Claustrophobia (5 page)

Certainly Derrick hadn't. He had known the possibility of lying and made generous use of it. A lie told even a long time ago remained a lie. So she certainly wasn't injuring him. She even felt a little grateful to him for the knowledge of it.

The Arts building was quiet except for an occasional unearthly screech from peacocks in the courtyard, the campus curiosity. Maybe a symbol of something; Pen didn't know why they were kept there. She walked around a few times, glancing from side to side, but even where the odd door was open nobody looked out or questioned her. It was like a maze, a mausoleum, or the still corridors of a mental hospital. You felt the floors above were bearing down on you, and because each level looked the same, it was like those places that trap you in dreams.

It was a picture by Escher, and she was in it.

She could stroll once or twice past the faculty desk, check out the ID pictures on the staff noticeboard.

There was no photo of Kathleen Nancarrow on the noticeboard.

She might even inspect the door of Room 413, A/Prof K Nancarrow.

That door held nothing but a pouch for student essays and a timetable that showed
Student contact times Mon & Wed 10 till noon
.

It was now late in the day. There was a small glass panel against the roof, too high for anyone to see in or out of, but enough to indicate that the light was switched off inside.

Pen tried the handle: it was locked. She could come back some other time …

In just such a room, long ago, when Derrick was a student, on the other side of the country, there were trysts, no doubt, declarations and remonstrations, maybe even tears. An anonymous box of an office, like a confessional. Sordid but solid, impenetrable.

Suddenly it was as if there were simply too much weight on this side of the continent, even with the room apparently empty. As if a set of scales were tipping, and must be put to rights.

Pen checked both ways along the corridor, reached into the door pouch, and retrieved an armful of papers. Marked essays, ready for collection.

There was nothing to stop her walking down the stairs with them, out past the faculty desk – which in any case was closed now, its convent-like grille pulled across and bolted – past the drinking fountain with her eyes straight ahead, as if she were any tutor or mature-age student carrying her work home, past the cold stone wall with its giant chiselled motto
Know Thyself
, and safely out to the Volvo parked right below.

She would have preferred to burn the papers where she could really see them go, in the old open fireplace with its jutting mantel of Toodyay stone, but they never used that now that they had the Bushman stove, and Derrick would have noticed for sure. Instead, she fed the essays through the smoky glass stove door page by balled page, fearing that otherwise they might fly up and out and catch other things alight, even in winter, or lie around outside in half-legible fragments. So she screwed them up painstakingly and poked them in.

It was satisfying at first, like counting off money, but when it was done, it left a vague boredom: so what? Kathleen
Nancarrow was sure to have kept a record of those marks anyway, maybe even her comments. It wouldn't affect her teaching. She wouldn't even know
why
they were gone.

Swiping and then destroying them was hardly an achievement – no heroic gesture. It was more like the woman Pen knew from work who had once spotted an ex-boyfriend's car parked nearby and sneaked out to let the tyres down. Just petty spite, leading nowhere beyond the moment. Something that had made Pen keep a slight distance from that woman ever since.

It would not do. It was small, mean, and what was more, impetuous, not thought-through.

‘I will have to be smarter than that,' Pen realised, ‘if I am to survive this.'

She turned on the Mac again and started to browse the university website, in earnest this time, leaving no electronic stone unturned. There must be something she could do. That much Pen had learned from the things life had thrown at her: you could always
do
something.

‘I'm thinking,' she said to Derrick over dinner that night, the ashes of Kathleen's papers mixed now, undetected, with the kindling and logs he had added to get the evening's fire going, ‘of taking an extension course. At the university, I mean. Winter school.'

Derrick nodded. ‘That's great! At last.' He watched her eating for a few moments, not wanting to prod too hard, and then finally said, ‘Why don't you go the whole hog and pick up a degree? You know they've got mid-year entry in some courses.'

