The White Body of Evening (8 page)

“Can Hamish stay for tea too?” Paul asked from the living room, catching the mention of food.

“He’s got to come home to his own dinner,” Sarah said before Anna could consent, as she inevitably did in these situations.

“These children are really inseparable,” Sarah said under her breath.

“You can say that again,” said Albert.

Anna liked Hamish and the way in which he interacted with her own children. The boy had taken to German and once, when she read them a Heine poem about the Lorelei, he asked her whether Australia had a Lorelei of its own, which she took to be a revealing question, indicating the boy’s intelligence. While other children played cricket in Draper Street, Hamish was content to read or be read to, and his presence turned what might have been the loneliness of a mother and her children into something like the feeling of company. That, years ago now, he had looked into her eyes, seen her so cruelly exposed and then concealed the fact of such intimacy within him, never mentioning or even hinting at what he had witnessed, also filled her with warmth at the thought of his loyalty. Paul, Ondine and Hamish had grown up together, and though Hamish was older, the bonds between them seemed quite unbreakable.

Albert, on the other hand, was not so trusting. He thought a boy of twelve, nearly thirteen, was too old to be playing dominoes with a girl of seven. He could see that Hamish was infatuated with Ondine and it troubled him.

One evening Albert had come home to find Hamish nervously looking at an old issue of the
Bulletin,
fixing upon a provocative illustration by Norman Lindsay depicting “The Poet and the Muse”. The former was a forlorn, world-weary man, leaning bent and broken over a writing desk. The latter was a winged maiden, her rounded breasts drawn with precise detail, leaning over the poet sympathetically, as if to guide him. Hamish quickly closed the magazine when Albert appeared at the door, but not before he could guess what the boy had found so engrossing.

Later, according to Sarah, the boy had asked his parents what a muse was.

“What did you say?”Anna asked.

“Well, I don’t really know. Like an inspiration, wouldn’t you say? That’s what Jack said to him anyway.”

Albert promptly produced the very issue of the
Bulletin
that contained the sketch, which he showed the women, and read the accompanying poem about the sacred secret of infinity burning in the beauty of the rose, and the soul of the radiant maiden who breathes light and meaning into the visible world.

“Overblown rubbish,” he concluded.

“But better than the usual woman-hating stuff they come up with,” Anna rejoined, snatching the magazine out of his hands.”Listen. This from the wisdom of Nietzsche on the Red Page:‘Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a lustful woman? Mud is at the bottom of her soul.’”

She blushed as she read it, wondering why it seemed so repulsively resonant to her.

“He was a lunatic,”Albert muttered.

Anna dropped the magazine on the table sensing that Albert felt exposed.

“Anyway, it’s nice to have a muse,” she said finally. “Hamish has a romantic temperament, which in this day and age is a good thing.”

Albert slouched into a chair, resenting Hamish all the more. Anna treated him as one of her own children, not perceiving the stranger so close to their daughter. At the back of his mind Albert harboured the tremulous thought, which he knew he dare not explore, of the boy, chubby, freckled and with lumpish white hands, and Ondine, only seven, yet still on the verge of the cold sensuality that he imagined in his wife.

Years later, when Hamish McDermott dwelt upon his childhood, he’d recall parts of the city as if they were enchanted. He couldn’t be sure of the extent to which his imagination had invented the phantasmagoric city of his youth. Sometimes, when he had time, he’d go for walks through the streets and lanes looking for places that he had known as a child – a cyclorama, a dilapidated arcade, or a used-book stall selling banned literature – and not find the place, which made him suspect that it had never been there at all. Even so he never tired of the streets, which would wink at him with the promise of his childhood and draw him out into forgetfulness. To the casual passer-by it must have looked as if he walked in a completely aimless manner, with no apparent destination. And in a way the aimlessness of these walks was their pleasure. With no ostensible goal or object in mind, he’d meander off the main thoroughfares and find himself confronting some unfrequented lane or dusty window where time seemed to have stood still and an eerie calm prevailed.

“Ich
wei
nicht, was soll es bedeuten, da
ich so traurig bin.”
He recalled the poem about the Lorelei that Anna had read to the three of them, Paul, Ondine and him, when they were children. In the poem a beautiful maiden with glittering jewels in her hair sits on a cliff overlooking the Rhine and sings a song of such intoxicating power that a sailor is lured off his course onto the rocks and drowns. The poet who tells this story describes it as a tale from olden times. In the gloomy absence of the Lorelei’s song, the song of death, he is inexplicably sad, and this sadness is the mystery explained by the description of the song’s violent power.

When he was thirteen Hamish and Paul had run off into the city to look at near naked mannequins in the window of a ladieswear store in the Royal Arcade. The plaster figures stretched their smooth, white limbs into various postures of arousal. Behind the glass window, which caught reflected light from the other shops and the glowing white orbs suspended from the ceiling, they seemed to be swimming in a sea of stars.

“That must be what the Lorelei looks like,” Hamish said to Paul. He paused. He was on the verge of adding that he loved Ondine. He wanted to tell someone. He was bursting with the secret of his innocent desire, but put off by the closeness of the brother and sister, and the awkwardness he felt being excluded from their blood bond, he caught himself.

Instead he put the question to Paul:“Do
you
love Ondine?”

The younger boy smirked at him, shrugged and said nothing.

