Forty-Seventeen (10 page)

It was at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna that he first glimpsed the face of his seventeen-year-old girlfriend in the face of his seventy-year-old co-delegate, Edith.

The face of his seventeen-year-old appeared through the distortion of the double glass of a showcase there in the museum. The distortion came from seeing through both sides of the glass case, the angle of vision, too, maybe – and maybe the aura of the liturgical objects or whatever, who knows? – this together with his yearning for his girlfriend, all went to create her face, perfectly but fleetingly. Edith then moved and came around the other side of the showcase and her face returned to being that of the seventy-year-old and the girl was gone.

‘Go back around the other side of the case, Edith,' he asked, prepared though for the illusion to be exposed the second time around.

‘Why?' she asked, going back at his bidding anyhow. ‘Here?'

He bent down again and squinted at her through the double glass, but it was no good. Something wasn't there.

‘How long must I remain here?' she asked.

‘It's all right, that's it.'

‘What was all that about?' she asked, coming back to where he was.

‘There was an optical distortion,' he said, ‘it pleased me. I could see you as a young girl – you looked very girlish.'

‘Would that one could always move, then, in a glass showcase.'

‘I think it was the magic coming off …' he glanced at the label in the showcase, ‘the second-century glass liturgical vessel.'

They moved listlessly through the museum. He stared unseeingly at the objects, the other floors had dazzled him into apathy. Edith tried to make notes which would keep all that she was seeing and half-seeing fresh and organised in her crowded mind.

In this his fortieth year he had planned to visit Spain with the young girl – well, she was no longer seventeen, except in a master frozen frame of his multiple visions of her. But she had ‘fallen in love' and was unable to make the trip with him. Instead he found himself as one of the team at the IAEA General Conference along with Edith.

At the beginning of her Grand Tour the girl had written, ‘I wish you were here with your hip flask of brandy and crooked talk.' But a second card had come, ‘I have fallen in love.'

He wished so badly that she was there with him in Vienna with her carefully worded assertions, her nicely judged quotations, all so newly won from her thinking
and study – and he yearned for the physical intoxication she could bring to him.

‘You seem glum,' Edith said.

‘Too much history. Human race too old.'

 

At breakfast without his glasses he was again pierced by the young girl's image crossing Edith's old face as she entered the breakfast room after a night's rest. But as she came into focus, the suggestion of the girl went and it was the seventy-year-old who sat down.

Edith went straight into the jam, cold cuts and cheese. She had a youthful appetite.

He too began to eat. Why was it that in Austria he enjoyed the Austrian breakfast, in the US the US breakfast, in France the French breakfast, yet back home he didn't eat breakfast?

He asked Edith whether she had a theory about it.

‘No …' she said, wary of his teasing, ‘no, I have no theory on that.' And then she added, ‘That I know of.'

‘Changes of habitat require different diets. Maybe we're symbolically eating the prey of the country we're in.'

‘Cheese?'

She wasn't going to be led into jokey ground.

‘Sleep well, Edith?'

‘No, as a matter of fact, I had a restless night – I could hear strange water noises,' she said, taking a mouthful of roll and jam. ‘Yourself?'

‘Oh yes, I slept well, I'm a bushman – a few cognacs and all noises sound friendly.'

‘You would be the first bushman I've known who drank cognac. I might ask for a different room – would they mind?'

‘Of course not – but the hotel is probably full. Delegations and staff.'

‘I think I shall, though.'

‘See Frau Smidt.'

‘I think I shall. Or do you think I should see someone from the Embassy?'

‘No, see Frau Smidt.'

She spread more blackcurrant jam on her roll, taking his share of the sachets.

‘You don't think I should also tell the Embassy …'

‘No.' He held back his impatience. ‘There's no need.'

She exasperated him. He scrounged another mouthful from the dwindling breakfast food and waited for what he knew would be her request. He knew it was coming.

‘Would you mind dreadfully asking her for me – your German is so much better than mine.'

‘Edith – you know I have very little German. Her English is fine. But yes, I'll ask for you.'

‘Thanks awfully, I can't cope with that sort of thing, I know I'm being silly … these days women should, I know … try.'

She made this admission without conviction and at the same time poured the coffee pot dry.

He studied Edith while they sat in the auditorium listening to instantaneous translation of the speaker through headphones, an African stating that nuclear war fears were ‘Western hysteria'.

He ached to see the face of his young girlfriend appear in Edith's face again, but it would not. He moved his seat, he half-closed his eyes to reduce the light, he pulled the skin near the eyes with his fingers to cause distortion in his sight, but nothing brought back the girl's face. Edith's worried face remained as she strained to follow the argument and as she made frowns of satisfaction and wallowed in being appalled.

She liked being appalled. He suspected it was her strongest emotion.

 

In his room at the Hotel Stephanplatz he drank cognac and read Goethe's
Faust
, stalling now and then with self-consciousness, recalling the Consul in
Under the Volcano
, who also read
Faust
and drank – though he'd read Marlowe's
Faust.
Marlowe was next on the reading list. But given the Germanic influence about him and their mission, what else?

He hadn't been able to face the evening session of Non-government Organisations – too much piety and youthful attempts at re-invention of the world.

 

Age is an ague fever, it is clear / with chills of moody want and dread; When one has passed his thirtieth year, / One then is just the same as dead [says Baccalaureus, the young student … Mephistopheles replies] My children, it may be
so; / Consider now, the Devil's old; to understand him, be also old!

