Avenue of Eternal Peace (15 page)

Until there came a singular, baffling dream.

He was a horse galloping swift as mind down a long drive that wound through snug hills and golding vistas, a landscape of promise delivered, spring and autumn. His own motion, and a larger motion beyond his power, carried him eagerly through pine-covered cleft and wooded park, rainforest and open country where cattle lay beneath mighty spreading trees, through awesome wilderness and great good places to warm Arcadian Eden. As the horse galloped the scenes revolved, down a turning drive, back, to a place (he could not place it), a mansion of many rooms, one added to another over the years, in a declivity of scarlet earth, in a sea of ripe wheat, with the sound of ocean beyond.

It was a museum with polished floors and watery light cast through long windows onto worn country timber in well-proportioned rooms. On tables, melons and peaches nested in porcelain, and stars floated in crystal glasses of half-drunk wine. On a dining board by each place setting sat a small bronze fox, blackened, after Donatello.

The horse's hooves struck the floor with a din. Through windows a sloping greensward and terraced Italian garden were visible where men in white togas were dotted about. Despite their theatrical whiskers, worn to make them look old and stately—greybeards of powder and greasepaint they were, with pencilled wrinkles and receding latex hairlines—he recognised among them his best friend from high school who was a trade union leader; he saw those of his contemporaries who had become doctors, and those thinkers who had become tax lawyers and media managers. He saw those bright sparks from the lab in Cambridge who were professors and professionals. And there was Harvey Heilmann bent like a tree for all his swimming. The men on the lawn conferred with solemn animation, colleagues, but boys all, in their silly robes. Arranged in Socratic dialogue on the grass, the figures were attending a symposium. They represented Western Mind—high-toned blokes with painted faces. Was it in Athens? The westering sun soaked garden and hills in apricot nectar. Had they gone outside Florence to escape the plague? Somewhere on holiday? Beyond the shrubbery was a stand of soughing white gums, and a kookaburra cackling.

The horse stood by the window and from the half-filled glasses on the table came an ethereal kind of music that should have been inaudible. A cavity of his horse-brain noted the music as Mozart's for glass harmonica. Then suddenly, quite oblivious of the docile stallion, girls and women swept through the room as if summoned by the current of sound.

The women wore light, gathered robes that revealed their bodies through gauze, as in frescoes by Ghirlandaio. They laughed and whispered, reaching for each other as they hurried, mothers and grown daughters in a wise, passionate sisterhood. And the men on the lawn one by one cast their gaze towards the house, rubbing their hands, and one by one broke from their debate.
Ewig' Weiblich zieht uns hinan
…

And the horse nosed forward after the rustle of women, through long dream corridors as the crystal music died away and another music was heard—earthly fleshy sound. He came to the last crowded room, with men craning at the back, women at the front, and at the very front not visions but the women he knew—Bets's friends, the dancer, the abortionist, his mother-in-law, Cindy from Coogee, all in a solid phalanx—and leaning against the grand piano, her silver-blonde hair streaming, tanned shoulders bare, head high, mouth delivering that song was Bets—his wife.

A hand seemed to grab and wring his guts. The room was empty. The toga'd men and gowned women had vanished. He was a man again, and across the empty polished boards of the long sunroom he stared at her, in jeans and singlet, singing from the piano the old song.

Where was she? They? As day closed the hills burned with warmth and light, yet were cooled by zephyrs laced with sea tang. The nip of eucalyptus, the sweetness of hawthorn, the perfume of magnolia reached the mind from some displaced garden. Where was this dream that combined in one present too many enchanted stages of the past?—the house at Whale Beach, the upstairs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the rented Tuscan villa, the flat in the other Cambridge, Tintagel, the holiday shack near Pigeonhouse Mountain, the city pub where he found her that night at the piano, with her friends around, singing her lungs out. Then it became that other night on the terrace above the growling sea, and she was there not in jeans and singlet or quattrocento gown; just in her flimsy nightie.

6

‘I didn't want you to know before I did,' she said. ‘I've been seeing Geoffrey Mithers.'

Wally blinked.

