Gracious Living (13 page)

The hands were magical, not only with music, not only with her generous affection, but also with food. Of all Kate’s memories, Lottie Rosten’s table figured most prominently. It was not simply that school boarders were in a state of perpetual hunger, it was the type of food Mrs Rosten prepared. And while she was an easy person to love, to eat her food was to love her more. She even managed to transform lamb into a delicacy. Coming from the country, from a lamb-growing district, Kate had, she believed, been weaned from the breast to lamb; she thought she knew lamb – loin, chump, forequarter chops, legs, shanks – she thought she had eaten enough lamb for a lifetime. But she was wrong. Warm and rosy and a little surprised after her shower, Kate sat with Vivienne and the Rostens for Friday night dinner. Friday night was the sabbath, a special night. There were blessings said over candles and wine and bread. ‘Like the Catholics,’ Kate said. ‘Not really,’ Mr Rosten replied, and he talked a little about how Jews did not really go in for symbols and images, how Judaism was a religion of reason and explanation.

‘People can spend entire lives exploring the meaning of the old texts, the Talmud, sometimes just a tiny portion for decades. Jews aren’t satisfied with symbols, symbols are a step away from meaning, from the essence of a thing, and it’s meaning and understanding which bring the satisfaction.’

‘But isn’t language symbolic?’ Kate asked.

Mr Rosten looked surprised; he nodded.

‘Well, aren’t Jews with their texts studying language, aren’t they studying and using the symbolic system of language.’

‘I stand corrected,’ Mr Rosten smiled. ‘I meant symbols in the sense of imagery, icons, symbols which have become images with a meaning all their own, images that have lost their referent, these are of little concern to the Jew. Am I clearer now?’

Kate thought so, and although she would have liked to have
heard more, the food started to arrive, and the food was, to a twelve-year-old boarder, much more important. The soup was first, and while it was delicious it was the lamb that settled into Kate’s memory as perhaps the finest dish of all time. ‘Garlic and rosemary and a coating of honey make the difference,’ Mrs Rosten said, ‘and a drop of wine in the gravy.’ Whatever it was, Lottie Rosten’s lamb bore little resemblance to the grey piece of flesh sitting in coagulating fat that used to grace the Marley table. The vegetables, too, were unlike any Marley vegetables; instead of spongy lumps of potato and pumpkin oozing lard, the Rosten vegetables were sliced, sprinkled with cheese and onion rings and baked dry in the oven.

Years later Kate would describe Mrs Rosten’s cooking as a good novel: each page propelled you to the next, each dish made you eager for more; and being an eater in her youth as well as a reader, Kate swallowed considerable amounts of both. The Marley Irish stew clogged with chalky potatoes became goulash or beef bourguignonne under Mrs Rosten’s touch, and lamb’s fry and tomato gravy became kidneys in a rich brandy sauce. One day Mrs Rosten cooked brains, but, Kate reasoned, even the best chefs must have their off days, and when asparagus appeared at the next meal, fresh asparagus spears eaten in the fingers with a butter sauce, the lapse with the brains was forgiven. And there was Jewish food too: kreplach in the soup and potato latkes and kugel, but best of all gefilte fish served with sliced carrot, a dish as unrelated to fish and six of chips as Mrs Rosten’s home-made icecream was to junket.

Not only was the food a joy, but the house itself. It was filled with paintings and sculptures, not ordinary art, not the Australian print with sullen gums and blue-soaked mountains, not the embroidered wall-hanging praising God and home. The art was modern, forcing the eye to see the essence of things: the huge forehead of the bronzed woman, the threatening thrust of the jaw in the painted man, the slices and plains of mountains that erased any thought of a curve, trees where leaves were fractured light and wood layer upon layer of cells linking at angles that held the world together.

When the meal was finished, the dishes washed and fresh coffee poured, Kate stood in front of one mammoth woman’s head, longing to touch.

‘Go on, go ahead,’ Mrs Rosten said.

The surface was cold and hard on her skin; the edges cut sharply but the planes were smooth – like a lake, glassy with ripples, on a day with little breeze. The bronze was more tactile than visual; Kate looked at her fingers, surprised that the slithery coppery stuff had not rubbed off. The full flat forehead was enormous, jutting hard over eyes gouged with thought. ‘Just like Judith,’ Lottie Rosten said. ‘My mother,’ Vivienne explained. The eyes were deep, too deep to see the pupils, if indeed there were any, and the cheeks of straight intersecting planes were gaunt and long. The mouth was open but not distraught, it was a mouth working at something, neither tranquil nor frantic; you saw the strain but you also saw a faint smile, or at least Kate thought it was that. The figure was difficult to decipher, difficult for Kate who knew about happy and sad and angry and tired, knew too, about struggle and doubt but only privately, never glaring at you like this.

