Part 39 (1/2)

Leah moved irritably in her seat and considered the other occupants of the carriage: old ladies of the type you no longer see: thick stockings, hanging drawers, stretched cardigans, ruddy faces, dead fur, powder, flatulence, all for ever in the process of arrangement and rearrangement while they looked for their tickets and called each other Mae or Gert. They smelt of dust and ignorance, like front rooms that need airing.

Leah's cheek was smeared with tea-tree oil, the remainder of Charles's goodbye kiss which she would, in fact, carry with her all her life for she would never be able to smell tea-tree oil without remembering that acned face s.h.i.+ning bright beneath the aromatic sheen. He had made her promise she would come back and she had phrased her promise like a clever lawyer. She was ashamed of herself for the promise, and unsure as to the correctness of what she was doing. Regret hovered, waiting to be let in. And yet, as the train tore her free of Ballarat, she was mostly aware of having done something, at last, that was fine, something selfless, something that did not cater for what she imagined to be her mindless hedonism: the pleasures of movement, the tremors of skin, the sensualist's love of description. She did not relish Izzie, and for this reason she was pleased to go to help him but even while she savoured the pleasure of this fine decision she was pulling herself up sharp, criticizing herself for smugness and self-righteousness.

She was surprised to be on that train. Like a child who imagines herself locked in her room and then finds the door not locked at all, she stood uncertainly in the corridor, wondering if she would not, after all, be better to stay in her room with her dolls and her books.

She had not expected to be let go so easily. She had, of course, announced her intention firmly and then, to her surprise, found no one to question her. She had expected Herbert Badgery to fight her fiercely. Herbert Badgery, however, had not known this, nor had he guessed as she had, that once she had offered her services to Izzie it would not be easy to relinquish them. Later, when Herbert understood that his silence was based on a wrong a.s.sumption, he much regretted that he had not protested.

Not a simple regret either, it turned and turned, as endless as a corkscrew in his heart.

Leah did not overvalue Schick's easy emotion at the expense of Badgery's silence. She had lain in Herbert's arms often enough to have absorbed him, to have achieved that almost complete understanding of a character by osmosis. They had pa.s.sed fluids between each other. She knew that this refusal to display emotion was not heartlessness but a dam wall of emotion on whose deep side she had also swum, silently, in a place not suggested by the flashy talk and loud opinions of Herbert the urger.

The train shuddered down through the hills of Ballarat and travelled through the greedily cleared land which produced in her a melancholy unrelated to her own experience in this landscape. (It is true that she had danced in all these towns between the barren hills, first with Mervyn Sullivan and then with Badgery & Goldstein, bleak halls in frost-clear nights, potato farmers clapping (a padding noise) on thick callused hands.) But she saw the landscape with Herbert's eyes. It was his, not hers. She could feel nothing for the place, and only sense the things he had told her: how he had flown there, crash-landed here, sold a car to a spud c.o.c.kie there, at Bungaree. Even Ballarat had been like that. She had seen it as one might see a triple-exposed photograph: streets in which Grigson drove, Mrs Ester strode and through which the horse dragged Molly's mother's coffin. All of this she saw, but it was nothing to do with her.

Tonight she would see her father in Melbourne and she intended to ask him (took out pencil and paper to make the note) about his own feelings and why he had abandoned the rituals of their race which might have sustained them better in a foreign place. Why then had he denied himself (and her) this comfort?

Neither did she understand the old ladies in the compartment and although she recognized the squashed lamington cakes they produced (wrapped in wrinkled greaseproof paper) and could give them a name, they produced no echoes in her own experience. She listened to their long conversation about the dryness of the country from which seemingly poor material they were able to knit a conversation, or, if not exactly a conversation, a series of calls and answering calls like crows will do just before sunset. The word ”dry” repeated itself, joined itself to other words and then fell away into silence to be replaced by the subject of erosion (”rear-rosion”) which they clucked their tongues about. On the panel behind their heads the railways had framed photographs of ferny glades and cool green places on the other side of Melbourne where the Goldstein family had once motored in search of walks, single-filed, silent walks where they had all moved and stopped with a single mind, to listen to a bellbird, to hasten to a clearing, to taste the clean spring water.

She felt lonely, no longer joined to anything.

She took out her writing pad-never, ever, did she travel without one-and began the first of many letters in a long and complicated correspondence: My darling Herbert, it began.