Pen winced. It was an old, occasional topic between them – she could sit the mature-age test, it wouldn't matter that she hadn't finished secondary school, and so on – but it was always the wrong time. For a long while, before the miscarriage, she'd put it aside because of wanting children. Then there had perpetually been some other reason.

She worried about money, for instance. Derrick was confident he earned plenty, but Pen herself, being the usual shopper and bill-handler, had a fair idea how much they'd miss that second fortnightly pay, part-time and piddling or not. She wasn't sure she could give that up for full-time study.

But extension was different: they were intellectual hobby courses, a few hours a week – you didn't have to pass tests or write essays. You just paid a fee, and you went to lectures and discussions.
Improving your mind
, Pen's mother would call it. Like a wine, or a cheese, or an investment.

‘I don't think I'm ready for real uni,' Pen said, ‘and I'm a bit old, don't you think, to sit alongside all those teenagers? But I could try something short, something not for assessment.'

Derrick rubbed his beard: a sign of imminent disagreement, Pen knew.

‘You always sell yourself short, Pen,' he began. ‘I don't know why, after all these years, we can't get over this hurdle. I'm telling you, you could do anything you wanted …'

‘I
have
done what I wanted,' Pen said softly. ‘All these years. And this is what I want to do now.'

‘But you could actually get some return for it, get some credit, some acknowledgement.'

Pen thought of the evil letter:
You know who I am even if you will not acknowledge me
… All words now took their shape in relation to that letter, as if it were etched verbatim into her brain.

Now she thought, ‘Perhaps he is ashamed of my lack of education. Perhaps he despises me. Perhaps all this time when I thought he was just being encouraging … The way he was ashamed of my ignorance, when we met. There is another Derrick I didn't know was there all along, one for whom I was once only the means of getting at another woman. Whatever I am now. Everything he says is open to reinterpretation.'

‘I just want to see what it's like first,' she said at last.

Derrick shrugged. ‘Okay.'

What he thought finally, she could not tell. But he went straight to the computer after dinner, wanting to look at the courses on offer. Even more eager than she was. Or seemed to be.

Pen said, leaning over his shoulder, ‘I've already got all that stuff, love' – and pressed the Cancel button. ‘Besides, we're over our limit for this month.'

It wouldn't do for Derrick to see the lecturer's name, in among all the subjects. If he asked, she'd have to invent a name.

But at least one thing was established. Derrick had shown no sign of anxiety; he was all for it. Clearly he didn't know that Kathleen Nancarrow was in Perth now, and at the university. It was unlikely they'd had any contact. Pen allowed herself to breathe a little, marvelled at how easily she could make things happen. That Derrick would jump up and try to do it
for
her.

When she was a child, Pen had willed God to do things for her – base, financial things, because she never had any money, like letting her win ten dollars in a contest from the cartoon pages of the local paper, that sort of thing. The deal always was, she had to be good for a whole week – not even a bad thought – and it always paid off.

She smiled, slightly embarrassed, at the memory, and Derrick smiled back now, oblivious.

‘I'm so glad you're finally doing something for yourself,' he said, and Pen couldn't help thinking: ‘the model husband. No
Educating Rita
here. ‘And in any case, it'll give us new things to talk about. Part of that whole opening-up thing, you know. We mustn't stagnate.'

‘I know,' Pen nodded. ‘I'm sure it'll do us both good.'

Warm to look at, but cold to the touch. That was how Pen had always thought of the university, with its imitation Tuscan prettiness that caught sunlight even in winter, yet this pervasive interior chill of stone and low ceilings.

She parked up near the highway and walked slowly, a little too early for the afternoon class, having come straight from work without stopping to eat. She paused near a still, oblong pool, unruffled, almost unapproachable, and read the inscription:
Verily by beauty it is that we come at wisdom
. Pen didn't know where it came from, but it had the sound of a quote. That ‘verily' …

Outside the lecture theatre, a group was already beginning to form. They chatted over the squawking peacocks that glided in the external corridors and occasionally fanned their tails.

