Finishing at what was still an early hour, he felt sleek, jovial and generous. Whether she liked it or not, Rhoda would have to submit to his generosity.
At breakfast he began. ‘Do you know what I’m planning to do this morning?’ He looked out through the kitchen door at the almost amiable cat inhabitants of his yard.
By contrast Rhoda was looking pinched and sour. ‘It can’t be much of a plan if you propose to share it.’
He was so full of kindness he wouldn’t let her reject him. ‘We’re going to get dressed and take the tram to a fur “salong” I investigated some time ago. I’m going to have them fit you out.’
Rhoda was standing on her usual little box to lend her height for the washing-up. The silence sounded made for breaking as she recklessly stirred the crockery in the sink.
Presently she said faintly: ‘I wonder whether you know how cruel you are—to expose me to ridicule.’
‘How more ridiculous in a good coat than looking like something off a dump?’ He sounded the soul of bourgeois reason. ‘You used to be a great one for clothes and dressing up.’
‘Oh, yes!’ She sighed. ‘Then! And “dressing up” is just what it was!’ It might have ended in bitterness if steam from the sink hadn’t made her sneeze.
Suddenly she asked in a different voice: ‘What time should I be ready?’
It was such a volte-face he felt a bit resentful, but mumbled: ‘Give us time to get into our clothes.’
As she flung the water off her hands he recognized her feverish look.
They so seldom went about together, any neighbour seeing them that morning must have been surprised. His stride carried him somewhat ahead. Because it was a cold day he had put on his overcoat. He hid his unemployed hands in the pockets. He couldn’t hide Rhoda, though. She was wearing a cloak in green-tinged, black serge with a large wooden button fastening it under her pointed chin. He had hit the nail on the head mentioning the dump at breakfast: all her clothes looked come-by-chance, when her size and shape must have forced her to have them made for her.
Who, seeing him with Rhoda, would believe in his success? Didn’t believe in it himself: such transparent brilliance only emphasized his deformities.
In desperation he turned round from time to time, and called back over the intervening space. ‘Are you all right? Am I walking too fast?’ and finally: ‘It isn’t far now’; as though she didn’t know the tram stop.
Rhoda had obviously got it into her head that he was trying to make a fool of her. She composed her mouth and didn’t answer as she trotted along after him.
It was the same in the tram: his attempts at adorning a sense of duty with love, all seemed to fall flat. He truly loved Rhoda. Wasn’t she his past? The knowledge they shared had a common source.
He cleared his throat of an obstruction. ‘How do you like the idea of nutria? That’s a practical, discreet fur.’ What came out in a blast, ended as too much of a whisper when muted midway.
Rhoda, who never wore a hat, pushed back her greying, straying hair, held up her wedge-shaped chin, and said: ‘Squirrel is what I’ve always hankered after. I wanted Maman to give me squirrel, but she wouldn’t.’
‘Perhaps she was right. Squirrel was a soubrette’s fur. Don’t think it’s in fashion any more. Probably tears very easily too.’
They must have looked and sounded odd, seated side by side on the tram bench, fatally belonging to each other while not owning to it. Most of the passengers were too refined to stare: only the children did, fish-mouthed, in one case picking his nose; the children looked right inside.
Rhoda said: ‘If I have to go through with this, I want squirrel, Hurtle.’
Because she was deforming his intentions he remained silent for a whole section.
Then he said, looking with distaste at the circumspect expressions surrounding them: ‘It isn’t a major issue, though you want to turn it into one.’ The tram bell seemed to mark the end of a round, with him the loser.
Rhoda was sitting as erect as her body allowed. It was he who could afford to loll, not sloppily, at an elegant angle, as he had sometimes noticed in the glass: having shoes fitted, for instance.
‘Who’s trying to expose you to ridicule, I’d like to know? Tarting yourself up in squirrel! My idea was to see you warmly, presentably clothed in winter, instead of looking a fright.’
‘Oh, dry up, Hurtle! I couldn’t begin to compete with your vanity and arrogance.’
A couple of children began to laugh; while all the hatted ladies had been born deaf, it seemed: they glanced at the view or their engagement books. Only one of them, less controlled, or more honest, was fascinated by his ankles in the left-over pair of Sulka socks, a present from Boo Davenport, he had come across that morning.
