The Watch Tower (11 page)

The small steel catch of the cupboard door against which she leaned dug into Clare’s spine meanly. Its sharpness penetrated and she levered herself upright on her feet. Rain dripped from her hair.

‘What was it?’ she burst out. ‘What happened?’

Laura shook her head, eyelids lowered. She had thought Felix had lost his mind. Even now, for all she knew, he might be mad. ‘He broke everything,’ she said.

‘That huge—decanter.’

‘Your face is cut. There’s blood on it.’

‘Is there?’ Clare stirred and in the instant of stirring lost interest. ‘Didn’t hit me. Whatever it was he threw.’

They were silent again.

‘We can’t stand here for ever,’ Clare said, as if they easily could, and Laura met her eyes with a sort of consumed look, an extraordinary look, and boldly opened the glass doors leading to the shut-off house
and started to inspect it like a tourist at Pompeii. She noted the deep scratch across the surface of the dining-room table that Felix had deliberately carved into it with a piece of glass. Every piece of china and crystal he lifted had smashed with marvellous simplicity against the walls. Steak and beans and a mush of vegetables had somehow submitted to being arrayed peculiarly over the larger part of the carpeted floor.

‘What did we do? What were we saying? Oh, Laura. What’s the matter with him?’

Laura shook her head. Her excitement was mounting dreadfully and with it came a blind, obsessive look, tight fists, sudden automatic activity.

‘What were we
saying
?
Was he drunk?’ On her knees beside Laura, Clare collected splintered glass.

Feverish, glittering, Laura rose and sped to and fro with dust-pan and broom, hot water and washing-cloths. The house contained a connoisseur’s selection of liquor, but Felix had never so much as opened one bottle. In the past he had evidently frequented hotels, but now he never drank. ‘No, it wasn’t that.’

‘Well, what?’ Mechanically, Clare helped her restore the devastated rooms, her mind surging and brilliantly alert and lighted, running the scene again and then again in search of clues.

For neither she nor Laura had said anything remotely provocative, had only sat eating dinner,
artlessly good-humoured and ready to smile, listening to Felix, the wireless softly playing. Then he had suddenly vomited words at them, his manner extraordinarily agreeable, so that for seconds he might have been speaking Chinese for all the sense he seemed to make. Then with small smiles that were all at once painful but immovable, with unswallowed food turning poisonous in their mouths, they understood him.

He lurched to his feet. Oiled strands of his brushed-back hair fell over the jagged scars on his forehead. His face was contused, his gestures terrifying, his expression ogrish.

Staring-eyed and with a deep fearful incredulity they felt his voice beat against their heads. He lifted and threw and crashed and overturned.

‘Go outside at once and don’t come in till I call you!’ Laura cried over the noise to her sister.

‘What about you? Come, too! Come, too!’

‘Go outside, Clare!’

‘Don’t stay! Please don’t stay!’

Working for an hour they removed as many signs of Felix’s outburst as could be washed away and disposed of in garbage tins. Now they stood in the kitchen.

‘What made him go to bed in the end?’ Clare asked listlessly.

Laura shook her head. ‘He had no choice. He’d been—raving—for hours. It’s after one. I’m going to
lie down in the spare room. Go to bed. In the morning, we’ll see. Don’t say anything.’

‘I don’t ever want to say anything to him again!’ Clare assured her, then added, her look incredulous, ‘Do you want us to act as if nothing has happened?’

‘Yes. Till I’ve seen.’

‘Seen what? He’ll remember. Anyway, how can we pretend?’

Laura reasoned to herself, ‘It was a sort of—brainstorm. It won’t happen again. If we act as if nothing happened, he will, too. Do as I say. Do you hear me, Clare?’

‘Oh, I hear you.’ She wrapped her arms about her damp head.

Laura rattled two white tablets out of a tube on the window-sill, and swallowed them with a drink of water. Shutting cupboard doors tight, and pressing drawers in, she glanced all about and then switched off the light.

Downstairs on the ferry, and outside in the open air, Clare inattentively cast her eyes over the skyline, the shimmering dark-blue harbour, the over-familiar ships, gardens, red-tiled roofs and commercial buildings whose meaninglessness had begun to perplex her expectations.

