The Northern Clemency (84 page)

The perfection of the day surely heralded some big positive alteration in her circumstances, and on the way back, Alexandra paused outside the Manly Dress Shop. It wasn’t really called that; it was called, just like Mrs. Grunbaum’s shop in Broomhill, Belinda’s. It was a proper dress shop, though, with a beige summer suit and a pink-and-black
striped cocktail dress in raw silk in the window, the mannequins canted backwards as if recoiling from an explosion of light. She looked down at herself: although she had sat on a beach for an hour, her dress was elegant, and she could feel her hair might have been styled by the wind. She went in; she talked to the manageress; she asked for a job; and they gave it to her, just to see how it would work out. She told them her name was Alex, and they agreed to pay her, for the moment, cash in hand.

Any kind of ambition had, it seemed, been drained entirely away from her, and, within weeks, she was more happy than she had ever known, just advising rich girls from Sydney on the perfect look for them. It made her laugh; she couldn’t believe that, even now, the way she had learnt how to talk gave her some kind of edge in this place full of beauty. They actually thought, some of them—and Marion, whose shop it was, was one—that Alex had some kind of innate sense of elegant European style because of where she came from and how she talked. Marion made suggestions to her customers nervously, looking over at Alex for frequent confirmation. “That’s simply gorgeous,” Alex would say, or, every so often, “It’s a nice dress, but I don’t think it’s exactly—let me suggest—” And they were grateful. It was preposterous to Alex; she would have sacrificed a good deal to have been one of those people, dress sense and all. And yet she was utterly happy in her ill-paid job, with no responsibilities, and her sunny little flat, on the second floor of a building three streets from the ocean. It was utterly enough.

Though she had made her way by being English—“terribly terribly” was the phrase they used of her, she couldn’t understand it—she was damned if she was going to spend any time with the other English in Australia. Every single one she met seemed to drink like a fish, and to be regarded by the surrounding Australians with a kind of jocular terror, which tended to come out in tentative forays into insults. She was taken to an event at the modern art museum—she still hadn’t made it to that transported Graves on the hill. She went with a group of those friends who, here, seemed to accumulate from nowhere; they’d suggested it, thought she’d enjoy it because it was an exhibition of new British painting, shipped all the way over here, classy. They’d lasted fifteen minutes of gazing into their glasses of free wine before Alex let them off the hook by saying, in her most pukka tones, “This is bloody awful, let’s go to King’s Cross and get awfully pissed.” They liked that. She wouldn’t care if she never saw another English person again.

Before long, she had to remind herself that she had any kind of family, and what had been a commitment to write every single week without fail was sometimes put aside. It wasn’t that there was nothing to tell them; it was more that she didn’t really want them to be tempted to come over here. She could feel herself shedding her ties like a dog shaking itself after a bathe. Even the question of getting in touch with Chris, who was supposedly the reason she had come, seemed repulsive, as if he were part of her English life; her letters home always contained a short paragraph, steadily growing shorter as the months went by, of plausible lies about the dickhead. She couldn’t even remember what he had looked like. After six months, her voice, which was such a benefit to her in her pleasantly crummy job, started to grate on her.

She had a love affair; she enjoyed even its eventual unhappiness. He was older than her, and tanned into a leathery sort of state beyond his thirty-five years; the dry skin at his neck tasted like heavily salted crisps, and you expected him to dissolve under the tongue. He’d been married once; she’d moved back to Perth, his wife, with the nine-year-old twins, and he was putting too much weight on the relationship from day one. She didn’t care; she gave it five months, and it took five months.

One weekend, he took her to a friend’s house in the Blue Mountains. She hadn’t been outside Sydney since she’d got there, and amused him by asking if they were in the outback yet as soon as they were clear of the suburbs. It was a glass and wood ranch house, way up a back road, bone-shatteringly bumpy by night, and when she woke in the morning, a vivid slash of red clay through the eucalyptus groves and, incredibly, full of kangaroos. She’d never thought of seeing such a thing, but he laughed at her when she woke him up to come and look at the kangaroos in the mist of the morning. “There’s plenty to spare,” he said.