He uncrossed his legs, and squirmed around on the unyielding bench. He hated the prudent faces of the powdered ladies; he hated them for their discretion towards his hunchbacked sister, and at least one of them for her stupid admiration of what she saw as elegance of form: when he too, if they had known, was a freak, an artist.
It brought him very close to Rhoda. It made him glance at her, wondering whether she could have been hiding some secret gift inside her deformity all these years; but her expression wouldn’t allow him even to guess at its nature.
Arriving at what he had taken to calling the fur ‘salong’, and which Rhoda had refused to see as their private joke, they were accepting each other, if not as closely united as he wished.
The big Jewess in charge surged towards him with a smile which acknowledged his fame. ‘You remember,’ he fairly spat it at her, ‘I discussed with you a relative who would need special attention.’
‘Oh yes, Mr Duffield!’ The Jewess tilted her head till her moist lips were glistening with light and understanding.
‘This is my sister.’ He stepped aside, unveiling Rhoda.
The woman had been well trained; but it was obviously something of an occasion. The fitter she brought was nervous to the point of neurosis. The manager came as they contemplated Rhoda’s hump.
‘I thought, perhaps, nutria.’
‘Squirrel, Hurtle. We agreed on squirrel.’
Once this was established, Rhoda settled down as though in the hands of Maman. He wished Maman had been there; even Harry would have managed the situation better; Harry’s worldliness would have risen to the choosing of skins.
Both the Courtney children grew noticeably shyer, he knew, in leaving the fur ‘salong’. Would he pay a deposit? He did—humbly, if they had guessed—in notes: while Rhoda turned her back.
They were received into an almost empty tram for the return journey. As they rode the hills of Sydney, the luxury of seeming privacy and a glow from his recent generosity allowed him to ask: ‘What about Kathy?’
‘Who?’
‘Kathy Volkov. Have you seen her?’
Rhoda’s nostrils began to get their pinched look: scenting a prelude to bribery, no doubt.
‘Oh, I see her. Yes. When I visit her mother,’ she casually admitted. ‘I go there fairly often. They’re very excited.’
‘Why should they be—excited?’ His voice sounded dislocated; the motion of the tram was churning them round against each other whether they liked it or not.
‘Because of the recent developments, of course.’ Rhoda was perhaps attempting to tell calmly, unless he had irritated her by not knowing. Had she already told, and he was drunk or thoughtful at the time? Or was he already senile? He certainly couldn’t remember, and was relieved when the tram pitched her into her narrative. ‘Yes. Mr Khrapovitsky retired from the Con,’ she shouted against the screeching of the tram. ‘Mrs Khrapovitsky—well-connected, it appears—has inherited property in Melbourne. They are moving—down—there. He’s keeping Kathy on, because she’s an exceptional pupil. She’ll stay with a relative—Mrs Volkov’s cousin.’
‘When is she leaving?’ he shouted back into Rhoda’s teeth.
‘End of the month.’
He quickly calculated, and saw how cruel it was, but only too probable: the sort of thing that does happen.
‘Will you be seeing her?’ he asked with assumed meekness.
Rhoda wet her lips. ‘I’ve been bidden,’ she began (why the hell did she use ‘bidden’?) ‘by Bernice Cutbush—to a little afternoon party. It can only be boring for a child—but poor Mrs Cutbush—and Kathy at times does suggest she’s older than she is.’
He subsided on the wicked seat he was sharing with Rhoda. They were mostly silent. He tried to nauseate himself by remembering the smell of school tunic on a hot evening; while the poetry of Katherine Volkov constantly headed his misery in other directions.
It was fortunate he had his work. In the following weeks he painted several versions more or less abstract of his ‘Girl at Piano’. There were drawings too, which poured out on his board, on odd scraps of paper, on the walls of the dunny. He even returned to his conception of the boy-girl, both in drawings and, finally, in paint. The half-veiled face might have been tattooed in purple: or was it an eruption of pimples? Evil-looking by either interpretation; but the evil painting, coming to a head, relieved him to some extent.
In the meantime Rhoda had been for several fittings for the fur coat, which was giving trouble.
‘She’s so nice,’ she said, ‘really—when you get to know her.’
