Gatherers and Hunters (8 page)

We had two days of passionate lovemaking.

It was the sense of physical touch. From the very first moment of this second meeting, it was touch, touch, we could not get enough of physical contact with each other. We were voracious.

Later, that afternoon, after we had in fact strolled through the very ordered park with its over-green acid-bright grass and its as yet unmutilated elms (they would be all chopped out now, with the Dutch Elm Blight that was to follow) we ran – really ran – back to her flat.

There's no point in lingering over the details. I am assuming you must have experienced something intense and passionate and entirely sexual so you can substitute your own version of my specific giddiness.

Let me give you only one example. Large changes in our life can sometimes best be indicated by tiny details. And from that two day period of rapture and intensified awareness of everything I particularly recall the throaty low cooing of wood-doves, very early morning.

It was the park, outside, I suppose, the sanctuary. To wake with the air quite chilly outside the specific radius of our bodies, and to hear like a drone or musical burden the wood-doves repeating their hold on the world – I have only heard the sound a few times since, but it drives me almost to distraction with an old, unreturnable longing.

And, curiously, a sense of fulfilment.

Can I confide, even now – and to you! – it is a real sensation of union. We woke, on that now faroff morning, fully entwined. We had slept all night – or for some hours – physically joined, as if our innermost muscles would not let go after even the last hint of sensation. To wake – called by the wood-doves with their curious drone of insistence – and to discover that the dream of close union was no dream but the state of our bodies. Shared and sharing – you know, surely you know? – the true act of sex moves far beyond wakefulness, it is the point of intersection between wakefulness and the what we can only call dreaming, the body in flight, soaring. Angels with wings. So you can understand why I became, in a sense, imprisoned?

+++++

Look, I could go on. I did have to leave Juliet after those two days. Paris.

Paris? Well, another story, sharp, complex and limpid. I think I really loved it but the problem was I was seeing it with someone else's eyes, not my own.

No, don't be cynical. Juliet's eyes were impaired but that is not to say she was totally sightless. Her other senses provided a wealth of ‘seeing' if you like. In my mind, I was the eyes, the observation, the explainer. Everything, everything I tell you, was as if through her eyes, and it was as if I were giving her sight to see and be part of it.

What happened?

Twenty four hours before I was due to return to London I was filled with this great sense of joy. I was not really in Paris in those last twenty four hours. Simple as that.

On the last morning I had a fight with the ticket officer in the Gare du Nord. It strained my resources and my language. And I battled through in trimph, simply because I became terribly aware that Juliet was the point at the end of my line of communication. I would not let anyone or anything – and a ticket collector in France is a formidable anything – get in the way of my return journey. I phoned the minute I reached London. She was quietly cold.

She had as it were thrown herself into the relationship but because it had a finite term she could allow herself an infinity of warmth and heat to pour into it. I can say that now.

At the time I was puzzled, then angry, then confused. I returned to Qantas.

Suddenly, it seemed all over.

Gwen

It doesn't need for me to say it. You've interviewed Kester, you know him I guess, from the horse's mouth. Or from the Ass's anus. Sorry. That was intended as a sort of joke.

Juliet is dead now anyway, am I right? Let's not dwell on what happened back then, the world has turned right over three times since 1972.

Besides, Kester romanticises things. You have got that much. I once thought that enthusiasm appealing. Now it is such a bore. Not that Kester and I exchange more than pleasantries at family birthdays.

Juliet did betray me. It took me a long time to forgive that, but I have, there's an end and we do not have to drag out skeletons.

Well no, it was not really England. When Kester returned to Australia I sensed right away there had been someone. I thought at the time it did him good. Eased him, as it were. He was more liveable-with. For a while.

I saw it as a bonus, and I did not have to ask who or where or when; England and travel is always a free time, a time out not counted in the real world or in the world of real relationships.

No. It was 1974. That is the hurtful year. That is the year Juliet betrayed me.

