A Tale of Hobnobbing with Poms
Charade reaches behind the heavy coiled radiator in the hallway and feels for the envelope that should be taped to the wall. Yes, it is there. Can this be interpreted as commitment of a sort? Or has he always done this, done it for all the nameless visitors? She removes the key and lets herself into the apartment and waits.
All day she has been promising herself that she would not come. Sitting in a dive in Central Square, the one where she works as a dishwasher, barmaid, jill of all trades (illegal, no papers, below-the-minimum cash payments, afternoon and early evening shifts), she stared into a mug of beer and told herself: There comes a point. Etcetera.
“Listen, kid, ya been great.” That was Joe Parisi, her boss, eager employer of illegal labour, no race or creed refused, an equal opportunity exploiter. “It’s just getting too hot, is all. Too many Salvadorans, makes it rough all round. Immigration johnnies thick on the ground, sniffing everything down to the ice cubes.”
“Yeah I know,” she said. “It’s okay, Joe. I’ve been thinking of —”
“And that’s not all. There’s other fuckers poking round too, God knows who and I don’t plan to find out.”
“Joe,” she said, “it’s okay. I’ve been thinking of heading on home anyway.”
“Well, great. Beer’s on the house,” he said. “Listen, I got a friend is a lawyer. Let me know, huh? A kid like you, straight, clean, no complications” — he holds her arm up to the light as though it were a bolt of cloth, as though he were quality control foreman on colour — “ya know what I mean? Shouldn’t be no trouble at all to go legal.”
She considers that: a student visa, a legal life in the dorms where she camps (not that she’s the only one moving from room to room: a black market service, covering for absentees, filling cracks, keeping parents happy; dormies, they call them.) But then again, she tells herself: There comes a point.
So she sat at Joe’s counter, finishing the drink that was on the house, and wrote to Bea.
Dead ends in all directions, she wrote. Just as you promised, Mum. And another thing you told me a long time ago, about love, that women’s disease. Have one bad bout and then you’re cured, that’s what you told me. So I’m coming home for the cure. Don’t worry, no baby. See you soon. Love, Charade.
She walked past the Central Square Post Office and mailed her letter, then she told herself: I’ll hang around the dorm tonight, pack my things, spread the word that I’m leaving. I’ll say goodbyes. Or maybe I’ll take the INBOUND subway to Boston and browse the bookshops one last time. Maybe I’ll have a final splurge on remaindered books.
Yes, that’s what I’ll do, she tells herself as she drops her token into the slot on the OUTBOUND side of the tracks and, preoccupied, stares down the smoky tunnel and waits for the train to come snaking its way out from the city. Or else, she thinks, I’ll spend the night holed up in the Humanities Library, nowhere near Building 6 or Physics. I’ll start working my way out of science and back into history. Yes, definitely, she decides, as her body from sheer habit walks itself onto the car bound for Harvard Square, takes the escalator up to the street, walks through the Yard, past Mem Hall, into the region of elegant old Cambridge houses gone condo or turned into apartments. Faculty Row. It is as though she were being dreamed.
Enough is enough, she says to herself as she feels for the key and listens for the sound of Koenig’s car.
Koenig, as he pours two brandies, comments on the importance of meandering discussion as a prelude to breakthrough. He waves a hand, summoning up analogies: like stretching exercises, he suggests, to the long distance runner who will break a record. If she sifts enough family anecdote, the answer that lies waiting to reveal itself will surface. He talks and talks. Consider Heisenberg, he says, on the eve of the matrices thing, a mathematical breakthrough … Koenig cannot stop talking. He is weak with relief, but dares not say he is glad she came for fear of raising the issue of departures. Whenever he pauses, a sense of endings rises through the silent cracks between words.
I must be out of my mind, she thinks. You can’t pry anyone loose from an obsession. He belongs to Rachel and his guilt and always will, the way I belong to loss and absence. We all go round in circles, we’re doomed.
