Lovesong (21 page)

‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Who doesn’t want to write their memoirs?’

‘I’ve become a writer, Ken.’

I could see he was serious.

‘I’m making some sense of my life. It’s this I want to thank you for.’

I said, ‘I just listened.’

‘Our story was written in my heart. But I needed the confidence to write it. That’s what you’ve given me.’

He was rather solemn about it. I said something like, ‘Well this is terrific news, John. Good luck with it.’ I shook his hand.

He said, ‘I’m not asking you to use your connections to help me get it published. I’ll do that myself. It’s not ready yet. I’m dedicating it to you.’ He grinned. ‘I hope you don’t mind?’

I said I was flattered.

‘I suppose you’re in the middle of writing a new book by now?’

‘I have an idea for one,’ I said.

‘Have you done much work on it?’

‘Quite a bit.’

‘I’m happy if you want to talk about it. I might not be the perfect listener, but you could give me a try.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said. ‘But if you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk about it just now.’ I met his eyes. ‘I’ve found the surest way to lose a story is to tell it.’

He laughed uneasily. ‘I’ve
found
mine by telling it.’

I didn’t say, We’ll see, but that’s what went through my head.

We were silent for a minute or so, then he said, ‘You know almost everything there is to know about me. I know almost nothing about you.’

I said, ‘There’s not a lot to know. My life’s in my books.’ I got up and went inside the café and paid for our coffees.

I
was in the pastry shop this afternoon, waiting my turn, enjoying watching Sabiha serving her customers. I love to watch her move, to witness her calm reserve, the grace of her manner, to look at her and know her secret strength, her secret tragedy, her endurance, her courage enough to face a lion. She is my hero. I love her most deeply, most secretly. I have only ever been able to write about people I love. No matter how filled with doubt about my life I am when I go into her shop, I am convinced of my purpose once again by the time I come out.

She turned from serving a woman and looked out the window. I turned to see what she was looking at, so did the woman she was serving. The traffic was heavy at that time of the afternoon and all I could see was the usual line-up of cars and trucks behind a bus,
heat radiating off their bonnets. The woman Sabiha had been serving was not fretting at the delay, but was looking out at the traffic and the people on the street in the afternoon sunlight, as if she shared Sabiha’s interest in the scene. It was one of the beautiful things about Sabiha and her shop, this lack of hurry, the quiet respect with which people felt called on to treat each other in her presence.

Thoughtless people, people in a hurry, young women in black suits with frenzied eyes, their new Audi double-parked outside, were not in the shop five minutes before they discovered the joys of mental calm and good manners. I loved Sabiha for it. I was going to write her story, and I was going to go on being her friend and her admirer, and the friend of her husband and her beautiful daughter, a miniature replica of her mother. My part of Carlton was so much more hopeful with Sabiha and her pastry shop in it than it had been with the derelict drycleaners and the desolate supermarket. Thanks to Sabiha Carlton was my reality once again. There was no longer any need for me to think of returning to Venice to slip away quietly one summer afternoon like Aschenbach in his deckchair. The Paris of Chez Dom was my dream now, my fiction, and for a year or two I would live it. Venice could wait for another time.

The traffic moved along
and when the bus had passed I saw John and Houria standing at the kerb, waiting to cross to our side of the road. I have never dwelled heavily on nostalgia, but I couldn’t help thinking of bringing Clare home from prep in the old days. A lifetime away, that, and a fine subject for nostalgia. It was not nostalgia, not a longing to relive those times with my daughter, but a pleasure in witnessing once again that these things survived. I’ve sometimes been tempted to cry out with despair that everything has changed and all the good things have been swept away. But that is the prejudice of the old and must be resisted. The truth, if I can deal in truth for a moment, is that the very best and the very worst of things, those primal things that make us human, have remained unchanged, the good and the evil.