She wandered out on to the veranda; there was a mother and a baby, grazing a couple of feet apart. They stopped when she came out, and beadily observed her. She took a step closer, and another, and another, stopping only when they thumped off in their laborious way. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you,” but with one more step, the baby took a single leap and—she couldn’t see how it was done—was feet first back into the mother’s pouch, just the end of a foot and the black snub nose and a lumpiness under the fur to show that anything was there. The mother lumbered off. Alex had never seen anything so wonderful in her life.

But the weekend was a matter of grey tinned food and dried preparations and endless boring beer, and the television was up the creek, and by the end of it she was pretty sick of Dirk. It wasn’t his fault. They were perfectly polite in the car going back—he talked, as he often did, about the ways his first marriage had failed—and a couple of weeks later she ended the relationship, badly. She couldn’t mind anything; it was all just fantastic. And immediately afterwards she regularized her position with the authorities, left the dress shop and went to do exactly the job she’d been doing in England for one of the biggest insurance companies in Australia. Their billboards were everywhere—you couldn’t miss them; and after three more years she spoke like any Australian, and she lived in a flat with a terrace in Manly.

Alex had heard once of a way of life that had tempted her: a girl she had met at a party at university, somebody’s elder sister, who said that for four years, she’d worked each year for six months at an office job, and then with what she’d earned and saved, she took off to some really low-rent part of the world—Greece, India—and sat there for the next six months. She’d been a confident, drawling sort of girl, and her existence seemed better organized and better planned in its concentrated pleasures than any other Alex had ever heard of. “Like cocks and box,” the girl had said, to an admiring but uncomprehending audience at the party. It seemed to Alex that, though she couldn’t plan a life like that, hers had quite naturally, in some respects, fallen into similar rhythms. When she looked back over the five years since she had arrived in Sydney, it turned out that her life divided into two, and she alternated between two positions. For five months each year she would be with a man; it would come to an end, and she would be single again for seven months before she started thinking it might be nice to have a boyfriend again. Both had their pleasures; the pleasure of discovering somebody, of the sex, of giving yourself over to somebody, of settling into domesticity, of anticipating the end, of looking forward to being single again; or on the other hand the pleasure of being able to do exactly what you wanted, of being able to go out on a Friday night with whoever you felt like asking, of undertaking small domestic improvements, of staying in and trying out face-packs, and, finally, of anticipating the pleasure of meeting someone new again, to have someone dopy to go to bed with and to take you out for dinner. The rhythm had reached a kind of steady level, and it was surprising that the qualities of the man himself weren’t reflected in the length of the relationship. It always ended up being around five or six months, for some reason.

She went on writing a letter every few weeks, but with less and less to say; she got herself a camera, and in the week before she was going to write, she generally took it out with her and photographed a beach party, a night out, lunch with some group of friends or another, just to have something to send and something to explain. She photographed, too, those small domestic improvements, once even sending a photograph to her parents of a new iron she had bought. Most of her letters were just accounts of one or other outing, giving not much away. After three years, she sent a letter saying that she and Chris had decided to call it a day; she thought it might grow awkward, never sending her parents a photograph that included the long-forgotten figure.

To her surprise, a week or ten days later, the telephone rang, and it was her mother, full of concern; it took her a moment to remember what she had to be concerned about, and she took three minutes to work out, from her mother’s delicate questioning, that she might be under the impression that, without Chris, there was no point in Alex staying in Australia. That she might, incredible as it seemed, be thinking of going back to England. But England was dead to her or, as she put it, “I’ve really got my whole life here now.” And once a year, towards the end of November, she always cleared an entire day, and sat down with an old list, and sent a pile of Christmas cards to anyone she could think of in England. In the first three or four years, she included a photocopied letter with the cards, saying what she’d been up to and how she was getting on, with a photocopied image of herself looking tanned and happy in a swimsuit on a beach. It would arrive in an England sooty and harsh, stripped of any colour. After a few years, she stopped including this, and her cards just said Love from Alex, and if she was sure there was no possibility of the invitation being taken up, she might add, to Daniel Glover, for instance, “You must try and come out some time—it’d be a blast …”

