The White Body of Evening (12 page)
Still, the finery of the place put him on edge and he never felt able to relax in the way that he had in the old Brooke Street cottage. Winton’s library seemed an uninviting place to him. There were volumes of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson and a complete set of Sir Walter Scott, as well as Australian authors like Harpur, Kendall, Gordon and Clarke. There were, of course, other obscure tracts on medicine, social hygiene, sexual pathology and tribal customs, but none of these books, not even the most familiar of them, seemed to Hamish as if they were meant to be read. He was afraid to take the books off the shelves and didn’t want to borrow any of them for fear of damaging or losing them.
The sight of these books, so elaborately bound and preserved, with their gilded spines, reminded him just how much he actually disliked reading. The thought of sitting down in a comfortable study to read one of these volumes was deadly. When he first began reading in earnest he hated the way the sentences, paragraphs and pages strung out meaning interminably. He was too impatient and wanted a book to reveal itself straightaway. He imagined himself cutting up the lines until he was left with a mass of words that he could consume in one intoxicating act of understanding. He had turned to poetry for that reason. The dreamlike brevity, the condensation of meaning, the concentration of multiplicity in a single, primal word, were correctives to the lethargy he felt when reading larger works. The order and authority of Winton’s library seemed to mock this need for spontaneous revelation. It was like a tomb built out of books by comparison.
When he was asked to stay for dinner he often felt pushed to the margins of the conversation despite the doctor’s attempts to draw him out. He hadn’t seen any operas and his family didn’t own a graphophone, so he was unable to comment intelligently on the quality of this or that performance, or debate the relative merits of German and Italian music. He imagined that Ondine must be sneering at his vulgarity and lack of refinement. Like an expert mimic she had learnt the rules of taste and conduct that distinguish the upper classes from their inferiors. She sipped wine like a lady, held herself perfectly erect and touched her brother’s hand affectionately every so often as if, in proper aristocratic fashion, she had assumed the gestures of a subtle decadence. In public she and Paul had even begun to speak to each other like two characters in a contrived comedy of manners. When they carried on with this kind of talk, so artificial and pretentious, Hamish felt excluded and cut off, lacking the intangible quality they so greedily hoarded between them. If Ondine still spoke to him in her old familiar way, everything else about her had changed so visibly that he knew he couldn’t place any stock in this intimacy, which he was sure she would soon forget as she distanced herself even further from her past.
After these evenings Hamish threw himself into what he now saw, mockingly, as his own milieu. Instead of the opera, he watched vaudeville and fairground entertainments at the Mechanics’ Institute with workers from the wharves who knew his father, or other orderlies and cleaners from the hospital. Hamish hadn’t been an outstanding student at the state high school, but he had only narrowly missed out on a scholarship to university just the same. He hadn’t given up the idea of attending university, but knew that he would first need to save some money and so he hastily took a job at the Homoeopathic while he waited for a public service position to open up. He bridled at the way in which wealth seemed to translate into cultural attainment and didn’t doubt that Paul would eventually become the famous artist he had always dreamt of being, while he’d be stuck as a drudge in an office or a factory.
Galled at the thought of his own mediocrity, Hamish would drag himself along to the popular theatre at the Mechanics’ Institute and howl disingenuously at the juggling clowns, applaud the man doing bird whistles and feign wonder when a ventriloquist made a dog read Shakespeare. Once he saw a professor, claiming descent from the great ghost-seers of Europe, project a lightshow of spectral polyps around the walls of the hall. It pleased him to think that he was doing something that would so thoroughly debase him in Ondine’s eyes, and he imagined that the next time he dined at St Vincent Place he’d shock them all by describing these wonders.
