The White Body of Evening (11 page)

At twelve, when they’d first moved to St Vincent Place, she had an inkling of what it meant to live as man and wife. But back then her sense of this was abstract, innocently astray. She still looked up to adults as if they were faultless, semi-divine creatures unsullied by the elements. Her own father, of course, was an exception, but even there the mystery of a grown-up’s motivations, unfathomable to a child, preserved her idea of adulthood as an unassailable state. Now, at fifteen, she had begun to see her mother and Winton quite differently. There was nothing in particular that she could put her finger on, no one thing that could account for it. Rather it was the slow accumulation of detail that revealed to her intimations of their sexuality – intimations that were increasingly graphic and estranged.

It was not merely the thought of Winton being so much older. It was her awareness of his calm, confident possession of her mother, his easy command of the dinner table, and the rich, overpowering smell of his cologne. She imagined that such a pungent, artificial scent could only be used to mask the hot, musky odour of bodies frantically groping and pawing like animals. She imagined them languishing, swooning in each other’s arms, or rutting away at each other like the dogs she’d seen behind the Punch and Judy show on St Kilda beach. Her vision of their enjoyment might well have cast the familiar dinner gathering in a changed and disturbed light, but it couldn’t explain her sense that she was being pushed away from herself. It was a surreal feeling, as if the self she were used to was falling away, leaving her exposed, vulnerable.

For a moment there was an awkward silence. Anna smiled sweetly at Winton. The flickering candles cast a warm reddish glow over the room. The polished oak table, the chairs upholstered in Utrecht velvet, the gleaming silverware, the crystal glasses and the decanter imparted a heaviness to the proceedings which pulled against her mother’s incongruous lightness of manner. Ondine was startled by this contrast. It was as if the room, which had become so comfortable and familiar, were suddenly foreign, hostile even, as if it were questioning her presence in it. Her mother’s attention concentrated around the doctor, who seemed intoxicated by it and proud of the little gathering. For a second, an expression, partly of anxiety, partly of loathing, disturbed Ondine’s serene demeanour. Paul noticed the change and when she saw him staring at her she immediately resumed her customary prettiness, sipping the half-glass of claret she was permitted in the interests of cultivation and breeding.

After they’d finished the first course of watercress soup, Mrs Norris served a dish of glazed duck, the preparation of which Anna had supervised that afternoon.

“May I have some more wine, Mother?” Ondine asked after she had finished her ration. It was the first time she had referred to Anna as “Mother” instead of “Mum”.

“As it is Dr Winton’s birthday, you may,” she said, determined not to be put off by the hint of disdain in her daughter’s voice.

“Might one inquire as to the doctor’s age?” Ondine returned.

“The doctor’s age is an open secret, my dear,” Winton replied, smiling in a way that revealed his sharp, white teeth under his auburn beard.

Ondine, of course, knew very well how old he was, but thought she could embarrass him by drawing attention to the twenty-two-year gulf separating him from her mother. Her attempts, for now, came to naught. Anna and Winton carried on the atmosphere of geniality, and Winton again broached the topic of Paul attending classes at the Gallery School, which was now only a year away.

They’ve bribed him with all that art school nonsense, Ondine thought to herself, as the doctor talked enthusiastically about his connections at the academy and his acquaintance with many of the city’s leading art critics and reviewers, some of whom divided their time between medicine and the press.

“James Smith, in fact, was a close friend before he went off the boil and became religious,” the doctor said with a smile.

Ondine looked at Paul, who was evidently going to pretend that he knew who James Smith was. Thinking that she could deflate the doctor a bit she said, with an air of affected nonchalance that sounded childish, “And who exactly is James Smith, Doctor?”

Winton answered her in his stride. A girl of fifteen, he told himself, was not about to ruffle the feathers of a man who had been reinventing himself, across virtually the entire social spectrum, for the last forty years.

“Smith was the critic who tried to sink the impressionists. Streeton, Roberts, Conder and the like. A conservative really, but very influential for a time. I suppose history has run on ahead of him, poor chap.”

“So what use would a poor chap like that be to my brother?” Ondine said.

