The Best Australian Stories (40 page)

Mimi came back. Morning sickness, she muttered. Yes, I know, it should be over by now. Tell it that.

Shall I make a cup of tea, said Sabine. With a plain biscuit. Or dry toast. That's supposed to help. So they say.

Mimi, pink and damp, her black hair spiky round her face, in the intimate just faintly decayed grandeur of her own rooms, was splendid, with her big belly and frowning eyes. Sabine gave her the parcel from Plaisir d'Enfant. Mimi frowned harder. Sabine opened the door to a bedroom, smaller but equally tall, then found the kitchen. The apartment was tidy, clean, showing evidence of the life Mimi led there, with a lot of books, and catalogues from art galleries in a pile, with herbs in pots on a windowsill and a large green-flowered orchid and a computer with beside it a pile of manuscript pages. A newspaper was open at a crossword puzzle. In the kitchen she found a tin of tea and a teapot.

When she took the tea in Mimi was holding the tiny jacket and looking doubtfully at it. Thank you, she said, in a cold voice.

It's an act of self-indulgence on my part, said Sabine. I happened to see it in a shop window and couldn't resist it.

It's very pretty. Mimi put it down and looked at her. This isn't going to be Jean-Marie's baby. He isn't going to take her over.

Heavens, you can't even begin to imagine that he might want to do so. Jean-Marie doesn't do babies. Or children. Never has. Never will. He does not need mortal progeny to carry on his name. His immortality is his books, his words, they will carry his being, his essence, into the future, and far more dependably than any f lesh-and-blood descendants.

Sabine was silent, afraid of the naked bitterness she'd heard in her own voice.

Oh yes, of course, Mimi said reverently. Yes, of course, I should have understood that. Of course there can be no troubling him. She gave Sabine a dazzling smile. I feel so happy about this baby. When I don't feel sick.

I knew an Englishwoman who got morning sickness. She used to eat a large breakfast of eggs and bacon and sausages and toast and marmalade, you know all that English breakfast thing – Sabine gave a faint shudder – and then run off to the bathroom and vomit the whole lot up. Then she'd wash her face and come back and have another large English breakfast, eggs, bacon, sausages, toast and marmalade, and be perfectly all right.

Mimi laughed. How dreadful, she said, with wonder in her voice. One English breakfast, that's pretty frightening, but two!

I don't want to take your baby, either, said Sabine. I after all have Jean-Marie. But I would like to come and visit sometimes, and even help, if I may.

Mimi looked doubtful again.

A baby needs a godmother, you know that. To fill in the gaps. There are always gaps, I know enough about babies to be sure of that.

Well, we can see, can't we, said Mimi. A godmother.

An ancient necessity.

It sounds good.

Yes.

Perhaps.

Mimi seemed after all quite to like having Sabine to visit. They became friends in a wary kind of way. Sabine always brought small rich things, expensive beautiful versions of necessities, which she said she bought because it was such fun, which was true, and Mimi believed her. She didn't go to the birth, though Mimi invited her, there were other young women for that. She waited several weeks, then called in and found Mimi distraught. The flat a mess, the baby crying, a smell of old nappies and Mimi grubbier looking than ever. I didn't know it would be like this, she said.

Sabine didn't either, but had heard. Nobody knows, she said, otherwise the race would die out. Women even forget from one child to the next, so they say. She bought Mimi a washing machine and a dryer and came with pots of soup and stuffed cabbage in plastic boxes to freeze, and champagne to drink, and once a bottle of quite ancient sauternes with a jar of fresh foie gras so that Mimi would not always be submerged in infantile things. The baby was indeed a girl, Mimi called her Louise, and Sabine thought she was quite remarkably beautiful, unlike most babies she saw, with a round little head like a rosy apple with firm juicy cheeks and a cap of spiky black hair and eyes of that milky depthless blue before they let you know what their real colour will be. Jean-Marie had a rather cute tip-tilted nose which she had always thought a quite dangerous feature for a philosopher, and indeed it had once been rather sharply cartooned in a left-wing newspaper, but on Louise it was utterly charming. Mimi started to ring Sabine up and organise for her to come and look after her goddaughter.

*

The strength of a net is the myriad thin threads of which it is made. If even one of these is cut or broken then the precise perfect tension of the whole is irremediably lost. The things which it is designed to contain poke or bulge through it, possibly they fall out altogether, and are lost or broken. Some threads broken mean more threads break, and finally the net is a net no longer, but a snarled and snaggled tangle of threads.