You did not know? But of course she returned to Australia in 1974. She was a guest of the Adelaide Festival that year. They were in their stage of reclaiming old local celebrities who had disappeaed into the distance abroad: Rolf Harris, Alan Seymour, Peter Porter, Lorna Sydney; they scoured the minor opera houses and the remainder bookshops for ancient Aussie exports. Not all returned, thank goodness. But Juliet Klein did, yes our Juliet did.

No, I don't know if her concert in the Adelaide Town Hall was a success, I arrived in Adelaide two days later, there was my Forum Club Conference and I was not going to miss that, and certainly not for cousin Juliet who had not bothered to write to me for over two years. I know why now but I did not know then.

And, let me be frank about it, my own singing career – I was a contralto – had been withered by childbearing and kitchen routine. At exactly the time Juliet was being famous. Of course I was jealous – though I couldn't admit it then!

Juliet's correspondence, at any time, was something like a postcard from Exotica written at her dictation by some Post Office clerk or gigilo or hotel menial. No, I am unjust to Juliet but who wouldn't be, no who wouldn't be, she was so damned, damned exasperating and so self-absorbed.

All those years during our adolesence when I carried for, when I cared for her, when I did everything for her – so that she could swan around as if everything she did was so easy and spontaneous and elegant. Why, she practiced for hours just to walk across the intersection as if she could see a thing.

I'm sorry, Denzel. Can you wipe that bit out? Just rewind and we'll go over it.

Juliet sang to a packed hall in Adelaide. Her voice was small but still pure. That's what the reviews said. You should check them out in, say, the Barr Smith Library. She did not sing the Skye Boat Song. In fact I'm told it was an almost insulting program, ending with Schoenberg's Book of the Hanging Gardens. Juliet always had an instinct for self-mutilation.

I came down on the Friday after, and when I arrived at the hotel I was shown the room Kester and I had booked. Kester of course came down earlier. The smell of Juliet was in that room. It was pervasive. I arrived at 11 am and they had not done up the room. The double bed was still a tangle of sheets.

Of course I recognised Juliet's smell. I even remember becoming first aware of it, it was strong but, well I can't explain. It was musky but somehow fragrant. I sound like a smell fetishist and perhaps I am. I was always scrupulous, myself, especially in those Queensland days. I was a compulsive bather.

There is a world of difference between imagining something and having to confront it.

What had happened in that hotel bedroom was irrefutably physical. And then the insult, later, of Kester trying to ‘include me in'. I believe he was trying to suggest something like a threesome! As if he could please himself with both of us!

I cannot understand to this day how I remained calm and polite to the pair of them, how I even sat down with them to meals in the hotel dining room. We went as a threesome to two further concerts.

It was not until later. If you want to know I think it was twelve months, but I had a lot of thinking to do. And, thank God, I did my thinking. I worked out my own destiny and it did not include either Kester or – if you even thought it possible – Juliet Klein.

We were only cousins, though in a place like south-east Queensland we were family, of course I admit that. Perhaps in the end I only feel pity for her.

I don't have to feel anything for Kester. He scurried down to Melbourne. A good riddance. You say you have interviewed him already?

Yes, of course you did.

No, I don't know when Juliet died. Do you? You're a bit of a dark horse aren't you, Denzel?

I did receive a letter from some legal firm in Belfast, oh nearly a decade later, and it said Juliet Klein wanted me to have the enclosed pearl brooch, it was a family heirloom and they were acting on her instructions as per a codicil to her will made before her departure.

Yes, I thought that at the time, too. ‘Departure'. On the other hand, I thought Belfast lawyers might be old fashioned and not want to call a death a death. Of course I heard nothing more.

It is all ended.

All of it.

Denzel

My mother is not dead. I could not say that to Gwen, though for her, let it be properly ended.

Sometimes I think my mother might as well be dead. She has given up talk just as she gave up sight. I think the giving up of sight was willed, by the way. It was a way of escaping.