‘It’s a self-portrait,’ Vivienne said, ‘my mother was a sculptor.’

They talked about art, they talked politics, they talked ideas. The dinner table was the site for discussion. In the Marley home meals were functional: the clock struck half past seven, half past twelve, six o’clock, food was on the table, music or news on the wireless, the family sat down, food was consumed, dishes were cleared and washed, and life continued. Talking was somehow frivolous unless there was something to say – ‘I need more hair oil, Jean’ or ‘You children are expected at the church working bee on Saturday’ – talking was not something you did for pleasure, unless you were Robyn and talking was all you did.

The Rostens viewed it differently. For them conversation was a celebration, a journey of delight.

‘And now that I’m retired and we spend more time together, there’s even more to discuss. Galleries, concerts, books, so much more now. Although,’ Mr Rosten leaned across and patted his wife’s hand, ‘historians never really retire, they go on forever. Like Jews.’

He was an odd historian, Mr Rosten said, and an odd Jew for that matter, because he looked at the gaps in history. And while there were times when he missed the students, the release from teaching had been a blessing, he had so much to do.

‘But how do you know the gaps are there? How can you know about nothing, an absence?’ Kate asked, and then immediately regretted what she guessed was one of those questions that block the door to heaven. But the Rostens were delighted and encouraged her to ask more.

‘You have a fine mind, my dear,’ Mr Rosten said that first night. ‘Nurture it well, ask your questions, read, write, and above all, reflect. We’ll hear more of you in the future.’

‘Nana and Papa think you’re very clever,’ Vivienne told Kate at recess time the following Tuesday. ‘They say you have great promise.’

Kate was twelve. It was the first mention of promise but not the last. It worried her – she felt she’d not earned it quite honestly: she knew her skill at the piano had fed the impression.

‘You must play us something,’ Mrs Rosten had said after Friday night coffee and chocolates.

Kate decided on the Bach ‘Prelude in E Minor’ – a restrained, deceptively simple piece, but one which she believed showed her maturity, even though Chopin would have better demonstrated her technical virtuosity. The Bach was an excellent choice and the Coleridge-Taylor that followed even better. Mrs Rosten applauded her efforts and invited her to join in some four-handed pieces. It was all so exciting that when the girls finally went to bed Kate was convinced that even heaven could not match the Rosten household.

‘Tonight has been the best night of my life,’ she whispered to Vivienne.

‘I like you too,’ Vivienne said and was soon asleep.

Over the next five years Vivienne and Kate were best friends. They talked about everything, even their parents, and for the first time in her life Kate shared her disappointment in the pair that had been allotted to her. ‘Although,’ she said, ‘I’m sure if they loved me more I’d find them more satisfactory. The point is, if they
weren’t prepared to love me they shouldn’t have had me.’ And Vivienne always understood. ‘We love you,’ she would say, ‘we love you.’

Throughout the years of boarding-school, Kate spent every mid-term and free Saturday with the Rostens. They loved her and talked with her and taught her. Kate blossomed with their attention; no longer was she so careful, no longer was she so regulated by others’ opinions. As the chains loosened, she revealed a rich imagination and a strong sense of fun, she delighted in discussion and was developing into an eloquent and entertaining conversationalist. One day Mr Rosten asked Kate what she wanted to be when she was older. ‘I want to be a philosopher,’ she said, ‘I want to think.’ Mr Rosten went to one of the bookcases and selected a book. He leafed through until he found what he was looking for – a photograph of Rodin’s Thinker from the
Gate of Hell
.

‘The thinker is an observer,’ he said. ‘See how he perches atop the human mire, he looks and he ponders,’ he leaned his old face towards Kate,
‘she
looks and
she
ponders. But see also, the thinker sits at the gate to hell, not heaven. From the beginning of time the thinker has had an uneasy existence, saddled with a certain,’ he paused to think, ‘a certain impurity. Remember the tree of knowledge in the story of Adam and Eve?’ Kate nodded. ‘The thinker is distrusted, the thinker is feared, almost as if everyone knows that knowledge is power, which I don’t believe they do, not consciously. The thinker is not in the society, is not of the society, the thinker balances at the edge, precariously. It’s a strong person, a determined person who remains upright on that precipice; on the one side is the culture that has been seen too well, and on the other is a crazy hell in which the thinker’s mind can no longer be trusted by the thinker himself,’ again he acknowledged the young girl, ‘or herself. It’s a difficult course you’ve chosen, and yet without the thinkers, without the sight of those that peer under the surface of things we’d be even more savage than we are. We need our thinkers, you’ll show what can be done.’

