The White Body of Evening (7 page)

This sudden change startled her. Finally, the secret implication of Winton’s meandering, the secret she’d known all along, had worked its way to the surface.

“What are you talking about?”

The doctor paused, collecting himself. He breathed deeply for a moment, drawing in the air through tightly clenched teeth before regaining his composure.

“You wander from place to place,” he said. “One day you meet a man and stumble into a certain intimacy. How does it happen? What distinguishes him? Before you know it you’re doing the block with ‘your boy’, your heart’s idol, the romance of it all is overwhelming and in this realm of shadows you fancy that you are happy, contented, fulfilled. Good Lord! Only an idiot could put up with it, Anna.”

“It wasn’t like that,” she said, unable to disguise her annoyance.

“Of course it wasn’t. So why go on pretending? For the sake of respectability? A respectability that no one but yourself believes in?”

She met his stare and then quickly lowered her eyes again.

“I have no wish to, to…” But he couldn’t finish the sentence.

She wasn’t sure whether he was acting a part or not, but she didn’t let herself linger over the question of his sincerity. She thought about Albert, about how powerless she was in his hands, how vile and humiliated she felt. How dead, dead to her own pleasure. She was about to leave, but compelled by a sense of abandon welling within herself she remained in front of him, waiting for the certainty of her own desire to seize her. Winton appeared so vulnerable, as if his mask had fallen and she had seen something else underneath it. She had never seen this, this other thing, existing in a man, save for the moment at which Albert had stabbed himself.

“To live with our eyes open,” he mumbled. “That’s all.”

She touched his hand. She didn’t know what she was doing. But at that moment it didn’t matter. She had glimpsed something. It might have been freedom. It might simply have been the space to breathe. Whatever it was, she embraced it.

She touched his mouth. Her lips parted slightly as she held herself for him, his hand on the back of her neck, running up through her hair.

The next day, when Robert offered her money for groceries, she said casually that she still had some of the inheritance her aunt had left her, and that, for the moment, they could manage well enough.

“Very well then,” he said, relieved for her sake, and for his.

She turned away from him, unable to conceal her lack of composure as she thought about the doctor. Wasn’t she already prostituting herself? Albert had saved her from the disgrace of being a single mother left to raise a bastard son. He had also saved her from the shame of having to confront her parents with this guilt. And in return she repaid him with constant, abject submission. The shadow world of love had dissipated. She could clearly see what she had become, and it had happened well before Winton had sent her his ten-pound banknote.

In the early hours of 1901 the calm of the house gave Anna the pause in which to trace out the tangled threads of this existence. As she waited for her brother-in-law and her husband to return home, she watched Ondine sleeping, praying that her daughter might see with her eyes open right from the outset.

When Albert first began working out of Spencer Street Station he took umbrage at not being able to spend such long hours in the public library where he’d grown fond of the dim, yellowish glow of the old gas-jet lamps, the polished wood, and the musty smell of accumulated dust. As he slowly recovered his strength he had traded the banality of the accounts department, where books and figures had a deadening sameness, for the seductiveness of novels, poetry, essays and more obscure treasures fished out of the deep recesses of history. The secret knowledge of the library, which he imagined forming some vast, intricate system linking all the disparate faculties and inclinations of man, held him entranced as each of his obsessions ran its course, only to see another emerge in its place. The library, he came to believe, was the place in which the authentic being of man was possible, because in it all the tendrils of human possibility coiled around the essential but impossible core of authentic understanding, absolute knowledge and truth. These were, of course, literally out of man’s reach, but were nonetheless perceptible in the idea of the library – a vast, material metaphor for truth as resonant with meaning as any cathedral in the city. Behind the hundreds of thousands of words was a beginning, a world of soot and steam and shadow that stirred convulsively through the earthly endeavours of man. The word obscured this pure, sensual, brutal world, but it was also the key to it. With the faith of a religious maniac seeking insight, Albert buried himself in the library, reading books about the fall of ancient civilisations, the cults of tribal societies, the building of great cities, the secrets of nature, the powers of magic, the miracles of technology, the death of God, the birth of man and the perverse depths of the human mind.