‘Darling—' she said, reaching both her hands.

His own felt grubby after his night out, but she was sweeping aside such trivialities. She had floated free of accusation. At least that was her tone, a wafting lightness reserved for matters of utmost gravity. Mithers? He had never imagined, allowed for, a serious adultery. For all their separateness, he and she were too mature for that. One of his own colleagues?

‘Geoffrey wants me to go into hospital,' she continued, ‘for tests. A biopsy.'

The facts so briefly recounted were commonplace in Wally's line of work. It was as if she had told him of a minor domestic problem she had trouble with that he as a man could fix in a jiff; the kind of thing that need never become calamitous for sensible informed people like themselves. He refused to follow the implications, refused at first to respond.

‘Well?'

He was squeezing her hand with all his pressure and her hands were cold, his hands moved up her arms, he hugged her, as if to hoard the precious warmth of their two bodies, two drumming heartbeats. Over her shoulder the white fringe of the black sea was like a line of fatty tissue attached to the monstrous heaving organ.

She'd had pains, chronic indigestion, she's been passing blood. Knowing something was up, she'd gone to see Geoffrey—poor man!—asking him to say nothing to her husband. She hadn't wanted to burden Wally. Anyway an intuition or fear, a possibility like the present, had to be faced alone. She wanted to know first. Geoffrey's preliminary tests had determined the need for acting straight away. And Wally wasn't there.

‘Bloody hell. Mithers is a goon!'

From the tone of her singing that he heard as he came into the house, and the heavy serenity of her body, he guessed she had already renounced all alternatives but the worst; the patient's clinical reaction, that usually intensified into guilt or anger, the power of her spirit was even now turning to a kind of gildedness, in the early hours of this cool, clear morning. Dawn would come …

By first light Wally was talking professionally. They should not jump to conclusions; if the diagnosis was made early enough … there was no one path for disease but an infinite number of permutations in which medical science could intervene at many stages. Nothing was irreversible. He was the committee man selectively dealing out the Janus-faced news. Bets nodded at the plausibility of his trade. At last she yawned and said she needed a shower. They made love instead and as the new day stirred they ignored the first of the telephone calls and sprinted down to the beach with long skidding steps.

There was never a point at which the truth was spoken. Perhaps there was no truth: as Wally kept insisting, the situation must be considered multivalent. His optimism was resolute, Bets's light-hearted hopefulness the attitude required. Only once, without Wally's knowledge, did she talk candidly with Jerome. The kid shunned her at first, involuntarily resisting the wound; then came very close.

For month-long stretches of almost normality, the cancer did not change, as all held their breath before the next lurch downwards. And there was always the possibility of remission, in no one's power to effect, though Wally believed it should be his if anyone's (even as Mithers continued to handle the case). Wally committed more and more medical improprieties. He got at Mithers. He called for second and third opinions, and scoured the latest publications in the journals. On flying trips to the United States, Britain, Germany, he consulted with the best and worst of his colleagues and old mates, some of whom were moved by his uxorious devotion while others regarded his behaviour as a frantic quest to salvage
amour-propre
: a campaign to vindicate his life's work in medical science and his faith in humanity's capacity to side with growth.

Bets submitted with good grace to a punishing regime of treatments, from diet to radiation to the latest complicated hormone manipulation. Most she resented being discussed as a case. Among her friends she confided only in Aldo, who knew a miracle worker who used strenuous meditation to achieve remissions of forty per cent. In the end Wally looked to quackery too. Only partly submerged in the relentless pursuit of a cure, his anger was directed chiefly against himself—the mockery of his idealism—and himself as a representative of the fat vanity of the medical fraternity whose knowledge had scarcely advanced a step since Hippocrates—and himself as a member of a species that was nature's whipping-boy. There was no case here for dignified philosophical acceptance of the inevitable. A fine healthy woman in her thirty-seventh year struck down by a stray biological bullet that did not kill cleanly but inflicted the most humiliating wastage.