“Use?” rejoined the doctor, still smiling. “Ondine, we all have our uses.” He might have added that he was sure he could find a particular use for her, but held his tongue, not wanting to disappoint Anna and undermine her touching attempt to create a real family atmosphere.

Ondine drank her wine, aware of her mother’s disapproval.

“I think you’ve had enough for one night, dear,” she said.

“Oh, let the girl celebrate with the rest of us,”Winton said jovially.

Ondine again fixed upon his quietly assured control of the table, his effortless authority, his neatly trimmed beard, his studs and that ring, a tiny golden claw clutching at a ball of turquoise, he’d been wearing for years. Her sense of something repulsive in Winton, the outline of something ugly and even bestial concealed in his accomplished manner and impeccable grooming, became more emphatic, until she imagined she could see a primitive wolfishness glaring back at her from across the table. The man is old, she thought to herself, yet he fancies himself young. He behaves as if he were a man half his age. How is it that my mother could love him? Was she fooled by all this finery and talk of literature and art?

It only took her a second to piece this puzzle together, and the ensuing explanation cut right through her. That man has bought us all, she said to herself. A nice little family to put on display. All paid for in full, like figures in a doll’s house or parrots in a gilt cage. The house, the money, the polish, it all represented a right of dominion over them. It was as clear to her as the threat of overt violence.

She regained her composure instantly. It was as if she had lived through a revolution. She knew that the world she was inhabiting had not changed. She was simply looking at things with her eyes open, and had found the clarity of her vision startling. She regretted that it had affected her and now hoped that her rudeness had not undermined their position in the doctor’s scheme, had not offended his assumption of sovereignty. Like a creature capable of magically changing its form, Ondine cast off her look of distracted contemplation as if it were a piece of old clothing, and assumed an expression of gentle bonhomie as the doctor spoke about a performance of
Hamlet
to which he wished to take them the following week.

“Doctor,” Ondine said with deliberate melodiousness, “could we play Schubert Lieder on the graphophone?”

“By all means,” he replied.

“Thank you.”

The girl got up and walked to the corner of the dining room, where there was a new disk graphophone positioned in an oak cabinet designed specially for it. Ondine wound the machine and the record crackled into life, filling the room with the mechanically tortured strains of “The Wanderer’s Nachtlied”.

As she returned to the table she passed by the doctor and kissed him on the cheek, aware of his heavy scent.

“Happy birthday,” she said.

Anna blushed on her daughter’s behalf.

“Thank you dear,” he said.

After the usual round of coffee and chocolate, during which Anna presented Winton with a leather-bound edition of Dante’s
Inferno
illustrated by Gustave Doré, the children retired to their rooms.

Paul kissed his sister goodnight in the hallway, realising that she was drunk from the wine. He sat on his own bed, fully expecting her to appear as soon as the light in the hallway was put out by Mrs Norris. On cue Ondine opened the door, wearing a full-length nightgown, and immediately flung herself onto the bed in a fit of consternation.

“You know what’s happening,” she exclaimed, leaning on her brother’s shoulder.

“What’s wrong, Ond?”

“I hate them both.”

“Mum and Dr Winton?”

“Who else? The mere thought of it makes me sick.”

“Ond, they’re married. What do you think married people do?”

Paul thought he had already intuited what she was upset about, thought he’d seen her curious naïvety clearly written in her countenance at the table.

“Oh, don’t be stupid. I don’t mean that. Not just that. I’m not a child.”

She was on the verge of explaining herself to Paul as she glimpsed the difficulty of revealing exactly what she had seen. For a second she lingered over the word “prostitute”. She didn’t want to say it, didn’t want to sully them all with the thought of it.

“We could creep in and catch them at it,” she said, diverting herself. “Only it would disgust me too much.”

“Winton is not a bad man,” Paul said. “And he has made Mum very happy.”

“And of course
you’re
happy, going off to the Gallery School,” she said. “Oh, I don’t care a damn about him anyway. Not really. It’ll have to be us against them. A secret alliance.”

Ondine turned to face him, leaning back on her elbows and pulling her legs up around her brother’s waist.

