Coda (8 page)

Years ago—three? four?—Nina Waterman had knelt literally at his feet on a pool scootway flooded by the splashings of yoicks, polluted by arcadian flat-chested nymphs and lugger shepherd boozers, and bowed her magnificent head as his party song climaxed:
honey, did yo' hear dat mockin' bird sing las' night?
To lager and stubby wash of the good ship Hackendorf, Brain Hackendorf sang.

When he left the church the gondolas on the canal swung by with barely a glance from boatered polesters under the thin wash of early sun damped down by mist, pollution and the rags of sea-dragging cloud.

So long, Bosie, now rinsing out her underwear to hang on a neat packaway traveller's clothesline hooked across bathtub or shower screen.

In a room whose ceiling was cluttered with
putti
.

You brought a new kind of love to me
, blooted Harold ‘Shorty' Baker on trumpet, mute blocking like a heavy head cold the driving rhythms of Billy Strayhorn and Cue Porter. The ghetto-blaster
vibrated with its own racket from a barley-sugar balcony above him and there he goes, there goes Brain, who could not refrain from snapping fingers along with the sound, chuck-chucking as he almost pranced along cobbled streets to meet Nina Waterman, cool and agelessly middle-aging but still yummy, adjusting hat and scarf in the colonnade of a broken-down, still gorgeous palazzo.

Twinned! Snap!

There. Standing half-shaded by portico, by hat, one finger probing a timetable, her timeless profile trapped in connections. Nina. He felt that wild rush of excitement he used to get forty years before when he played hookey.

She had no sense of culpability.

‘This,' she would later insist to her divorce lawyer, when she decided long after that divorce might be neater, was entirely unplanned. ‘We had been trapped,' she would explain, ‘on the same tour. As it were. Ironically …' and she had smiled her ancient Attic smile … ‘a discovery tour. Fifteen days, twelve cities. I ask you!'

They had not lasted with their partners more than two.

‘Cities or days?' the lawyer had asked.

‘Why, days.'

In Rome Bosie had become sniping, whining in the Pantheon, the Colosseum (he, Brain,
was the one spreadeagled on sand under lion's breath!) and in the rain-drizzled square of St Peter's. She craved big spending along the Via Veneto. Mr Waterman developed Roman belly on the first day, a distressing condition that was to affect him for the rest of the tour, whose conductor was relentless in his insistence on culture. He barely noticed his wife had gone, and when Bosie bitterly pointed out to him on the third morning that some conclusion could be drawn by both absences, he cheered up immediately despite his illness.

‘This,' Brain said to Mrs Waterman, touching her hand as it rested on a stone balustrade of their fourth crumbling church on day one, ‘is not what I really came for.'

‘The decay?'

Joke, she had explained to his hurt, blunt features. Blunted as when he had pleaded with Bosie for God's sake just to hear Schreier singing his guts/heart out for a minute, half a minute, in the
Schwanengesang
and had said
Hist!
Actually, he had said, ‘Hey! Lissen a that!' as once, three years before he had held a rapt finger to the tip of Johnny Hodges' fluid lace of notes and caught a barely known Nina Waterman watching with poised amusement. Bosie had poked out her tongue and walked away, slamming a muffling door between them. Dampered! Twice!

‘That's for all of us, the decay,' he said. And her time-endangered hand twitched on eroded stone.

The leaving had been easier than he could have imagined, having imagined so often these last years in the humid nights of Reeftown with his wife snoring persistently beside him. Take five. Take this: an abandoned heap of outer garments (holding memories of his vanished dad) on the dazzle strip of some deserted beach, any beach, and a two-hundred-yard swim round a point to predeposited dry clothing, cash and a motor-bike panting to whip him away, never, not ever, to be found as Brain Hackendorf again.

The reality was the briefest note tucked under a bedside lamp, his pockets stuffed with air ticket, travellers' cheques and passport with numerous visas already stamped in and throbbing to be used in rhythm with his overexcited middle-aged heart.

Mere escape, he argued.

Or was it the sight of Nina Waterman, more a metaphor of escape than a fornicatory goal, under the ambiguous shelter of her dipping hat?

It was, he insisted inwardly, giving her cool fingers a belated squeeze, the escape itself.

Bimbo and Chaps would be outraged, but not for long.

Kathleen would be amused.

He must send a card to that sweltering Brisbane home. That's if the poor old girl could take it all in, she was so damn vague these days. Vague and forgetful. He must ask Shamrock if she ever wet the bed. He'd heard that was an early sign. Incontinence of brain and bladder. But would Shamrock, entangled with the entertainment schedules of her ambitious backbencher husband, even have bothered to visit the old Mum in months unless she needed something? Shamrock had never been a daughterly daughter or for that matter a sisterly sister, any more, he had to admit, than he had been a son.

He blinked away guilt brought back by dubious wall stains and puddles along the alleyways and focused on his partner in elopement. His conscience wouldn't let him alone.

Something nagged.

Guilt.

Impulsively he rang Kathleen from a pay phone at an
ufficio postale
, ignoring the thought that it was now nearly midnight in Brisbane.

‘Mother,' he said without preamble, ‘I've left Bosie.'

‘Where, dear?' his mother asked. Her voice came through as strongly as if she were in the next phone booth.

‘In Venice.'

‘Darling,' Kathleen said, ‘what a lovely place to leave her.'