When a passer-by disturbed the moment of reverie the boys withdrew from the window and headed back towards Bourke Street. Hamish couldn’t remember what happened next, but the image of the mannequins and the tension he felt would often resurface, luminous with its promise and possibility, through all the dark times that subsequently crowded around it. It was a moment that never left him, even though he knew, in the years that followed, how delusional it had been. The celestial shopfront of naked female forms, the glassy mystery of the arcade, flooded with light, yet still harbouring a darkness that had been gathering for decades, might have been what he was searching out on his many walks through the city. Whenever he returned to the arcade it was heavy with the memory of those mannequins. Even though the place had fallen into disrepair, he still imagined that, amidst the flaking paint, the cracked walls and the broken windows, he could hear the song – pure, primal sound, calling him away from the profane shimmer of electric lights and the din of motor car traffic into some watery Rhineland dream.

After this visit to the arcade Paul returned to his pencils with a head brimful of imagery. He was almost frantic as he sat down, dangling over the clean, white page before him, anxious about the appearance of the first line. Ondine sat opposite him on the floor, moving a toy spindle around her hand, occasionally glancing up at her brother. The two children looked alike at a fundamental level. Both were pale and slender, both had delicate hands and faintly freckled skin, but Ondine’s flaxen hair was a stark contrast to Paul’s jet black. Nevertheless they barely noticed this difference, instinctively dwelling on the sameness between them as a source of enormous comfort and security.

Paul looked at his sister, who was careless of his attention, and then looked down at the paper again. The arcade, he thought, was like a cathedral, or a cavern, or a vast grave site, a catacomb full of aloof figures ghosting up and down its length. He imagined crosses and candles. If he drew the arcade it would be a place that had a large crucifix at one end, that was lined with candles and bathed in a weird, orange light. He drew the smooth, hairless pudendum of the mannequin in the shop window with long lines curving around the pristine whiteness of the page. Then, on another sheet, he tried to draw the arcade itself, using straighter lines and angles. But he found the control and the economy of these drawings tiresome and soon his hand began to move faster and more erratically as he jerked the pencil in short, sharp movements across the page, drawing the shopfront as a chaotic ensemble of lines and limbs and hastily composed objects. He tried to capture the effects of the light, starting with simply drawn rays emanating from a lamp and then, unsatisfied, tried to shade in parts of the window with heavier, more densely concentrated pencil lines until the whole composition seemed far darker and more crowded than he had wanted it to be.

The drawing turned out much like his picture of midnight in the city of Melbourne, entirely destroying the sense of light and glass he had wanted to capture, turning the mannequins into fearful things of terror, leering out of the thickly drawn darkness like ghouls. Realising his error he decided to finish the picture by adding more extreme and grotesque features to the figures, giving them bulbous red eyes and exaggerated, gaping mouths. In the space around the window he drew a mass of tiny objects hovering in the air like a cloud of insects. Diamonds, coins, combs, scissors, a dagger dripping with blood, a crucifix on a chain, a gun, a glove, a little doll with its hair sticking up erect, a spider, a snake, a pair of bloodshot eyes, a coffin, a skull, a saucer and cup, could all be made out of the frantically drawn minutiae encircling the harpies in the shop window like a halo of detritus. The picture finally nauseated him. It was as if something had gripped him and his hand, quite mechanically, had run out of his control. He had wanted calm, and instead he’d drawn a kind of sick, sensual anarchy.

Ondine put down the spindle and moved over to Paul looking at the picture as she took up a piece of paper and started on her own. She drew his face, concentrating on the pale freckles standing out against his white skin, giving the cheeks a greenish glow as she shaded them, and the eyes a deep blue, with a faint, yellowish outline. She drew calmly, changing colour quickly and pedantically, as if just the right amount of each were the essential secret of her portrait. Paul watched her, noticing that the skin tones looked better when they were tinted with blue or green, rather than red or brown, which was his instinct. He returned to his first picture, which he began to amend following his sister’s use of these colours, smudging them with his thumb into a mysterious, fleshy form, the promise of a garish vitality that, for a moment, pulsed with life on the page before him.

Later, when the children were asleep, Albert paced the house scrutinising the drawings his children had left lying about on the floor. Anna sat on the couch reading Ada Cambridge by the light of an old oil lamp, trying to ignore Albert’s agitation, which was grating on her nerves. He was on the verge of saying something to her, but caught himself, realising that he didn’t have the words to express succinctly the sense of anxiety that mounted in him as he looked at the sketches. He had detected certain tendencies in himself, but detection and a degree of understanding did not render him capable of self–mastery. Accepting his own failure in a resigned and apathetic manner he was still, nevertheless, hopeful that Paul might be able to summon the powers of concentration and self-control, the absence of which had unhinged him. My son should be able to keep his head down, he thought to himself, and at that moment Albert glimpsed the vortex to which he had slowly sacrificed all the sounder principles of life and wondered at the folly of his own delusion.

He wanted to say something about this to his wife, but the formulaic rhythms of their life together precluded confession as surely as it did intimacy. The sense of their partnership fulfilling itself according to the remote and automatic logic of hollow contractual agreement, in which man and wife were simply the masks they adopted for the sake of convenience, was now so apparent to him that he would have felt foolish and even a little bit insensitive reintroducing something of himself into their intercourse. There was no telling what it might have sparked in her. She seemed to sit there on the edge of hysterical self-revelation. Albert had no idea about Dr Winton, but in moments of clarity he hoped that Anna had been able to find something more than what the four walls of their cottage offered her, that she had been able to stumble after and perhaps lay hands on her own chimeras and draw life out of some secret source untouched by the poison that slowly seeped through the crevices of their marriage.