 

He guessed that Edith would be back from the evening session and he went to her room, wanting company, even Edith's limited company. It was 11.35 p.m., at least politely before midnight. He knocked. Was he drunk?

‘Yes, who is it?' she called, from behind the door.

‘It's me.'

She came to the door in a robe over her slip. She looked very old, identified by dress with her generation now passing out of life. But he felt, despite her age, that she still didn't ‘know the devil'.

‘I was preparing for bed – you wanted something?'

Then. For an instant. Their eyes met in a weak glow of sought desire – like a torch with failing batteries – but this was extinguished instantly as he recoiled with the physical incompatibility of it. The utter unfeasibility of it. He was sure she had registered it but she looked away, nervously erasing whatever faint carnal sensation she had picked up, or, sent out.

He'd wanted, he realised, then, to glimpse the girl, moved by a foggy concupiscence, a dim, unformed intention of somehow lurchingly imposing his erotic exigence on her aged body, but even in the dim night lights of the hotel corridor the girl was not there. Even with so much cognac twisting his imagination, he could not find the girl there in her.

‘I thought you might have a spare airmail letter form
– the late-night letter-writing – from the darkness of the soul.'

She was flustered and left him standing at the door while she went to look.

She stopped half-way across her room and turned back to him. ‘An airmail letter form?'

‘Yes, just one.'

She turned away and then turned back again. ‘Oh do come in – how rude of me – I'm getting ready for bed.'

‘Is the room quieter?' he asked, as he came in and stood in the middle of the room.

‘Yes, thanks awfully, it was decent of you to arrange it all.'

He saw her medicines beside her bed. Medicines of ageing.

She handed him the airmail form and he left.

Down the corridor he stopped. He wanted to look at her once more, to try once more to see his girl's face in her. He retraced his steps to her door and tried it, found it still unlocked, and opened it, without premeditation.

He was in the room and Edith was standing naked and shocked.

He thought of a skinned kangaroo and then mumbled, ‘Sorry,' and went back out the door, closing it behind him.

 

Mephistopheles: I thought to meet with strangers here! / And find my relatives, I fear: / But, as the ancient scriptures tell us, the world is kin, from Hartz to Hellas. / I've many
forms, in action swift, / For transformation is my gift / But in your honour, be it said … / I have put on my ass's head … / Faust: caste one by one your maskes aside! / and lay your hideous nature bare! / … My choice is made: this pretty dear … / Alas, dry broom sticks have I heare / … this little darling would I clasp … / A lizard wriggles from my grasp.

 

At the early breakfast before the trip to the contemporary art exhibition he said good morning to the Canadians,
bonjour
to the Cameroons,
guten morgen
to the waitress, and made his way to where Edith was already seated, eating her way through the rolls, jams, meats and cheeses. He decided to ignore the embarrassment of the night before.

‘The Austrian idea of a rest day,' he said, ‘up an hour earlier than usual to be bussed out of the city.'

He avoided her eyes, as a guilty dog. But she spoke brightly to convey to him, he thought, that nothing was amiss, all was to go on as before.

She stayed with him throughout the visit to the art exhibition although he tried to disengage from her, to be apart from her for a time. But she'd said, plaintively, ‘Would you mind if I clung on to you? – I'm feeling a little off today.'

He realised that she was exploiting his impropriety of the night before, taking a compensatory payment.

As they moved around the galleries together, she would say, ‘But is this really art?' She'd been happier at the Kunsthistorisches.

After a while he said to her, ‘I suppose art is what you find in art galleries.'

Some of the material was displayed in the Orangerie of the old summer palace and, while looking at this, Edith said, ‘Maybe, then, this isn't art but oranges we're looking at.'

He turned to her smiling, it was her first joke with him. ‘Very good, Edith,' he said.

They stopped at photographs of the OM Theatre.

‘Art or oranges?' became a running joke with them.

‘Orgies and mysteries,' he said, reading from the programme notes. Edith peered, uncomprehendingly, at the photographs.

‘You're looking at the entrails of a freshly slaughtered cow.'

She screwed up her face and with delight he saw again the girl's face, his girl was there again in the subdued lighting of the gallery, but it came too from the frowning face of puzzlement and the resistance to what she was seeing.

She stepped back and the girl was gone but she said, this time mocking herself, ‘Is that really an orange? Or are we in the Orgierie now?'

He was trying to hold on to the image of his girl, even though it was accompanied by the hurt of separation, but Edith's humour interfered with his privacy and he let it go.

After the opening of the exhibition the director, R.H. Luchs, said that the older artists should not pursue the splendid rashness of youth. To desire only the new and
the young was a state of mind which bred nervousness and distorted one's personal history.

Sure did.

 

At breakfast back at the Hotel Stephanplatz he asked her.

‘Edith, there's something I want to ask of you – a favour.'

‘Of course – you've done lots of things for me on this trip – you've been really very considerate.'

‘This is an unusual request – outside the boundaries of our mission.'

‘Well, you can but ask.'

‘There is a girl in London – I need her address and telephone number – I've lost contact.'

‘And?'

‘I want you to help me get the telephone number. She won't give it to me.'

He looked at her defencelessly.

‘Where do I come into it? – it's rather odd – if indeed I do come into it.' Her voice guarded.

‘You could telephone her home in Adelaide – and ask for it – you could say – this is a cover story – that you found her wallet here in Vienna and wish to return it to her – you could say that's where you found her home address – in the wallet. Something like that.'