Charades (17 page)

“These days, the De L'anneaus have a finger in plenty of pies,” says Nicholas. “Along with my father. Very hardheaded and pragmatic, people like the De L'anneaus; well, no more so than your average Catholic aristocrat, I suppose, especially the recently impoverished, especially the ones with Parisian connections, especially the ones who are Jewish if you go back far enough.” He surveys the almost empty refectory. “Katherine, my dear, cafeterias are frightfully depressing, don't you think? Next time, anywhere but here. Agreed?”

Next time,
Katherine thinks, swallowing hot tea and not trusting herself to speak.
Katherine, my dear.

“Anyway, I've known her since we were kids. De L'anneau's her legal name by the way. I expect she'd told you that?” Absent-mindedly he picks up his knife and begins tapping its blade very lightly against Katherine's forearm. He could be doodling on a piece of scrap paper for all the awareness he bestows on this, but the nerves in Katherine's body realign themselves at dizzying velocities. She watches the piece of metal that connects her with Nicholas. “She was V
é
rit
é
Acier when she came to them,” he says. “That's the name the nuns in Le Raincy gave her. She's the one who insisted on Ashkenazy again, as soon as she got here, right from the start.” He stops tapping with the knife and leans forward. “My father got that from her parents. Amazing really, when you think about it; that kind of determination when you're nine years old. Has she talked about this?”

Katherine, eyes on the unfocused allamanda distance, shakes her head slightly.

Nicholas sighs. “Of course she's had the best of medical … the best of psychiatrists. The De L'anneaus have been able to see to that,” — he gives Katherine the kind of wry smile that assumes complicit knowledge of the business world — “in the wake of recent real estate deals in which my father had a hand. Anyway, we assume that's helped. The psychiatry, I mean. But she'll never speak French, it's a kind of hysterical muteness.” He begins tapping with the knife again. “And the absurd thing is, you know, she's the reason I decided to study French — as a callow but lovesick Churchie boy.”

Churchie:
and Katherine is hurtled back to Finsbury Park when
Churchie
was just an exotic word and the golden boy lay in the grass with his recorder. So constantly accessible in dreams.
Churchie.
Church of England Grammar School. Katherine's heart sinks; she withdraws her arm from the tapping knife; the refectory table widens and widens, it is wider far than Finsbury Park. She stares across unbreachable distances. Private school people, she thinks, are given something very early on, perhaps it is something they eat, something that tells them they are always right, and even if they are not, it doesn't matter.
State school people are always afraid they are wrong; they worry about it.

“I thought she might talk to me then. In French.” Nicholas shakes his head, amazed at his own life. “The reasons for doing what we do!”

Oh yes, Katherine thinks. The amazing reasons.

Her eyes still on the middle distance, on the haze above river and racing eights, she asks: “Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I'm afraid. Because she seems to be getting further and further away.”

Katherine, studying his profile (since it is Nicholas who now stares into the bougainvillea), asks herself: Who fascinates me more, he or she?

But how does one choose among gods?

“I don't understand,” she says awkwardly, nervously, “why you think that I … why I could possibly be of any …”

“Nine years old,” Nicholas says. “Of course, the weeks in the forest living by her wits, and then the convent years. All the daily deceits required and the never knowing when … But still, amazing.”

“I don't know …” Katherine stumbles over words. “I mean, yes, it is, it is amazing, only it …” In another way, she feels, it is quite unsurprising. “There's something …” But can she translate into words her sense of the rime-cold prow of the boat where Verity stands? And of the
way
that Verity will always stand, undaunted, unflinching, the worst already known. Is it possible to express this? She would need to speak, she thinks, in Anglo-Saxon. “The lighted hall,” she begins clumsily, inanely. “Once it's lost …” But she gives up and says in another kind of voice altogether. “I don't think you need to be afraid for her.”

“Moving further away from all of us,” Nicholas says, his barque sailing in other waves. “Other people have noticed. Not I alone.”

Not I alone.
The private school syntax snags in Katherine's mind. She flinches, scanning backwards for possible errors committed, the grammatical gaucheries of state school speech.

Nicholas leans forward and catches hold of her wrist with a sudden urgency and demands: “In her seminars, do you notice …? Is she always coherent?”

“Yes,” Katherine says, looking at his fingers on her wrist. “Absolutely lucid. Always.” There will be a bruise, she thinks.
A permanent bracelet of some kind, a sort of pressure scar.

“Charade,” she says at the shoreline of a much later chapter, “I've thought and thought but I've never accounted for it. From almost any perspective, it's neurosis. Viewed even from the next table in the refectory, it's pathetic. Or just silly.
That poseur,
was what someone used to say about Nicholas, another student, a Richard St John, who teaches at Oxford now.