What can she say of the effect that is produced by his hand and his wrist as he gives her the brandy? It is just a hand, after all: veins cross the back of it like small bunches of string, light catches a few hairs beneath each knuckle and at the wrist. It is just a hand. The fact that certain regions of her body respond extravagantly; that she wants to put the hand against her cheek, her breast, her belly; that she wants to taste it and stroke it: all this is just one more convoluted, arcane and ludicrous game.
As for me, Charade thinks, I’m bailing out.
“… and Bea,” Koenig is saying. “She has to have answers, it stands to reason. It is Bea you should be talking about.”
“Bea’s difficult,” Charade says. “It’s hardest with someone who’s too close. Bea’s a patchwork. I’d have to cobble her together from other people’s talk, Michael Donovan’s mostly, who got it from his dad. And from Babs, who used to be a barmaid at the Duke. I tracked her down. But Bea’s difficult. I’d be very unreliable on Bea, we’ll have to skip her.”
But she will tell him what happened in England.
Koenig raises his eyebrows in surprise. “England? What has England …?”
“I told you that, early on, when you never paid attention to me. It was England I went to first, before Toronto.”
Koenig’s relief is so visceral he can taste it in the brandy. She is talking again, she is wound up, she is off and away.
“It was Aunt Kay’s advertisement that started this whole wild goose chase. The ad for Verity, you remember what I …? Right. But I didn’t write to Aunt Kay, I’m not sure why.”
Koenig watches how she clasps and unclasps her hands.
“Well, I suppose I know why.” The hands are clenched, keeping boundaries clear. “Mum and Aunt Kay … there was a final rift, I guess.” When the knuckles uncramp, Koenig notes, and come to rest against the dimple in her chin, at these moments she has the air of someone at prayer. “It was round about the time I was born,” she says, and the knuckles turn white again. “I seem to have been … It appears there were multiple explosions.” She laughs briefly. “Yours truly,” she says, with a self-deprecating flourish of her hand, “was the efficient cause, as the philosophers would say. And when the fragments settled, pouff! Nicholas and Verity had vanished. And Aunt Kay and my mum have never spoken to each other since.”
In a burst of nervous energy, she pulls a football jersey over her head. (Football jersey? Whose football jersey? With whom does she stay in the dorms? An uneasiness settles on Koenig’s mind. What does she do with her days? But he is too nervous, or too superstitious, to ask.) The jersey is much too large and hangs almost to her knees.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he says.
“Do what?”
“Perch on the windowsill like that. It’s not safe.”
“What you have to understand,” she says, “is the way that ad affected me. In black and white in the Sydney Morning Herald. It was like … God might as well have spoken in thunder. I thought: My God, they’re real! They’re real people, those two, they’re not just legends. It was like a … I don’t know. A conversion. Suddenly nothing else was as important. I had to know everything.”
Sometimes, because of the slightly matted mass of curls, Koenig cannot see her face at all. “Mum was upset.” Her voice comes muffled through the curtain of hair. “Let sleeping dogs lie, that’s all she said.”
Charade snaps her fingers. “But I was obsessed.” She taps her forehead gently against the window pane: idiot, dreamer, naive fool, she implies. “I’m still obsessed,” she says. “What I am is an editor of my own past. I collect versions of my pre-history, arrange them, rearrange them, and then tell them to you.”
“Aha,” he risks joking, “if you hadn’t met me, you would have had to invent me.”
She misses that one, and describes at a breakneck pace how she combed the records at the University of Queensland. Musty boxes are invoked with vivid gestures, piles of them, mountains of them, crammed in storage rooms off the registrar’s office, personnel and employment records smelling of the Second World War and the fifties. He half closes his eyes, watching the ballet of her talk, the fizz, the animation, her garrulous hands. He is waiting for the blaze, the grand jeté, and here it is: the moment when she found some terse and impersonal entries under those fabulous, those mythical, those perfectly real and ordinary names: Nicholas Truman and Verity Ashkenazy. They had both resigned, within days of each other, at the end of the academic year of ’63.