I had never been addressed by her so tenderly.

53.

She was surprised that her mother had not come, and startled to see Wysbraum at her father's side, grinning widely and stamping his big feet while Sid Goldstein held out the parcel to his daughter. So intent was he on offering this parcel, so triumphant was he, so inexplicably delighted by the poor state of the thin bare cotton dress his daughter wore, that the embrace was awkward and became a defence of the parcel rather than anything else. Too many things were said at once, questions about bags and journeys, platform tickets (Wysbraum had lost them), concern for Izzie, all orchestrated with a triumphal note regarding the parcel and the dress.

”You see, Wysbraum,” said Sid Goldstein, ”you see, I told you. I told you she would arrive with nothing, Try it, try,” he said to his daughter. ”You are as thin as I imagined. Isn't it true, Wysbraum, didn't I tell you?”

Wysbraum nodded and smiled at Leah. He had become fat. His belly bulged against his s.h.i.+rt ungracefully. ”Try it,” he nodded and she was shocked, again, to see how monstrously ugly poor Wysbraum was and her heart went out to him. He was so ugly that people stopped to look, even the dusty old women from her carriage had paused for an open-mouthed moment to consider the spectacle of Wysbraum as he took the parcel from Sid and, there, right on Platform 1 at Spencer Street, undid the string and held a grey silk dress out towards Leah. He pressed it against her shoulder and made her-she was laughing and embarra.s.sed-look at herself in the Nestle's chocolate display case in whose mirrored back wall she saw herself reflected. The dress had fas.h.i.+onably wide shoulders and narrow hips.

”The latest thing,” said Wysbraum, parroting what Sid had told him. ”Your father knows. It is his business to know. Feel it, feel it.”

Leah felt it.

”Silk,” he said, as if it was somehow her fault.

”Very nice.”

”Silk, from silkworms,” he said, almost angrily, nodding his big head and making funny blinking signals with his eyes.

It occurred to Leah, quite suddenly, that he was signalling her to kiss her father and when she had tested the validity of this theory and discovered-what a beaming smile she received from Wysbraum-its correctness, she was shocked that he should take such a proprietorial att.i.tude.

”Change,” instructed Wysbraum, attempting to bustle through the gates without showing a ticket. The ticket attendant tried to stop him but he bustled through (rudely, Leah thought) with calls of ”Come, come, you can change here.”

There was a small fuss about Sid's ticket, but it was eventually found, together with Wysbraum's, in Wysbraum's pocket.

”There is a good ladies' here, right in the station,” Wysbraum said (stamping away, coming back). ”I have a friend from Colac, she comes up here often and she tells me the ones in Flinders Street are bad, disgusting, you would not ask a dog to use them, but for the country people they take trouble and the ladies' toilet here is always clean, no problems with paper and it is mopped out four times a day, so she tells me. The cleaning woman has a sister in Colac, this is how my friend knows. I said to your father that if you wished to change this was the best place because it is better you go into the Savoy dressed in your new dress. You can make the correct entry. Very smart,” he said, rubbing the silk in his grubby fingers. ”Real silk.”

Leah escaped into the ladies' toilet. She sat there longer than necessary, trying to still her irritation. She liked Wysbraum, of course, but she wished to see her mother. She wished to see her sisters. It was three years since she had seen them, and that was the Christmas she was in love with Izzie and had hidden in her room. And now that she was here it was because Izzie had been hurt, badly hurt, in Albury, and it was not correct that the two men should be jostling each other and talking loudly and being like schoolboys on holidays when the occasion of her visit was something so terrible.

She emerged to receive praise, and indeed she knew she looked attractive in the dress and that it suited her well. As she mounted the steps of the Savoy Plaza she walked with a dancer's walk and felt the eyes of the doorman on her. She had no make-up and her eyes were sunken a little but she knew she was a striking figure. She walked as if she were famous. And, although one part of her was guilty and irritated, there was another part that thirsted for something as rich as the Savoy-after years of counting pennies, eating Bungaree trout and lard and golden syrup on stale bread, she was antic.i.p.ating the white tablecloths, the long menus, the American c.o.c.ktails with sugar around the rim of the gla.s.s. It was a big event not just for her, but for her father who would not normally have eaten in such splendour.

”Anything you want,” he whispered in her ear as they walked towards the dining room, ”anything, just order. Beef, chicken, whatever you want.”