“Do you know, Charade, just last year I finally spent a day in the library looking for traces of brilliant Nicholas. Not a book, not a single article, going back twenty-five years. What does this mean?

“And yet that day in Toronto last year … The mere sight of him … I felt as though I'd been shot. Traffic screeching, horns, I could have been killed. And then when he —”

“Wait,” Charade says. “Wait, that's a switchback jump, I can't … How did we get to Toronto?”

“I thought I'd lose him, I went careening across the street between cars —”

“My father's in Toronto? You found him?”

Katherine blinks. “Nicholas,” she says faintly, leaning back against the limestone cliff of her lakeshore. “Even the name, you know, after all these years …Just saying it.”

“He's here in Canada?”

“Here?” Katherine looks about her uncertainly. “Where are we?” she asks, as though a fog has settled around them.

“Kay! Kay!” Charade is pounding with her fists. “Aunt Kay, don't
do
this to me. We're in the refectory with my father, and then suddenly you're —”

“The refectory,” Katherine sighs.

In the refectory, Nicholas is asking: “She doesn't … drift off? Lapse into silences?”

“Verity? No. Not in lectures or seminars.”

“But at other times?”

“Don't …? Don't we all?” Katherine ventures.

“Ah,” he says, letting her wrist fall back on the table and rubbing his temples with his fingers. “What lapses. What silences may come.”

Katherine says hesitantly, “Aren't there necessary silences?” What she is striving to articulate is this: she believes she has the sorcerer's stone in her hands, she believes Verity pulled it from the pocket of her jodhpurs and gave it to her. She believes henceforth she will know what to do at the batwing touch of harm, of fear, of loss. Mute, she holds her cupped hands out towards Nicholas by way of explanation.

“Raisins,” she says.

“Raisins?” Nicholas frowns. “What do you mean, raisins?”

“In Verity's pocket. You know the way she is always …'' Nicholas, quizzical, is looking at her as though she is reading from the wrong page. “You do know,” she says, confident in her tiny area of specialisation (minor contribution, perhaps, an esoteric footnote, but significant), “you do know why she always has raisins in her pocket.”

He lifts an eyebrow, bewildered, perhaps even politely amused. “Hmm. Raisins. I've known her a long time but I can't say I've ever …” He asks suddenly: “This isn't one of Bea's stories, is it?” He conveys benevolence, affection, the very mildest of discreetly patronising smiles. “Bea claims you believe
anything she —”

Panic. Inner vertigo. Also anger and humiliation fuel Katherine's powers of invention. “I meant it as a figure of speech, actually.
Synecdoche.”
She taps astonishing reserves of irony. “Certain things, of course, she
has
discussed with me, especially hunger as both a literal and symbolic issue.” A whole prior life for Verity balloons up in Katherine's mind like a dandelion puffball, lodging seeds of event, putting out details, growing yellow as the sun and at least as flamboyant. “But I don't think I should violate her trust.” Dizzy now with power, seeing the clouding of his eyes, the quick wince, she turns the knife: “Of course, she's grateful to you, Nicholas. That goes without saying.”

Nicholas is in disarray, both his Proust and his Villon hats askew. “Katherine,” he says, looking at her differently, “I had no idea you …”

And nor did she. It is as though she has discovered a dagger in her hand, or a steel backbone running through the middle of her body. Bemused, she rubs the nape of her neck where it might perhaps protrude. And a part of her frantically signals Miss Warren, dragonlady of the library on Mondays. Is it possible Miss Warren is still living? Daydreaming, perhaps, on the terrace of an Eventide Home in Brisbane? And if Katherine were to write her a letter?

Dear Miss Warren:

On the occasion of your irritation with Verity Ashkenazy, our Dark Lady of the Others, what did aforesaid defendant place on your table on the Monday of unremembered month inst., A.D. 1951 or thereabouts?

(“Charade,” Katherine sighs, kneeling on the limestone shingle and splashing her face with lake water. “I still don't know the answer to that question. Were there raisins, or weren't there?”)

* *

Nicholas says: “I knew there was something between you, some connection, I sensed it.” He pauses, weighing risks. “I'll tell you something a little odd, Katherine. You could say I became aware … You could say I was warned of you in a dream.” He makes a graceful gesture of ironic self-deprecation with his hands. “It's, ah, quite exotic in its way. In the dream, Verity and I were riding up near the rainforest somewhere. And then I noticed she had a child in front of her saddle. When I drew alongside” — he gestures again to indicate the illogical nature of dreams — “it wasn't a child, it was you. And I said: What are you doing with one of my students in front of your saddle? And Verity said: She's not your student; she's mine.”