At first the trains had been a poor substitute for this devotion to the absolute. Robert had urged him to apply for the job when it was advertised and Sid Packard, against his better judgement, had warmly recommended him to the Rail Board. Albert loathed the thought of working again. He saw work, in fact all forms of merely utilitarian endeavour, as ultimately futile and worthless.

“You have a family, Albert,” Robert urged him one evening in the Limerick Arms. “You have to take responsibility for them.”

Albert, who was always at his calmest and most reasonable in the presence of his brother, didn’t disagree, but merely avoided direct eye contact, sulking in a way that acknowledged his high aspirations would have to be put aside for the time being.

“I should have lived in another century, Robert,” he said.

His brother looked at him, but Albert sensed that Robert, a mere journalist after all, a scribe more than a writer, a simple recorder of the everyday rather than a quester for the truth behind it, would never understand him.

“What century would that have been?”

“Never mind. It’s curious to think that we are so worn out. The place is barely a hundred years old and the country seems completely exhausted. All that settling, felling and digging has taken an awful toll.”

“You used to sing a different tune. You and your mate Sid.”

“Did I?” Albert asked, looking at his brother with an expression of mild surprise.”I can barely remember.”

“Albert, you need to take that job. You can’t expect Anna to keep spending the little bit of money she has supporting the children while you fritter away your time in the library. If you wrote articles I could maybe organise some sort of freelance work for you, but …”

Robert knew he couldn’t finish the sentence without insulting his brother. With the thought still hanging he signalled to the bartender and ordered another round.

But working as a conductor was not like working in an accounts department. At the insurance company there had been a constant stream of bureaucratic detail to attend to. There was no relief from it, no time to think, no time to be oneself. As the trains swayed and bumped between Melbourne and their various provincial destinations, however, Albert found that he had time to spare. In the contraction of space between two points, as the locomotive sped between cities, a contemplative expanse opened up in which he could meander from one abstraction to another. The regimentation of the railway, the constant adherence to schedules and timetables, was also a relief. The administrative erasure of free will in the measurement of miles, hours and minutes, meant that he was spared the burden of having to concentrate too hard on the job at hand. It was simply a matter of turning up on time and then letting the mechanised ensemble of man and machine run itself. Whereas the work of a clerk involved the constant exercise of will, until there came a point at which will gave out altogether, the life of a train conductor was an automatic one. As the machine moved through space, the conductor moved anonymously through the train’s compartments and carriages without the burden of identity or responsibility.

Later, after his shift had finished, Albert struggled to remember what he had done. He was usually physically exhausted by the time he got home and could recall only strange, disjointed impressions of landscape, darkness and rushing light, of sleeping passengers, the sound of his own footfalls, the vision of a beautiful woman alone in a compartment gripped by the motion of the machine, the light caught in her hair like a nimbus.

T
owards the end of summer Albert took Paul with him on a trip to Ballarat, thinking that the novelty of train travel would interest his son. It was a quiet weekday and the train was almost empty, enabling him to spend a good few hours sitting with his son instead of patrolling the carriages. Paul was a taciturn and self-absorbed child and had brought a pad and a handful of coloured pencils with him. Even before the train started moving he was drawing what he could see through the window.

“What are you sketching, Paul?”Albert asked.

“Just tracks and stuff. And people.”

As the train gathered speed the child’s hand became less steady. At first Paul gripped his pencil and concentrated more earnestly on the integrity of line and form. But the jolting motion of the locomotive became more intense and the scenes passing outside the window more rapid, until finally the cityscape rushed by in a blur. His hand gave in to the movement of the carriage, producing a chaotic series of jagged, plunging lines. Having finished with something that looked like a record of seismographic activity, he gave up, letting his eyes settle on the stream of images outside the window.