Men in black suits were attentive to them, although she thought she saw the maitre d maitre d. look askance at Wysbraum whose suit wore the marks of less ill.u.s.trious meals.

They were seated at a table overlooking Spencer Street where, as Wysbraum pointed out, they would be able to view the arrival of Leah's train in three hours' time. He ordered a Corio whisky although Sid urged him to have a Scotch. Sid then also ordered a Corio whisky. Wysbraum urged him to have a Scotch and not to deny himself on Wysbraum's account, that Wysbraum drank Corio whisky because that was what he preferred, not because it was cheaper and that if Sid-the drink waiter s.h.i.+fted weight from one leg to the other-if Sid preferred Scotch then that was what he should order because he did not have his daughter, the famous dancer-the drink waiter sighed-to toast every day. Sid weakened and ordered a Scotch. Leah ordered a Brandy Cruster and Wysbraum, as the waiter was leaving, changed his order to Scotch.

”It is true,” Wysbraum said to Leah, ”that I prefer Corio whisky because I am used to it. One gla.s.s each evening and I sit on my balcony and watch the lights of the city. It is a taste I am used to. And yet if I drink Corio whisky and your father drinks Scotch then, you see, it will not give him the pleasure it should. All the time he will be worrying about me. He will imagine that the Corio whisky will burn my throat while the Scotch is soothing his, and there will be no pleasure because instead of the smoothness of the Scotch he will taste what he imagines is the roughness of the Corio, not rough at all, but he imagines it is. Now, tell me Leah, you are finished with this fellow?”

”What fellow?” She had been watching Wysbraum and thinking that he was, after all, in love with her father, that he spoke in this embarra.s.sing obsessive way because he loved Sid Goldstein more than anyone on earth and that, she realized, was how he had always spoken. He had spoken in exactly this tone at the dinner table in Malvern Road but then, when she was younger, it had seemed the way things were, and everyone had smiled at Wysbraum, but now it seemed a rudeness, that he should have made love to Sid Goldstein at Edith Goldstein's table.

”What fellow?” she asked, not really thinking about the question, but seeing the abnormality of her family and shuddering mentally to feel herself free of it.

”Badgery, this fellow you have been in business with. You are through with him?”

”Oh no, Wysbraum. No, I very much doubt it.”

”But,” said Wysbraum, tucking his table napkin into his collar and picking up the menu, ”you are returning to your husband, so your father said, who has been in trouble with the police. His photograph was in the paper. A nice-looking boy,” he said. ”Your father has been very worried for you.”

”Wysbraum, Wysbraum,” said Sid Goldstein. ”Leah, don't listen to him. She writes to me every week, sometimes three times,” he told Wysbraum, tugging at the menu to make him listen. ”She writes to me. She tells me everything.”

”You showed me the letter,” said Wysbraum. ”Very nice,” he told Leah. ”Very brainy.”

”I showed him one,” Sid told Leah apologetically, polis.h.i.+ng his gla.s.ses with his handkerchief and leaving his big eyelids as soft and vulnerable as a creature without its natural sh.e.l.l. ”How is your husband? He will have no use of either leg?”

The Brandy Cruster arrived at this moment. Leah looked at it doubtfully. She shook her head to her father's question while Wysbraum made some fuss about the Scotch. Her father would not ask, she knew, the extent of the injury; it would be something they could write about.

”Where is Mother?”

”At home,” he said, again embarra.s.sed. ”She sends her love, and Grace and Nadia also. Nadia is doing very well in her secretarial course.”

”You told me,” Leah said. ”Why didn't they come?”

”It is my fault,” Wysbraum said. ”Tonight is the night, Tuesday; every Tuesday your father and I have a meal in the city.”

”So why couldn't Mother come?”

”It is Tuesday,” said Wysbraum firmly and Leah saw her father's uncomfortable look, the way he cleaned between the tines of the fork with his napkin, a boarding-house habit he still exhibited when nervous or agitated. It was Wysbraum's night, just as it had been Wysbraum's suit, and it could no more be taken from him than the suit could.

”You have all this,” Wysbraum would have said. ”Monday, Wednesday, all the days. I, I only have Tuesday.”

”So tell me,” her father said. ”How is Mr Schick and what will happen to Mr Badgery now that he cannot perform with you?”