After one such evening in the Mechanics’ Institute, where he’d witnessed an unconvincing display of telepathic communication conducted by an enthused and excitable spiritualist who claimed to have lived as a Roman slave in the days of Nero, Hamish walked over to St Vincent Place, where he intended to wallow self-indulgently in the frustration of his unrequited devotion to Ondine. In good romantic fashion he hoped that this might galvanise him in one direction or another, jolt him towards some sense of resolve or purpose. He sat down on a park bench in the middle of the garden. It was a cold, cloudless night, and he could see the steam of his breath in the moonlight. He fell into a trancelike state in which, but for an awareness of his own misery, his mind was empty. In this stupor the garden came alive with the mystery of its stillness. He felt that he was being watched, that other forms moved in the night, that the garden was peopled with shadows come to lose themselves in darkness. Then a figure glided past him, oblivious to his presence. It paused, almost in front of him, gazing at Dr Winton’s house. At first Hamish doubted his own eyes, then wondered just how many other suitors were troubled and pursued by the thought of Ondine.
He didn’t have to wait long for the mystery to be resolved. As the figure turned despondently away from the house, the moonlight betrayed Robert Walters, Albert’s brother. Hamish remained motionless, hoping against hope that Robert hadn’t noticed him. He seemed to be looking straight into his eyes, but registered nothing, slowly dragging himself off in the direction of Clarendon Street. It was a moment of awful self–recognition. Robert looked pathetic, as if he’d been sapped of life and left to wander as a kind of human shell, a hollow vessel. Was the man pining after Anna? Hamish got up and walked swiftly in the opposite direction, confident that his lonely vigils in the name of thwarted love were over.
He was, however, to allow himself one final act of remembrance. The house the Walters family had lived in on Brooke Street had been rented for a few years after their departure, but for the last two had been vacant, a home only to the occasional drunk or vagabond. Anna eventually sold it and the place was about to be demolished by its new owners, before it collapsed of its own accord. At the hospital the next day Hamish decided that he would walk through the place one last time, drawn by the mystery of his childhood and the hope of rekindling some of its enchantment.
He thought about the house the whole day, the better to forget the corpse he had wheeled towards the undertaker’s van almost first thing that morning. An old bloke he had pushed around in a wheelchair from time to time had died of a cancer that had eaten its way into his lung and finally through an artery wall. He drowned in his own blood during the night, coughing up a horrible clotted mess. By the time Hamish arrived in Brooke Street he had spent almost eight hours wrestling with the image of the dead man, the bloody evidence of his dreadful death rattle, and the memory of the cold, cancerous coughs he had heard as he pushed the breathless patient around the wards.
The Brooke Street cottage had fallen into such a state of disrepair that Hamish feared he might fall through the rotted floorboards. The place smelt like urine and was littered with old newspapers, rags and odd pieces of clothing – a single worker’s boot, a pair of football shorts, some soiled underwear. In the living room there was straw scattered about and the blackened remains of a makeshift fire. A few empty bottles had been tossed into one corner. In the kitchen the linoleum had been torn up and many of the floorboards had decayed, leaving a view of the dark underside of the house, the moist, swampy soil of the bay that looked as if it had been coated in treacle. In the front bedroom there was only a mattress with the stuffing leaking out of its side. Hamish recalled the sight of Anna’s naked body that afternoon and how it had been twisted out of shape beneath Albert’s. But it was not Anna that he saw in his mind’s eye, it was Ondine. And in the scenario he now pictured to himself it was he and not Albert humiliating the girl on the piss-stained mattress before him. He felt himself go hard and wondered if he had it in him to masturbate over the mingling of fantasy and memory that now overwhelmed him. He foresaw himself spraying like a tomcat into the mattress and then anticipated the shame he’d feel walking back out into the light of the street, wet with his own semen.
As he withdrew from the room he noticed a curious thing. A floorboard buckled under his weight and flipped out of place, suggesting it had been deliberately loosened. There was something underneath it, wedged into the shallow space between the sagging floor and the ground. He pulled out the adjacent floorboard and then, kneeling over the hole, lifted up a brown leather satchel from the house’s foundations. It was damp and mouldy, and so stretched at the seams with papers and books that when Hamish dropped it on the floor it literally burst open, vomiting forth its contents with a host of spiders, beetles, and other crawling insects which raced at various speeds towards the extremities of the room.
