The White Body of Evening (19 page)

“Not much,” Ralph said.

“Not even Sorel singing
‘Un bel dì vedremo’?
Don’t tell me you’re that heartless. I’ll have to start calling you Pinkerton.”

“Perhaps you’d be preferring the Kremo family acrobats at the Gaiety?” Paul said.

“Well, to tell you the truth I don’t see a great deal of difference between the melodrama of an Italian opera and that sort of thing. There’s a certain childishness in both, isn’t there?”

“Oh, now you’re being perverse,” Ondine said.

“Don’t suppose they have much of anything in the bush,” said Paul, bored with the conversation.

“They don’t have much of anything here either,” Ralph said. “It all seems rather thin on the ground to me, and getting thinner. Melbourne’s fortune was made out of gold, and now that there’s not much of that left you can see the place grinding to a halt.”

Ondine looked into his eyes and smiled to herself. Paul seemed ready to argue, but Ralph, thankfully, was quite uninterested.

“I didn’t realise you had a basis for comparison,” Paul said defensively.

“Well, I think I’d like to get out of here for a bit.”

“Back to the farm, eh?”

“No. Thought I might take off for the Continent. If your sister marries me, then I’ll take her with me.”

Ondine turned crimson and her eyes flashed at him. “Don’t be silly, Ralph,” she said.

“That’s a damned insult!” Paul swelled with anger. “Are you trying to make us look ridiculous?”

A few heads turned at the sound of Paul’s raised voice.

“Not at all.”

“You’d expect my sister to marry you?”

“If she wants to.”

“You’d have to ask me,” Ondine said vaguely. She was too nervous to look directly at him. Her eyes wandered about the vestibule and finally fixed on a point suspended safely behind his shoulder.

Paul took his sister’s hand and led her firmly towards the door. As they stepped out onto the pavement, still thronging with people leaving the opera, Ondine shook him off and rushed back inside. Ralph was rooted to the floor where she had left him.

“To tell the truth, I feel quite sorry for your brother,” he said.

“Ask me then, you stubborn idiot,” she said, ignoring this evasive comment.

“All right then, I’m asking.”

“Are you? Don’t make a fool of me.”

“Marry me then,” he said with a smile.

“All right then, I will.”

She squeezed his hand, and then walked back onto the street, where Paul had turned pale with rage. He caught her arm and led her to a cab.

“You can’t be serious, Ondine,” he said. “The man is a philistine.”

For the moment, anxiety about how Paul might react was swept away by her happiness. They rode silently back to South Melbourne, each careful not to look at the other.

“I’m going to have to marry one day,” Ondine said as she climbed out of the cab. “And after all he is rich.”

“I hate him. And if you’re serious, I’ll hate you as well.”

“You’re behaving like a child,” she said as she mounted the steps, leaving him on the street.

She went straight up to her room and flung herself on her bed, confused and excited. The tranquillity of the bedroom brought with it memories of her brother’s warmth and despite her resolve she felt uneasy at the prospect of turning her back on him. She’d only been there for a moment when he materialised at the door. He looked weak as tears welled up in his eyes. At the sight of him she burst into tears as well, her body convulsing uncontrollably. But the fit passed in a second. Before he’d walked the width of the room to comfort her, she had regained her composure. Paul stood in front of her with eyes that pleaded for sympathy. As if animated by a force beyond her control she pushed him against the wall and held him there, her hand firm under his jaw. She stared at him, feeling the blood course through his neck, amazed at his fragility. She could crush his windpipe with one hand, and not think anything of it. She slapped him, laughing, then kissed him on the lips and threw him away from her in disgust. Then she burst into tears again, sitting on the bed, cradling her face in her hands.

Paul went to her and tried to hold her hands.

“Please leave me alone,” she said, pushing him away.

“I love you,” he murmured.

“If you ever say that again to me, in that way, I’ll hate you forever. It makes me sick.”

He drew back from her. “So you are going to marry him, then?” he said.

“Yes.”

Paul turned his back on her and left the room without another word.