“I was born,” she says, with a carefully timed theatrical leap down from the sill, “that October. And they resigned in early December. And over here,” she says, as she settles in the armchair and hugs her knees, “JFK was shot in November, which came, believe it or not, to have a bearing on my first month of life.”
“What is curious,” Charade says, “is that there are plenty of people still teaching at U of Q who were there when Nicholas and Verity were. And not one of them knows where they went or why. Or so they claim. Now that strikes me as more than passing strange.”
And then there was Nicholas’s father, Charade’s grandfather, the younger brother of the Seventh Earl of Something, who was supposed to be a real estate swashbuckler in Sydney.
There were tales, Charade says, in every pub from Bondi to Parramatta, but they all petered out into haze. No one knew what had happened to the flamboyant Pom. According to one version, he’d been so drunk at a yachtboard party one night that he’d fallen overboard and drowned in Sydney Harbour within sight of the Cremorne ferry dock. According to another, there had been shady deals, too many quick speculative turnovers of waterfront property, and he’d left the country post-haste just ahead of the law.
The only thing, she says, the only clue that struck her as grazing against possible truth instead of legend, was dropped by an old-timer at the Rigged Ship, a pub on Circular Quay.
“Alfred, his name was,” the old-timer said. “We used to call him Alfred the Great. He had a kid, a smart little bugger, young Nicky.” Charade felt pins and needles run along the full length of her arms. “Chip off the old block, young Nick was. Always reckoned that kid would get himself in and out of trouble as many times as his old man did. Should have placed bets on it.
“He came in here, Alfred the Great did, he came in here one day and drank five whiskies neat.
“ ‘Struth!’ I says to him. ‘You trying to croak?’
“ ‘Jesus, Jesus,’ he says. ‘It’s Nick. Gotta ship him back to England fast.’
“Had to bugger off fast himself then, he said. Perth, I reckon he said. Or Borneo, was it? Somewhere like that, some bloody place at the edge of the world.”
And then? And then? Charade asked.
But the old-timer cadged another beer and drifted on to grievances against horses and jockeys, certain winners, who had let him down.
And apart from that, Charade says, there was just that one afternoon in the staff club at the University of Queensland … For the umpteenth time, she’d gently removed the hand of a professor from her thigh, and this time, from deep in the fog of his third beer (and an unrelated bitterness over an article rejected for publication) he’d taken offence.
“A bit up yourself, aren’t you?” he’d demanded. “Like your father, the bloody Pom. There’s always someone to watch out for you lot, isn’t there?”
“How do you mean?” she’d asked quickly, alertly. “In what way, watch out?”
“Always someone to pull strings. Keep things out of the papers.”
“What things?”
“What things indeed.” He had smirked, bending close, and Charade sensed a sharp appetite for nastiness. Instinctively she leaned away a little and something ugly showed in his eyes. For a second she thought he was going to strike her but he stood and bowed sarcastically and said with soft menace, “What things indeed.”
Turning to go, he swayed slightly. A barstool rocked, paused, crashed over. “What things indeed,” he murmured, leaving.
“I was frightened then,” Charade tells Koenig. “I knew I was tracking down an answer I wouldn’t want to know.” (Let sleeping dogs lie, Charade.) “But obsessions …” She gestures helplessly. “Anyway, I reckon that whatever happened was hushed up quick and clean, and the records were laundered.”
And what was the sum total of the evidence in Verity’s file? Almost nothing. Reason for resignation: personal. Forwarding address: left blank.
And this was what she found on her father. Reason for resignation: Offered position in UK. Forwarding address: c/ Alicia and Penelope Truman, 36 St Ann’s Mews, Twickenham. London. UK.
“They’re his aunts,” Bea told her. “His father’s sisters. You’re not going to get anything out of them, from what I heard. There’s another sister, married, and she’s worse. Let sleeping dogs lie, Charade. I had a good time with your father, what more do you want?”
