Lilian's Story (14 page)

The pencil stopped at last, somewhere near the front, and there was a gust of nervous laughter from everyone.
And now, perhaps.
Professor Noble's voice was urbane and experienced and I heard a girl behind me whisper,
Wouldn't he looked distinguished in tails?
F.J. Stroud nudged me and handed me his own pencil.
Again
, he said, and I held it, looking at tooth marks in the wood, until finally he snatched it back and began to scribble in his notebook.

I was in no state of mind for wisdom and heard nothing that I wanted to write into my own crisp new notebook. I watched Professor Noble, but his upturned pale face, with its dark mouth hole opening and closing, was as unimportant as a scrap of paper under a desk. At last I felt that I must write something and join all those who were filling page after page around me and I glanced at F.J. Stroud's book. He had filled several pages already, and was about to start another. I read, 'Tis a far far better thing to be brillig or enter the breach dear friends for there is a season for every man jack of them? Before I could see more, F.J. Stroud closed the book with a smack that made Professor Noble glance up. When he had gone back to his notes and smoothed his hair again, F.J. Stroud whispered moistly into my ear,
Hot air rises.
I nodded, but when Professor Noble turned to the blackboard and drew a big diagram of lines and circles, I copied it carefully. I listened while he explained, but could not decide what was important enough to write down. Professor Noble enthused in an urbane way, and jabbed at the diagram with the chalk until it was freckled with dots, and I sat listening to all those pens writing it all down.

What Matters

What is it like, Lil?
John wanted to know.
It is not wisdom,
I had to tell him.
It is more like school.
I could see he was disappointed, but I did not want to mislead him. I felt it should be possible to spare him something, since I had those four extra years under my belt.
It is all right
, I said finally,
but it is not wisdom
, and John nodded as if he had expected nothing better.

He had become adenoidal, and enunciated badly. He sounded on the point of tears at all times.
The tuba is bad
for him
, Mother thought aloud in moments of clarity, but Father had hopes that the tuba might make a man of him. In the evenings, when John came home from school, he ripped off the tie and jacket before he came in the gate, and tore off even the socks that were part of school before he wrapped himself in his tuba. His face became red, his eyes closed, and nothing existed for him except his vibrating lips puckered against brass. When I tried to produce a note from the tuba, I failed. He did not try to show me how, but took it back and blew a long sad note.
It goes right through me
, he said,
it shudders me
, and shivered to demonstrate. It seemed that the world was nothing but tuba for my brother. He made breathy hooting noises for hours, the sound drifting across the water when I rowed out into the bay in the grey dusk. It was a soft incompetent sound that travelled like a current through the air to me, resting on the oars.

I do not care about wisdom anyway
, John said.
I would like to be
rich. And have a motor car. And a twelve-piece brass band of my own.
Those who thought him backward had not heard him become passionate about what he believed, and only I had heard this, because he had missed out on friends, somehow, and only had his tuba and sometimes his sister.
There is nothing
that matters
, he told me.
And even that does not matter much.

I could not agree. There was nothing that did not matter. The way leaves fell and turned into earth, the way sun caught an eyelash or showed the bones in fingers: all this mattered.

Kitty Again

Someone brought a pup to a lecture, and it got out of its bag and made straight for Professor Noble. He did not seem to know what to do, and everyone became tense on their benches when it looked as if the pup meant to be sick over the Professor's shoe. A girl with dyed red hair that had gone a kind of green ran out and stuffed the pup back into the bag, and smiled up at the rows of students as if it had all been on purpose, and I was reminded of Aunt Kitty and decided to visit her.

Father mentioned her sometimes, when warning me about things.
A wasted life
, he said.
Not a bad-looking girl, but a
wasted life.
At these times Mother would twist her wedding ring around her finger and say,
Aunt Kitty has had a difficult
life.
When I said that I was going to visit Aunt Kitty, Mother nodded as if it had been her idea all along and said,
Yes, yes, she has had a difficult life, and your father has done all
he can.
Father shook his head and looked solemn.
I will not
forbid, Lilian, but I discourage.

