Читать книгу Chaconne - Diana Blackwood - Страница 8

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Home Truths

FROM THEIR SECOND year at the university, Eleanor Weston and Ruth Sonnenberg had shared a two-storey Victorian terrace house, as pinched and dark as old prejudices. Sometimes Ruth brought home strays – a biochemistry student ejected from a group household, an Israeli friend-of-a-friend needing a lumpy sofa for a few days in Sydney – but mostly it was just the two of them and the friends and young men who passed in and out of their lives. On Saturday mornings, if no one had stayed the night, and daydreaming all week had not toppled Eleanor into panic over an essay, she and Ruth would curl up in the two tattered armchairs in the front room to talk and read over pots of tea. They discussed music and books and cinema and politics, the attitudes and behaviour of men, their friends, their lecturers and occasionally their families. They aired their philosophical positions on the removal of leg and armpit hair – Eleanor was in favour, Ruth against – and asked whether they could bring themselves (the personal being political) to use the word ‘cunt’ with nonchalance.

In the end they concluded it was not worth the struggle. Ruth even voiced her conviction that speculum parties were an urban myth and that Wonder Woman never really said “With my speculum I am strong!” Sometimes she was disposed to speculate about how the plague of homo saps would eventually destroy the earth, which was not always by nuclear annihilation. Eleanor was not so keen on that topic, for it was too much like the dispiriting dinner-table conversation at her mother’s house.

On this Saturday morning, however, Eleanor was reading to Ruth from a letter on blue airmail paper. She fancied she was holding a segment of autumn sky, delivered by the westerly wind that had swept the smog out to sea. Outside, in the tiny rectangle of front garden, the furled bark that hung in untidy strips from the lemon-scented gum trembled in the wind. Both of them were fond of their only tree, but today Eleanor would have betrayed it for a silver birch.

“Prolétaire?” said Ruth.

“Prolétaire,” said Eleanor, with the correct arc of intonation, a ‘p’ that would not flutter a candle flame, and an ‘r’ that purred. She was vain about her accent.

“Say it again slowly and try to sound less French.”

“Rien ne vaut le naturel si excitant de ma ravissante australienne prolétaire.”

“Nothing beats the exciting – or does that mean sexy? – umm … naturalness or unaffectedness or something like that of my ravishing proletarian Australian, or ravishing Australian proletarian, or …”

“Okay, okay. Not bad for a biologist.”

“But are you really?”

“Am I what? Ravishing? Sexy?”

“A prole, you dope.”

Eleanor knew better than to read to Ruth from the breathless letters on the squared paper because of her habit of lifting up words and poking around underneath them to see what would crawl out. In the blue letters Julien did something similar when he dissected love; it was unnecessary, and unsettling as a hot, dry wind. Sometimes in those analytical passages he would attribute to her a simplicity that flowed into innocence. It was not a version of herself that she recognised. Perhaps because she had taught him a thing or two about sex, those bits amused her, and she would read them to Ruth, who usually found them funny too. They would squawk like schoolgirls over their cups of tea, and once Ruth said that for an apprentice philosopher, Julien was easily duped. But today she was in her probing mood, itching to shine her torch into the eyes of something.

“Do I own property?” said Eleanor. “Do I own the means of production? Do I own anything much at all?”

“But what does he mean? Does the proletariat include part of the middle class? Are teachers in it because they’re on salaries? Let’s look it up in Keywords.”

“It’s probably a Marxist term of endearment, for heaven’s sake. Or it’s because I took him to Wollongong-euh and he saw the steelworks. Anyway, he’s not talking about the great unwashed. That’s the lumpenproletariat.”

“But I still want to know …”

Ruth’s family lived in a book-filled house in an expensive suburb overlooking Middle Cove. Eleanor had spent a good few Friday evenings in their company, and had even stayed the night while she and Ruth were looking for a place to rent, by the time she got around to taking her friend home with her to Wollongong. In the end, Ruth had had to insist quite firmly, after they had shared the terrace house in Dartmoor Street for nearly half a year, that it was unfair that Eleanor should know the Sonnenberg family foibles and not let her experience Mavis at first hand. She said it as if an equal exchange were not only desirable but possible, but also as if she had begun to suspect Eleanor of keeping something from her.

When Ruth spoke of her parents’ foibles she meant, affectionately, her father’s Hasidic jokes and his jazz and klezmer collection, some of it on authentic 78s; but also, somewhat less affectionately, her mother’s preoccupation, now that her son was settled, with Ruth’s finding a suitable husband. Eleanor laughed at the jokes, even if she sometimes had to ask Ruth to explain them later, and loved the records, delighting the father by asking in German to hear the 78s. (“You’ve got the musical tastes of a Central European Jew,” Ruth said. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” replied Eleanor.)

And when Anna Sonnenberg happened to mention marriage as if it were a normal event in a young person’s future, Eleanor was charmed. Her own mother frowned on anything that might lure a woman into the marriage trap. For Eleanor, the Sonnenbergs – their music, their conversation, their grace – glowed like the challah loaf on the Sabbath table. The stark Hebrew words of the ritual moved her like a melody, all the more because the family professed no religious beliefs. It was a long and sorrowful history they honoured, a belonging, a continuum. She had nothing like it to offer in return.

“You can’t mean it,” said Eleanor. “You’re just being perverse.”

A cold July wind was blowing from the south-west and the beach was empty, save for the gulls and the two young women heading north. Even as she dreamed of escape, Eleanor had always claimed this stretch of yellow sand as her own.

“Isn’t Mt Keira an interesting shape?” Ruth said. “And the light! It’s as if you could see each leaf. Yes, I do mean it. She’s tough and smart and entertaining. My mother, on the other hand, probably thinks the phosphorus cycle is a setting on her washing-machine. When I try to make her understand that we’re teetering on the brink of ecological catastrophe, she says she doesn’t want to know, it’s all too depressing. Mavis isn’t weak-minded like that. Anyway, at least you had chooks. I always wanted chooks.”