Houria was looking up at her dad with an eager expression on her face, evidently asking him something that was important to her just at that moment. Her blue and yellow kid’s backpack bouncing about on her back as she made her point with great enthusiasm. John was looking down, listening to her. I watched him bend and pick her up then. She was a big girl for her age and he held her against his chest, his bulky satchel making it an awkward manoeuvre for him. He stood holding her, looking along the street, frowning and
ready to make a dash for it as soon as there was a gap in the traffic. Watching them I experienced again my old anxiety at children and traffic and wide streets. In fact I could not bear to watch and looked away from them and at Sabiha.

Sabiha was laughing at something the woman customer had said to her, and was selecting pastries with the crocodile tongs, offering that same considered care she had shown me the first time I came into her shop, holding the paper bag in one hand and looking into it as she positioned the pastry inside, being careful not to damage the crust.

When I looked out the window again John and Houria had made it to the centre island. John set Houria down and took her hand and they stood waiting for the cars to pass. There wasn’t so much traffic going into the city, and it was only moments before they were able to cross in safety. Houria didn’t walk, she jumped. She was seeing how big she could make her jumps, her hand gripping her dad’s hand, he looking down at her and encouraging her, giving her an extra lift.

The woman said, ‘And I wouldn’t mind getting some of those too.’ She was pointing at the pyramid of honey-dipped briouats on the shelf behind Sabiha. ‘How do you pronounce that again? They always look so delicious. I’ve been meaning to try them for ages.’

Sabiha picked up the crocodile tongs and selected the two topmost briouats, one at a time, and put them into a paper bag. She put the bag on the counter next to the bag of pastries. ‘Try them. No, you don’t need to pay me for these. They’re just for you to try.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ the woman said. ‘Frank will love them. I’ll be lucky to get a look-in.’

I looked at Sabiha and wondered if the night of Bruno’s murder still flashed in her mind when she was lying awake beside John. Did she go over the details of that night again and again in her memory? Reliving the horror of it? Was she still tortured by guilt and remorse for what she had done to that man? John had said she had found a way to live with it, but none of us is master of our dreams or our night fears. To see her smiling and talking to the woman customer it was almost impossible for me to believe that Sabiha was a tormented woman. But I remembered the day I first saw her, and how I had witnessed some deep old grief in her eyes and had wondered then at the cause of it. I had her story now, but it is one thing to have a story and another to write it. How was I to articulate the delicate complexities that must give weight and depth and beauty to her story, those things that most easily elude us?

She turned to me, her eyes meeting mine as if she saw the question in my mind. ‘Hello, Ken,’ she said and smiled. I was aware of John and Houria coming into the shop behind me, Houria’s high-pitched voice, excited about something she wanted to tell everyone. Whose idea had it been, I wondered, to call the pastry shop
Figlia Fiorentino?

Sabiha said, ‘I’m cooking for Wednesday’s dinner. Something you and Clare have never had before.’ She laughed.

‘You can’t do that,’ I protested. ‘You’re my guest.’

‘Something Tunisian,’ she said. ‘A surprise.’ She looked at me. ‘We cook for our friends, Ken. We know how to do it. It’s what we do. You and Clare can provide the hospitality of your lovely home. We’ll do the rest.’ She held my gaze and I saw she wanted to say something more but was hesitating. ‘You are part of our story now,’ she said.

I was moved. But Houria was tugging at my sleeve and shouting my name over and over, ‘Ken! Ken! Ken!’ I turned and knelt down to her. ‘What is it, darling?’

She held a piece of paper in her hand. There was a child’s drawing on it.

‘I got a prize for my drawing of Mum!’ She was breathless with it. I scarcely had time to look at her drawing before she snatched it away and ran past me
and went around behind the counter and held it up for Sabiha to see. ‘Mum! Look! I got a prize for it!’ Sabiha picked her up and hugged her and Houria struggled and yelled, ‘Look at my picture, Mum!’