In Koenig’s bedroom, Charade muses on that. “There was good sport at my making,” she says. The football jersey bounces lightly at her thighs. “That’s something. That’s definitely something. I don’t know why it isn’t enough.”
“Why did he go back?” she’d asked Bea.
And Bea told her; “A certain kind of Pom always does.”
“They left together, right?” Charade asked. “They got married before they left. Or else in England. They must have, right?”
Bea had gone on shelling peas, and the peas drummed into a chipped enamel bowl like hail.
“I was mad that she didn’t answer,” Charade confesses, pleating the football jersey, rubbing one bare foot against the other like a fly. “I tried to goad her.”
Here is Charade in a tumbledown house in Tamborine, with a cacophony of voices, the sounds of younger half-siblings, in the air. “I guess I have more half-brothers and sisters in England, hey Mum?” She sticks her tongue in her cheek and says in a plummy Brit voice: “My little brother, my half-brother Julian, is going up to Oxford next year.” She laughs. “What do you think, Mum?”
And Bea says quietly: “I got no opinions on that,” and goes on shelling peas.
The in-between, Charade says, is tedious; the letters sent to the Misses Alicia and Penelope Truman and not answered, the saving up and getting there — all that’s another story, and a boring one, not worth telling. But the being there is worth a short tale.
Once upon a time, Charade says, a young woman with the improbable name of Enigma, armed only with her Australian accent and a foolish quantity of hope, went tapping on the door of her history. There was a brass knocker beneath leaded glass inserts, a profusion of wisteria at the lintel, and lavender, hollyhocks and roses in all directions. The house was in Twickenham. When the door opened, she smelled the Edwardian era.
“Oh my dear,” said Miss Alicia Truman with a rustle of violets.
Her sister Penelope put a hand to her throat, where the points of a lace collar quivered.
“We shall have to enter her,” Alicia said, circling her slowly. “Yes, her name will definitely have to be inscribed. She has Alfred’s eyes. Another branch, another twig.”
“Where will it end?” asked Miss Penelope. Her breast rose and fell beneath the purest wool cloth, cloth so woollen and so pure that a phrase (from Thackeray? from Carlyle? from Burke?) lodged itself in Enigma’s mind: woollen stuff. She wanted to touch it, to know the intimate and whimsical kiss of hackles. She half reached out with a questing hand.
Penelope, incredulous, clasped her arms across her breast and stroked her woollen stuff herself — an involuntary gesture — in search of comfort. From the napped surface of her sleeves rose sweet and musty and calming thoughts of Harrod’s, though her visitor caught a whiff of camphor.
Alicia patted her sister’s arm. “The sherry, my dear,” she whispered. She made her eyes go very bright. “I think it’s absolutely dashing to have a young … a young connection from Australia.
We’ve met some lovely Australians, haven’t we, Penny? Remember that ball before the war?”
Miss Penelope offered sherry (Bristol Cream) in Waterford crystal, and turned back to the decanter and the sideboard. At the nape of her neck, the collar of Valenciennes lace betrayed not so much as a pucker, not a wrinkle, while she poured a quick glass and gulped it down. It was delicately done. She refilled her glass. “Lovely,” she confirmed, though a small furrow between her eyebrows bore witness to a struggle in summoning up Australian names. “And you mustn’t think,” she murmured on a swell of graciousness, eighty proof strong, “that anyone would dream of blaming you for where you were born.”
“Nor for the circumstances,” Miss Alicia hastened to add.
“Every family has its Alfred,” Miss Penelope sagely observed.
Oh Alfred, they sighed, smiling at each other and settling onto the Queen Anne settee. What a naughty boy he was. What scrapes he used to get into. Remember the country weekend in Buckinghamshire? Oh dear, they laughed. Oh dear. And their laughter was like music boxes being opened.
“Australia was the best place for him, really,” Alicia said. “Some very fine families have sown their wild oats in Australia. Though Father was furious at first.”