‘Who is?’ He was irritated by Rhoda’s sly innocence; he almost put up an arm to prevent her brushing against Katherine Volkov, the actual one he was at present creating in his mind, as opposed to the figment of his original lust.
‘The lady at the fur place,’ Rhoda was explaining. ‘So understanding. She was in Auschwitz. Has the numbers tattooed on her arm.’
‘Too flabby.’
‘You reduce everything to a physical level. How do you suppose anyone survives? How did Mrs Grünblatt, for instance?’
In the end you couldn’t talk to Rhoda.
She had taken to smothering herself in powder, which didn’t at all improve her nose: the transparent tip kept its same gleam of gristle, while a chalky residue collected round the periphery. Whether Mrs Grünblatt was the sole reason for these attempts at camouflage, he couldn’t decide: Rhoda was so secretive, yet at the same time naive.
For instance, she threw in: ‘Mrs Grünblatt used to be acquainted with a painter—his name, I think, was Groze—or something like it.’
‘Grosz?’ He snorted; if Mrs Grünblatt was of the school of Grosz, he could visualize her mental drawings of Rhoda.
One evening she returned wearing a dab of dry rouge on each cheekbone and an unmistakable thread of lipstick. He restrained himself from telling her she had been to the ‘little afternoon party’ given by Mrs Cutbush for Kathy and Mrs Volkov; nor did Rhoda confess.
As the deadline approached, he looked regularly in the letter-box for the tattooed message. He bound one of the boy-girl’s ankles, in spite of which, the sores continued escaping through the bandage.
By now he might have dispensed entirely with the original Kathy, if, on a steamy morning, he hadn’t believed he recognized her at a street crossing. Realizing at once that Katherine Volkov, actual or fictitious, was his overwhelming belief, he began scurrying bumping painting retching almost it was such a short green and all his fellow pedestrians equally determined or desperate: while Kathy sailed on, away.
She appeared leggier than before: long, burnished legs. As she ran, and propped, and ran, her eyes, of the same blazing blue, flashed a white warning from their corners; and what had been her starfish breasts were jolted into flesh.
He ran after. Might have been caught in mid-stream by the red. Collided with a vast soft woman the impact made surprisingly hard. It stopped him calling out to Kathy. Fractured the intention at chest level. Almost winded. The woman was a laugher.
He scuttled on freakishly and caught up in a quiet street beside a church under some scorched planes.
‘Aren’t you Katherine Volkov?’ He heard his own, stupid giggle.
‘Yes—Mr Duffield.’ She waited with a resigned politeness: he might have been a friend of her mother’s.
‘So you’re leaving,’ he blathered. ‘Perhaps we’ll see you at Flint Street before you go.’
Was his hat set too rakishly? She was looking embarrassed, perhaps sulking, at the pavement, a bundle of sheet music curving under her arm.
She said: ‘Yes, Mr Duffield,’ and smiled a rather thin smile.
‘You’ve altered, Kathy. You’ve grown. I almost didn’t recognize you.’ As silly as that: an old coot embarrassing children with obvious remarks; his hands looked scabby and freckled.
‘I’m fourteen in nine days’ time.’
A whole year.
Then a shower of music burst from under her arm, and he helped her gather up the sheets from the pavement. It saved them further embarrassment.
‘I must go now,’ she said; she had the music to return.
There was no reason why she shouldn’t look composed: their meeting had been an accident, not an assignation.
He took a street in an inconvenient direction, while remembering Sid Cupples, an old bloke from his boyhood who knew most of the reasons and answers. Sid had been thrown from a horse, and walked for ever after with a bent leg; it gave him a curious wishbone look: frail but resilient.
When he could bear it no longer, he didn’t ask, but told Rhoda: ‘The little Volkov must have left by now.’
‘Oh, no.’ Rhoda was smoothing a grey-white garment with an iron. ‘She’s leaving tomorrow evening. Pity it’s the evening. I shan’t be able to see her off.’ The act of ironing always seemed to soothe Rhoda. ‘I can’t very well abandon the cats again.’ Kathy, as self-sufficient as a cat, would barely notice. ‘A long journey for a young girl—on her own—at night.’ Rhoda’s iron felt its way tentatively.
He realized she was ironing a little nightgown of such antiquity she might have worn it as a young girl. It was trimmed with scallops of torn lace, grubby with age, or night journeys.