The White Body of Evening (32 page)

“Embraced it? Rubbish. I’ve shaped it. Made it modern and done away with all that lyrical nonsense.”

“Made it modern? What are you talking about?”

“Well, I mean contemporary – the shattered psyche of the age. You know what I mean. The war and all that.”

Ondine said nothing. She was aware of how constantly neglectful Paul had been of Ralph’s death.

“Look, Ond, my point is that entertainment, what you so derisively would call amusement, can be relevant. It can capture the spirit of the age and express something new.”

“Well,” Ondine said calmly and without a hint of animosity in her voice, “I think you could be accused of making light of it.”

“Not at all. There is a profundity there.”

“Paul, I’m led to believe that the
Grand Guignol
is the very opposite. Cheap effects, sensationalism, and painfully obvious gestures. Bathos and bluster. A child’s theatre really, as the name suggests.”

Paul bristled. He glanced at Laura, who sat impassively, well aware that she too was being indicted by these comments.

“And what about you, Laura?” Anna asked with no clear idea of the information she was requesting.

“Yes, what about you?” Ondine turned to her solicitously. “We’ve heard enough from Paul. Has the
Grand Guignol
been as unequivocally fulfilling for you as it has for my brother?”

Laura blinked at the question, revealing long dark eyelashes and what Ondine thought a touching reserve.

“Well, yes,” she said finally, a bit hopelessly, not wanting to be disloyal to Paul. But as Ondine raised her eyebrows quizzically, she realised that this reply could do her no credit in her sister-in-law’s eyes. “In Zurich people were talking about the plays all the time.” She tried to sound authoritative but sank into her chair as she spoke, letting her shoulders drop in unconscious acknowledgment of how unprepossessing she was.

“What people?” Ondine demanded.

“The public,” Paul put in.

“A beastly thing, the public,” Ondine said. “A vulgar thing. I can’t bear it.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to refuse to come along to my plays, just because they appeal to the public?”

“Of course I’ll come.”

“Good. They’ll be a sensation. You’ll hear the screams across the bay.”

It occurred to Ondine that she was not overly fond of her brother right now, even though he had a right to expect some warmth from her after his long absence. She felt that Laura was withdrawn and a bit insipid. Paul, she suspected, had robbed this girl of her will, turned her into something pliable and lifeless. In Europe she must have been completely dependent on him – as dependent as a child or a slave. The thought of it put her on edge. A vague, destructive impulse welled within her as she contemplated the apathy that was expected of her own sex in the service of male creativity.

Laura imagined she could sense her sister-in-law’s disdain for her. It was evident in Ondine’s impatience with Paul. And in perceiving the new and revealing light in which Paul was cast by his sister’s sober questioning and lack of sympathy, Laura found her own confidence diminishing. She did not find the sorority she had expected in her husband’s home and she felt as if she had been left to fend for herself. Ondine was like some vision of the ideals for which men fight. Even as they arrived Laura suspected her fear and admiration would mingle in equal parts, but now she felt like a tortoise without its shell, and couldn’t wait to escape the penetrating gaze of Ondine’s clear, blue eyes.

It was almost midnight when Anna retired. Paul swirled a glass of aromatic, orange liqueur. It was the moment he had been waiting for. Ondine stood up and stretched drowsily. When they kissed goodnight on the landing outside their old rooms, Paul gave her a small parcel wrapped in gold paper.

“A gift from the old world,” Paul said. “Don’t show it off to Mother.”

“Why?” Ondine asked with a shrug of her shoulders, questioning the shape of the book inside the paper with her hands. “Is it the forbidden yellow book? How predictably decadent of you.”

“Better than that. It’s the family archive. I was lucky to get it through customs.”

Laura stood awkwardly beside her husband. She wanted to add something prescient in front of Ondine, but all she could think of was Klessmann. The merest mention of him in conjunction with the book was sure to irritate Paul. They never talked about him now. He was a secret they shared in silence.

“What is the family archive? Never mind. I’m about to find out.” She kissed her brother again, chastely, and then, unexpectedly, gave Laura a hug.