Half her insides were cut out and reorganised with clamps. Then followed another plateau of laughing lunches on the terrace above Whale Beach in a capricious winter of sunshine and squalls. Then another lurch, a metastasis. A stepped-up course of chemotherapy was set up using technology of greatly improved accuracy, the famous silver bullets that the hospital had specially flown in. Wally was to meet Bets in the clinic for the first session; only she didn't turn up.

He had not even known where the place was, and when none of the numbers on her telephone pad answered he had to look up the Angel in the yellow pages. On the corner where he parked streetwalkers stood wearing raincoats over their miniskirts. The voice came to him as soon as he was inside the door, in the rowdy, muggy downstairs bar that opened to the street. The voice came from over his head, and he stomped towards it up the wooden stairs.

She leant against the upright piano, her thinning grey-gold hair brushed out and frizzy from rain earlier in the day, her shoulders and fleshless arms tanned like polished wood. She wore a scrap of a singlet that hardly covered her and tight jeans, and her brilliantly made-up face was red from drink and grey from chemicals. She gave the impression of hot bronze. Slipping a bit, she reached for her glass and propped herself against the piano's vertical, while around, basking in the radiance they conferred on her, were the original communist, the ex-nun, the abortionist, the Liberal politician, the drag queen, the richest woman in Edgecliff. An intrigued young audience hung about, kept in line by the woman who ran the pub. Aldo was at the keys.

Bets was singing that old love song. She sang both the man's part and the woman's, and her voice achieved extraordinary depths and colours. She sang as she had never sung before, in ultimate self-delivery, bound and yet released, so beautiful and sad. Her mouth was taut, her eyes a caked mess of tears. Her smile lines stretched as she saw Wally standing impotently behind the crowd. And for him, who would remember all the other times, she sang
Bess, you-izz my woman now, you-izz/ And you must learn to sing and dance for TWO IN-STEAD OF ONNNNE!
Rejecting further treatment, she was on her own.

7

The new leaves on the little magnolia they planted in the drive were burned by salt. After the trip from the crematorium father and son looked morosely across the food they were obliged to eat, searching each other's eyes for rescue, hating the sunshine. A year passed before Wally could decently extricate himself. His grief took the form of scathing disgruntlement with the vanity of medicine. The certain way to convey that sentiment, needling his colleagues to his immense satisfaction, was to suggest that Western medicine had exhausted itself. Though his colleagues lost patience, he half came to believe in his new attitude. From deep in his memory, from a pregnant time in his career, he fastened on a Chinese name and, burrowing through his files, came to those old papers as signposts to the road not taken. He proposed, as Chairman of the Department, to invite this Professor Hsu Chien Lung to be a Faculty Visitor. Letters were written, the quest began. But to the Faculty's relief the fellow never materialised. Wally's colleagues wanted no venerable Chinaman, and facetiously advised Wally to go to China himself. He surprised them by agreeing. He believed the Chinese could offer some useful pointers. He needed a change of scene. In his heart of hearts he also knew that the stake was greater. If he didn't get away from that terrace overlooking the ocean, he would go crazy. He must escape the depths of his emptiness, and the knives of his guilt.

8

The dream singer became mute, as if the dream's sound was turned off, and Wally heard his own guttural moan as he rolled over and grasped at the empty space beside him in the bed. Dreams come from nowhere to taunt with intimations beyond our powers, creativities we cannot possess. From the grey vacancy of his existence Wally had summoned up such colours and presences as made him sweat. Better if they left him alone? That would mean he was dead. He caught as he could at the crumpled rope of bedclothes, the dream that had been his torture his only comforter.

With the lights on, he fell asleep again. There was a knock at the door. He answered in his dragon-embroidered robe, and frowned when he saw the woman who had slipped in past the attendant and up the stairs. Before he could express his surprise she had taken up a position in the centre of his room where her head drooped modestly. By way of introduction she spoke one or two phrases of compressed Chinese that Wally missed. Apart from Mrs Gu, he had never had a female caller at the College before. This one, in a black slacks suit and hair up inside a cap, could have passed for a boy except for the mask-like made-up face. Pink and puce shadings over the cheeks; green, black and white in a zebra pattern around the eyes.