Handing down the delicious Waterman into the gondola, that half version of a Melanesian war canoe, Brain was stabbed with
déjà vu
. Dad, he remembered. Mum. Two eccentrics he had regretted but delighted in as he matured. After his father's death mother had flung herself head first into evening courses and floundered through a bachelor degree in economics. Mother in her middle years on a borrowed bicycle, cycling all the way down the old Sandgate Road to attend a Corpus Christi procession at his college, cycling in her moth-eaten undergraduate gown, even though no one bothered wearing
them those days, a trencher cockahoop on her skull, bat wings flapping. It was his final year and he had tried pretending—oh shame! shame!—that he hadn't seen her as she propped her bicycle against the football oval fence and came seeking him out, grinning her excuse me's through the crowd and the roaringly sung
Pange Lingua
.

Mother! Oh Mother!

In guide-book Italian he asked the straw-boatered gondolier to take them up the canals to the railway station. There appeared to be some difficulty. The boatman kept shaking his head as Brain shouted ‘
Il stazione
' over the noise of police launches and ferries. Not even waved money bills of impossibly large denomination were lubricant. The gondolier poled away, taking huge and elegant sweeps with his oar, glancing occasionally at Mrs Waterman, who was too amused by the whole business to do more than catch that admiring Italian eye. After twenty minutes of graceful movement up and down the major canals they found themselves back where they had started.

‘This is too much!' Brain cried, angered, and producing thousands of lire. The gondolier daringly kissed Mrs Waterman's fingertips, giving her ring finger the smallest of nips with his teeth, and refused to look at either of them
again as he waited for the next mad tourist. In the end they were forced to take a water taxi.

Despite the spiritual dousing of the boatman who had tampered with spontaneity, there they are, entrained, racing towards Milan and points north of there. North to Zürich where the Zürichsee would mirror its indifference to their unadventurous adultery. Brain had been expecting a sexual renaissance. Perhaps he was in awe of his partner's almost phlegmatic urbanity, despite the pneumatic attractions of her pastel flesh. A sense of trespass which might have sustained them failed to stimulate. Having left all their possessions to be lugged about or sent home by their abandoned partners, they were forced to spend too much of their time replenishing essentials. Exhausted and now irritably guiltless, they tucked into
Sauerbraten
and told each other how bored they had been in their former lives. Bored, bored, bored, Nina said, almost wolfing her tucker. Brain was appalled by her healthy appetite.

They made no inquiries as to the reaction of the tour party. They dismissed the anxiety—if there were—of their spouses and pressed on into Germany where they stayed for three days in a hotel near the cathedral in Augsburg. On the second morning as they left their hotel, Nina expressed a most urgent need for chocolate and
they found themselves in an upstairs
Kaffeehaus
chockablock with huge German
Hausfrauen
, shelf-breasted like escritoires, demolishing mini chocolate mice and Dachshunds to muted Strauss. The air was trembling and breathing fur, perfume and the more subtle scent of overfeeding.

The waiter patronised their broken German and in perfect English pointed out errors of adjectival agreement and tense. At the next table an elderly sourpuss paused to absorb this half way through chomping, leaving a small nugget of mouse suspended by its candy tail from her gaping lips.

‘Joyboy's mother,' Nina whispered, stricken unexpectedly by the antithesis between postwar gluttony and postwar horror. She smiled up at the waiter. ‘Do you want me to explain? Do you remember “The Loved One”? The
dolce vita
is too ghastly.' She began shaking with silver ripples of laughter and then a noisy choking. ‘Oh the death camps,' she said tactlessly to Brain. ‘The ovens.'

Brain admonished through his own laughter.

Their hot chocolate was brought. Nina lowered her perfect profile to the cup and began sipping. Brain lit a cigarette and there were immediate cries of outrage from the table
behind. The waiter returned from his on-guard position by the cash register and reprimanded him in excited German and then in English. Brain took one more drag on his cigarette before stubbing it out on his saucer, then he looked up and held the waiter's eye. Kathleen could have handled this, he thought, and said conversationally, ‘Lots of smoke in Auschwitz. Why does one cigarette upset you?'

The waiter vanished and returned with the manager.

Residues of fifty-year-old resentments were all about them.

‘I must ask you to leave immediately,' the manager said. He was a heavy man with fat-protected eyes of light blue.

Brain rose, holding out a hand to Nina. ‘Nazi,' he suggested amiably. Somehow he didn't seem to care about anything any more.

They went down the stairs clutching laughter, anger and rails—the feeblest props.

Mrs Waterman told him he had been brave but foolish.

That's me, he thought, with the emphasis on
foolish
, and his fingers ran playful scales on the tender skin of her arm. He began humming as they walked to the Bahnhof, humming then singing softly under his breath, increasing the volume, a mobile busker, until at the station
entrance,
plena voce
, he achieved a climax of farewell.

And the slow rain. The slow rain in Copenhagen, pitting sidewalks and window-sills, drowning hair and eyes in the slowest of tides, pocking the last snow in the parks.

Brain felt no urge to sing Tosti to parka-muffled Danes. He treacherously wondered if this haphazard union were part of the real thing. He wondered if she wondered as well, sitting on the edge of a lumpy bed in a second-rate hotel misnamed The Grand. They had sauntered through arcades, examined monuments and explored parks where the statues still wore neat singlets of snow.
Where was the bloody rapture?
Could he be, he wanted to know, self-embroiled in emotional swindle? He was startled to hear himself tell this near stranger-carnal partner that he ached to get back to the discomfort, the essential crudity of the homeland. The heat. The laissez-faire. Even, he added, allowing his lips to curl deprecatingly, the cockroaches. He especially missed them.