He pushes his cup of tea away from him with distaste, and looks around restlessly as though whisky could be tapped from the air by wishing. “Odd,
n'est-ce-pas
? But I must have known, unconsciously, that she had talked to you about me.”

Katherine averts her gaze, trusting to the bougainvillea.

“I hope,” Nicholas begins. “It's not a question of prying or violating trust, it's just … Well, I hope we can talk again.” He reaches out and touches the tip of Katherine's finger where it rests on the table. “You're a fascinating little puzzle-piece, aren't you?” He runs his finger lightly the length of hers, crosses the plateau of her hand, explores her forearm. “You're coming on the arts picnic, I hope? To the Glasshouse Mountains?”

“I don't think —” Katherine says, fighting for breath. “I don't … I never go on those things. Too much study, there isn't time. I never —”

“I know you don't. But I hope you'll come on this one. In fact I insist. I want to talk to you again.”

“Of course he didn't say that, Charade,” Katherine says, tossing pebbles into the water. “Of course that's utter nonsense. But for years that's what I let myself believe. I went on that arts picnic, that hike up Tibrogargan, with that silly wish as my compass.”

7

People Who Climb
Glass Houses

“In Toronto,” Charade tells Koenig, “the Royal Bank tower is made of glass.”

“I know,” Koenig says.

Charade is startled. “Oh. Yes, of course you do. I forgot that you … I get confused.”

He laughs.
“You
get confused!”

“I was confused that day with Aunt Kay.”

“In Toronto.”

“Yes. In Toronto,” she sighs. “It was very confusing …”

“Which is us?” Charade asks, and the mirrored plates clamour back in noisy facets: which is us which is us which is us?

Twenty Katherines laugh, twenty Charades reach uncertainly toward all the Katherines. Mild dizziness swoops at them, and a sense of groping. Toronto passes and repasses like clouds. And the glass tower of the Royal Bank watches impassively.

“I sometimes think,” Katherine sighs, as taxis thread their way through her hair, “that I owe the reappearance of Nicholas to a random conjunction of Borges and the Royal Bank building. Because it happened here. I saw his reflection first.”

Charade shakes her head, a time-swimmer flicking watery daze from her lashes, the race-lanes curling and jumping in the deep shifting pool of her history. “But … you've lost me again … how did we get to Toronto?”

“You don't remember driving in? And the subway?”

“I mean the twenty-five years in between. From the Glasshouse Mountains to here.”

“Yes,” Katherine sighs. The unpredictable pleats in time, the juxtapositions. “It always baffles me,” she says. “From 1759 to here just like that.” She snaps her fingers.

Charade blinks. “What?”

“If Cook had sailed further upriver with Wolfe …” Katherine says and trails off. If he'd kept going past Ville de Quebec, back in 1759, would these shining obelisks have amazed him any more or less than the ones he saw on the Queensland coast just eleven years later? “If he'd looked round a bend in time?”

Charade puts out a hand — as though to steady herself. Or perhaps trying to catch hold of the reflections that flit through Katherine's mind.

“I know,” Katherine sighs. Someone we haven't yet met, she thinks, is waiting for us. “It happens all the time,” she says.

“Aunt Kay, please,'' Charade whispers. Her heart is hammering. (Will her father appear on Cook's navigation charts?)

“Are you all right?” Koenig asks in some alarm.

“Sorry,” Charade says. “Just the force of that moment coming back, when I thought Nicholas was about to … I thought I might fall right through Toronto to Queensland. But it was just, you know, shadows, reflections, the old story. And I'd have to admit” — she trails an index finger down Koenig's chest — “yes, I'd have to admit that the Royal Bank in Toronto, seen from a certain angle at a certain time of day, definitely reminds me of Crookneck. It's the view Nicholas would have had driving up from Brisbane on the day of the picnic. And of course it's the view Cook had from the
Endeavour
.”

“I'm making every endeavour,” sighs her lover, “but the thread of this story —”

“Cook's
second
voyage. In 1770. I've already told you about it. You know, the Transit of Venus in Tahiti, the landing at Botany Bay, then the long trip up inside the reef, hugging the Queensland coast. In Moreton Bay, the sun hit the basalt and blinded him. From the ship he thought he was seeing glass towers.”

“Ah.” Koenig reaches for the chair beside the bed and fishes in the pockets of his coat. “Clear as a riddle.”