Still, it was a pleasant novelty to be abroad on a weekday afternoon, away from college and the
stationery smell indigenous to all such clerical places. (She had a mild allergy. The local doctor was passing her on to a Macquarie Street man.)

College—As people often do, she proceeded to muse about the place she congratulated herself on being absent from. College—Mrs. Robertson—Practising what she preached, Mrs. Robertson invited four girls to her flat every Saturday or Sunday for afternoon tea, and Clare went in her turn to indulge in some social life. It had sounded desirable and sensible when Mrs. Robertson had first expounded its workings—social life—but what it turned out to be like was waiting at a bus stop, a grimy bus stop with grit and traffic tearing past. She was desperate to be gone and had been waiting, it seemed, since her life began. She was staring through the grey light and grit and monochrome press of traffic and crowds, waiting for (she supposed) a bus, with longing and anxiety.

Then, because she happened to be standing in the queue, voices addressed her in unending soliloquies, burrowing like parasites for space inside her brain. ‘I’ve told him again and again not to shape my hair in like that at the back of my head. It’s old-fashioned—The skirt’s going to have six yards in it, and underneath there’ll be this petticoat with layers of frills—Ten cartons of Nutty Roughs—With all this funny weather our suitcases were covered with green mould—Hitler’s got the right idea about the Jews, they can say what
they like—Napoleon, there was a man! Where’s your female Einstein, your Rembrandt? Women! Why were all the Greek and Roman statues of men? Because male beauty is superior in every way—When I win the lottery—The neckline’s down to about
here—
After the war this block of land’ll be worth three times what we gave for it—
Till you find the bluebird of happiness—
It’s very important to keep your typing even.’

Gently, mildly, she responded. Politely, she replied.

Glances were thrown at her now and then to solder chains on her attention, since she happened to be there. She smiled and raised her eyebrows with interest. For how could you hurt people’s feelings? And it was no one’s fault. What it was she expected (and so much time had passed that she could barely remember what it was exactly) was long overdue. To her heart’s blood she craved its arrival. In the midst of this curious kind of anguish, people cheerily addressed her at life’s bus stop as they would have addressed any wooden post with ears on it.

Without the least doubt, either, Mrs. Robertson, and Ruth and Noelene and the other girls at the college, and Laura and Felix (and these were all the people she knew) found their needs in this direction easily appeased. Yet she was grief-stricken, bleeding to death, because of these daily encounters. If she lied or acted all her life, no one she knew or ever had known
would recognise the fact; alternatively, when she was herself, no one recognised that either. If their satisfaction and selves were apparent to her, why not her reactions and self to them? And that she knew and was not known were facts of a piercing intuitive force whose truth was not to be doubted.

For courtesy’s sake, and from frustration, she often acted as if she felt herself at one with the company, but since no one assumed that she was
not
one of them, since she never convinced herself in the role, since no one else would have known if she had been Bo-Peep or the man in the moon, it seemed pointless to struggle to grind out genuine lightheartedness and interest, when ears and a display of teeth and any sort of speech contented her associates. Except Laura and Felix, who usually expected silence, but sometimes wanted her to entertain them. Oh, the trouble was there was not
enough
of anyone.

The Russians—Now with Chekhov’s, Dostoevsky’s, Tolstoy’s Russians, who were all more recognisable as people than people were, you could sit on a fine day, or a day of storms, and discuss the very topics that were so lethal in other mouths. You could discuss even the weather with exquisite joy in the company of fully-grown human beings who had eyes set straight in their heads. Peace on earth, goodwill to men! To be always, in whatever circumstances, with people whose ways were instinctive to you.

But alas, alas! Clare sighed and stared at the everlasting harbour. The lost tribes of Israel, the wandering Jew, had nothing on the only Russian in Sydney. Where are you, my treasures? Where are you, my darlings, angels, sweethearts, truthful, laughing ones?

A bell rang. The ferry reduced speed and drew into the wharf at the Quay. It was necessary to rise, wait for the gangplank, walk off among the other walking bodies—joggling, jostling, wearing the tin button of charity in lapels, with puckered mouths and brows and out-of-joint lolloping movements and fancy gawky hats; and servicemen idle on leave with yellow faces from atabrin, loafing about the Quay; to be washed about with the sweet startling odours of the country and flowers and wood alcohol; sprinkled with dust, pursued by litter, thrilled by the light in the sky, depressed by the asphalt—Aie, aie!

