of them entirely agreeing with their own argument, but being passionate about it. You were right, Christophe, she says to him, better to moulder away than this theme-park immortality.
She wonders about the past’s not existing; it seems an easy idea to refute. The house, it exists, clearly. But if its stories are forgotten then perhaps it is only a present existence. Maybe that is all there should be. A place to live in now, and who cares what temporary lives overlaid it in the past. She knows she doesn’t believe this.
In the evenings Marie-Claude plays Christophe’s old opera records. I do not normally care for opera, she says, but here …
It is love and death, says Elinor, and Marie-Claude’s mouth pleats, her eyes grow huge with tears. Yes, she says, in a voice that quavers. Love and death. And sits and listens. So much pleasure in love and death, she says. I wouldn’t have imagined it.
Elinor thinks: the house has won. Séverac has triumphed. But whether it has won by defeating Marie-Claude or converting her she does not know. And anyway, the verbs are not right.
Won
,
triumphed
; maybe
prevailed
is better, suggesting less action than being. The house’s patient, centuries-long stillness, its mute voice of endurance, its slow dwelling in time … Marie-Claude is understanding them, as Christophe did, and Elinor learned to. Whether it will make any difference is another matter.
On warm winter days the sun shines very bright and clear from a sky the intense summer blue of forget-me-nots run wild in a garden. The air is cold, sharp as a blade that nicks the skin and threatens to slice through the flesh, but this benign sunlight shines on you and warms you, and is a blessing as it is not in summer, when you avoid it.
So, this winter Saturday afternoon Clovis is sitting on his ferry wharf with his head tipped back to the sun and thinking about the red velvety colour of the lining of his eyelids when he hears people approaching. He straightens up, opens his eyes. It is two women. Good afternoon, he says, bold since his encounter with the willow sculptors, and they reply, Good afternoon. They walk a little past him and lean on the rail.
It is Elinor and Marie-Claude, who have been lunching at The Point, with Ivan who’s now in the library. Marie-Claude has never been to Canberra before; Elinor is always inviting her and suddenly she said yes. Clovis sees the women as neat figures in dark overcoats with coloured scarves at the neck and thin legs underneath, pointed anklebones he can decipher, and one has a fair amount of brown curly hair and one skimpier blonde. Their fine black-gloved hands they keep in their pockets, occasionally taking them out and pointing. The air is so very still and clear, in this sun-dried high country afternoon, without mists or vapours, that Clovis can hear quite clearly what they are saying. He decides that one of the women is French, he recognises her accent, and possibly, maybe, but it doesn’t seem likely, her voice. He squints at them, trying to see them clearly. It is only when he wants to look at people that he misses his spectacles, and that is not very often. He was good at faces, when he could see them, a handy thing in business, remembering faces and the names to go with them.
We should take a ferry, says the French voice. I like to travel by water.
You’d wait a long time, I’m afraid.
Isn’t there a ferry service, to and fro across the lake?
Elinor shakes her head.
But in Sydney, ferries all over the harbour. Why not here?
There’s somehow nowhere to go. I think you might be able to go to the museum by ferry, when it opens, but that’s because the parking’s expected to be so dreadful, they won’t want people to come by car.
Ah, yes, cars; Canberra the city of cars.
You’re remembering Christophe, when he was here, saying Canberra was all very nice, but what a horror for pedestrians.
Oh yes!
Clovis sitting idly listening to these women idly chatting and thinking how their voices have a particular modulation that enables them to speak quite softly and yet their words carry and can be easily understood at a distance, Clovis thinking that this is class, and confidence, prosperity, certainty, you speak and your words matter, Clovis is caught by the name Christophe. He squints anew at Marie-Claude, whose face is turned to Elinor as they lean on the rail and look out over the water. Christophe. He knows now who she is. The dinner in Sydney, years back. Meals in restaurants in Paris. Christophe. The OECD. Important negotiations. Oh yes they were, he thought so then. Christophe was how he found out about Laguiole knives. The useful peasant knives of the country he came from, as Parisians do, coming from Paris but always somewhere else as well. Pulling it out of his waistcoat pocket, running his fingers along the polished horn of the handle, showing them the brass bee at its junction with the blade, which is the mark of the real thing, and Clovis thinking that he wanted one for himself. His wife saying afterwards, in the hotel room, in her discontented voice: French women are always so elegant, and yet look at them, look at that Marie-Claude, what is there in it? How do they do it? So smart, and yet what can you put your finger on?
You look very smart, he said.
Not like her.
What if he were to stand up, bow lightly, and make himself known to madame. It’s a pleasant little frisson of a thought, but his body stays still, it knows he won’t do it. Important negotiations. He tips his head back to the sun.
Marie-Claude says: Do you think he sees us? Christophe? In some way sees, knows, is aware of us?
I’d like to think so, says Elinor. I want to think that people we love who’ve died still know us.
Clovis’s attention is pierced by that. He listens harder.
I find it difficult to imagine heaven, says Marie-Claude, how it could not be so so dull. Eternity and praising God without end. But some consciousness, I believe in that. I want to think Christophe sees us here, and likes to be with us.
In the Antipodes, with too many cars.
Not too many, just too many where the people should be.