“How
do
people draw on trains?” he asked his father.

“Usually they don’t.”

“That’s because everything moves so fast and the train is always bumping you,” he said sagely.

Albert looked at his son, wondering what the boy knew. He could divine little from the child’s features, which as yet were too unformed to reveal much of his character. Ondine was, if anything, more opaque to him, but the fact that she looked so much like her mother suggested that the girl would grow up to have the same remote demeanour, the same passivity, the same dread-inspiring aura of Lutheran purity. That Albert barely knew his wife didn’t occur to him. He was confident that he understood her thoroughly, despite the obvious distance that separated them. Empathy wasn’t necessary for him to grasp the deadening, Nordic chill of such women.

When Paul got used to the movement of the train he tried drawing again. This time he didn’t bother looking out the window, but drew from his imagination. He didn’t try to exert a strict control over the movement of the pencil either, but let the train exert a degree of influence on the shapes and forms he drew.

“What’s that, Paul?” Albert asked, looking at the crude farrago of faces and bodies that his son was producing unselfconsciously before him.

“It’s the arrival of midnight in the city of Melbourne,” the boy said.

Albert could make out the post office clock tower, the streamers and banners, and the rudiments of a crowd. The whole thing had a grotesque, comic energy that could have been the result of the boy’s lack of skill, or of the train’s chaotic effect on the steadiness of his hand. The faces in the crowd were outlandish, warped little blobs stuck on bloated bodies. Some had animal fangs, chattering skeleton teeth, hollow eyes, or sharp, vulture-like beaks. Some looked like bears, wolves or dingos. Some wore top hats, carried swords, waved flags or were busy vomiting a nasty melange of liquid and assorted garbage into the street. The sky was dark and in the distance the child had drawn flames dancing around the revellers, and a scarlet moon. Paul’s hand jerked with the jolts of the train, adding further distortion to the brutality of the scene, as forms closed in on each other creating a menacing jumble of activity. As Albert watched his son’s seemingly random pencil strokes he saw the relentless chaos of plummeting movement. Coherence gave way to disintegration, ordered form to compulsive distortion, yet the drawing had more life in it than anything he could imagine producing himself.

When Paul and Albert arrived home in the evening, Hamish was in the living room playing dominoes on the floor with Ondine, while Anna and Sarah drank tea in the kitchen.

“That’s an eight,” Hamish said gently.

“Oh,” the girl said, snatching the tile back and replacing it with a matching nine.

Paul sat down beside them. “You wanna see what I drew on the train?” he asked.

Ondine put her arms around him and diverted herself away from Hamish, who was clearly peeved at his demotion in her attentions. Paul showed them the picture, which now had the title written in crude letters underneath it.

“That’s awful,” said Hamish.

“I think it’s beautiful,” said Ondine.

“No it’s not, it’s ugly.” He might have added that Ondine herself was beautiful, that her mother was beautiful, that each of them was the embodiment of a beauty more radiant than any of the princesses or sprites in the stories that Anna had read to them.

Albert watched the children debate the merits of the picture and then strolled into the kitchen where his wife stood up, kissed him on the cheek and poured him a cup of tea.

“Did Paul behave himself?”Anna asked.

“He worked most of the day and sat quietly in the depot office in Ballarat. Good as gold, so to speak.”

The ease with which they both slipped into the rhythm of the evening sometimes astounded Anna. She would have preferred it if Albert had looked at her like a quivering madman, but he didn’t. His usual manner had nothing really exceptional about it, the demeaning uniform aside, and the casual observer would not have sensed that there was all that much out of the ordinary.

“Hungry?” Anna asked as Sarah finished her tea and made to leave.

“Yes,”Albert said.

“I’ve got some chops, fresh.”

“That sounds good.”

The surface of things had its own comforts, and sometimes they could both feel at ease in it, as long as neither of them dwelt too long on the deception.