As Laura followed Paul into his old room, which had now been made up for the two of them, and watched Ondine glide into hers, this brief physical impression was rounding itself out in her mind and she brimmed with adoration.

“Your sister is dazzling,” she said to him as she sat down on the bed.

“Yes. Dazzling like white light, or the rays of the sun reflected in the snow,” Paul said affectedly. “But she doesn’t understand that men prefer to prey on garbage.”

Laura turned away from this comment. Paul had once explained the meaning of the line from
Hamlet
in which garbage might be taken to mean entrails.

“I’m going to sleep,” she said. And with that she put on her nightgown and then, ill at ease, watched Paul undress on the opposite side of the room.

In her own room Ondine tore off the gold wrapping paper and found a volume of poetry. The Gothic lettering on the title page read
Nocturnes
by Albert Walters. Translated from the German. As she tried to fathom the mystery of this revelation she was already reading the first page.

A child wrapped in a white shawl stood on the sand. The writing lingered lasciviously over the detail of her mouth, her red tongue, and her white teeth. The water sparkled as the sun set. The toxic waste of the city leaked into the spongy depths of the bay. A magician, expert in French letters, stalked the streets. The sky slowly burned itself out, shadows danced by the lamplight and the mouths of painted women dripped with blood.

She turned the pages one after the other, barely aware that she was reading at all. In her father’s sick imagination faces leered out of the darkness, velvet curtains concealed freaks and monstrosities of a sexual nature, poisonous flowers gave off noxious fumes, the abortions of the ocean dragged themselves from the water to rot in gutters, and bodies decomposed outside the walls of the city. The orange lights of the markets and the arcades conjured the obscure properties of the night. The God of Christianity was dead, usurped by the evil powers and savage retributions of primitive religions. The world was made of ash and blood, the heathen fear of darkness, strange shapes trembling in the sky. At times it all read like gibberish as the images proliferated in an uncontrolled, hysterical outpouring of depravity and perversity which circled around visions of prostitutes, gutter-crawlers, strangers lost in shadows, shameful encounters and violent crimes in a city collapsing into its own foundations.

Ondine imagined her father’s secret and disgraceful life. She closed her eyes for a moment and remembered her own wanderings through the city of crippled soldiers. The cult of the prostitute. Her father worshipped these women as if they were deities, the mystical bearers of desire and death. She wondered about her mother. She wondered about Paul, and half suspected him of concocting the whole thing either as some elaborate literary hoax or as a ridiculous exercise in self-aggrandisement.

What Paul called the family archive was a web of symbols, obscene clichés and obscure confessions that alluded to a great, but unnameable, crime. The whore pointed to the corpse, the corpse pointed to the killer, the killer gave way to the drunken wanderer, the wanderer was himself a madman or a poet who demanded punishment by mutilation or blinding at the hands of terrible, omniscient forces presiding over the city since the beginning of time. All of these moments bled into one another, all circled around the transgression that festered behind the words like an infection.

Ondine felt the darkness pressing around her. She shuddered as she read, remembering her father’s eyes fixed on her with a mysterious intent. “My daughter’s wanton eyes shine like razor blades as the burning curtain falls.” She wanted to feel disgust or hatred, but there was something contrived to her in that. In fact she felt queer, sensing the way in which the words robbed her of herself. That was the only way she could describe it.

That night she dreamt of the house on Brooke Street. Underneath the rotting floorboards she could see pupae clinging to the wooden bearers and joists. When they hatched, darkly-coloured moths – blood-red, purple and black – flew into the house and hovered in front of dusty dressing-table mirrors. The house was full of mirrors so that each moth threw off a host of reflected images as it hurtled about. But the moths all had damaged wings and, one by one, they dropped to the floor, where they twitched and struggled against the force of gravity until the remaining floorboards were thick with them. Ondine struggled out of her dream to warn her father that his heavy boots were going to crush the moths, making a bloody mess that she wouldn’t want to look at. Already her bare feet had squashed some of the dying creatures into a thick brown pulp. She couldn’t endure it. She had to warn her father, but with every step she took towards him, she killed more moths until, finally, the whole house was strewn with crushed bodies and torn wings and the soles of her feet were wet with blood. The dream gripped her until the killing was over. When she finally awoke, she knew that she had been the guilty one. In the first confused moment of consciousness she imagined that the savage judge would come for her as well.