So, thinks Clovis. Christophe dead. The small figure, so neat, so charming, so suavely full of life. Christophe dead, and me … dead to the world. And he smiles, a secret melancholy quite joyful smile, lying back in the red velvet space under his eyelids.
Elinor is saying, Ivan did say forty-five minutes, he probably meant it. We should wander up to the library.
But how can he get a book and read it in forty-five minutes? It’s not possible.
He called it up yesterday, but couldn’t wait for it then. It’ll be there, he’ll rush in, check what he wants – it’ll make him very happy. He’ll tell us all about it.
This is the scholarly life, says Marie-Claude.
And if he doesn’t come we can look at the stained-glass windows, says Elinor. It’s getting too cold here, now.
Clovis turns around to watch them walk up the slope, their feet pecking neatly at the grass. Good wives, he thinks. Women of virtue, which is a calm and certain thing. What is a good wife? Is it different from a good woman? Thinks of his own wife, whom he must have loved. Didn’t he? When she was slim and blonde and pretty and laughed, no no, that’s a cliché of a wife, Lindi was always a bit angular, and blonde indeed but shortly after they were married he looked at her shouting face and it wasn’t the sweet fair face in his mind but a darker face, disguise undone, when it frowned and shouted at him, and he saw the line of unblonde roots like an antihalo round her head and how drab this real thing was, not dark, not tough brunette turned fake blonde but simply dull, and felt great pangs of deception, not fair of him at all to mind so much because he had always known hair so blonde as hers wasn’t natural but somehow he’d expected the pretty blonde face to be real, but it wasn’t either, there was an angrier harder face that belonged to the drab hair, with a long nose a bit crooked and dark eyebrows too close together. And her laughter a form of malice. But wasn’t the problem not Lindi so much as the eyes of love? He stopped seeing her with the eyes of love and that was when the drabness took over. If he could have not lost that gaze, maybe she would always have been as blonde and charming as he’d believed at the beginning. But then, why had he stopped seeing with the eyes of love?
A good wife … what about a good husband? He’d tried to be that, as defined by her, but was hers a good definition? Maybe he should have tried being a good man. And now he thinks of Lindi with compassion. Remote, but compassion. His mind owes some of its present furnishing to Lindi. She believed in Art, in their duty to it. First nights. New books. The great European galleries. Lear and his poor fool hanged. You can’t even wonder about the reasons being wrong, he would be arrogant to do that. He now is testament to there being no wrong reasons for paying attention to works of art.
He stands up and goes and leans on the rail where the women stood, sees the vast indifferent blue sky, thinks, but why should it not be indifferent, would I want it to be paying attention to me? I want it to be itself and thoroughly so, as it is. Vast and blue and beautiful. Between it and the cold lake, the fringes of habitation and vegetation. Relate to those he could if he chose but he does not. No swans today, though the day is fair. Maybe the black swans like darker days.
Clovis turns his head and there is a bride and her badly done by bridesmaids, their fat and ugly dresses making the bride more beautiful but not more generous, the wedding party standing at the edge of the water being photographed against the bright blue day across the lake.
Sweet day, so calm, so fair, so bright
… he still hasn’t looked up the rest of it. Not one of Lindi’s, that isn’t, long before Lindi. The two black-coated wives have disappeared into the library. One wife, one widow …
and thou must die
. Where does that line come from? Out of the blue, adding itself, not following straight on, something missing, but he knows it belongs.
Gwyneth is suddenly beside him, she has the gift of quiet moving, this girl. He hasn’t seen her for a while. The grey cardigan is looking rather matted. The brassy yellow tideline of her hair is lower. She’s biting her fingernails, her hands are blue and grubby, picked red at the quick. Around the urgent biting of her little finger she gives him a faint smile. He wants to hold her hands, tight and kind, stop her biting them, calm the anxious nerves, but he has not the habit of touching her, nor does she invite it. Hi, he says. The police launch speeds past, up the lake towards the river end, the pontoon of the ferry wharf dips and plashes when the wake reaches them. Clovis squints at the wedding party, and says:
Sweet day, so calm, so fair so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky
He hums the rhythm of the next line:
And thou must die.
Gwyneth winces as her teeth rip the quick of her fingernail. What’s that? What’s this
must die
? Freaky. Bloody freaky.
I thought it was a poem for a marriage. But I’m not so sure.
Tell you what, when I get married, I won’t have dogs like that for bridesmaids. My wedding will be beautiful all the way through. Pale grey I think I’ll have them in, that stiff silky stuff that goes into shiny crumples, with little straps, they won’t be fat, they’ll look terrific, and I’ll be wearing silvery white with a great big skirt. And a really tight bodice, with pearls in patterns sewn on. Not too low, I think low dresses on brides look common. All your boobs hanging out. And a long long train with people to hold it. And you can be the father of the bride, Clovis, and give me away.
I shall be honoured, says Clovis, bowing, hiding the sudden damp in his eyes. Do you have the lucky man in mind?
Not Saul, for sure. But little Braddy can be the pageboy, and hold the white satin cushion with the rings on it. My ring will be all diamonds, but the man’s will just be gold, diamonds aren’t the thing for a man. She holds out her hand, fingers spread in a starfish, and looking at it smiles so secretly that Clovis looks away.