Hamish brushed away the last of these creatures and examined the satchel’s contents. There were obscene photographs, erotic drawings and lithographs that depicted women copulating with the devil, with monkeys, with writhing, tendrilled sea monsters, whores peeking out from behind dominoes, black masses and Oriental harems, all drawn with lascivious detail and exactness. Some of these pictures had then been copied, crudely, without the tawdry economy of the expert pornographer, on loose-leaf sheets of paper. There were also several notebooks containing writing in a small, steady hand that must have taken concentration to maintain. There were poems, fragments, diatribes, ruminations, lists of words and phrases. Skimming through these Hamish found fragments of written pornography, the violence and perversity of which made him colour. He found poems written to the powers of night, accounts of mythical cities, fantastic dream-states, and descriptions of familiar parts of Melbourne that were shrouded with an uncanny sense of menace.
When he came across some old copies of the
Bulletin
folded into a collection of newspaper cuttings describing the trial of Edmund Howard, Hamish had no doubt in his mind. The satchel had belonged to Albert Walters.
W
inton realised that the children had been slow to catch on, and had given him and Anna a merciful few years in which their relationship could be pursued without the worry of their disapproval. While Paul and Ondine acquired all the trappings his wealth provided they were content, and it almost seemed that the four of them together had succeeded in forming quite a conventional family. Winton, with a stepfather’s instinctive animosity towards the natural son, had always feared Paul, believing that a rebellious adolescent eager to redeem his father’s name might begin to see ghosts commanding him to vengeance. For this reason he had been especially solicitous of the boy’s confidences. He’d promised that he’d send Paul to the Gallery School when he left Wesley, and made every effort in the meantime to construct a genial, cultured ambience that would triumph over whatever Oedipal animosities might be festering within his stepson.
On the night of his sixtieth birthday dinner, however, he saw that he had miscalculated. It was Ondine who had been the first to look at him accusingly, and the girl had not been sophisticated enough to conceal her disgust. Late that night Winton sat in his study and closed his eyes, trying to quieten the spectres that now rose up around him. The girl’s revulsion accused him not simply of sleeping with her mother, but of all his past indiscretions as well. His days as a man about town were well and truly over. Falling in love with Anna had seen to that. But in his past lay incarnations that might be dredged up at his dinner table by the girl eager to humiliate him in front of the woman who, alone, sustained the thought of life unsullied by the fear of aging and ultimately of death.
As an author and an occasional lecturer Winton was always confident that his proclivities were justified in the interests of science, health and hygiene. Anna already knew about his public face, the progressive man of science. It was the thought of what lay beyond the public mask that now had him writhing away from his own guilty conscience. He dropped his head into his hands and tried to shake the memories loose. How many times had he done it? A dozen? He didn’t remember. An accommodating consultant, that’s what they called him. Aborted pregnancies, foetuses wrapped in bloodied sheets, the backblock stench of those brothels. He was another person then, before the Midas mine had made him rich and let him wash his hands of the whole business. Had Ondine somehow found him out? He knew he was being childish but her disgust, glimpsed out of the corner of his eye earlier in the evening, now gripped his innards like a talon. In a moment of acute anxiety he imagined her preternatural knowledge and the danger it put him in.
Later, when Anna casually suggested that her daughter might be married and taken off their hands, the doctor was immediately gratified at his wife’s unconscious sympathy with him and promised to set about finding a suitable young man. After a long discussion they decided that he should settle money on the girl, ensuring that she might marry into a secure family with decent prospects.
“This is not the old world,” Winton assured Anna. “There are no end of simple, adventurous settler families who have made themselves rich in this country, not through inheritance or the privileges of the blood, but through honest hard work and a bit of luck. Any one of them would be happy to have a beautiful, cultured creature like Ondine gracing the drawing room.”The girl will make a fine ornament, he thought.
“Charles, you have been so good to us,” she said, holding his hand, her voice faltering.