So it was with Sabine's complex net of timetables which held the life at number 23 rue Guy de Maupassant in its thin strong filaments. It had been a kind of magic net which she constantly wove, knotting the threads and checking the work for flaws and weaknesses, her skilful fingers performing the intricate double task of creation and mending, her eyes vigilant. Now threads broke, unnoticed, the tautness was lost, it no longer held. Things dropped through, and were broken or lost. The net began to dishevel, to become lumpy and misshapen.

And then there were the accounts, with their own complicated webs of figures. Bulges there too. Washing machines. Clothes dryers. State-of-the-art prams. Lots of small astronomical sums from Plaisir d'Enfant. Jean-Marie looked at them with a queasy eye. He never had understood them. The balance at the end, yes, in the black always, and that still seemed OK, but there was something strange about the process. He shook his head. It didn't help. Of course, the balance at the end was the thing. That did still look OK.

Things began to go wrong. The house was no longer immaculate. Sabine was no longer immaculate. Jean-Marie put on one of his pearl-grey suits and found a gravy stain on the lapel. He opened the drawer and there were no shirts impeccably pressed and folded in their laundry cellophane. Dinner was increasingly often from the charcuterie or the bakery; once he thought it was a frozen meal, a quite classy one, but certainly not the real thing. The beans had not been picked while still tiny. The courgettes ran to fat. One day some strange cleaning woman burst into his library. He lifted his head in shock. Only Sabine cleaned and dusted the library. He roared. And then … he had lost his train of thought! Something really important, something huge, it was just shaping itself, he had his fountain pen ready, something vital, essential, the thing he'd been working to … and now, what was it? Where was it? Gone. Lost. Lost. His eyes filled with tears. He rushed out to find his wife, but she wasn't anywhere about. He realised that he was alone in the house with the cleaning woman, that Sabine had left him alone with the cleaning woman. What possessed her to do that?

It couldn't be menopausal, could it? Surely she was long past that. Wasn't she? Surely, long past. How old was she? He tried to recall her face, as it had looked at breakfast, say. He closed his eyes and pictured her. Her hair rather long, even shaggy, starting to curl a bit, very grey of course, had been for a while, her cheeks pink, her eyes bright. Quite pretty, in a rather unkempt way. Of course she had been very pretty when she was young, and then always a handsome woman. An elegant bourgeois matron. Always to be depended on to catch the right note of smartness. Not a grey-haired girl with a pink face. He realised suddenly what it all meant. She had a lover. Sabine had a lover. That was it, a glow. It meant a lover. Why was she doing this to him? The anguish, the rage, the bitter gush of jealousy like a monstrous attack of dyspepsia, how could he think in that state? What possessed her to do this to him?

He took off his djellaba, got dressed and caught the train into the city. He would go to a certain little gallery in the Latin Quarter and look at pictures, it was a while since he had bought a picture, and perhaps the lady who ran it would be there, and available in the evening, and if not he could still dine on his own on one of the excellent menus at the Blue Lotus.

When Sabine arrived home quite late and with Louise and found him not there she supposed she must have forgotten he was going out. Mimi was off to Bruges for a conference and Sabine was minding Louise for three days, not just an afternoon. She put her to bed in the pavilion, with the baby intercom she'd bought; she would sleep there herself later.

Next morning Jean-Marie came down to breakfast at his usual time and found no sign of it. He went into Sabine's room, realising he hadn't set foot in it for years, decades even; she wasn't there and the bed wasn't slept in. The shameless hussy. Jean-Marie had to sit down suddenly with the shock of it.

A thought struck him, and he went out to the pavilion. He opened the door, and there she was in her nightgown. A mixture of scents wafted round her, perfumes and powders and sweet fleshly odours. A naked baby lay on the table. He gaped.

That's a … baby.

Sabine smiled up at him. Yes, she said. She was tickling its tummy and helping it kick its legs. The baby gurgled and Sabine pressed her face into its stomach and covered it with kisses. Her hair was askew and she had no make-up on. Her face was shiny and quite red.

A little girl, as you see, she said. A little girl, in the pavilion. Always girls in the pavilion. Always betrayals in the pavilion. Betrayals, ha ha, that's funny. She laughed, a long throaty laugh.