T
he next day Ralph was speaking to Winton and Anna confidentially in the study. A day later the entire family was invited to the Matthews’s Toorak mansion, where the engagement was formally announced. Bruce Matthews, though now amongst the city’s wealthiest inhabitants, was not the sort of man to entertain notions of his own importance or to imagine himself belonging to an antipodean version of the British aristocracy. On the contrary, he was happy to snub the Anglophile anachronisms of Toorak and South Yarra by marrying his son into such a bohemian family. He knew, of course, that Ondine stood to inherit a great deal of Winton’s capital, but wealth alone couldn’t attenuate the sense that she entered Melbourne society as an exotic, and this pleased the old man no end. He toasted the, engagement with liberal sentiment and good humour, and welcomed the union of the two families.

The wedding was planned for spring the following year, after Ondine’s eighteenth birthday, and with the odious transaction all but signed and sealed, Paul decided to talk to Winton about his own future. Since the night of the exhibition, they hadn’t spoken much. In fact they had done their best to avoid each other. Paul was embarrassed and felt the sting of his disgrace acutely. No amount of bravado could mitigate the shame he experienced in the presence of his stepfather and mother. Winton, for his part, already knew just how thoroughly he had fallen under his stepson’s power. As Paul muttered incoherently the day after his exhibition, there was no doubt in his mind.

The evening after the engagement was announced Paul sat in front of Winton in the study, flicking through a volume of Keats’s poetry.

“He had syphilis, you know,”Winton said, sitting down.”At least those are the rumours.”

Paul closed the book and replaced it on the shelf. “I’ve never heard that,” he said.

“Of course, there was nothing very chaste about his writing.”

Paul noticed how nervous Winton seemed, how he fumbled with the little bust of Shakespeare on his desk and refused to make direct eye contact with him.

“You know we’ve invested a great deal of energy in your educations, Paul, yours and Ondine’s,” Winton said. “I’ve always believed that education is the way forward, that it civilises and satisfies, equipping us for a peaceful and fulfilled life, enabling us to integrate the disparate aspects of our personalities into an harmonious whole. That’s the ideal, at least, and it seems to me like a good one.”

“I agree with you there, Doctor.”

“Of course, most of us are in reality more complicated than the simple psychology of this allows. And society itself, moreover, develops very unevenly. What might look like progress and civility from one angle, could appear as barbarity from another. Progress in medical science or social hygiene, for instance, might be well in advance of progress in morality or jurisprudence. Or certain tenets in philosophy might be well in advance of the prevailing artistic sensibility of an age, creating dissonance and confusion. Some of us are living not for our own time, Paul, but for the future.”

“Yes, I follow you,” said Paul.

The doctor fell silent, waiting anxiously for his stepson to say something decisive and reveal his hand. When it was clear that Paul was not about to volunteer his secret, Winton suspected him of unnecessary cruelty and he resumed with a note of desperation in his voice.

“Paul, I’m getting old. I’ll live a little longer, but soon enough your mother will inherit a fortune which will eventually devolve to you and your sister. I’ve adopted you as my own. You can bear my name if you wish to. I’ve provided for you all, and I love your mother to distraction. As far as it is in the power of a mortal to do so, she has made me young again.”

“I’m grateful, Doctor,” Paul said.”We all are.”

It struck him as odd that he still called Winton “Doctor” after all these years, as if paternal authority had vanished with the death of his actual father, and then reappeared as a colder, institutional knowledge that kept vigilant watch over them.

“You could show me that gratitude by promising that —” But Winton broke off, not knowing quite how to broach the subject. “Paul, when you were delirious, you said something, a name, a nonsensical name.”

“I don’t remember.”

“But you do know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes I do. In fact I came in here thinking that I might try my hand at a bit of blackmail.” Paul’s voice assumed an unusual calm as Winton fidgeted again with the bust, not quite knowing whether this was an attempt at levity or not.

“Really?”

“Well, in a manner of speaking.”

“What is it you want? Money?” A shudder ran through Winton as he realised that the young man sitting opposite him, whom he’d tried to look upon as his own son, looked back at him not as a father, but as a resource, a means to an end that could be ruthlessly exploited. “Do you have such little regard for me, Paul, to come here wanting to extort what you could freely ask for as my son?”

“I think you’re taking it all a bit to heart, aren’t you?” Paul said. “I understand that you’re anxious to keep aspects of your past hidden, but I’m not in the business of extortion either.”

“What do you want to talk about, then?” Winton asked coldly.

