Julia Paradise (6 page)

 

Her illness brought about a sudden change in Joachim's attitudes towards rearing the child. Now he became neurotically protective of the little mute, restricting her movements to a cruel and unnatural degree. The child, who had always taken her morning lessons out of doors, was now shut away inside the dark house. Lessons consisted entirely of reading in English. Although she was unable to speak or, apparently, to hear, Julia spent hours with books.

Joachim found that he was able to be at home more, and began to knuckle down at last to the composition of his monograph on the propagation of Pacific coral. Each morning he spent alone in his study, sifting through all the data he had tipped into a scatter of drawers through the years, and writing it all up carefully, in German, with his fountain pen, in a leatherbound ledger-sized journal he had purchased as a youth and had kept all these years for the purpose.

Each afternoon he took his daughter on nature excursions, although the routes he chose for her through the garden were always quite safe.

They made a strange sight in the Queensland sun, the European ‘doktor' with his neatly-trimmed goatee, his felt hat and walking stick, in his light cotton suit, and the small girl, her face grown into a mask of pale seriousness, with that quizzical look the deaf mute develop. She had no freckles now, not even a touch of the sun in her features, her long black hair tucked up under the brim of her sun hat, her delicately-boned wrist cocked against the thought of any sudden attack from the bushes along the garden paths. Her eyes, flicking from side to side as she walked along the path had, as the summer passed, grown more and more disturbingly dark.

The child had a way of looking through her father which puzzled him. He did not read in it any rebuke for his actions. Behind that cool stare there was something taunting. Or as though she were inviting him to share a glimpse into the place where she continued to live.

During the season when it rained at the same hour every afternoon he often came upon her on the veranda on the southern, cooler side of the house, which he had filled with pots of his exotic plant specimens. One day she had her back to him and was apparently unaware of his approach, although Joachim was never entirely convinced of the genuineness of her affliction. The sound of the torrential rain drumming on the roof and in the trees was very loud.

Unseen by her, he spoke, describing all the wickedness he had in store for her, while the girl continued to stare ahead into the rain. When at last he walked around in front of Julia, for a long moment she seemed not to see him. These bouts of apathy he began to think of as her ‘absences', in the mental notation of the scientist.

Although Joachim long worried that her brain had in some way been
affected
, the girl continued to display in her reading an undoubted intelligence. But as her twelfth birthday drew near and she began to menstruate, her grasp of the mathematical diminished to his profound disgust. She had no interest in staying up late into the night with her father in his wooden observatory in the garden, with his telescope and his charts, plotting the path of an approaching comet against the stars. This was of course Halley's Comet, as its orbit approached that of the earth in 1910. Now the girl's only interest was in romantic literature, and she did not stop at the cheap romantic novelettes she borrowed from her ill- educated governesses. She devoured all of Shakespeare in a matter of weeks, then memorized entire slabs from Palgrave's
Golden Treasury.
She read over and over obsessively that poem in which Coleridge describes how he approached the palace of Kubla Khan and heard the music played by the damsel with the dulcimer. All of this Joachim dismissed as contemptible, although as a scientist as well as a German he had to admit a grudging admiration for the works of Shakespeare.

The man went to extraordinary lengths so that his daughter might have European governesses. Invariably these young women wasted their train journeys north. Once he received a letter in reply to his advertisements in the coastal weekly newspaper from a widowed lady who happened to have a twelve-year-old daughter of her own. He thought that the companionship might have jolted Julia from her torpor. The other child, a spiteful, tow-headed Dutch girl, whose experience in the mission school on the coast had equipped her with a malice and cunning which far outmatched Julia's, was always favoured in disputes by the mother. Joachim could not bear to see the look of uncomprehending misery on his daughter's face, and he sent the woman away, although she was in all other respects a good and careful worker. But he sent her away not before he had taken her one night when she expected it least into his wooden observatory and seduced her in full view of Halley's Comet.

In the classified columns of the
Mem Courier
his search for a governess continued. If only Joachim would have admitted it, his search was impossible because he was not looking for a governess so much as a successor in his bed to Julia's English mother. And only a woman who resisted his advances out in the wooden observatory would be worthy of this honour.

He thought he might have found such a lady when the Scottish-born Vera came up to live at the house at Duck River. Her nationality was close enough to English in his eyes to substitute for his darling dead Elizabeth. She was invited out into the observatory one night soon after she had arrived.

As she bent forward over the eyepiece of the telescope he ran his hand up her cool leg. She began screaming with such intensity that it required the administration of so much laudanum as to render her insensible. It was as she lay drugged that night that the scientist finally conquered her. When she awoke and deduced from the bloodstained sheets and from the extreme tenderness of her private parts what had occurred, she went away. Nevertheless, Joachim remembered her fondly afterwards as that
rara avis
, the genuinely virtuous woman.

 

Julia was thirteen and had begun to grow breasts. She was as isolated from her father as ever, almost as inaccessible, he told himself, as the mountains at the source of the Duck River he had once explored. Even with his scientific zeal, he found that he could not chart his daughter's ‘northern reaches'.

His daughter's skin, now that she avoided the sun so completely, had begun to take on the same appearance as his wife's during her long period as an invalid: pale, anaemic, the ‘English complexion'. And one day at luncheon while they were eating soup he noticed that the shape of her teeth was changing. Her eye-teeth were developing in such a way that when she opened her mouth for food and closed it again the tips of her eye-teeth rested on her lower lip—just like his wife's, when she had been young. He felt the involuntary shower of memories rain through his mind.