But Kate Marley did not and Martin Rosten was very sad.

Oddly, few others noticed, and there were many who could have, for as the years passed Kate found herself increasingly popular. She was different, her friends would say, Kate could make the ordinary trials of life exciting. Under the influence of her imagination the boarding-house food with its stews and leathery meat, its sallow vegetables and white sauces became a series of magnificent feasts, and the greyest, most forbidding teachers acquired exotic histories that, without any change in their behaviour, somehow made them more tolerable. Miss Groves, a sadistic ex-missionary who taught maths and scripture to the fifteen-year-olds was a case in point. Kate made up a story of how Miss Groves’s abuse of the girls, her insistence that they sit for long periods cross-legged on the cold floor with hands on heads, sit like that in silence for no reason at all, and her dreadful taunting of the Asian students, was all a result of a thwarted love affair during her time as a missionary in Tonga, with a married man in her spiritual care. Kate would supply the basic stories and everyone else would add the details. It was the girls’ secret game and it made life easier. Over the years Miss Groves was not the only teacher to be described engaging in practices that never in her wildest dreams would she have indulged in.

By the time Kate Marley started university she was accustomed to being an object of interest, even though she was often perplexed by it. Where she had failed with her family she succeeded with her friends; she learned how to get attention and how to win love, only her needs remained a mystery, and not knowing what they were or how to make them known she took everything that was offering. Her friends knew none of this, they saw an intelligent young woman, extremely entertaining but with a certain mystery. The friends were many and soon there were lovers too, and they all wanted her badly, wanted to be within reach of her voice. And once there they did not want to leave.

Dear Vivienne,

she wrote in April 1964, after five weeks at the university,

I only hope Oxford is as good as the University of Melbourne. I was so worried about starting here without you, but I am managing extremely well. College is heaven, and because of the full scholarship I’m treated with a certain deference, and not just by the other first years but by all the students. It’s all such a change after boarding school, but, as you can imagine, I’m adapting quickly. The work so far is easy, and with so much free time – only 12 hours of classes each week – I’ve had no trouble fitting in a part-time waitressing job (and much need for it, I can assure you!). Plenty of time too, to drink coffee in the caf. (I now drink it black without sugar, it’s my new sophisticated image) and talk. There’s never been so much talk, and while the classes are easy enough, the reading I must do for the sake of my social life is quite another matter! The Existentialists are at the top of my list, but also it would help if I knew at least something of Nietzsche, and Hegel seems to be very popular. As for Marx, he is essential reading – particularly if I’m going to get anywhere with Harry. Yes Vivienne, Harry. A
MAN
! He’s in third year, combined politics/philosophy major, absolutely brilliant, and he has his eye on me. He’s also a Marxist.

Must dash to philosophy, I’ll finish this later.

Later.

Back again, and already I’ve borrowed
The Communist Manifesto
from the library. I’m surprised it’s so small – and yet with so much to read I suppose I should be grateful. I envy you these few months before you begin in September. I quite like the subjects I’ve chosen. Philosophy is good, although sometimes I can’t help but think it has very little to do with real life; your grandfather says my attitude will change as I read more. I hope he’s right, because at the moment we seem to spend entire tutorials in heated argument of minute issues that will never change the world and no one much cares about anyway. For example, do you lose sleep wondering whether the table in the next room still exists even though you are not there to perceive it? English is
much the same as at school, even down to the authors – Shakespeare, Austen, Richardson, Milton, Blake, and so on. We don’t move into the twentieth century until third year. Fortunately the approach to French is quite different – very modern: Sartre, Gide, Ionesco, Camus, Prévert. My conversation is still appalling despite hours spent in the language laboratory, but the literature is really exciting. Such a contrast with ancient history which is a real drag, I cannot imagine what made me choose it – as if we didn’t have enough of Romans storming the battlements in our Latin classes. Although you’re quite the wrong person to complain to. I still find it extraordinary that you actually
want
to continue with Latin; and here was I thinking you’d only bothered with it for your entrance scholarship. Such a little soldier you are, or, as Horace would have it,
Audax omnia perpeti
.