The Point (17 page)

Whereas Canberra, now. A place where fences are illegal. Don’t fit with the concept of the garden city. You can have a hedge, which in the old days the government cut for you. And of course people break the law. High walls round courtyards, iron grilles, brushwood, all designed to fortify and exclude. I sometimes wonder, what if government cracked down, made everybody demolish them? Of course it doesn’t, it turns blind eyes. And not everyone is nervous, or shy, some have lawns to the street.

And the bugger won’t even live here, Di Caprio was saying. What message are you giving, when the government of a country chooses to build itself a capital – and does a pretty good job of it, let me tell you, had a chance to look round yet? – and the PM of that government won’t even live here?

Why, asked the British politician, who seemed a rather taciturn man but I suppose he was on a fact-finding mission.

Di Caprio pressed his finger to the side of his nose. Rumour has it, he said, and don’t ask rumour to explain itself, or confirm, because it’ll back right off, but rumour has it that the good lady wife of the bloke in question, she said, Not while
that woman
lives there.

So … because the PM’s mistress lives in the capital, the PM’s wife refuses to let him do so …

Exactly.

How bizarre. The Britisher looked truly astonished. Where would a wife expect a mistress to live?

This made me reflect; I stopped listening, in my own thoughts again. It is true that we don’t have sex scandals the way the Brits do, the whole circus of suspender belts and crotchless knickers and strangulation orgasms, but we doubtless do have like events (I don’t imagine that we are less decadent than old Mother England), it’s just that journalists don’t report them in this way. Are they lily-livered, or is it some elegance of mind? Hard to believe, that. More likely some sort of tricky bargain.

I was staring at the window as I thought this, my eyes not focussed, when they registered a pale face against the glass. Looking in, intently, it seemed, when I blinked at it. A disembodied face, just floating there; it was very strange, though maybe I could discern the faint shape of a body below. I squinted and blinked, the face floated, pale, bluish, the face of a ghost, and receded, faded, disappeared.

Is the restaurant haunted, I asked Laurel, but she had never heard of such a thing. I don’t believe in ghosts, she said.

Well, of course, I don’t either. But I had seen that face, I knew that. Some lost energy, perhaps, or shattered, scattered by violence, haunting its old place, taking shape for a moment … I think there is more in the world than we know.

Martin came to take my empty dessert plate away. That was superb, I said, meaning it, I’m not a great one for sweets and this one had a wonderfully complex unsweet quality. Please tell – Kate, isn’t it? – just how brilliant I thought it.

Martin looked as pleased as if I was complimenting him.

Kate is your … intended, is she?

She’s my partner, said Martin.

In life?

Yeah, we live together.

And in art?

I suppose so. We want to open a restaurant together one day.

I think it will be very good. I would like to come to it.

Martin gave his waiterly bow. It’s a matter of finding the money, to begin, he said, and then walked away quite quickly.

When I look back on myself at that time I see that I often confused people. Or at least, gave them to think. Indeed, I suppose I did it on purpose. I thought it did no harm for people to have to relate to a somewhat eccentric figure; it stretched their minds. There I was, finely suited, with my silk shirts and bow ties – silk too of course, and of course tied by hand – and saying things that puzzled. I’m sure they thought, queer old bird – well, not queer, weird – old fogey, old bore even. But maybe they took in the words, a bit formal, a bit unexpected, and possibly they thought about them.

A partner, in life and in art. What a charming thing. Like Ted and Julia, the willow weavers. They met on the job when they were apprentices in England and came to Australia in that New World way, the young so filled with desire for it and who’s to say they are deluded.

Whereas Flora and I were not partners in life yet, and would not be in art. In obsession, maybe, in our separate pursuits of our separate ultimates, partners we could be in that.

When Flora came to sit with me, finally – Di Caprio had taken an age to leave, calling for Flora, introducing her to his guest, raving on, at least Boyer had the grace to slink out quietly – and she’d taken deep mouthfuls of the white wine she liked to drink at the end of the evening’s work, she said in a sad voice, There’s money missing.

From the till?