In reality she never thought of England. When she first arrived, she had thought immediately that this city was like a Sheffield that had died and gone to heaven. If, on the other side of the world, there was a city that was rooted deep in its geology, hauling up blackened shapeless treasure from the depths of the earth and turning it into money, here was a city that seemed to float on the surface of the water. She had no idea, really, how Sydney made any money; it just seemed a matter of unrooted confidence, exchanging sums, one for another. She learnt,
too, a notion of family that suited her, however new and strange it at first appeared.

“I haven’t seen them for years,” Toni said—she was a journalist on the
Sydney Morning Herald
, decisive and punctual in her judgements. “It’s stupid to keep it up when you’ve nothing in common with your parents.”

“Do they live in Sydney?” Alex said. It was a late-night conversation; they were lying on a pile of beanbags on a veranda, overlooking the blue-black warm summer of the sea, a trail of silver leading across the surface to the huge moon and the silver Southern Cross Alex always looked for, as once she had looked for Orion and his belt. It was a party of some guy Alex had never met before; Toni had told her to come along, and she had.

“Mum and Dad?” Toni said. “No, I don’t think so. I grew up in Canberra, you know—the last I heard, Dad had retired from the Civil Service and they went to live on the Gold Coast. I guess they play canasta with a lot of other retired civil servants all day long. I’ve got nothing in common with them. There wasn’t a row, we just lost touch.”

It seemed wonderful to Alex that you could do such a thing, cut yourself off from the guilt and burden of family, and live entirely in the surface-skimming world of this city, reflected in the water. She knew she couldn’t do such a thing, and the letters and the Christmas cards continued without a break. What seemed strange to her at first was that Toni, for instance, was very hot on the idea of Australia’s ancient history, on Aboriginal heritage, on the Australian earth’s unbroken history over the millennia; she introduced Alex to people who told her, unblinkingly, that they were Aboriginal. She’d never say such a thing, but she couldn’t help observing that some were hardly darker than she was, and some actually had blue eyes. She rethought her ideas of the culture; she did her best and bought two Aboriginal paintings from a gallery on the harbour front. But Toni laughed at her when she saw them.

“That’s stuff for tourists,” she said, when she saw them hanging, one on each side of Alex’s big picture window. “They’re done by Aborigines, sure, but it’s not their culture. They just sit in a big shed near Alice Springs with a cut-out potato and four jars of poster paints, and they get on with it, all day long. You want to see proper Aboriginal painting, you need to go to the museum, but they go for a fortune now, a really good Clifford Possum Tjapaljarra.”

“A what?” Alex said.

“Clifford Possum Tjapaljarra,” Toni said, without hesitation. “That stuff’s serious, but these, it’s just interior decoration, right? It’s not something you should have in your house if it’s not your culture.”

“Well, I just liked them,” Alex said. “I don’t care if they’re worth anything or not.”

“That’s not the point,” Toni said. It was as near as Alex had ever come to having an argument with anyone in Australia; even the men tended to come to an end with a brisk agreement, a chilly nod and a swift departure. And she did like the paintings and, most of all, she liked the feeling that she could get rid of them when they started to bore her. In any case, what was her culture? She couldn’t say more than “England” when people asked her where she came from; she didn’t belong where she was born, which was London; she didn’t belong where her parents lived, which was Sheffield. She just didn’t.

Alex had been away for a long weekend in the mountains—she had been in Australia for twelve years—when she got home to find two messages on her answer-phone, one from her father, another from her brother. It was about her mother, and she had to sit down for ten minutes. They didn’t have her mobile-phone number—it had never occurred to her to give it to them. In a while the clarity of principle, of the shape of her life, made itself felt.