“It was the suddenness, you know.” Miss Penelope shook her head. “And the waste. Such a splendid marriage, vis-à-vis society I mean. Thrown away, simply thrown away.” She flicked her frail little right hand over her shoulder, once, twice, three times, to illustrate reckless abandon. “And taking little Nicholas with him.”
“His poor dear wife,” Alicia sighed.
“He was besotted with that boy from the start. The actress’s child, wasn’t he?” Penelope shook her head in fond dismay. “Oh Nicholas, Nicholas, what a little madcap he was. Bad blood will out, I’m afraid.”
“Sarah — Alfred’s wife, you know — was a saint about Nicholas, an absolute saint,” Alicia said. “Alfred was so … impetuous, so stubborn about things like that. Insisting on grammar school and riding lessons and having Nicholas always in the house. Living here, I mean. Just as though he hadn’t been born” — here Alicia rolled her eyes slightly upwards to show what a woman of the world she was — “on the wrong side of the sheets, so to speak. Sarah was a saint about all that.”
“She looked very well in black,” Penelope mused, the impeccable gowns of the impeccably abandoned Sarah in her sartorially educated mind’s eye. “She was very fortunate in that sense.” Penelope again stroked her own woollen stuff, which had talismanic powers, and cast down her eyes. “But in other respects …”
“Though once we came to realise …’’ Miss Alicia, conspiratorial, leaned forward on the settee and lowered her voice. “He was such a naughty boy about liaisons. One could never know who might make trouble. It was a gallant thing, as it turned out, a gallant thing, even Sarah had to agree. I mean,” she said, with a thrill of horror in her voice, “imagine if he’d been here when the scandal broke.”
“Of course,” Penelope smiled fondly, indulgently, “he has made it most awfully difficult to keep the tree up to date. The unofficial side, I mean, the ah … But the records, complete records, must still be maintained.”
“Oh dear yes,” Alicia said. “Branches and twigs, branches and twigs, you have no idea.”
“The tree?” Enigma blankly inquired.
“Two South Africans!” Alicia gleamed, leaning into the fabulous labyrinth of family history like the wingèd lady on her Rolls Royce.
“… that we know of, ” Penelope said. She touched the points of her collar.
“Another branch,” Alicia explained. “Before Alfred sacrificed himself… oh yes, well before he left for Australia …” She dropped her voice to the whisper favoured for daring pronouncements. “He was only fourteen the first time. Right in the house with a scullery maid. Father was stunned.” She fortified herself with sherry. “Oh yes, from well before his marriage, but it didn’t stop there, the bad boy. Even during the marriage I’m afraid there were …” She paused delicately, searching for a word.
“Love children,” Penelope said.
“Oh yes. We don’t even know how many. And now each of those …”
“It’s a kind of epidemic,” Penelope said, discreetly reaching for the decanter.
“One of them, we understand” — and Alicia leaned forward, her eyes glittering, a hand to her palpitating heart — “in fact the first one, the scullery maid’s son, went to India with the 58th Highlanders in ’46 and stayed on.” Her eyes invited Enigma to consider possible battalions of Anglo-Indian cousins.
Enigma smiled and said politely, “My father Nicholas. He came back here in 1963?”
Isn’t it adorable, they smiled at each other, the way she talks? Such a quaint, such a wittily outré accent, the Australian one. Oh and as for Nicholas, they smiled, settling comfortably back into anecdote shared and worn smooth as a pebble. A chip off the old block, we’re afraid. A regular scamp.
“One of his, it’s the little Canadian one I believe?” — Alicia raised her eyebrows at Penelope, who nodded in confirmation — “she’s only fourteen or fifteen, a very sweet child. She’s at Thornhill Academy for Girls. She comes to visit once or twice a year and plays her clarinet for us. Your half-sister dear. Isn’t that quaint?”
“My father …” Enigma’s voice faltered just a little. “Then he didn’t marry the woman who … What happened to the woman who came here with him from Australia?”