“I'm not making this up,” Charade says petulantly. “This is history.” She slides off the bed and begins pacing round the room. At the window she pauses, watching him light his pipe, watching the bedroom mirror where he appears left-handed. Two flames, one in and one not in the mirror, quaver between the booklet of matches and his meerschaum. Absorbed she watches his right hand, his left hand, dip the twin flames into tobacco. “For us,” she says as his mirror-mouth sucks in smoke, “for Queenslanders, the Glasshouse Mountains are like … well, like Niagara Falls or the Statue of Liberty, perhaps. Every Brisbane kid, practically, climbs them, it's a rite of passage. Especially Tibrogargan, you climb it first on a grade school picnic probably, but again and again. We save Beerwah for puberty or later, it's tougher.”

Koenig sets his pipe down and reaches for her. “I know it's not logical for a physicist, of all people, but I have this old-fashioned craving for a simple narrative line. Time curves, it can't be helped, but I don't see why plots should.” He pulls her onto
the bed.

“Plots
do
have to —”

He stops her mouth with a kiss. “Another night,” he says, digressing into touch.

And another night, insistent, she argues: “Plots do have to double back on themselves, there's no other way. I've brought you something, it's not a digression. Of course the MIT library was no help at all, I had to get it from Widener and I copied it out from the microfiche. Listen. The log of James Cook, captain of His Majesty's barque
Endeavour,
entry of May 17, 1770, 5 a.m. Can I read it to you?”

“Mmm,” he murmurs, nuzzling her thigh.

Charade's body readjusts itself slightly.
“Some on board were of opinion that there was a river there
 …” She glances up over her sheet of paper. “There was. The Brisbane River, which he didn't see.”

“The Brisbane River, imagine.”

“Beside which river, a couple of centuries later, my mother Bea and my aunt Kay, sitting in the Botanical Gardens —”

“Yes, yes.” Timelines like a tangle of balloon strings cross-hatch the bed. “But if we could just pin down the Glasshouse Mountains.”

She frowns. “I'm trying to do that from Cook's journal, if you wouldn't interrupt. Listen.”

This place map always be found by three hills which lie to the northward of it … These hills lie but a little way inland and not far from each other: they are very remarkable on account of their singular form which very much resembles a glass house which occasioned me giving them that name. The northernmost of the three is the highest and the largest.

“That's Beerwah,” she explains, “which I've also climbed. It's a lot tougher than Tibrogargan. The third one is Coonowrin, but we call it Crookneck. I've never climbed Crookneck. It's as sheer as the Royal Bank tower, just a finger of rock.”

“Though I'm sure your father, the mythical Nicholas —”

She frowns at that. “Do you want to hear Kay's story or not?”

He raises an eyebrow. “Ah, I'd forgotten which tale we were chasing, but it's hers and not yours. So. Back in the old Einstein-Bohr game, eh? Back in the K box. Are we in Toronto or Queensland?”

“Question,” Charade says. “If a woman stands in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue facing MIT, but her memory is so vividly snagged on one particular day of her childhood in the village of Le Raincy that she is unaware … that she is
oblivious
to the cars around her and so is hit, run over, killed … Is she more truly in Boston or in France when she dies?”

“Well put,” Koenig says. “The indeterminacy problem in
a nutshell.”

“Do time and space really exist?” Katherine asks Charade. Or are they, she wonders, like soul and eternity, just clever ideas? Metaphors of explanation. A way of holding things apart in our minds? None of the Charades on the faceted flank of the Royal Bank responds. “Because I stood here last year,” Katherine explains, “here on Front Street, Toronto, with the traffic roaring by, and I naturally thought of that hike up Tibrogargan and of Captain Cook's journals, why wouldn't I? And of course I thought of Borges — well, anyone would — the multiplications, the reflections of reflections. And then I saw —”

“Yes,” Koenig interrupts, “memory's holographic, that's pretty well established now. Distributed, not localised. Touch any bioelectric splinter and the entire thing can stage a replay.” He holds her hand up to the light. “Vivid as a hologram,” he says, studying her delicate bones and translucent skin. “So there's no certain way of knowing if this is happening now.” He draws a question mark, lightly, between her breasts. “Or then,” he says.

Charade says archly, “I get better and better in the reruns.”

“Mmmm,” he murmurs as they slide into another intermission.

“As Katherine was saying …” he prompts.

“Ah yes. And then as she was saying by the Royal Bank towers …”

“I saw Nicholas,” Katherine says, “and a sort of mad euphoria hit me.” She laughs uneasily. “He might have sprung straight from the thought of Borges, but I ran full tilt at the …” She watches her twenty heads shaking themselves in disbelief. “I chased his reflection. People must have thought I was crazy.” She rubs her eyes with the back of one hand. “Stupid,” she says. “Stupid.”