Perhaps this was what Eleanor had feared all along: not that Ruth would find Mavis dull or gauche, but that she would think too well of her, be swayed by half a dozen domestic fowl and become less willing to see things Eleanor’s way.

“Entertaining! What do you think it was like for me to grow up with all that ranting, especially after my grandmother died? Talk about oppression. And you wonder why I’ve got no ambition!”

“Okay, maybe it was too much too soon, but she’s not wrong. I agree with everything she said.”

“And I think you should marry a nice Jewish anaesthetist, and the sooner the better.”

Stopping in her tracks, Eleanor turned her back on the escarpment to face the choppy ocean. A tanker perched like a doom-laden toy on the horizon. High above the shore, three pelicans glided in circles, giving themselves up to the air currents – out of necessity or indolent pleasure, who could tell? As a child she had been drawn to pelicans; they had made her want to sing to the sea. If she couldn’t fly with those magnificent wings, singing had to be the next best thing. Now she dug her feet into the sand, twisted her body into an operatic pose and filled her lungs with salt air. What followed was part clunky recitative, part crazy Mozartian aria. The words mocked, but her voice shed its bitterness as it soared above the ostinato hiss and rumble of the waves.

“Yours is the luckiest generation in history! No major war, no depression, no polio, plenty of food, contraception, abortion, free education. You don’t have to be a nurse or a secretary or a teacher; you’re not forced to marry or to breed. Such freedom, such opportunities as we never knew. And when the superphosphate runs out and the topsoil is all gone and the hungry billions can’t be fed and the seas are radioactive and the forests have vanished and the pollution is killing everything, you at least will have had your lives, unlike your children if you’re stupid enough to have any …”

Ruth was laughing. “You sly dog, I had absolutely no idea you could sing like that. You should have singing lessons – join the university choir, at least. Do something with that voice.”

“Do you know what Mavis keeps under her bed? Just in case we’re nuked or supplies are cut to Wollongong, she has enough skim milk powder to last two years, cans of fish and tomatoes, and bags of dried beans and rice that she has to replace when the weevils attack them. Oh, and iodine. That woman is a deputy matron in a public hospital!”

“Iodine in what form?”

“I don’t know, brown pharmaceutical bottles.”

“Lugol’s solution. Good idea. Iodine blocks the uptake of radioactive …”

“Ruth!”

“Okay, calm down. Look, she’s not so strange. I know a Jewish family in Melbourne who had a hiding place and secret exit built into their house when a fallout shelter might have been more to the point.”

They walked on until they reached a rock platform that extended beyond a small cliff. The sea had eroded the pink and yellow sandstone into an overhang and nibbled holes in its surface. Ruth wandered from rockpool to rockpool, avoiding the clusters of periwinkles, until she found a pool that pleased her, whereupon she squatted like a child beside it and peered into the scooped-out shallows. She would be imagining herself a creature in a tidal pool, Eleanor was certain. She would be looking up at our world of sunlight and air from her muffled world of Neptune’s necklace, anemones and sea urchins.

“Did you know,” Ruth said in a dreamy voice, “that sea urchins have an amazing jaw structure – five jaws that meet, in fact – called Aristotle’s lantern?”

“Ruth, look!” A brownish grey octopus, too large to be the lethal blue-ringed species, had heaved itself out of a nearby pool and was slithering and contracting its way across the rock platform. When it reached a tiny inlet, it dropped into the foaming, sucking sea.

“It must have seen our shadows,” said Ruth.

“It won’t be dashed against the rocks, will it? It looked a bit squashy and fragile.” The endless struggle that was the lot of so many creatures was sometimes sad to contemplate.

“It’s tougher than it looks. It swam in with the tide, after all.”

Now Ruth was taking cautious steps towards the slippery edge of the rock platform. The spray wet her sandshoes, but she seemed not to notice. For a minute or so she stared at the sea. Then she turned and walked back, eyes downwards, like a person travelling a sober line of thought.

“Eleanor … Your father didn’t really die when you were four, did he?”

“What makes you say that?” Her voice faltered and she looked away, as if she had been caught in a shameful lie. Yet the untruth about her father had never felt like falsehood: it lacked a lie’s glinting edge, a lie’s poisonous tip. It was just an old habit, something she wore to protect herself from prying and supposition. There wasn’t much anyone could say – so young, how sad! – about the prosaic finality of a heart attack.

“Oh, I don’t know. I was just wondering how octopuses mate and suddenly I thought … I mean, Mavis hasn’t mentioned him, there are no photos of him around the house, you never talk about him. In my family we talk about the dead. Too much, I sometimes think.”

“He might as well be dead.” But that was not quite true either. Death she could defer to, but the thought that her father could still be alive somewhere and had never, so far as she knew, sought news of her was a canker. “And he very likely is.”

Ruth sighed. “I understand that it’s painful to talk about. And I’m trying to accept that you don’t want to discuss it. I’m not even saying you should. Well, maybe I am. It’s just that I don’t see … I simply cannot see what’s in it for you to be so … For heaven’s sake, if you can’t trust me, who the hell can you trust?”

They were back on the sand now, walking south in the direction of the Port Kembla steelworks in whose foul interior Eleanor’s father had passed his working week. There was no dodging Ruth’s plaintive logic, or no way that Eleanor could see without causing hurt.

“He did leave when I was four – went to work one morning and didn’t come home. Mavis drove him away, if you ask me. She said he drank, but if he did, I wonder why. Don’t forget, she made him change his name to hers, and then she went and named me after Eleanor bloody Roosevelt.”

“What was his name again?”

“Jesukevičius.”

Ruth hooted. “She did him a favour. But do you remember him at all?”

“I’m not sure. I think I remember a man’s voice with a foreign accent, a male presence.” She did not say that the voice that came to her in memory and in dreams sang swirling, fathomless lullabies. She had once asked her grandmother if she had ever heard him sing. She had not, though she seemed to remember Mavis mentioning, in the early days, something about Jonas having a bit of a voice.