For a moment he was surprised by the frankness of her body and he blushed. Her thighs tightened around him. He slid his hands over her shoulders, resting his palms on her ribs, just touching her breasts with the tips of his thumbs. Years of longing welled up in him. All the lascivious detail he had accumulated in his mind, the seething carnal mass that spilled over onto his sketchpad, now blinded him in a moment of dazzling possibility. He put his arms around his sister and kissed her playfully. Ondine seemed to melt into him as she kissed him back, gently biting his lower lip.

“Do you love me, Paul?” she asked with a contrived coquettishness.

“Who else would I bother loving?”

At that very moment, in another part of the house, Anna looked at herself in the mirror. She was thirty-eight years old, still pretty, but the weight of years had begun to etch itself around her eyes. Her face, she fancied, had a hardness that reminded her of worn stone. She turned over in her mind the image of her daughter kissing Winton. She was ashamed to admit that it made her jealous. Ondine was beautiful, more beautiful than she had ever been. What’s more, she was going to have all the advantages of Winton’s money. The doctor had already willed the house and nearly two-thirds of his portable capital to Anna, who would see that her children lacked nothing. It was a vague and petty anxiety, she knew, but she imagined she’d be happier when her daughter was married and securely settled.

A part of her knew that she was being trite clinging to this fiction of domestic tranquillity. When Albert was alive she read novels about marriage, domestic romances and the like, partly as a way of seeking refuge from her own situation. She was never really taken in by them. She always saw through the optimism of the fairytale. And she wasn’t foolish enough to take her own good fortune with Winton as proof of anything more universal either. Still, the thought of Ondine happily married was one she harboured for all their sakes. Though Anna didn’t credit theories of hereditary madness, the fact that her daughter shared her father’s blood still made her anxious. Ondine’s stateliness and her occasionally condescending air put Anna on edge. There was the hint of excess lingering in her capacity to parody the conventions of family life, and Anna was convinced she’d sooner see Ondine happily reconciled to these than up in arms against them. She hoped that her daughter would not need reining in.

S
t Vincent Place was a wide crescent bordering pleasantly sculpted gardens of winding paths, flower beds, Algerian oak trees, palms, lilly-pillies, and, in season, apple and cherry blossoms. Before Federation the outer rim of the street, divided into St Vincent Place North and South by the gardens, housed some of the most prominent and well-to-do families in the colony. This was not Toorak wealth mind you, not a matter of stately mansions or of antipodean aristocracy built on vast pastoral leases, rather it was what Australians respect far more – the modest opulence of professional classes and shrewd investors. But just as the new rich of the colonies were never far away from reminders of their humbler origins as opportunistic settlers, St Vincent Place was only a matter of blocks from places like Brooke Street. It was a vagary of South Melbourne’s early design that a street of such solid middle-class prosperity could coexist side by side with a tangled nest of lanes and alleys that might, without much chance of melodramatic exaggeration, be described as squalid.

Hamish McDermott was increasingly aware of these differences. The miraculous social elevation of his childhood playmates had been a bitter lesson in the awkwardness of class distinction, one that he bore with moroseness and resentment. Some afternoons, if he had an early shift at the Homoeopathic Hospital where he worked now as an orderly, he concealed himself in the gardens opposite Dr Winton’s house and watched as Ondine arrived home from Albert Park Ladies’ College, wondering at her lithe, graceful beauty and the way in which she had assumed the mantle of her new position with such theatrical imperiousness. She learnt the piano and was taught French and German by expert tutors. Sometimes Hamish would stay out in the gardens until well after dark, gazing at the faint orange glow emanating from within the house. On rainy days he wore his thick, black overcoat and imagined, without a trace of humour, that he had become a sad, Quasimodo-like figure, a lumpish young man with thick worker’s hands, unkempt red hair, freckles and an awkward gait, waiting forlornly to dash his hopes at the feet of an Esmeralda corrupted and made cruel by money.

Despite the amount of time he spent furtively lurking outside it, Hamish was in fact no stranger to the interior of the house. Paul frequently invited him to peruse Winton’s library and study, which had a marvellous collection of the Romantic poets and some fine pieces of early colonial art. The two of them still kept up a healthy friendship. Paul craved Hamish’s company after putting up all week with the sons of financiers, bankers and, worse, the squattocracy, at Wesley College. Anna too was happy to accommodate Hamish, treating him almost as one of the family.