T
he war had passed by Hamish McDermott. Overweight and suffering from what the military doctor described as collapsed arches, he was initially ruled out of active service. He hadn’t wanted to fight anyway, sensing something sycophantic in the Australian response to a European crisis, especially with the Americans keeping well clear. But that was a difficult thing to admit to in a climate of frantic mobilisation and mounting national sentiment. For a few weeks in 1915, after reporting on a meeting of Irish nationalists for the
Melburnian,
he was placed under investigation by the police as a potential Sinn Fein sympathiser and was even threatened with incarceration at Langwarrin until the investigating officers realised that they were barking up the wrong tree. He never received a white feather in the mail, but when uniformed men brushed past him in the street, or women glanced disparagingly, he always felt that he was being accused. Galled by these perceived insults and feeling a kind of anxiousness that he didn’t doubt would finally have a physiological effect on him, he thought he might as well put on a uniform, for the sake of appearances. As the army gradually eased up on its exclusion of unfit recruits, Hamish was posted to an administrative office in the St Kilda Road barracks, where he spent his time drawing up futile lists of resources for the military to commandeer.

He saw Ondine only once during those years. It was shortly after he had joined up. She was standing on the corner of Bourke and Elizabeth Streets, outside the post office, wearing a grey skirt and matching jacket. Hamish had just left the Royal Arcade and was standing on the other side of the street. He recognised her in an instant and was about to cross the road to greet her when a man in uniform appeared beside her. Without saying a word to each other, they crossed the road and walked right past Hamish into the arcade. Ondine’s eyes were fixed in front of her with an apathy that reminded him of the deadness in her mother’s eyes, the deadness he had never ceased to yearn for. The young man in the uniform was an officer who walked with a slight limp and the aid of a cane. Hamish watched them head towards the Little Collins Street end of the arcade and decided to follow them. They crossed into Block Place and, from the corner of Little Collins Street, Hamish saw Ondine unlock a red wooden door about halfway down the narrow lane, into which the two of them disappeared.

He stood on the corner wounded by what he’d seen. Perhaps he felt betrayed. Perhaps he felt simply jealous. He could have waited for her to reappear and offered her money to fuck him, or beaten the man she was with until he confessed everything. He waited for almost an hour. The afternoon faded into twilight and still neither Ondine nor the soldier reappeared. Finally Hamish dragged himself back to his flat on Flinders Lane feeling sullied by the prurience of his own curiosity. His penis was still hard when he lay down on his bed and imagined that he was the soldier she’d led through the mysterious red door. Often after that he walked through Block Place, casting an inquisitive glance at the red door, or lingered around the Royal Arcade feeling his heart beat faster with anticipation. But his efforts were in vain. He didn’t see Ondine again until well after the war was over.

It was the opening night of Paul’s play. Laura was backstage, reluctantly painting faces with carmine and rice powder, Anna had shown no inclination to venture out, so Ondine was alone. She was pleased to see Hamish, kissed him on the cheek and insisted that they sit together, for old times’ sake. In the vestibule they walked past a booth behind which sat a doctor in a white coat offering to take people’s pulses and check their blood pressure in case they doubted their ability to withstand the shock of what they were about to witness.

“This ought to be an interesting experiment,” Hamish said as they made their way towards the front of the theatre and sat down.

“Oh, experiment nothing. I’m sure people will love it. My brother has become much shrewder than when we used to know him.”

Hamish noticed the muted cynicism in her voice.

“I meant to ask you, Hamish, did Paul ever show you a book by my father –
Romanze zur Nacht
or
Nocturnes
?”

“I have both of them.” He blushed as he said this, aware that his possession of these volumes had given him something over her.