“Do you look like him? You don’t look like Mavis. Maybe your great-great-great-great-grandmother was raped by a Tartar.”

“Not enough greats. I’ve got a few photos I’ll show you later.”

Just as Eleanor had begun to feel calm again, panic struck like sudden vertigo. She gripped Ruth’s arm. “Ruth, there’s another thing. How do I know who he was? How do I know he wasn’t one of those Lithuanians who joined the … you know, the Einsatzgruppen.”

“Actually they had their own death squads. They didn’t need German orders or encouragement.”

“He would have been nineteen at the end of the war. How do I know he didn’t take part …”

Ruth replied in her most reasonable voice, which sealed off any struggle with her feelings. “I thought about that when you told me your father was Lithuanian. You can’t know for certain. You’ll probably never know. Even if there was ever such a thing as a war crimes trial in this country and they decided to charge him – and they’d have to find him first – you probably wouldn’t be sure even then. He may have participated, or he may have seen or only heard about what went on – he would have been very young, after all – but you can be pretty damn sure he would have known something about the massacres. And supposing you did discover the truth, and it turned out to be what you most feared? What difference would it make, really? You’d still be you, we’d still be friends, you’d still be just as secretive, if not more so. It’s not as if you’ve been brought up by some rabid anti-Semite. You’re so ridiculously philo-Semitic that you can’t see what a pain in the bum my mother is, and you won’t listen when I try to tell you what’s wrong with Israel. Eleanor, seriously, you can’t be held responsible or pardoned for someone else’s crimes, real or hypothetical.”

Ruth’s father, a lawyer whose principles had survived legal practice, had schooled his clever daughter in a scrupulous moral reasoning. Her daunting ability to stay faithful to it was the measure of his gift.

“Hey, look at the time! I’m feeding the chooks, remember?”

Ruth knew how to keep out of dark places in the daylight hours, but sometimes at night she cried out in her sleep. Once, Eleanor had gone to her room to find her sitting up in bed, weeping. She would not recount her nightmare. How could she describe the chaos of screaming children, the crush of terror and despair? Now she took off in a run along the beach. Eleanor, who was lean and lithe like her mother, gave her a head start. There was more to be said, but it could wait. One Saturday morning they would have a conversation about inherited guilt (a bit of an indulgence, Ruth might say, unless it led to action) and forgiveness (Christianity’s one beautiful but unenforceable idea). Ruth might steer her away from the Shoah – “you’re like a moth to a menorah!” – towards the here and now of Aboriginal dispossession and South African apartheid. Without knowing how she had come to such a view, Eleanor might venture that perhaps what the victims of past wrongs wanted above all else was for their suffering to be acknowledged. Perhaps more than anything, they just needed to be heard – regardless of whether it brought an immediate change in their lives or whether they could ever find it in themselves to forgive.

Meanwhile the past, known and unknowable, was not going anywhere, but Eleanor was going to sprint as hard as she could to catch up with her friend.

Mavis had invited her friend Audrey to dinner. Pleasant-faced and long-limbed, she wore her greying hair in a thick plait that reached half way down her back. Not only had Audrey designed and sewn her purplish-brown jacket herself, Mavis explained, but she had also dyed, spun and woven the wool, all with her own sweet hands. Wollongong’s one-woman cottage industry! In honour of Eleanor and Ruth’s awkward vegetarianism, Audrey had made a spicy chickpea and pumpkin casserole. She was tending to go meatless herself; only the other day she’d bought Recipes for a Small Planet. Since her husband had left her for a librarian, she could cook whatever she liked, and that didn’t include lamb chops. She had also stuck A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle on her bumper, although she felt she should apologise for the infelicitous use of ‘like’ as a conjunction.

“We should get her Eve was had,” said Ruth.

“Or Sisterhood is powerful – it crushes women,” said Eleanor. Those were graffiti they walked past on the way to the university.

Mavis had placed a black bowl of pink camellias on the green linen tablecloth. She had set out the best glasses and cutlery and the treasured family dinner service. Such womanly efforts extended even to her own appearance: she had put on some lipstick and was dressed in a fine camel pullover and chocolate velvet pants, colours that brought out the ginger in her hair. Eleanor had to concede that her mother didn’t look too bad. If only she’d grow out that butch haircut … Wine had softened her face, lent a girlishness to her gestures. Wine? Mavis wasn’t a drinker, but there she was, sipping and bantering and giggling at Ruth’s crisp wit.

The conversation turned horticultural. Ruth was explaining how she had pruned olive trees and grape vines in her kibbutz year. Gardening was safe terrain, unless it led to the phosphorus-cyclethat-was-no-longer-a-cycle and how the world’s agricultural lands would inevitably turn to desert. Eleanor tried to follow her friend through the sunny olive groves, but the half-light of memory that pooled in the recesses of the house had seeped even into this bright, chatter-filled room.

The old dining table had come from her grandparents’ dairy farm, a place Eleanor knew only in imagination. Grief had killed her grandfather, grief that his only son did not return from the war. The farm was sold in 1949, and the bank claimed its hefty share. By then Mavis was nursing in Sydney, and her older sister had married the cane farmer from up north. The grandmother – always busy and productive, always two steps ahead of anything anyone could ask of her – had come to live with Mavis and Eleanor after Jonas left. It was she who had sewn the dining-room curtains and embroidered the sinuous pattern of foliage on the border panels. Beautiful but unnecessary, in Mavis’s view; beautiful and therefore necessary, in her daughter’s. For countless evenings of Eleanor’s childhood, while Mavis worked her shift at the hospital, the grandmother had watched over the girl in this manless house. If there were no homework to be supervised and facts to be memorised – the products of Birmingham and Leeds, the rivers of New South Wales – she would tell stories about the old days on the farm or even recite some Wordsworth and Tennyson.