I was not discouraged, but found Aunt Kitty's house, where the front lawn was gay with nodding paspalum and the paint of the front door had gone powdery with age.
I am your niece
, I said when Aunt Kitty, in white frills that had once been smart, opened the door. She showed no surprise.
You are Lilian
, she said, and I nodded in the draught of the hall, smelling whisky and old chops. A tiny spider descended calmly on its web beside my aunt and settled on her shoulder, but I felt I did not yet know her well enough to say anything.
I am glad to see you, Lilian
, Aunt Kitty said at last, remembering how language worked.
Very
glad.
She lost interest in me then, and turned a dead plant in its pot on the window sill as if it needed only a fresh view to come to life.
Follow me, Lil
, she said then in a sudden loud commanding way, and led me through the smell of chops to the back garden. When we were standing there among cactuses she began to smile and exclaim over me, and offer me barley water and arrowroot biscuits as she always had.

But, Lilian,
she said finally,
you are fat.
Few people were so blunt. Aunt Kitty stood, thin and wrinkled, her hair drawn into a bun that was uncurling like a blown rose. It was easy to see that Father was right. She had once been pretty, but she was not pretty now. In the web of broken veins on her cheeks, her eyes were a weak blue and her wrists were knobbed as she gestured with her glass.

But her smile was sweet, and none the worse for its missing tooth.
I had taken a drop
, she said, confidentially when she saw me looking,
and I woke up on the f loor with my
tooth in my ear.
She fingered the gap and said with sudden robustness,
It could happen to anyone
, and I agreed.

She continued to smile, so that I finally asked,
Aunt Kitty,
are you always smiling?
She brushed at my jacket, stroked back a strand of my hair, wet a finger with spit, and smoothed my eyebrows.
I have few visitors
, she said at last.
And I smile for
all of them.

We sat in her garden, which was many rockeries, many cactuses squatting on sand.
I like spikes
, she remarked, topping up my barley water, and sat looking dappled like an old stone under her lace parasol before she said.
But,
Lilian, why are you wearing black?
I suggested,
Perhaps I am in
mourning
, but Aunt Kitty declared,
I am the one in mourning
, and shook the white frills of her dress at me.
In China, the
deepest mourning is white.
She made me sit on a rock, balancing my arrowroot biscuit on one knee, while she disappeared into the house. She returned with a tiny metal tin with a picture on it of three moustaches arranged like a flower.
Not just for gentlemen
, she said.
For us too.

For a long time she stood in front of me, blocking out the sun as I sat on the rock, sipping my barley water and nibbling my biscuit, while she smoothed and smoothed my thick eyebrows with moustache wax. Her finger was infinitely smoothing, the barley water warm, the biscuit stale and soft. Near my foot a cactus was producing a single outlandish red flower.
It f lowers once every hundred years
, Aunt Kitty said.
Like a really first-rate wine.
The barley water was confusing her, but I would be dead next time the cactus flowered. Aunt Kitty and her confusions would be dead, my eyebrows would no longer be a problem.

And how is John?
Aunt Kitty remembered when she had had enough of smoothing my eyebrows.
He is blowing into
brass
, I said.
Trapped in a tuba.
Aunt Kitty lost control of her laugh and it went careening and shrieking away across the cactuses and startled birds out of the trees. I saw that children were looking through the fence at her, where the palings had fallen sideways, and she saw, too, and reached into the cactus pot and threw pebbles at the fence until the faces disappeared. The sun was becoming oppressive. On Aunt Kitty's face concentration and the pressure of an audience had worn off the red lips drawn shakily on the skin round her mouth, and the lace parasol was ineffective now among the barbaric cactuses.