“But
was
he …?” Charade ventures, breathless, watching the Royal Bank watching Front Street. “Was my father …?”

“He was wearing, I remember, a white shirt and jeans. I'd never seen him in jeans. And a cloth hat pulled down over his curls. Well, we'd all been advised … it's an awfully hot climb … Only his was white, not army surplus like the rest. I remember people were making jokes … Nicholas, seventh Earl of Irregular Verbs, stuff like that.” Katherine looks about her, vaguely startled as cars brake, as horns rise like Canada geese.

“I think,” Charade says urgently, “I think we should find a restaurant and sit down and …”

“The strangest sense,” Katherine says, as a waitress indicates a pine table beneath green and white awnings, “I have the strangest sense of
d
é
j
à
vu.''

At a pine table beneath a green and white awning which has been temporarily erected, the beer is passed from hand to student hand. Katherine abstains. It seems to her, crowded and deafened by the din of talk and laughter, that she is even more conspicuous than when she stood unwillingly in the Friday night kerbside circle, hemmed in by hymns and megaphones, and listened to Merv Watson lob scripture into the heart of Brisbane. Beyond the rabble of noises, birds call. Only in one sense, she thinks, only in the insignificant corporeal sense, is she present at this rural academic gathering. She pictures herself from a bird's-eye view, a kind of cipher at the edge of the raucous goodwill, not quite understanding the jokes (Bea-talk and bawdy, she recognises that) and looking longingly up into the scrub and tree shadow. If there were a way to cross the open space of brown grass and dust, a way to disappear into those long green tunnels that slope up to the sun …

Climbing a mountain is as natural to her as breathing. But it is something to be done alone, or in the company of people one knows very well (Bea, for example), people who will not scratch the great surfaces of peace with unnecessary talk.

From time to time, new cars arrive and a fresh spill of people buffets the picnic grounds; fresh voices and jokes reverberate under the green and white awning, oppressing Katherine. She watches for Verity.

Nicholas is already here, Katherine has been aware of this from the moment she arrived, though she can no more look at him than one can look at the sun. Except obliquely. She is aware, certainly, most vividly aware of his white shirt half unbuttoned. There is some disturbing quality to it, an incongruous note of refinement but also something faintly erotic, set over against all the bright and loud T-shirts, the cotton checks. It is difficult to see Nicholas clearly. Satellites of students, mostly girls, moon about him in a constant cloudy circle.

There is no indication that Nicholas is aware of Katherine's presence, no reason to believe he remembers that he “insisted” she come. Studying him from the edges of her mind, watching him laugh, watching him sip beer from a glass proffered by a girl whose shining body gives off sexual invitation, Katherine wonders: Does he think of Verity at times such as these? Is he watching for
her? Does he think of Bea? What categories exist in his mind?

She looks again at the open space between the picnic tables and the treeline at the foot of Tibrogargan. In her mind, she gets up casually and crosses to the trees and disappears up the slope into the scrub. In her mind she rehearses: the shifting of weight, her footsteps on dry leaves, the embrace of shadow. It should be possible. Would anyone notice?

When Verity arrives, it will become simple. They will climb together. Probably.

Casually, sliding the question like an illicit
billet doux
underneath the convivial hubbub, Katherine asks a fellow student from Verity's tutorial: “Is ah is Verity here yet?” — knowing the answer, but looking about indifferently as though for something temporarily mislaid. “I don't think I've seen her.”

The student raises an eyebrow. “Are you serious?”

“What do you mean?”

“Ashkenazy? She never comes on these things. She's practically a recluse, I thought everyone knew that. Bit of an
idiot savant,
if you know what I mean.” The girl taps her forehead significantly: “I've known her from way back. You know what I think?” She leans toward Katherine and lowers her voice behind her bottle of Four-X beer. “I think she's got Nicholas by the balls. If you watch him — even when she's not here — you'll see her tug on the leash every now and then. He's all tied up, worse luck.”

Katherine thinks: If Bea heard this? Suppose I were to drop by the Duke of Wellington and mention, casually … “Just gossip, the sort of nonsense one hears around … But he's all tied up, in popular opinion.”

And not by Bea.

The girl persists, holding her bottle of beer like a shield in front of her lips to indicate the confidential nature of her information. “She's got some kind of hold on him, there's something sick about it. Frankly, she gives me the creeps. She's … stuck up, don't you think? And cold as a fish. Frigid, I'm willing to bet.”