Having refused to part with the family’s old upright, her grandmother had paid for Eleanor’s piano lessons out of her pension. She died one night while the house slept, several weeks after Eleanor’s sixteenth birthday. Grace was never spoken again at the dining table, although for a time Eleanor repeated it silently to herself until she began to suspect that it only sharpened her grief.

Some months later Mavis announced that her daughter had had enough piano lessons – she could play, couldn’t she? They needed the money for maths tutoring so Eleanor would have the best chance of getting into medicine. The piano teacher made entreaties on her student’s behalf, but that only steeled the mother in her resolve. For a week Eleanor slammed doors and cursed and wept in her room but uttered no threats of retribution, for she had recently learned in French that la vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid. Her revenge would be a cold dish indeed. Instead of failing to qualify for medicine, she worked hard all through sixth form, especially at maths, to ensure that her marks were sufficiently high.

When it came time to go up to Sydney to register at the university, she enrolled instead, with a bilious rush of satisfaction, in an arts degree. That night over dinner Eleanor trumpeted her defection to the humanities. Instead of raging in defeat, however, Mavis merely commented that it was Eleanor’s choice, although some would say an impractical one, and that in the end people should do what truly interested them, just as she herself was now studying horticulture.

After the piano lessons had ceased, and before she found herself a Saturday morning and Thursday night job in the foundation garments section of a department store, Eleanor set about dispensing with her virginity. Mavis had gone visiting gardens for the after-noon, and Eleanor had invited a boy to come over with some music. She felt no deep longing for him, but he was guileless and stoical in the face of the school barbarians when they taunted him about his “dickhead music”. He sang bass in his school choir – Eleanor’s school was new and had no choir – and also owned a fine collection of records that he never lent or allowed anyone else to handle but would record onto cassette tapes for the few he judged worthy. That day he brought the late string quartets of Beethoven, which, despite all her avid listening to the radio, Eleanor had never heard.

“This is my favourite, the Opus 132. He wrote it after recovering from a serious illness. Now, close your eyes. You have to listen with your soul, if you see what I mean.”

Oh, she saw, though music, it seemed to her, was just as much in the body – an oscillation of cells, a pulsing of blood, a rhythmic stirring in the muscles.

She closed her eyes and felt him sit on the end of her bed. The opening phrase, slow and ethereal in its ascent, reached her as if from another world. ‘Soul’ was as convenient a word as any, she supposed, and hers kept company with the quartet through the abrupt shifts of mood, tender offerings, assertions, altercations, thickets of polyphony. It was subdued into introspection by the hymn-like melody in the third movement before falling into step, twice, with the sudden dance of joy. But towards the end, dazzled by contrast, her susceptible soul almost lost its bearings, and then her mind chipped in. Music could arouse in her an intensity of emotion that the rest of life had so far denied her. Those feelings were hers: intrinsic, not borrowed. So why shouldn’t she live it too, that exquisite depth of feeling? While music consoled her for her circumstances, it also fed her desire to escape to a life of passion and European refinement – doing exactly what, she wasn’t quite sure – far from her intractable mother and all the dreary people who had no inkling of who Eleanor Weston truly was.

The closing major chord hung in the air, triumphant. Until that spring afternoon, nothing so mysterious and soulful as the Opus 132 quartet had ever come her way. It made what she was about to do seem pretty tame.

The boy said softly, “If we’re nuked tomorrow, at least we had Beethoven today. The finale’s a bit of a tease, isn’t it?”

She smiled at him, hazy with shared sanctuary. He had allowed her into his inner world, and she was grateful. Before he could leap up to put on another tape, she slid towards him and took his face in her hands. He looked so like a startled rabbit that she almost laughed, almost lost her nerve, but then she began to kiss him until he kissed her resolutely back. She thought what she always thought about kissing, which was that having someone’s tongue poking around in her mouth was a risky imposition. What if she caught glandular fever and failed fifth form?

When he reached for her hand and placed it timidly on his groin, she was relieved to be getting on with it. Without a word she stood up and from the underwear drawer of her dressing-table took out the condoms. (Mavis had put them there, without comment, a month after her daughter’s sixteenth birthday. It was not the act of a broad-minded parent, Eleanor had explained to her dumbstruck schoolfriends, but an infringement.) The boy’s eyes widened in apprehension when she handed him a condom in its foil packet; no doubt his imagination had always skipped the awkward bits. To rally him she unbuttoned his shirt and submitted to another schoolboy kiss. Then she liberated his penis and stroked it as if it were a needy pet. While she undressed, facing away from him, he fiddled with the condom. Home and hosed, he said at last. Not quite, she replied, dangerously close to giggles. She had not thrilled to his kisses and fumblings, but then she had hardly expected to. Penetration, on the other hand, surprised her: bloodless, unalarming, almost impersonal, it nudged towards future pleasure.

By the time Mavis came home, they were fully dressed and listening to the Opus 127 quartet.

There was a pause in the dinner-table conversation while Mavis served steamed golden syrup pudding. She had even found the patience to make real custard. Pudding had always been Eleanor’s grandmother’s domain, an unspoken contract of indulgence between grandmother and grand-daughter. Steamed golden syrup pudding, made only on the wintriest of days, had been the most special of all.

“Ethnic enough for you?” said Eleanor to Ruth.

“Oh, it’s heaven. The best.”

“Very fattening.”

“My mother’s was better,” said Mavis.

Something’s going on, thought Eleanor.

“We have some wonderful news,” said Audrey, turning to smile at Mavis, who beamed encouragement. Ruth looked up from her pudding like someone eagerly expecting the announcement of a wedding or a longed-for pregnancy. Her expression was so silly that Eleanor might have been tempted to kick her shins had they not been out of reach. Instead she slumped in her chair, sullen as a teenager.

“We’re buying land together on the far south coast near Cobargo – 160 acres. It’s half cleared, half bush, with a big tin shed we can sleep in. We’re thinking we’ll build a mudbrick house and live there one day.”