I keep it in a drawer. Not a lot. Missing, I mean. Not all of what was there. But a considerable amount. Laurel discovered it.

Have you told the police?

I don’t want to. I think it has to be somebody from here. Laurel wants to make it up, but I wouldn’t let her. Told her I’d start to think she’d done it if she insisted.

You don’t think … it’s Oscar?

No, I don’t really. I don’t see how he’d have had a chance. Or that he would. I think it has to be somebody that’s around. But I can’t bear to think it of any of the staff. And I’m afraid that Laurel thinks it might have been Oscar.

You don’t think it would have been a customer?

How could it? They’re never alone. Laurel’s always there. And how would they have known?

A person from outside?

But there’s always someone here.

You do need to find out who it is.

I know.

Your fancy dishwasher?

Joe? She bit her lip. I thought I might call everybody together and say I know and I’m worried and I don’t know what to do. And stop keeping money in the drawer.

It’s unpleasant. Having to be suspicious.

Horrible. And I’m not going to think about it now. She put her finger on my cheekbone. Now is a kind of magic time, for me, a kind of out-of-category time. I want to enjoy it, while it lasts.

I want it to last. I want it to be normal, too. Magic, yes, but normal as well.

She smiled at me in an indulgent way that made me miserable.

There’s a real world, we have to live in it, she said.

I’m not saying anything else. You’re saying
we
. We, you and me, in the real world.

I told her about the idea of going together, and the sense of a journey in this, and the possibility of change, but going together through all of it.

She was restless. Her thin shoulders twisted under the white tee-shirt, her velvety head bent. Let’s just be, now, she said. I’m afraid … I’m not sure … I don’t want any more hostages to fortune.

She wouldn’t explain that last bit. It wasn’t until much later that I found out about the baby who died. Maybe I could have convinced her I understood her grief, or anyway had some inkling. My baby who was killed, and hers who died, they were the same grief, though in different measures, if
measures
is a word you can use. If I could have explained to her that if I could feel such desolation over a person who barely existed, who never was a person, then how much worse for a child who had entwined himself in your life, and I could understand that.

At the time I thought that by hostages to fortune she meant simply children, potential children, but now I think she meant herself, her own life, anything she valued … maybe, possibly, me. At the time I thought I could change her mind about not having children, a child, she was young enough, plenty of people her age have children or at least a child, if we were quick, it was a joy we could achieve.

And her saying,
I am afraid
… I thought it was one of those manners of speaking. I’m afraid I can’t come to dinner on Friday night, I’m afraid I’m not fond of D.H. Lawrence. But looking back I think she meant simply that: that she was afraid.

I’m not sure that we can live without offering hostages to fortune, I said.

Maybe. But there are some risks more terrifying than others.

I took her hands and said, I would like to save you from terror. She smiled, a small dazzling wisp of a smile that made my heart wobble like a spinning top stopping. Flora, I muttered, I do love you.

Don’t say love, said Flora, don’t say love.

I mean it.

Don’t say it.

17

Gwyneth says: Have you ever eaten at that restaurant?

Not that one, says Clovis. Ones like it.

Are they good?

Well, yes, they were good. It was something one did. Make pilgrimages in search of good food experiences. Tell your friends, compare notes, get up parties to go to them. It was one of the ways you patterned your life.

Gwyneth wrinkles her face. Clovis recognises this as her expression of confrontation with new ideas. Or maybe, even, with ideas.

You don’t just go for a good feed?

Well, you do. Of course you do. But, there was something more. He is finding it hard to grasp what it was there was. He looks up at The Point, at the dim windows, misty with distance and his muzzy eyes and perhaps also fogged up with warm breaths and the steam of food and the gasses of digestion. It hangs there. The promise. The rituals. The exquisiteness of desire.

Or else just something that people with quite a lot of money can afford to do.

I been and looked up close, real close, right up against the glass, says Gwyneth. It doesn’t look like fun to me. I mean, people don’t seem to be having a good time.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by fun, says Clovis. Serious eating can be a solemn business.