Both the Misses Truman leaned forward slightly on their cushions, fluttering, giving off a soft whirr of interest. Enigma thought of hummingbirds around a syrup feeder in a garden trellis, the way they marked time in air. What woman? asked the bright waiting eyes of her father’s aunts.
Enigma said carefully: “I have reason to believe that when he arrived back in England, he was either married to, or travelling with, a woman named Verity Ashkenazy.”
A little gasp of shock escaped from the tastefully arranged lives of the Misses Truman, and trembled through their silver-grey curls. Ashkenazy, they murmured. Or rather, their lips silently shaped themselves around the word. “Your mother?” they breathed as one, and Enigma saw herself catalogued with the Anglo-Indian cousins: exotic, racy, not so much disreputable as endearingly, non-threateningly, deliciously dangerous.
“No,” she said. “Nicholas ah left my mother, in a manner of speaking, for Verity. At least, I think so.”
They patted their knees with the air of having sewn up a complicated matter (though not without a smidgen of regret, not without wistfulness for the risqué road not travelled) and ran index fingers along the trim creases of sideseams and pleats.
To the best of their knowledge, they confessed, there had been no woman with him that time, though perhaps dear Sarah — He hadn’t realised, you know, that she wasn’t his mother, oh dear such a shock it had been for poor Sarah when he turned up like that without warning. They smiled; it was typical Nicholas behaviour, oh dreadful dreadful really, but only to be expected, and rather lovable in its own outrageous way. And they did find it charming to have this Australian connection. It made the tree so interesting, so far reaching, a kind of King Oak of the genealogical forest.
Enigma cleared her throat and put her Waterford goblet on the side table and gathered up all her courage. “And where is my father now?”
Oh my dear, they smiled, turning up their hands (it was like Queen’s Birthday doves released from cages in Buckingham Palace). Oh my dear. With the most elegant, the most sinuous of movements, they shrugged their shoulders. Who could say? they wondered. Who could even hazard a guess at the name he was writing under now?
“Footloose, incorrigibly footloose,” Alicia said. “When I pick up The Times, I ask myself: Could this be from his pen? Or this? With absolutely no way of knowing, of course. No way at all.”
“India, Africa, Uruguay.” Penelope shook her head in wonder. “Sefton claims — you’ll be meeting Sefton shortly — Sefton claims there are books and books by your father.” A born storyteller, a writer for newspapers, even a novelist, so people said. At any rate, a compulsive liar. “Sefton says there’s a tragedy behind it, that he can’t stop running. But really, you know, I don’t think we need a theory like that. I think it’s simply … well, son of an actress, gypsy blood, that sort of thing.”
“Though you must admit, Penny. It’s perfectly Alfred too, it’s really very very Alfred. He used to drive Father mad with his stories.”
“The position,” Enigma said. “He came back to take up a teaching position. Which university was it, could you tell me?”
Dear me, they said, reproachful, mildly offended. They could be quite certain that Nicholas had never been one of those. Swashbuckling perhaps, a bit of a rover, a dilettante, a literary man in the sense of Dr Johnson or Oliver Goldsmith or even Laurence Sterne, that naughty trifler; a literary man who roamed the world and wrote amusing pieces under a pseudonym. But he had never been one of those scruffy university people.
“One could say, I suppose,” Penelope mused, “that Marlow is scruffy.”
“Marlow’s kind of scruffiness,” Alicia said firmly, “is different. But there have never been, I am pleased to say, any academics in our family.”
“Well,” Enigma said, standing and smoothing down her skirt, “perhaps I’d better be going then.”
But my dear! they protested. You simply can’t leave yet, we haven’t had dinner. And we’ve planned a little surprise for you. Your cousins, your second cousins have been invited, our sister Isolde’s children. In a sense, they explained, strictly speaking, they belong to your father’s generation — they’re his cousins at least; but Isolde was much the youngest, and her two are not much older than you are. They’re dying to meet you, they’d never forgive us if … And you will be surprised, oh won’t she? We’re not such old fogies as you think. And besides, they said, Marlow and Sefton, they’re in the same kind of, ah, the same demi-monde as Nicholas. Artistic. Bohemian connections. Why, it’s probably no time at all since they last saw him.
