Amanda said she would have the fish of the day. She looked too skinny; Jonathan could not remember young women ever being so thin. The accepted ideal shape for a woman was getting smaller and smaller; soon all young women would be expected to be the size of infants. Amanda’s waist was ridiculously tiny; if he put his two hands around it his fingers might meet. She wasn’t drinking.
‘The Hunter Valley, please,’ he said, ordering himself a glass of Shiraz to go with his lamb, even though it was lunchtime and a weekday.
‘So. How are things, sweetheart? Work okay?’ He realised Amanda never asked him anything about his life. She was still young enough to believe he was born when she was; for her, he had no real existence beyond her own.
‘Work’s fine. I’ve got a gig with an after-school program.’
‘That’s great news,’ he said. He waited for her to elaborate, but she did not. He’d forgotten that conversation with his children was a question-and-answer routine.
‘Seen Mum?’
‘Yeah. When you and Mum are finally divorced, she and Cath will probably rush off and get married. Maybe they’ll ask me to be bridesmaid,’ she said.
Amanda was watching him, a sort of smirk on the face that was so like her mother’s. He saw that she was asking for reassurance; through the smirk, the old fear, the desire for a mother and a father to be like the sun and the moon, irrevocable as the earth’s turning.
‘She won’t get married again, sweetie. Not in a million years.’
Amanda looked relieved; she was a child, not yet willing to put on the harness of adulthood.
Sarah wouldn’t get married again, would she? He recalled a dinner party, shortly before she left, with two gay architect friends, and an impassioned debate about the value of same-sex marriage. He recalled Sarah saying that marriage was essentially a patriarchal institution devised to protect the rights of men and why would any two women want to parody it, let alone two men? But Alex argued that was irrelevant; the critical point was human rights and gays should have the same rights as heterosexuals. If only Jonathan had listened harder; if only he had ears and eyes and a heart that would tell him everything, every secret sigh, every secret breath, every secret faltering step a person takes in moving away silently but surely from another.
Amanda was going to carve in ink upon her skin the name of her new boyfriend.
‘I hope he’s got a nice name,’ said Jonathan. He was pretty certain the ink would last longer than the boyfriend.
‘He’s got a beautiful name. Raphael. That’s partly why I’m getting it done. I’ve always loved that name. And now I’ve met the man to match it.’
He pictured her baby skin, unbreathed upon, her miniscule fingernails, the merest flakes, like slivers of shells. The tender envelope in which she came wrapped, still carrying some sacred scent, and now traced with needles, branded like a cow. He would never get it, the carving, the blood, the ink; once the province of hard men who went to sea, prisoners, low-lifes, and now the realm of privately educated, middle-class young women. She had a twenty-centimetre blue butterfly tattooed on her back and a ladder of tiny Chinese characters running up the nape of her neck.
When they had finished lunch he said goodbye, feeling vaguely unsettled. In his head Jonathan carried a cherished picture of family conversation, in which true words were said, their exact meaning conveyed. In this imaginary conversation there was perfect accord, perfect understanding. As he walked away from his daughter now he recognised there was not much difference between Amanda’s yearning for parents as fixed as night and day and his own dream of a perfect conversation. He was beginning to think this conversation—indeed the cherished, idealised family to which the conversation belonged—did not exist.
Back at the office, Jerry knocked and stuck his head around the door. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ he asked.
Jonathan opened his palms; a gesture of helplessness.
‘DERM are pretty keen on it going ahead. The DG’s got a bee in his bonnet because the minister wants it. Good news is that they’ve got Buckley’s. It’s bullshit.’
‘Excellent,’ said Jonathan. ‘I think.’
‘The minister’s a dill. He won’t listen to advice from the department. Have you seen him? He’s about two feet tall, totally up himself.’
Jonathan smiled. ‘Sounds dangerous.’
‘Mate, you know my theory about small men. Everything they do in life is compensation. Hitler? Five foot eight. Napoleon? Five eight. Stalin? Five eight. I rest my case. This bloke’s about five foot nothing in his platform shoes. Lucky he’s not in charge of an army.’
‘Better not say that too loudly,’ Jonathan said. ‘I’m sure there’s some anti-discrimination law you’re breaking.’
‘I’m an unreconstructed alpha male, mate. We’re a dying species.’
It was true: for all his Labor left politics, Jerry did not get feminism, sexism or homosexuality. He equated Sarah’s going off to bat for the other team with someone going insane. There was much in modern life which Jerry did not understand, much less approve. Jonathan feared for Jerry’s daughters and sons, for all the tattoos to come, the wrong boyfriends, the wrong wives, for all the inevitable wrongness ahead.
The next day he called Anna and, just before lunch, they met and walked around the Gallery of Modern Art. It suited her, the elegant space, the blinding white, the amplified air. She wandered off and he watched her form, her grace, the effortless lines, tapered legs seamed to curved hips. They ate in the restaurant on the terrace; the air around them spicy, fragrant, perceptively changing from spring into the warm reach towards Queensland summer. Anna spoke in her winding, meandering paragraphs about Hartford House, where she had lived, with such tenderness.
‘It was built by Latrobe, the architect who designed the White House. It’s Palladian, in the spirit of Greek temples, which were never originally intended as human shelters, of course, but as houses for specific gods. Latrobe’s god for Hartford was Apollo. His inspiration was the Temple of Apollo on Delos.’
He watched the movement of her mouth.
‘Apollo’s the god of hunting, you know, as well as the god of music and the arts. There’s a beautiful plaque above the entrance to the library of him playing a pipe, wearing the skin of a wild beast he’s just killed.’
He tried to picture her life of hunting and grand houses; a son with a French name at boarding school in the country. He took a sip of wine. ‘You seem remarkably well informed.’
‘It’s only because I adore Hartford. I wanted to find out everything about it.’
‘I thought those grand houses were all owned by the National Trust. Death duties and what have you,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘Most of them are. Various large chunks of the Hartford estate have been sold off over the years, but the family’s managed to hang on to the house. Hartford’s open to the public three times a year, too—to paying guests—and we always hold a village summer party.’
He saw her, dressed in white, walking on green lawns adorned with bright flowers. She was like someone from another century.
‘The army requisitioned the house during the war. We had the library refurbished a few years ago—dry rot—and we found American cigarettes and army scarves under the floorboards. Once I found a Georgian doll in an attic room. Porcelain, beautifully preserved. It was like stumbling across a perceptible ghost.’
He could not say what compelled him towards her. She had no job, no visible means of support, and had apparently spent her adult life flitting from husband to husband. She lived in England, for God’s sake.
‘You remind me of Jean-Christophe,’ she said. ‘The same tristesse.’
He waited.
‘Gaspard’s father.’
‘Is that good or bad?’
‘Oh, definitely good. Jean-Christophe was the most sensual man I have ever met. Our carnal appetites were exquisitely matched. The trouble was every other woman also thought he was the most sensual man she had ever met. And he loved women.’ She gave a hopeless sort of shrug.
Did she move her hand towards his, or was it the other way around? He looked down and their fingers were laced; he felt the warmth and softness of her skin, which lived in greenness, in mists, beyond the reach of the Queensland sun. ‘We should make love,’ she said. ‘I’m tired of tears.’