So that was it. It was what her mother had always wanted: to buy back the farm. They would turn their land into a commune for ageing widows and divorcees. Mavis chattered about organic farming and conserving native vegetation and wildlife. Audrey described the creek that ran through the property. It had a clear pool, edged by tree ferns and remnant rainforest, that was deep enough to swim in. Ruth’s eyes shone. What was the matter with her? Mavis and Audrey had obviously given up on ever finding men! It was pathetic, especially as Audrey was quite pretty in her wholesome, earth-mother way.

Later Audrey suggested that she and Eleanor do the washing up. She asked how Eleanor was getting on at the university with her languages and talked about the ups and downs in the lives of her grown-up sons. When she had rinsed the last dish and stood it in the draining rack, she removed her rubber gloves and quietly closed the door to the dining room.

“You must have noticed how happy your mother is, Eleanor,” said Audrey, sounding like the teacher she had once been. “I want you to know we’re very much in love, devoted to one another. And that means, as you’ve probably realised, that you’re free to live your life without having to worry about her any more. It’s a freedom neither of us had, I can tell you. Use it well, my girl.”

It had never occurred to Eleanor that she should worry about her mother, and somehow Audrey knew it. She also knew that Eleanor had not twigged that she and Mavis were lovers. The canny gleam in the older woman’s eyes, the tiny, exultant twitch at one corner of her mouth, unmasked Eleanor as a pretty little fool, self-absorbed and unworldly. Her cheeks flamed; she wanted to fling the damp tea towel at Audrey and run screaming into the chilly night. Why hadn’t Mavis told her that she’d found someone, that she wasn’t alone any more? Why had she left all the announcements to Audrey? But that was just what Audrey would want her to ask, and Eleanor was not about to give her that satisfaction.

“I’m very happy for you both. I think it’s great, I really do. I can’t wait to see the property, even if there are leeches in that patch of rainforest. Shall we see what Ruth and my mother are up to?”

For as far back as Eleanor could remember, her room had contained a spare bed for those occasions when a friend slept the night or a girl cousin from North Queensland came to visit. The older Eleanor grew, however, the more she had preferred not to share her private space. Tonight she wanted full possession of her old refuge, but Ruth was in the other bed, alert as a scalpel.

“Are you all right? You were awfully quiet over dinner. You don’t mind about …”

“About my mother being a lesbian? Of course not. But I do mind about her not telling me.”

“You don’t tell her things, so I suppose she thought …”

“But she’s my mother, for Christ’s sake!”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Anyway, I think they’re sweet together. Audrey’s a dear. There goes her car … Listen, I found out something about your father.”

“You what?”

“Just listen, okay? Apparently the drinking started after a visit from a couple of Lithuanian men from Adelaide. Actually she said Balts, but they spoke his language. They talked and drank all after-noon and into the night. Mavis thought they were mates from the old days, so she left them to it. But it was after that visit that he became seriously depressed and hit the turps, as she put it. He refused to talk about what was troubling him, said no one would understand, so he just drank himself into a stupor every night.

“One morning he left for work – you know this bit – and never came home. The police weren’t much help, but eventually he started sending money from Darwin. Maybe you know that bit too. But that stopped after about a year, and she didn’t go after him for it. His demons got the better of him, she said, and she didn’t want you to have anything to do with him.”

“Why did she tell you that and not me?”

“For a start, I asked. You should try it some time. Handy things, words. Anyway, while you were a child I imagine she was protecting you. Dropping your bundle isn’t something to be proud of in her view, is it? She’s all for dusting yourself off and getting on with it. She didn’t really talk about it to anyone until she met Audrey. I think she has only the vaguest idea about what he might have seen or done during the war. It’s hardly common knowledge that this country is harbouring war criminals. Now she’s probably just scared of you, and I can’t say I blame her, sometimes.”

Eleanor snorted. “That woman has never been scared of anything in her life.”

Last year, after Ruth’s father had referred in passing to the massacres of Jews in the Baltic states, Eleanor had searched the library and found enough references to Lithuanian barbarity and enthusiasm to freeze her blood. A sickening dimension was added to all the wondering about her father, and until today she had not voiced it to anyone. Which was the greater torment, knowing or not knowing? She would probably never be able to answer that. Eleanor had long understood that she must learn to accommodate loss and uncertainty, even as she had continued to blame her mother, through all the yearning and chafing of adolescence, for such burdens. But tonight the words seriously depressed had flared like a struck match in a dark room. In their brief illuminating of anguish – and possibly also shame and remorse – they summoned the shadowy, sonorous creature of her imagination and gave him a prickly kind of substance. They did not exculpate him, if indeed exculpation were called for; but they made of him yet another human being, innocent or guilty, whose life had been blighted by war. In revealing the man’s inability to forget, those two words saved him in his daughter’s eyes from monstrosity. As for his wife, she might perhaps have done more to help him, but not even Mavis could stare down history.

Ruth yawned and said it had been quite a day. She was so glad to have met Mavis and Audrey and the chooks at last. Good night … Eleanor closed her eyes on the day’s unruliness and let her mind drift with the sound of the sea. But memory kept tugging at her like an undertow, and she was too tired to resist. Here she is, fifteen years old, sprawled on her bed reading a romance novel – the sort of book Mavis calls deplorable rubbish, or even female pornography. She has ignored her mother’s suggestion to leave her maths homework till later and get out and enjoy the spring sunshine. Her grandmother’s sewing machine whirrs in the dining room, where she is making a summer dress, cornflower blue, for Eleanor. The jasmine-scented air caresses the girl’s skin. From the back garden comes the thwack-thwack-thwack of the mattock, a regular pulse to her illicit reading. Then it stops, and suddenly Mavis is singing in the most tuneless voice the girl has ever heard: Here I go again / I hear those trumpets blow again / All aglow again / Taking a chance on love.

In the jumble of feeling stirred by the memory of her mother’s song, Eleanor was astonished to find pity.