Pen stood at a distance and observed. The human group was mostly middle-aged, and mostly female, all thick hair, fine teeth and quality fabrics. She felt again that attraction and repulsion these sorts of women always provoked in her, with their shawls and ‘interesting' beads, their well-fed figures, their complete carelessness of their own leisure and good fortune.

She knew, too, that this was a prejudice, and that she couldn't have it both ways. There was this, or there was where she had come from, and that hadn't worked for her either.

‘I belong nowhere,' she thought glumly, not for the first time, and watched as the sole albino peahen thrust its way through the crowd, tiny head lurching, indifferent to the flapping and fuss of the colourful ladies it was disturbing. Then the doors were unlocked, and the whole group moved in.

Pen could hardly think for the pounding in her temples. It was the element of the unforeseen: she had taken certain steps, but who could know where they would lead?

And there at last was Kathleen Nancarrow at the front of the hall, introducing herself, and Pen sat intently, eyes wide as if no amount of looking could saturate her vision.
Verily by beauty it is that we come at wisdom
, she remembered ironically.

Of course the woman was beautiful. It couldn't have been otherwise. Even from a distance you could see it – the kind of face and body that don't age.

From the half-shadows of the cold lecture hall, Pen watched her mount the rostrum and arrange her papers. Kathleen shook her glossy blonde hair, and appeared to gaze straight back at her. It was an illusion, given the crowd, but Pen knew for a moment how Derrick must once have felt, back when he was a young student in Sydney at this woman's mercy: unnerved, stripped of his nerves.

Time had passed, and yet stood still. Kathleen's face was
rounded like a child's, though porcelain-pale; her eyes were bright blue globes, lamplike. And then her mouth – small and discreet, the mouth of a Twenties film star, yet the room fell utterly silent when it opened to speak.

Whether it spoke sense or nonsense, Pen could not yet determine. Around her, others took notes, but Pen only sat, observed and listened. Pen had not come to study The World of the French Symbolists, Extension Course FR100. She had come to study this woman. She had come because she could not help herself.

Now Kathleen began to read, her French solemn, precise and impeccable, and then translated what she'd read:

Soon we shall plunge into the coldest shadows
Farewell, bright light of our short-lived summers!

As it went on, and the lecture built around it, the poem almost stirred tears in Pen. She was torn between her irritation with the speaker, decided in advance, and this new feeling, caught off balance. Gripped, in spite of herself.

‘It's because of Derrick,' she told herself. ‘I am over-identifying with him, as if I were in his shoes. I must be more guarded. Women like her have a certain kind of charisma, of course they do. That's how they hook people in.'

Yet when she glanced about for evidence of this effect on her fellow students, she saw only the same placid self-containment they had shown outside in the icy corridor. They might as well have been at a macramé class or a cooking demonstration. They simply nodded now and then, or murmured politely, as if to signal they were keeping up.
None appeared as stricken as Pen felt.

‘It's because I haven't eaten, and I've been rushing around,' Pen thought. ‘It makes you light-headed.'

After the lecture she loitered near the door, self-absorbed.

‘We're going for coffee, would you like to join us?'

It was one of the cluster of shawled women, beckoning to Pen.

Pen looked at the floor. Why would they want her along?

‘Come on, it'll be good to get to know each other.'

The woman's smile seemed genuine, and for a moment Pen felt guilty about her earlier thoughts. But she didn't want this distraction; she couldn't afford it.

‘Maybe another time,' Pen said. ‘But thanks anyway.'

Kathleen Nancarrow was still in the room, gathering papers, as Pen lingered. Walking out, she nodded and smiled at Pen, and then was gone.

An empty hall, peacocks calling plaintive at the windows.

Pen thought, ‘So now I have
seen
her, and so what? Nothing has come of it. Nothing is fixed, nothing put right. What did I
think
would happen?'

Even now, in those few moments when Pen had had the chance to speak to her alone, what could she have said? She was disgusted with her own indolence, her failure to act. She had not even ruffled the surface, not skimmed a single stone on the still pool of that woman's composure.