‘Go behind that screen and take off your clothes,’ Sir Ronald said gravely. He was a specialist, tall, immaculate, with greying hair and a sun-lamp tan. Having surveyed the patch of hives on the left side of Clare’s throat, he was now surveying Clare.

‘Ah—’ she hesitated, uncertain that he had heard her, but unwilling to have him misjudge her hesitation. ‘They aren’t anywhere else,’ she mentioned again, reassuringly.

‘Nevertheless.’ Fiftyish, urbane, accustomed to deference, the specialist looked down at her.

‘Oh!’ Clare went behind the screen and undressed rapidly till she was left in high-heeled black shoes, leg paint, and a white petticoat. She stood considering what it would be sensible to do next. It might have been wiser to have left on some other piece of underwear than the petticoat? Almost certainly he had not meant her to remove literally everything. She had no objection: that would be stupid. If only, though—She wished he had been a little more specific, so that she could have appeared clothed exactly as he expected her. She could hear Sir Ronald moving about.

‘Ah—everything?’ Her voice went casually through the heavy floral curtain.

‘Yes.’

Oh. He had no doubt about what he wanted. Well. Now she knew. Off with the petticoat. She laid it over the back of the chair with her other clothes. So. All she had to do now was emerge. She brushed at the curtain with her fingernails then paused and looked down thoughtfully at her high-heeled shoes. With the rest of her naked, perhaps they looked a trifle—overdone? Slipping them off, she looked at her bare white feet. They seemed not quite fitting to the situation either. Too informal? As if she was about to have a bath? Mrs. Robertson said, when she heard of today’s appointment, that Sir Ronald and his wife were always in the social pages shaking hands with famous visitors from overseas. He probably expected
some
ceremony
from his patients. She slid her her feet back into her shoes, drew aside the curtain and stepped composedly out into the surgery.

There were no buildings opposite this long cliff of doctors’ rooms in Macquarie Street, and in Sir Ronald’s apartments, ten storeys from the street, a wall of windows faced the sky and overlooked below the barbered greenness of the Botanic Gardens and distant views of the harbour and the eastern suburbs. The light was truly dazzling.

Sir Ronald had been waiting. Since he was evidently disinclined to move, Clare approached him and stood in the middle of the dignified room in her high heels.

Not looking into her eyes, Sir Ronald cleared his throat. Clare watched his downcast eyelids, then stared past him through the windows at a cloudscape of wondrous beauty.

‘Hmmm’ Sir Ronald touched her left breast lightly and cleared his throat again. He walked slowly round her. A clock ticked on his desk, otherwise the room and the city were marvellously quiet. Almost, Clare could have slept, standing there with her eyes open on the clouds.

‘No,’ the specialist murmured to himself, standing in front of her again and slightly to one side, ‘there’s no trace of it here.’ He touched her other breast lightly with his fingertips.

In the sober, dignified room, Clare’s body could have felt conspicuous had she not perceived some
years before that she and it were by no means one and the same person. Though she had been dissected and her skeleton and vital organs exposed to a multitude, still, it did seem to her, they would not have seen
her
.
No, it was not difficult to be detached. Just the same, her body was extremely white and smooth. In the brilliant daylight, it glowed with the pearly phosphorescence of the clouds she was staring at so assiduously. Her vanity was a considerable support to her. Which of her classmates could have risen to these serious, sky-regarding, unselfconscious heights? What remarkable self-possession!

‘No, there’s no trace of it here,’ the doctor said again, after a moderately long silence.

‘I thought it was only on my neck.’

Sir Ronald’s lids were still lowered, Clare noticed, moving her own eyes somewhat gingerly from the great outdoors to the specialist’s face. He gave the impression of being at least twice as clean as most ordinary men. Even so, interesting as it was to observe at close quarters a knight who shook hands in the social pages and was very clean—

Further reserves of equanimity had to be called up while an injection was prepared and jabbed in her upper arm, a prescription written out, and general warnings uttered regarding allergy-producing plans and soaps. Clare would
not
feel at a disadvantage in this situation, so she received all, standing there in her
white body with the demeanour of a sincere, spiritual and devoted nudist.