Did you know, Ruth would ask (knowing that Eleanor did not, as it was something she herself had only just discovered); did you know that … And there would follow some little offering of fact or surmise about the natural world, as a child brings a trusted adult a shell or a piece of bark or something quite mysterious. It pleased Eleanor to think for a moment about a tiny desert marsupial – a dunnart, Ruth would insist, not a marsupial mouse – that urinated crystals; to marvel at the adaptive genius of other organisms. But on this Saturday morning, several weeks after their visit to Wollongong, Eleanor had something for Ruth.

“No more of that French sicko, for pity’s sake,” said Ruth, without looking up from the newspaper. She meant Story of O, which was doing the puzzled rounds of their friends.

“This is Flaubert,” said Eleanor, waving L’Éducation sentimentale at her. “I just want to read you one little paragraph.”

“Oh, all right, but translate.”

“This is the narrator on a minor character called Mademoiselle Vatnaz: ‘She was one of those Parisian spinsters who, every evening, when they’ve given their lessons or tried to sell their little drawings or place their miserable manuscripts, go home with – I think that’s nineteenth-century mud, not dog shit – on their petticoats, make their dinner, eat it all alone, and then, with their feet on … a foot-warmer, by the light of a dirty lamp, dream of a love affair, a family, a home, a fortune, everything that is lacking in their lives. So, like many others, she had welcomed the Revolution as the advent of revenge, and she was devoting herself to – extreme, probably, I’ll have to look up effrénée – Socialist propaganda.’ ”

Eleanor had imbued her delivery with all the masculine contempt she sensed flowing through the passage. When she looked up, it was to see rills of tears running down Ruth’s cheeks.

“It’s a wonder he didn’t make her a Jew as well,” Ruth sniffed. “I suppose she’s too ugly to find a husband.”

“Too plain to be a high-class tart, apparently. But Ruth, it’s only a novel. It’s the view of one syphilitic old sourpuss with a private income who thinks he’s superior to everyone.”

“But it’s not!” Ruth wailed. “What could be more conventional? There are versions of it around still, in 1977. Plain women like me, no matter how intelligent or talented, are pathetic without a man.”

Eleanor felt a shock as sharp as betrayal. Somehow she had believed her friend to be above the common run of female fears. Indeed, she had grown to depend on Ruth’s good sense, consulting it like a respected dictionary. It may have been, in the first minutes of their meeting early in the previous year as they chatted in the dinner queue at Women’s College, that she had stuck some kind of label on Ruth Sonnenberg’s looks – une jolie laide, perhaps, because she was drawn to paradox – but whatever it was had long been eclipsed by affection. She loved the caprices of Ruth’s dark curls, her noble profile, the lively and sometimes solemn way her eyes drew your attention. Hers was a face for men to cherish; a face to take on its own terms; a face as dear to Eleanor as the person herself.

“Plain is not the word for you. There is nothing plain about you. You’re magnificent.”

“Ugly, then. I hate my hair, I hate my nose …”

“Would you like my silly little nose? Would you like my boring straight hair? I’d swap you any day.”

“I’m fat …”

“Ruth, for heaven’s sake! You’re not fat, you’re a bit plump. And you wouldn’t even be plump if you stopped making puddings from that Presbyterian cookbook.”

“I’m just curious about what I missed out on.”

Eleanor unfolded her legs, stood up and took three steps to the other armchair. Kneeling beside it, she felt the bite of sisal matting on her knees. “Now, tell me what this is all about. What’s really going on? Who is it?”

“Plant ecology.”

“What?”

“My plant ecology lecturer.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh. The one who takes us on the best field trips. The one who is utterly inspiring and funny and honourable and unlike any man I’ve ever met. The one who’s happily married.”

“Oh. The one who wears shorts all winter.”

“Most of the winter. And stop saying ‘oh’.”

“But has there been anything between you? Has he given you any signs?”

“I don’t know, it might just be my imagination. He’s always friendly, but he’s friendly to everyone. He sometimes looks at me when he says something funny, but that might be because I laugh more than the others. And what does it matter anyway? It’s impossible. Just don’t tell me – whatever you do, please don’t tell me – that it’s only a crush like that six-week attack of lust you had for your German tutor and then got over because he kept clearing his throat or slurping his coffee or whatever it was. It isn’t like that, and I can’t just forget it and console myself with some boring young fart.”

“Oh, Ruthie,” said Eleanor, taking her friend’s hand. “Poor you.”

From that day forth, Mademoiselle Vatnaz took up residence at 17 Dartmoor Street, and Eleanor and Ruth amused themselves with scheming on her behalf. They had her write one great novel, an antidote to L’Éducation sentimentale, in which bruised love found its awkward way, the hapless heroine grew strong and wise and at least one friendship was true. Then they packed la Vatnaz off to England where George Eliot befriended her and organised the translation of her masterpiece. The translator, a phlegmatic Cornish widower, fell deeply in love with her but lacked the courage to declare himself. Great men fell at her feet, but no one understood her origins or guessed at her Jewishness save the translator, himself a man of mysterious birth. Many impediments and wrong turns later – quite a few Saturday mornings were expended on those – they married and later adopted from an East End orphanage two Jewish sisters called Grace and Susannah. Grace became a famous contralto, and Susannah, through her field work in Australasia and South America, made significant contributions to evolutionary biology that were recognised in her lifetime.

Before she saw Julien, Eleanor had not known that desire might assail her unannounced. Before Julien, desire had begun as a low hum outside herself, and she would, if she felt like it, invite it in and feed it with the imagination. One overcast Friday afternoon in July, in her fourth year at the university, she walked out of the library, the fusty smell of dictionaries still in her nostrils, and noticed a dark-haired young man talking to the Trotskyite who slouched behind a trestle table piled with pamphlets and books. The stranger wore a trenchcoat, which guaranteed his foreignness, and he was gesticulating in a controlled, emphatic way that she recognised. Last January, in Parisian cafés with Ruth, she had watched through the haze of cigarette smoke the movements of such hands – hands that knew how to touch (or so she imagined) as well as to assert and refute.