A Hungry Beau

When I discovered new corners of the university I enjoyed the satisfactions of Cook or Leichhardt, even though others had been there before me. Cook and Leichhardt had not worried about a few natives, and nor did I. There was a small damp courtyard where palm trees grew out of bitter clenched soil and gnashed their fronds overhead, and I thought I was alone there, and might have spoken to those busy fronds or smiled in an unguarded way to the square of sky they played in. Two boys leaned, watching me, against a wall. Their grey jackets had pretended to be stone. They were as sudden and chilling as a spider under a leaf. I also pretended: I pretended that my smile had been a cough, my words a sneeze, and walked by them with dignity. They stared at my body as I walked by so that my steps stiffened as if I had forgotten how to bend at the knee.
Not worth the time of day
, one of them said just after I had passed, and in a stiff voice like my knees I said,
Pardon?
They straightened against the wall as if preparing to be shot.
Nothing
, one said and blushed mauve. The other made a gesture like brushing away a fly or a bad dream. I walked on and heard their laughter behind me, echoing in sniggers around the courtyard.
Not at me
, I whispered like a prayer.
Not at me.

But there were always the consolations of food. In the refectory I was undaunted by the greasy walls and putty-coloured busts of ancient scholars, and sampled everything on the menu. When F.J. Stroud sat beside me there, in the steam from my stew, he introduced himself again.
I
am F.J. Stroud,
he said, and this time I was ready for him and said,
You were the one ahead of me in the Honours list. I am
Lilian Singer.
Strengthened and comforted by my stew and mashed potatoes, today I could look at F.J. Stroud. He was a pale skinny boy, and short, with the poor complexion of too much bread and dripping. With a shaking finger he pointed to my stew and said,
What's that you're eating?
but did not wait for me to answer before saying,
Looks like entrails.
His laugh was shrill, like a cry for help. I saw how dry and cracked his lips were, and the thinness of his wrists. Through a hole in the shoulder of his black shirt, his skin was pale, bloodless, cold-looking, and it was not warm enough to wear so little. I said,
You must be cold, F.J. Stroud
, but he did not seem to intend to answer. He breathed in a wisp of steam before saying on a sigh,
I never feel the cold.

I could feel the grease warm on my lips and the cosy peppery taste on my tongue, and felt him watching as I put my knife and fork together and pushed the plate away. His scornful smile and his hunger made me angry, and I could have been shouting when I said into his pale face,
Not eating?
He pushed my plate further away and spoke quickly over the rumbling of his stomach.
I have a delicate constitution
, he said loudly, and as his stomach went on rumbling he went on talking.
I cannot possibly eat in such oily public places.
Beside him I felt myself the size of a battleship, felt my whole face to be shining with greed. I could not remember the last time I had allowed myself to feel hunger or heard my stomach rumble. I sat wondering how I could offer to buy F.J. Stroud a plate of stew when he said,
You must be clever.
I was willing to agree, and had begun to smile and nod, but he went on,
I
like clever women.
He sat staring at the table and cracking his knuckles one by one, as if to conceal the blazing blood that had risen into his face, his neck, even his ears where they showed through his ragged hair. Only his hands stayed pale, freckled, awkward. I remembered repartee I had heard on the lawns, which I had never attempted before, and tried to make my reply sound witty:
And I like clever men
, I said, although I did not know if I did, hardly knew if I had ever known any clever men. F.J. Stroud replied immediately.
I am
a clever man
, he told me urgently.
In fact, I am officially a genius.
This was no attempt at repartee but a statement of fact. I wanted to laugh, but knew what other people's laughs could sound like and I chose instead to nod, and examine the flecked hazel eyes of my first genius.

A Beau up a Tree

In spite of my alphabetically arranged books and my notebook becoming dog-eared from my bag, although not filled with notes, I was still not permitted to decline those tennis parties.
You must not close off your options
, Father said, and tweaked at one of the unflattering frills on my dress.
Options should always remain wide open, Lilian.
With a tearing sound he ripped his fingernail out from where it had become caught in a frill of bodice.

On the lawns, fringed by every colour of azalea, lives were beginning to be arranged. The mothers looked away now when Ursula and Rick disappeared into the shrubbery to look for balls, and after so many years Ursula's mother had put away her black dresses and had taken to mauve.