My breakfast, said Jean-Marie.

You know where things are, said Sabine. Well, I suppose you don't. But you can learn. It's logical really. And you, my dear, are above all a man of logic.

She started shaking white powder over the baby as though she were flouring her in order to fry her. Her fingers paddled in it, a little cloud rose up, and she talked loving nonsense words. Giggling. Cooing. A woman her age, making a fool of herself. As people always have, always will, offering language and love to each new generation. Louise looked in her eyes and laughed back.

Jean-Marie did not see this, the love and language. He saw a woman immune to reason, a woman it was impossible to talk to. But he tried.

My breakfast, he said, again.

Sabine was folding a nappy with skilful fingers, wrapping and pinning.

It is long past the proper hour.

She looked at him then, and smiled, a dazzling triumphant tender smile, but so strong, so tough, so serene, that his words were shredded to pieces like a wave against a large smooth rock in the sunlight. The words shredded into fragments without meaning, not to Sabine, who was moved by them no more than is a rock serene in the sunlight which a wave dashes itself against, and not to Jean-Marie either. He did not know what to do. Words had never lost their meaning before, not to his colleagues, his students, his acolytes, however subtle and difficult they found their sense, and never to Sabine, who normally needed very little telling, who answered his wants by instinct. And certainly never to himself. He could not remember when he had spoken and it had not meant anything.

Make me a cup of coffee, dear, while you're at it, she said. I should feed Louise now she's had her bath, she'll be hungry.

Whose is she? Jean-Marie asked. For a terrifying moment he thought she might be Sabine's child, but surely she was too old, and wouldn't he have noticed her being pregnant? And he certainly hadn't fathered it. He knew how long it was since he'd made love to her.

She's my goddaughter. Her mother is a friend. Isn't she simply adorable?

Jean-Marie grunted, and with a small swing of his djellaba which was meant to be masterful but felt simply petulant, turned in the direction of the kitchen. It was long past time for his breakfast. That was why he felt sick.

On the Splice

Emily Ballou

Ella James Garfield Bird had been named after her father James, a clockmaker, and the assassinated twentieth American president. Ella had always wondered why they even bothered with the Ella part, so clearly had they wanted a boy. Her father felt President Garfield had never been given a proper chance. He'd been shot twice in the back at a train station after only four months in office. ‘Nobody will ever name his son after him,' he had said. ‘I will.' Her dad never used her first name, but called her Jamie, and if somebody said Ella, he'd look up in shock as if he'd forgotten; as if he'd forgotten it was a daughter he had. Her mother called her Birdie.

As a child, Ella privately thought it worse that President Garfield, the first left-handed president, had been shot before he'd had a chance to board his train. She always thought it'd be better to die on the way back from somewhere.

When she was little she'd dream who she might have been if she'd actually been James Bird and not Ella Bird, and she'd recite to herself, ‘James Bird … stuntman … James Bird … bear trainer …' It was a practice her partner Dan had kept alive, repeating to her whenever she was tired of her job and threatening to quit, ‘Ella Bird … taxi driver …'

‘Ella Bird … endocrinologist …'

‘Ella Bird … taxation specialist …'

‘Ella Bird … dust collector …'

At the moment, she was testing out Ella Bird … librarian. She had a job in the National Library's rare books and manuscripts room, helping Ada Tims, the head librarian, with copying various important historical people's correspondence, 1826–1856, etc, etc. She liked this work. She liked to sit up in the ancient, attic rooms of the library and turn the cranks on the old, compact stacks, watching them slowly inch open by means of mechanics to reveal hundreds of years of paper offerings. Shelves with wheels on runners saved on space and provided moments of wonder in an otherwise ordinary room.

For some reason, when she first applied, she thought she'd be copying out letters scribe-like. She'd forgotten about microfilm. She watched as the parchment-thin letters were captured in flashes of photographic light in the basement studio. Each flash, she felt, preserved its contents, but took them closer to their true extinction. She had to carry the letters down in a box. She wanted to stop in the ladies' room and riffle through them. Would someday a girl like herself be transporting a box of Very Important Emails, working on a project to preserve, catalogue and copy Such and Such's Electronic Correspondence 2000–2050, a major official primary source for archival history in the first half of the twenty-first century? But who kept their emails? Who would build the archives of the future? What would future historians have to plunder? These things she worried about.