And so, of course, Enigma was seduced, and she dallied, and “Oh!” Penelope clapped her hands with delight. “I can hear
them now.”
“I’ll have dinner served,” Alicia said.
“Personally,” Marlow announced, a forkful of roast pumpkin paused meditatively between the dinner plate and her mouth, “I can say that everything I do, every artistic statement I make — and I’m speaking particularly of my more recent work, especially the experimental feature films that Sefton and I have worked on in the last five years — every cinematic declaration is done for the sisters.”
Enigma, working her way through brussel sprouts that had been boiled rather longer than necessary, waited for clarification.
“Not that many of them thank me for it,” Marlow said.
Sefton, seated on the same side of the dinner table as Enigma, swivelled sideways. He watched Enigma with inordinate interest, and translated for his sister. “Marlow is years ahead of her time. She’s a genius.”
Yes, it’s true, acknowledged the lowered eyelids, the slightly twitching eyelids of Marlow, who was absorbed in mashing her pumpkin with her fork.
Enigma studied her second cousin, the genius, who was gaunt and hollow-cheeked, a little carelessly malnourished, perhaps, in a style that Enigma suspected was thought of as “interesting”. Marlow’s abundant hair, of no particular colour, was pinned up very loosely in a topknot. Strands fell about her neck and face, not unbecoming. She wore a man’s shirt and a man’s trousers, both baggy, bleached to a wan absence of colour, purchased from an exclusive survival-clothing mail-order catalogue (the labels were stitched to the outsides of the pockets). Aggressive Bohemian, Enigma would have called the style. Every few minutes Marlow reached down inside her shirt and scratched. Her feet, which were bare inside handmade sandals, seemed clamorous; look! they demanded: my toenails are ragged and filthy. And I don’t give a fuck, they seemed to say (unless you fail to be shocked).
Alicia said brightly: “We saw a lovely Australian film, didn’t we, Penny? All those dear little schoolgirls on a rock somewhere. It was terribly sad.”
“I cried and cried,” Penelope admitted.
“Oh really.” Sefton put a hand to his brow. (He was dressed in Expensive Bohemian, leathers and velvets.) “Such schmalz, my dear aunts, you can’t be serious. Appallingly portentous stuff. We find Beresford, Peter Weir and those chaps rather … infantile, I think is the appropriate word.”
“Absolutely dreary’,’ Marlow said. “Dreary,” she repeated, stifling a yawn. “All that bourgeois symbolist crap.” She reached down her shirt and mopped at something with a damask napkin. “Of course, one can’t expect post-colonials to do radical work. White post-colonials, that is. They’re too busy proving themselves to Mummy Empire.” Sefton emitted a single trumpet note of laughter. Marlow contemplated Enigma as though trying to determine how much translating down she should do. “Sefton and I,” she said, having made an assessment, “are very involved in Third World artistic endeavours.”
Penelope patted Marlow’s hand, much as though she were a difficult spoilt child. “Sefton and Marlow were in Australia last year,” she said. “For a film festival. They were showing one of Marlow’s films, the one she made in Australia.”
“Oh yes?” Enigma inquired politely. “Which was that?”
Sefton said: “Fuchsia, labia, and other antipodean flora. Highly satirical on the Americanisation of your cities.”
He appeared to be memorising the surface of Enigma’s skin. Embarrassed, she met his eyes for a moment, but to no avail. He was impervious.
“And on your impossibly primitive men, and the plight of your women,” Marlow said. “We took an avant-garde approach, of course.”
“Not widely understood in Australia.” Sefton shook his head in incredulous memory. “You would scarcely credit some of the questions the press asked Marlow in Sydney.”
“Absolutely dreary,” Marlow said.
“But then,” Sefton sighed, “what can you expect in a country that has fish knives?”
They both found this killingly funny.