Sabiha was Clare’s age when she fell pregnant with Houria. I wondered if it was just possible that Clare might have a child too. Clare had never felt Sabiha’s overwhelming need for motherhood. I looked at the two of them now, Houria talking like crazy, correcting her mother’s attempts to interpret the drawing. ‘No, that’s your nose, not your eye!’ Whenever Sabiha was asked by her Italian customers, as she quite often was, Why did you call your pastry shop by an Italian name when you and John are not Italian? Sabiha always told them, Signor Fiorentino was a man who gave us something precious for which we can never repay him. But of course she never told anyone what this precious thing was that Signor Fiorentino had given them.

John and I greeted each other. He hefted his satchel. ‘English assignments,’ he said. ‘I might not be doing too many more of these.’

I said, ‘I wouldn’t give up your day job just yet, John.’

I
t’s getting dark outside. I haven’t switched the light on. I’m sitting at my desk looking across the road at the last of the sun slicing through the elms in the park. I have Sabiha’s blessing now, her permission. One day I will talk to her about my fiction. The house is quiet. My notebook and box of sharpened pencils are on the desk in front of me. I don’t use a computer. I like to lean on my desk and twist my notebook around and chew my pencil and look out at the elms. A screen in front of me would stop me from dreaming. Writing is my way of avoiding the Venetian solution, not encouraging it.

Stubby nudges my leg with his nose. I’m watching the last of the sun. It is a very beautiful sight. When I told Clare earlier that John was writing his story, she said, ‘I told you he would be.’ I said, ‘Yes, he’ll
probably call it
Murder in the rue des Esclaves
.’ She said, ‘You might be surprised.’ I said, ‘I might be.’ Then she asked me, ‘What will you call your version?’ I said, ‘We’ll see.’ I’m not convinced by John’s claim to have become a writer overnight. However forgiving he is of Sabiha, there is a sense in which he has closed off those difficult channels into himself that a writer needs. I just don’t see him getting it. ‘Come on then, Stubbs,’ I say, and I get up. ‘Let’s do the walk while there’s still a bit of light left to us.’ Sabiha’s story had come out of her and been carried to me; now, after I had lived in it jealously myself for a while, I would carry it to others, and in the end would let it go and be done with it, like all the other stories I have carried.

I
would like to express my heartfelt thanks to my editor, Annette Barlow, and the team at Allen & Unwin, and to Ali Lavau.

Landscape of Farewell
Prochownik’s Dream
Journey to the Stone Country
Conditions of Faith
The Sitters
The Ancestor Game
The Tivington Nott
Watching the Climbers on the Mountain

‘Alex Miller is a wonderful writer, one that Australia has been keeping secret from the rest of us for too long.'—John Banville

‘Few writers since Joseph Conrad have had so fine an appreciation of the equivocations of the individual conscience and their relationship to the long processes of history …
[Landscape of Farewell
is] a very human story, passionately told.’
—Australian Book Review

‘As readers of his previous novels will know, Miller is keenly interested in inner lives … As one expects from the best fiction,
Landscape of Farewell
transforms the reader’s own inner life. Twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award, it is only a matter of time before Miller wins a Nobel.'—
Daily News,
New Zealand

‘Miller is a master storyteller.'—
The Monthly

‘The most impressive and satisfying novel of recent years. It gave me all the kinds of pleasure a reader can hope for.—
—Tim Winton on
Journey to the Stone Country

‘A terrific tale of love and redemption that captivates from the first line.’
—Nicholas Shakespeare on
Journey to the Stone Country

‘Miller’s fiction has a mystifying power that is always far more than the sum of its parts … His footsteps—softly, deftly, steadily—take you places you may not have been, and their sound resonates for a long time.’
—Andrea Stretton,
The Sydney Morning Herald

‘A wonderful novel of stunning intricacy and great beauty.’
—Michael Ondaatje on
The Ancestor Game

‘In a virtuoso exhibition, Miller’s control never once falters.’
—Canberra Times
on
The Tivington Nott

Lovesong
© 2009 by Alex Miller.

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EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2010 ISBN: 9781443405409

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

First published by Allen & Unwin: 2009
First published in Canada by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd in this original trade
paperback edition: 2010

FIRST CANADIAN EDITION

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