Do you ever wish you was in there, doing that like you used to?

No.

Afterwards he wonders about that no. It had come so firmly, so quickly. No time to think. And it did seem to be true. He had no capacity for desiring himself into fine clothes and fine company … maybe that was the sticking point. You had to have somebody to go to a restaurant with. No point in dining on your own.

I tell you what, though. One night, you and me, we’ll get scrubbed up and go in there and have the works.

Gwyneth looks at him. She doesn’t even smile. Fuck off, she says.

The wine would be better. Clovis squeezes some more into her glass.

How?

Softer, more mellow, better flavour.

She frowns. Then she takes a mouthful out of her glass, swills it round her mouth, and spits it out elaborately.

Clovis finds this immensely funny. Not in the restaurant, though, he says.

I still think it looks dead boring, she says. But it’d be nice to be on the inside, instead of the outside.

Depends. Depends on what it costs to be in there. I’m not talking about money. Or not just. Besides, I thought you were doing your best to stay on the outside, avoid inside.

There’s inside and inside. You know that.

Possibly. Though maybe all insides have a lot in common. Gaols, restaurants, banks, offices. Schools. And possibly the outside is always about freedom. When you think about it. You and me, we’re free … it might not be much, but it’s better than a lot of things.

I’d like my own inside, just for me.

It would be solitary.

Cosy, says Gwyneth. With the TV for company. I miss the TV.

After a while she makes off across the grass. Clovis is sorry to see her go. She gets him talking, and talking shows him he’s been thinking. He’s interested in what he says, doesn’t know he’s going to say it until it comes out.

All that time not talking, it seems to have starved out that idle bushy habit of yapping on that was so much part of his old life. Now words are simple attempts at meaning. If he does mean them. His alter ego says: That’s for me to know and you to find out. Ho ho.

The food left outside the restaurant is getting tidier and organised into separate plastic pots. Far more than Gwyneth can eat. Plenty to choose from. She’s crept up early enough to see that it’s a young guy putting it there, carefully and somehow secretly, a bit out of the way and quietly so no one sees. She watches him and then says, softly, Hi. He jumps, and goes furtive.

Thanks, she says.

It’s okay.

She doesn’t say anything. Clovis has noticed how good she is at not saying anything. It’s made him wonder if it comes naturally or is something she’s learned.

It’s good food, the guy says. Hardly touched. I thought I’d give it a second chance.

Sorry it’s not hot, he says.

I’ve seen you round, he says. Do you live hereabouts?

Where would I live hereabouts, says Gwyneth, with delicate scorn.

I dunno. I haven’t been here long. My name’s Joe.

Gwyneth.

That’s a pretty name. It’s …

My mum’s name.

I’m finished, really, he says. Everybody’s gone, except Flora and her, her friend.

They are standing and looking at one another, wondering if this is all there is to say, when they hear strange sounds, a sort of whistling and rushing and a soft violent commotion. Thudding noises, and heaving, and the release of pent-up …

The screen, shrieks Gwyneth.

There are figures attacking the willow sculpture. Someone with a thin club-like weapon, others bashing and pulling at it with their bodies, someone running and throwing himself at it. She lets out one of her screams, and rushes towards them. She screams a number of times, and in between screams she shouts: Fucking bastards, stop, stop, fucking bastards. She is on the opposite side of the screen but she rushes at them, shouting and screaming, and the figures stop.

Flora comes out of the restaurant, and the tall man who’s often there. What’s going on, he asks, in a loud calm voice. Flora, call the police. He gives her the mobile phone out of his pocket.

He starts to walk towards the screen and the figures on the other side run away, off across the slope of grass, with whoops and catcalls. It’s a normal winter night, dank, frosty, with fog in the air. Impossible to see who they are, all wrapped up in overcoats against the cold, but the nimbleness with which they run suggests they are young. No sign of the weapon. They plunge up the hill, their coats flapping wide like the cloaks of vampires.

Flora is standing looking at the screen, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide and staring. Jerome takes off his coat and puts it round her shoulders, tries to persuade her to come inside.