Just as I was a sort of escape, but one that could not be disposed of easily. It is amusing, I suppose, that in the end she was a victim of her genes like everyone else, except that I was the consequence of her mid-thirties crisis and the desperation of the empty womb.

Didn't I fill it up! Didn't my old man, too.

To seek him out, though, all these years later: perhaps I am also a victim of genetic fixations and an incurable nostalgia. Daddy dear where are you?

And what did I expect?

I had a friend in Bristol who went on a daddy search and ended up claiming a manor and three well-paying tenant cottages that the tourists line up for in the spring and summer, Americans mostly.

My daddy was a – is a – minor radio personality in Melbourne. It is a regional Australian environment. I like that word, environment. I like my daddy too, as a matter of fact. Is that a disappointment?

I do not like my mummy, but whoever does? Tell the truth, it is the old dependency, I had to break free, I really did have to get away from the claw-like hand and the lovely oh so lovely voice always begging me just to help a little here or maneouvre this there, or that somewhere else, mainly friends or enemies but sometimes simply groceries or the light bulb.

I am cruel, I am ruthless. I have to be.

And her voice, it is a man-trap, all steel teeth. The strange thing is that my daddy, my new found daddy has actually convinced me (I think) that Juliet Klein in her prime was just the goods.

As a kid, I adored her.

The goods.

Just helping her I felt so important. Now, helping her, I feel used, a chattel, she hardly acknowledges my existence.

Do you know when it was in that first interview I realised my daddy was still hooked? Yes yes, he was still hooked and that made him more truly my daddy, poor idiot poor old lover-man, yes, that's my poor ol' daddy.

I brought along a CD. The Voice. And after he had finished slobbering and remembering and thanking me for showing an interest I gave it to him. I played it. It was put down only last year, a recording made in Brno, on a minute label trying to cash in on the capitalist market. The Voice Herself, yes you could tell who it was, though the range is now about two inches and the emotional depth just as narrow.

At least to me. But perhaps I am not exactly impartial.

I did hear her sing wonders, I think nobody else but I heard my mother try out everything from Paul Simon to Gorecki. I did even pride myself I was her best accompanist, but when the shutters fall from your eyes, well the shutters fall.

Her only late triumph was to catch onto this Eastern European pastiche stuff, you know, Schnittke and Pärt and G
ó
recki, ecclesiastical imitations with a bit of folksy rhythm, a dab of Stravinsky and lots of monotony.

My mother was hypnotic at the monotony, endlessly repeated slow phrases, she wove them like a cat's-cradle, she used that narrow voice like a really profound incantation, she held a note forever and made you think it was the soul of music.

There I go again. She remains The Singer.

I nearly wept when my father grew so passionate, listening to that CD. Wept for him, not me, for music, for my mother too, yes, for my mother.

I did not tell him a thing. You learn tactics.

But of course I dreamed, again, the old impossible dream. You know, you must know. The one where my parents get together again.

Gwen, his ex-wife, like my own mother, she is implacable, she is unforgiving. I know her.

I wish to know my father.

All I know is that sons in the end confront and destroy their fathers, and hasn't he given me ammunition! I know I'll use it.

Still, that would be better than sons destroying their mothers and I think I have done that.

But then I think: without our life together, without me kicking out and kicking back and simply declaring that I am alive, I am me, I have to have my space too – without all those things, would my mother really have been able to add the quality of pain and purity and joy into her voice and that is what really gives her voice the magic depth in these new incantatory pieces that she has made her own. Even the composers of these pieces are almost servants to her voice. She has made them.

You see how it is? To have been made by her?

Kester, my father, is like me. He is on the edges of that. For the first time, with him, to be on the edge is to be ­somewhere. Fancy coming so far, so far back, to here, to her birthplace, to be somewhere.

I still cannot tell if Kester will be surprised. Or glad. Or desperate. What a bucket of guilt I'm about to unload all over him. What a little Game of Consequences. On the other hand, I sort of like him. I have all the cards.