As Eleanor approached she heard the wearer of the raincoat defending, in tentative English at odds with the confident hands, the PCF, which she knew meant the French Communist Party. He and the porky Trot appeared to be arguing about whether the French party was Stalinist or not. She couldn’t see how it could still owe anything to Stalin when he had been dead so long and everyone knew what a monster he was. She moved as close to the trenchcoat as she decently could, close enough to be sure he didn’t reek of cigarettes or antediluvian sweat. Ruth claimed French BO was sui generis and that she could sniff it out in a crowded room, but Eleanor couldn’t smell anything in the least discouraging.

“Aucun rapport. It’s … euh …”

“Irrelevant,” said Eleanor.

He turned to look at her, his brown eyes lightening. She thought of kelp in the moment that sunlight strikes it.

“Merci.” He held out his hand and smiled. His teeth were not perfect, which gladdened her; his skin had a golden glaze. “Julien Foucher.”

She clasped his cool hand and pronounced her name as if she were the Queen of Aquitaine, she who brought the troubadours to Northern France. For a dizzy moment she thought he might raise her hand to his lips.

“Anyway,” said the Trot, scowling at Eleanor and shuffling his feet, “have a think about what I said.” He had apparently concluded that female interference had brought the discussion to an end.

“I will do zat.”

French emboldened her, like fancy dress. She was going to the cafeteria. Would he like to come?

In the cafeteria Eleanor apologised for the coffee, scalding and insipid, and for the poor choice of food. Julien said there was no need to apologise; Australians were always apologising. He had just been to Alice Springs and back on a bus, so he knew.

She did not remove the mantle of French. No negotiations took place over language, even though Julien had come to Sydney to practise English. He was staying with a married cousin, a geologist who was employed by a mining subsidiary of a French giant with an interest in Australian uranium. The cousin and his wife referred to Australians as les australos, short for les australopithèques. As Eleanor struggled to keep up with his words, her feelings fell behind in a fog. She barely reacted to the australopithecines because she was still stuck in her dismay about the uranium.

Some weeks earlier, marching behind an Aboriginal land rights banner in an anti-nuclear demonstration, she and Ruth had chanted, with thousands of others, “Leave uranium in the ground!” (“Men can’t be trusted!” the group of lesbians in front of them had added.) But then Julien launched into a tirade against multinationals and bourgeois hegemony and the exploitation of the third world. He described the arguments he had over dinner with the cousin and his reactionary wife; he removed his PCF membership card from his wallet and held it up for her to admire. Yet he was unlike any communist she had ever come across: nothing like the scruffy Maoists who would wave their newspaper under your nose when you were having coffee with a friend; nothing like the shambling Trot outside the library or even the charismatic trade unionist she and Ruth so admired for having led his union in a campaign to save historic buildings. Julien was European, and that made all the difference.

He spun for her a cocoon of French, a private Paris of the mind without exhaust fumes or dog turds or sneers clothed in formules de politesse. He had just completed the second year, with the strange name of khâgne, of a gruelling two-year preparatory course for the École Normale Supérieure. Having recently sat the philosophy entrance exam, he was waiting to hear if he had been accepted. Oh, like Sartre, she said, indifferent to the sleazy old gnome but anxious to show Julien that she knew something. The Marxist-Leninist demigod leaned across the table towards her: indeed, but it had taken him two attempts to get in.

Eleanor had a vague notion that it was the agrégation that Sartre had failed and then repeated a year later, but she didn’t say so. Why set so much store by exams and elite institutions? She wondered how philosophical Julien would be if it turned out he was not among the chosen.

That evening she had to babysit for the Greek family in her street. On Saturday night she had intended to go to a party with the history student she’d been seeing in a desultory way. She could back out of the party easily enough, but what could she offer Julien? Her life held more cups of tea with Ruth and jobs fit for teenagers than bohemian mystique. But there was always the potentiality of lunch. If the cousin could spare him tomorrow, she asked, would he like to come to Dartmoor Street at midday? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

Usually she scurried across the footbridge over Parramatta Road, holding her breath against the fumes that rose from the highway below and humming a melody to divert her ears from the roar of traffic. Julien seemed oblivious to the noise or to how much lead he was inhaling. He dawdled as if they were strolling in the Luxembourg Gardens, and she forced herself to match her step to his. She said she had never cooked for a Frenchman before. (Frenchman! He must, she had calculated, be at least a year younger than she was.) Were French communists as demanding as the rest of the country? He laughed and said some national characteristics were worth hanging on to. Would she like him to bring a tart from a French bakery he had discovered? She said that would be lovely and then began to worry about what meatless creation of hers could match it. They had crossed the footbridge, and it was time to part.

As a child she had endlessly rehearsed the return of her father: where it would occur, what he would say, how saintly and forgiving Mavis would prove to be. Usually Eleanor was in the middle of playing the piano in a concert or dancing a ballet solo when he walked right in. She had therefore been forced to conclude, somewhere around puberty, that nothing ever happened quite as you imagined it would, if indeed it happened at all. That hypothesis had yet to fail her, though she had not let it dampen her daydreams or douse the pleasures of anticipation. For such pleasures she envied the French the convention of the double kiss – the restraint of form, the risk of lip brushing lip on the transit between cheeks. She parted slowly, adhesively, from Julien, and he from her. Her belly lurched with hunger for him as he ran down the steps into the hellish cutting to catch his bus.

The following morning there could be no flopping about in armchairs drinking tea. Eleanor and Ruth bustled about the house, tidying and cleaning, and Ruth even vacuumed Eleanor’s room while Eleanor made pumpkin soup and cheesy eggplant bake. Back in the kitchen to report on her efforts, Ruth slouched against the door jamb and declared that she’d had no idea that seducing strangers was such hard work, and since when were communists so damned fussy, anyway?

“Try to be more Zen about it,” Eleanor suggested, nervously breaking up a lump of ricotta with her fingers. Although she had a yen for some Schubert piano music – the impromptus and Moments Musicaux – she invited Ruth to put on any record she liked, which these days could mean a neither-one-thing-nor-the-other black female singer.