“Our hostess,” Marlow said, speaking exclusively to her aunts in the manner of an adult discussing unintelligible adult matters over the head of a precocious child, “our hostess in Rushcutters Bay, an unbelievably vulgar woman, dreadfully nouveau riche, insisted on serving a fresh fish course absolutely every night.” Marlow pulled down her bottom lip and pinched her nose and mimicked a heavily nasal Australian accent. “Catch of the day, she would say. We thought we would die.”
(I wonder. Enigma asked herself, if they think in italics.)
“With fish knives!” howled Sefton, dabbing at his eyes with a linen serviette. “Oh dear, it was priceless.”
(The tableware theory of moral value, Enigma noted. One of the more profound offshoots of Late English philosophy and Third World artistic involvement.)
“But our little Enigma,” smiled Sefton, leaning archly against her side and rubbing an affectionate second-cousinly hand from thigh to armpit, “wouldn’t dream of using fish knives. She has far too much good taste.”
“Do you use fish knives?” asked Marlow.
Enigma thought of the trestle table in Bea’s kitchen at the edge of the rainforest: the press of grubby little bodies, the laughter, the tussle for the insufficient number of mismatched and battered knives and forks. “No,” she said. “In point of fact, we don’t use fish knives.”
“You see.” Sefton raised a Waterford goblet, triumphant. “Blood and good taste will out!” He slid the back of a hand skilfully up the inside of Enigma’s sweater and pressed her breast. “Any time you’re ready to leave,” he offered, “I’ll drive you home.”
“Thank you,” Enigma smiled. “But there’s really no need. I can take a cab.”
“What a shame,” Sefton said. “I had so much chatter to pass on from Nicholas.”
Beneath the tablecloth, Enigma pressed her hands tightly together.
“How absolutely dreary,” Marlow said. “Personally, I think the Electra complex was one of Freud’s more luridly silly theories. I can’t think of a more boring topic than fathers.”
“Perhaps,” Enigma said, “if you’re sure it isn’t out of your way, Sefton?”
And in the car he said, well it wasn’t the kind of thing he could prattle on about while changing gears, but if she would come in for a drink … and if you’d just, he said, outlining particular tastes, bite the nipples, just so … a little harder perhaps, and push your index finger … ah, in there … gently now. He was fastidious. About sex, she should know, he was something of a connoisseur of the more unusual …
Oh Nicholas, yes.
Well, a bit wet in some ways, Sefton was sorry to say. They’d shared a flat for a while and that’s how he knew. Nicholas had nightmares and babbled on about things in his sleep. Oh, this and that, and something that happened in Australia. Sefton never could make any sense of it. And then, in his cups you know, where he often was, Nicholas was a compulsive talker, a storyteller — only it was the same story over and over again, a thousand versions. A thousand pseudonyms too: the same story under different names, set in different countries. First in magazines, then in books. A compulsive neurasthenic type. Sefton curled his lip with distaste. Bit of a Lord Jim, he was. Saw himself as a tragic hero, has to be always on the move, have a woman in bed by night, talk or write stories all day to keep the black dogs at bay. She could count herself fortunate, Sefton said, that he’d removed himself from the family in a decent and honourable way.
Now, if she could bite his nipples again, a little harder … ah lovely, lovely.
Dear Mum, Charade wrote.
A dead end, as you promised. Except you have to think the best of anyone who escaped from all that. They’re enough to make an undertaker laugh. So why am I sitting in the Red Lion getting drunk and feeling depressed?
And Bea wrote back: What did I tell you? That’s what comes of hobnobbing with Poms.
“Bea,” Koenig says. “It’s Bea I want to hear more about.”
Charade warns: “I won’t be at all reliable.”
“Ah well. Who is?”
Charade closes her eyes in concentration and knocks lightly on her forehead with one fist. “Open sesame,” she says.
“I didn’t necessarily mean immediately.” Koenig sets his brandy down. “Another night,” he murmurs as he slides a hand along her thigh.