On their infrequent visits to the coast he treated his daughter in public as though she were already his wife. He took her to the shops of the little port town dressed in her mother's clothes he had bought in Europe twenty years before. Her mother had been a tiny woman, but even so Julia had to lift the hems of the long dresses as she tripped along the hot main street under the verandas. They were beautiful clothes. She wore a tailored dress with tight-fitting sleeves and a short-backed jacket trimmed with velvet, embroidery and braid. There was another dress of lace-edged lilac chiffon she loved to wear, with a jewelled buckle on the velvet belt. Her father allowed her to wear to town her mother's little hat trimmed with an ostrich feather and a mauve veil which fell to just below het eyes.

With her grown-up dresses and extravagant hat he took her to the town's sad tea room, the Astoria, gloomy behind its wide veranda, next to a draper's. The draper, a short man in a grey apron, always scurried up to the door of his shop to watch them pass. There they sat up to tea and cakes in the window before taking the narrow-gauge train home in the late afternoon. Glimpsed through the window of the tea shop, or in the carriage of the train, the effect of the cosmetics and haberdashery was convincing, although when you looked more closely her painted little face was grotesque.

At home he supervised the undressing so that the costumes were properly stored where they had lived all these years in her mother's cedar wardrobe. One evening when they had driven the horse and trap home from the station and she had taken off the precious petticoats, he suddenly grasped her around the waist from behind. His fingers bit through her cotton shift and she turned around, fearing she had displeased him in some way. She was surprised when he was smiling through his beard.

He went to his study and came back with a leatherbound folio from which he took several watercolour paintings he had made of various species of birds. On some of the thick pieces of cartridge paper he had replicated exactly the stuffed birds on his study wall; on others he had sketched birds mating.

It excited him when he came across a pair of birds hurling and fluttering against each other in such a way in the garden. He had often taken up his stick to point this phenomenon out to her. He even indulged himself in preening, little pirouettes in imitation of the birds, and laughed and bade her join in the game.

Now, beside the cedar wardrobe, the games continued.

 

In those intervals between governesses and when Julia stayed shut up with her books, Joachim had become casual in the matter of nudity around the house. He had dismissed all the servants the previous year out of deference to his ideas on racial contamination.

In the late afternoons when customarily he bathed, and the slanting light fell deep through the slats of the shutters and along the passages, there seemed to be a third presence, quite apart from the man and the girl, and which could not entirely be ascribed to the memory of the brooding, ill woman who had died in the room at the back of the house, and to whom all the months of enemas and foments had given the appearance of utter lifelessness long before it was actually so. Now, in the afternoons, there was something subtly and inevitably manipulative in the silences.

On the occasions when he did have a woman from the brothel at Mem make the journey up to the Duck River, Joachim was not always careful to ensure that the bedroom door was completely closed. By this time he had his doubts about the authenticity of his daughter's deafness and on one occasion that summer, the woman's howls of slaked lust brought the girl silently to put her eye to the crack of the door. Joachim noticed the slight disturbance in the configuration of light there (in spite of the fact that at that moment he was still in complete possession of the woman) and he knew that it was with jealousy and not shame that the girl slunk away, her childhood finally behind her.

 

It was the rainy season again, the season when Joachim, who hated the wind, spent entire days in bed with the shutters closed, locked into a semi-permanent artificial night. He sat up in his bed with his spectacles on, the candles burning, his writing tray balanced on his large stomach. Reference books he had carried in from his study weeks before were stacked up on the floor as high as the bed, his notes and manuscripts scattered around him.

During these times, Julia's household duties doubled, then trebled, so that whenever she had a moment to herself she fell asleep. She had to cook for him, and in spite of his inactivity his appetite was voracious. She had regularly to empty his chamberpots, of which there were two, one for each bodily function. And she massaged his paunch to ease his pain through his attacks of flatulence. Then, as though it were a natural concomitant of her nursing duties, with his wind expelled and his member erect, she made of her mouth a repository for his semen.

The longer his periods of hibernation, the less inclined he was to leave his bed at all. As with his other corporeal urges, there had been another subtle transformation in the relationship between them. Their sex, since she had begun menstruating, had retained the spontaneity of that first time they had begun ‘playing birds', the game by which he had introduced her to partial penetration. She accepted it as quite natural for him to take her at any moment of the day or night. In the kitchen while she was at her chores, outside in the garden, even at table during a half-finished meal, Joachim would simply move behind her, raise her skirts and take her with several brutal efficient strokes. This was always his method of enjoying her, as if to have to look at that pale bewildered face while he was performing his act would have been too much for even his hardened heart to bear. From this early age of thirteen she had come to accept the insertion of his erect penis as a natural and unremarkable bodily function.

Now, as her father spent longer and longer in bed, she learned to judge his sexual needs by the clock. These duties became so mundane that she performed them without thinking. After she had helped him break his wind, she pulled her long black hair from her face and rested her cheek on the soft paunch and performed her perfunctory but efficient act of fellation. From that position she found she could stretch her neck over the edge of the bed and spit out his semen into one of the china chamberpots.

Sometimes, resting face down over the side of the bed like this, listening to the slowing rasp of his breathing and the monsoon winds outside shaking the trees and rattling the iron roof, she looked at his manuscript scattered across the floor, the pages criss-crossed with his spidery German hand in black ink. Half closing her eyes, the lines rearranged themselves in new patterns and she liked to speculate from these upon their possible meaning. Gradually, from recognizing a word here and another there, she began to decipher lines of his text. Also, there were his beautiful drawings of plant specimens, rock formations, birds, animals, and the vast cities of coral building themselves under the water. She loved to look at the delicate night blues, the Venetian reds, magentas, russets and cyclamens; at the rose, dragon's blood and cinnibar; at the sea greens and jades and viridians of the coral which he had captured in his water colours. And forever after that when she heard German spoken or saw it printed on a page she was back in the dark airless atmosphere of that room with the taste of semen in her mouth.