“Too busy.” Ruth began to goosestep through the kitchen towards the bathroom.

“That really is quite uncalled for. No one’s making you do the bathroom.” Cleaning the bathroom was a job they both hated. No matter how selflessly you struggled or how mindfully you focused on the rhythm and circularity of the scrubbing motion, it never looked as if you had lifted a finger.

“Relax,” said Ruth, “it’s just a silly walk.”

Two minutes after the appointed hour Julien knocked on the front door. Eleanor fussed in the kitchen while Ruth let him in. They had agreed on such a stratagem beforehand because Ruth thought he might turn tail and run when confronted by the voracious female spider that was Eleanor. Ruth also wanted to get a good look at him in case she needed to give a description to the cops. His voice in the front room was explaining that he had taken a taxi from Rose Bay, a luxury Eleanor could not have permitted herself. For a moment she felt like hiding in the backyard, afraid that she had been too eager the day before, too cringingly, colonially obvious. Yet they had so little time. Ahead of her now were two weeks of mid-winter break, and ten days after that he would be half a world away. Julien, carrying a cardboard cake box, preceded Ruth into the kitchen. His eyes sought Eleanor’s and held her gaze longer than was comfortable, as French men tended to do. Did that make him unexceptional, no different from the men who lurked in the Louvre on Sundays to try their luck with foreign girls? Was that look, which should have been about her, no more than a mannerism? But then the shy twist to his smile and the measured double kiss of greeting expelled any irritation. Behind him, Ruth waggled her eyebrows, amused by something – the air of bonne famille, the music-hall accent, or perhaps the unlikelihood of having to report to the police after all.

After she had left to spend the rest of the weekend with her family – “for you, ma chère, I make zis sacrifice!” – Eleanor and Julien fell into French. He was curious about the house, its customs and objects. He plonked himself down in the beanbag with a theatrical sigh of contentment and asked what it was called in English. Pointing to the huge cushions heaped on the floor under the staircase, he enquired whether people actually sat on them. Did she have parties, meetings? Oh, orgies, she said, every second Thursday. He peeked under the Indian printed cloth draped over the trunk that served as a coffee table. He ran his fingers down the hardened rivulets of candle wax on the bottle of Mateus rosé, which neither Ruth nor Eleanor would admit to having drunk. Maybe that was what philosophers did, wander and exclaim and question. He wanted to know why she didn’t insist that the landlord repair the balcony overlooking the street; it was unsafe and blocked off with a sheet of masonite. Eleanor explained that he was in no hurry because they were students. Besides, he would only put up the rent if he fixed it, which was the last thing they wanted. Julien then asked politely about the rent. Quelle chance: so much space, so much freedom.

Over lunch, to her relief, he declined the cheap red wine that was all she had to offer, saying he would drink a glass of champagne if he absolutely had to – she wondered in what circumstances a person would absolutely have to – but he didn’t drink wine any more than he wore a beret or sported a moustache. He praised the pumpkin soup and the cheesy eggplant bake and pronounced the brown rice, which he had never eaten – Jamais? Jamais! – delicious. As she eased into French, she let go of her conversation-class rigidity. Now that she could focus less on the effort of putting one word after another and more on him, she noticed some tension in the way he held himself and wondered if he was unsure of how to behave. She suggested they go for a walk and leave the tart he had brought till later. Across the pond of lemon curd the pastry chef had piped the word citron in chocolate cursive. It seemed almost a shame to breach the tart’s calm surface. After excusing herself she went to the bathroom, which adjoined the kitchen as an historical afterthought.

She dithered, took deep yogic breaths, combed her hair, applied lipstick, wiped it off. Then she looked resolutely into her grey, reflected eyes. Courage, les hommes ne sont pas compliqués! Deep down men are simple creatures: that was what women believed, or at least that was what she’d heard plenty of women say. God, how she wanted him. How could she let the world snatch him away? She washed her hands, put in her diaphragm, washed her hands again and walked out of the bathroom.

Julien had left the table, which took up the dimmest corner of the front room, and was sitting on a cushion, leaning back against the wall with arms folded across his chest and legs stretched out before him. He had to try it, he said, as if life would never again offer the opportunity of parking himself on an absurdly oversized cushion in a dingy Victorian terrace house in an inner working-class suburb of Sydney at the end of a decade that would not be remembered for its good taste. She smiled down at him, and he up at her. Straddling his legs, she held out her hands to him and asked if he was cold. A little, he replied. He grasped her hands firmly, tucking in his legs with one swift movement and springing to his feet. As he steadied himself he laced his fingers through hers. She stared at his throat, at the fine blue stripes on the button-down collar of his shirt. She could feel the vehemence of his breath; her breast rose and fell to its rhythm. Then he released her and brought the back of one smooth hand to her face, slipping it tenderly from cheekbone to chin and from chin to cheekbone. His eyes roamed her face and then settled on her mouth. With his index finger he traced the fullness of her lips.

“You’re so beautiful. I suppose they all tell you that.”

“No, they don’t – this is Australia.” There was more truth to that than coyness. Only her grandmother, and Ruth in her half-serious way, had told her she was beautiful. One or two brave and hopeful boys might have hinted at it.

“Fools,” he said. “What fools your compatriots are.” He took her face in both hands, looked into her eyes and at last, at last, brought his lips decorously to hers, as if asking permission for the kiss that would spin her out into a wild, gasping joy.

Afterwards she would recall the aching ascent to the bedroom and the shivering plunge onto the cold futon, but little of the progress of hands and lips and tongues. His body delighted her, though she was unprepared, never having been acquainted with one, for his foreskin. He came too soon and apologised, but he stayed inside her, as if he could not bear to part his body from hers. She stroked the dark waves of his hair, warm in the glow of him; she drew knowledge of him in through her skin. It was then, or so it seemed to her later, that love stole in and lodged in her so firmly that not even the long separations and bodily rationing could evict it.