“Well, I think that things have pretty much run their course for me here,” Paul said. “I’ve had it, to be frank, and imagine that it might be better for all of us if I were to leave for a bit. I thought I’d try to study painting in Europe somewhere – Munich or Vienna. I’m a disgrace to the family, after all, and could easily end up being a rather unpleasant skeleton hidden away in a closet.”

Winton folded his hands, collecting himself. “I need your word, Paul, that the things you’ve heard about me will be forgotten. I’ll arrange an allowance, to be paid twice yearly. You can spend it as you wish, whoring in Melbourne or in Vienna. I don’t give a damn. If our agreement is broken, the allowance will be cut off and you’ll not be getting another penny out of me. Tell me one thing, and I’ll go to the bank tomorrow. Who mentioned that name?” Winton couldn’t bring himself to utter it.

“The thing about the cat?” Paul asked.

Winton closed his eyes and nodded.

Now Paul felt a pang of remorse. The doctor’s bluntness presented him with an unflattering image of what he had fallen to, and he shrank away from himself in disgust.

“Doctor, I just want to leave here. I don’t care a whit about your past and I’d never disturb my mother’s peace or yours by telling her about it.”

He spoke as if he’d been sapped of his strength and now stood in front of an accusing judge nervously awaiting sentencing.

“Who told you, Paul?”

“Les Collins. Christopher Leslie Collins.” Paul spoke the name as if it were a curse.”Do you know who he is?”

“Yes I do,” the doctor said.

“Have you seen him recently?”

Winton shook his head.

“The man is a corpse. A sack of bones. A gutter-crawler. That’s what will happen to me if I stay here. This country will crush me. It will turn me into dust.”

His voice shook with conviction, and Winton saw the father in the son, the same failure to accommodate, the same propensity for regression. Instinctual deviation.

“If you think like that you’ll always be a child, Paul. A country can’t decide your fate for you, unless you join with it wholeheartedly.”

“I’d like to leave early in the new year.”

“Before your sister’s wedding?”

“As soon as possible.”

When Paul went back to his room Ondine was sitting on his bed, waiting for him.

“What do you want?” he said sullenly.

Since the night of the opera their exchanges had dwindled to embarrassed formalities.

“I wanted to apologise,” she said.

“There’s no need.”

“I’ll never hate you, Paul. I’ll never not love you. As a brother, I mean.”

He sat down, not beside her on the bed, but in the reading chair on the opposite side of the room.

“I’d sooner see you marry someone like Hamish,” Paul said wearily.

“Hamish is a fool. His romantic temper is sickly.”

“You’ve suddenly become very respectable, haven’t you? You’ll be a pillar of the establishment soon.”

“Oh, I don’t care about that,” she said.

“So you really love him?”

“Yes I do. Won’t you accept that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hope you will.”

Paul rubbed his eyes, which had begun to ache. He squinted at her, trying to screen out the glare of the ceiling light. He was on the verge of saying that he couldn’t look upon her simply as a sister, but the mere possibility of articulating that had vanished. She was about to take the name of another man, to be branded with his mark, to embrace the law they had together denied. Or had they? For the first time, the remoteness of his sister struck him as undeniable. It was he who had longed for her, he who had dreamt of possessing her, his hands that had timidly roved over her body, while all along she’d remained at a distance, granting him nothing more than the occasional performative flourish, just enough to keep him hanging on, enthralled.

“Ondine, I’m tired. Please leave me.”

She stood up silently, stretching her long body in what seemed to him a gesture of mockery.

“Goodnight then.” She walked across the room and, with ceremonial candour, kissed him on the cheek.

When she left, Paul hurled himself onto his bed and smelt the subtle odour of her body still lingering on the counterpane. Why hadn’t he told her about his plans to leave Melbourne? She’d be as pleased to get rid of him as he would be to go. He could only embarrass her with an image of the thing – the perversity – she’d have to forget in order to marry and live out the mundanity of a respectable bourgeois existence. The thought of it made him sick. He would always gravitate to the covert, and imagined concealing himself in obscure nooks and alleys, away from public view, away from a life of unending tedium. The horror of the everyday gripped him and he saw himself fleeing its perpetual, accusing gaze – a gaze as insistent and as tireless as the sun itself. If it were the one thing he’d do in his life, he vowed, he’d drag himself clear of the monotony, the utter, soul-destroying monotony of the everyday.