Dark Palace (35 page)

‘The League is not a movement. It's an instrument. A political arrangement.'

‘Frankly, Edith, it sounds like a movement to me. I tend to agree with Mussolini—that the League's only fit for the scrap heap and that nations should clear the table of all illusions and lies. And live with the hard truths of life.'

Edith poured herself another cognac and put some in Alva's cup as well. Alva didn't object.

Alva went on, ‘How could you ally yourself with people who want to starve Italy into submission? Italy, to whom the world owes some of its greatest achievements, the greatest poets, artists, heroes, saints, navigators, aviators. Marconi—the inventor of radio.'

‘Al, is this why you stopped writing to me?'

Alva looked away with some embarrassment. ‘I think that I felt I hadn't much to tell that would interest you. My life in Sydney seemed rather dull.'

Edith stared at her. She thought, Alva, you've become childlike in your political faith. As had so many in the world. Believing in political fairy stories.

Edith said, ‘Oh, Alva—that isn't right at all. I thought of all of the gang all the time. You're part of my living memories.'

‘I should've kept up the correspondence, I know. I felt bad about it. And I was angry about the sanctions.'

Edith found her mind wandering to the memories of their university days. ‘Alva, remember going to Miss Williams for exemption from college prayers?'

Alva nodded.

‘We bucked against religion then because it was not part of the spirit of inquiry? Nor is fascism. The faith I was talking
about was faith in our intelligence. And our political ingenuity. Ingenious democratic solutions.'

Alva came out with a different tone, close to sarcasm. ‘Good old Edith. Always trying to correct the error of everyone's ways.'

Edith was embarrassed. Was that how she'd appeared to others back then?

‘Was I always doing that?'

‘Correcting the error of other people's ways? Oh yes. You were always against souping. You were against using the freshers as servants. You were against this: you were against that. The rest of us mostly wanted to fit in. You wanted to rewrite all the rules.'

Edith was losing the point. ‘What I wanted to say was that, although we never got official exemption from prayers, she did say that we didn't have to
go
to prayers, remember? But Williams said it would still be considered to be cutting and we still had to go and apologise to her at the end of each term. Even if it were a formality. I thought that was an ingenious political solution.'

Williams had created a diplomatic solution to the problem. An example of political ingenuity. Not bad at all.

Alva also ploughed on. ‘Frankly, Edith, I didn't think going to prayers was such a big issue. It was all part of college life. Part of our world. All you did was to make our gang into rather ridiculous pariahs.'

Edith decided to leave the discomfort of this and lifted her coffee cup in a toast, needing the brandy. ‘To the Newtown tarts.'

‘
Newtown tarts
?' Alva presented a puzzled face, but still raised her cup in the toast.

‘Remember? The boys at the Union used to call us Women's College girls the Newtown tarts?'

‘It's not something I would care to remember.'

‘You must remember. After they began calling us the
Newtown tarts—a sort of undergraduate joke in bad taste—our gang decided to adopt the name, turn it back on the boys, and called ourselves the Newtown Tarts. Surely you remember that?'

‘Not really.'

‘I rather liked being called a tart back then,' Edith said, feeling rather
risqué
and wanting also to say it as a way of pinching Alva's arm. ‘And I liked being identified with slummy Newtown which I privately thought of as
demimonde
, a world of devilish mysteries.'

‘Edith! We never went there,' Alva complained.

‘That made it an unexplored place. A metaphorical place.'

‘I seem to remember that we weren't allowed to go there,' Alva persisted.

‘I thought of it as The Underworld,' Edith said, wondering what Newtown had really been like.

‘It all seems long ago. I suspect going away to Europe kept all of that student stuff in aspic for you.'

‘Could well have, I suppose.'

Would nothing succeed in this conversation with Alva?

‘The rest of us had to get on with our banal lives,' Alva said.

Alva then made an effort—perhaps it was the brandy working at last. ‘I do remember when the No Smoking and No Drinking signs went up in the college rooms we all rebelliously adjourned to your room—the headquarters of rebellion—and had a cigarette and a drink of sherry. For some of us, the putting up of those silly signs was the first time we had a cigarette or a drink. Not for you, Edith. You always claimed that your family had wine with your meals.'

Edith laughed, remembering that evening of insurrection. ‘We were a very rebellious year.'

‘
You
were.'

‘It's funny hearing you describe my room as the headquarters of rebellion. Some days I used to curl up there in
utter confusion and not want to leave the room,' Edith said. ‘It was sometimes like a hospital room where one had been sick for a long time.'

‘I don't believe that. I used to get jealous if I was passing and heard laughter coming from your room.'

Alva seemed to be finding her tongue. ‘The human is not strong enough or smart enough for democracy, Edith. That's what I think.'

Alva picked up the cup and took a big sip. ‘If we're honest with ourselves we can't really rely on the sort of people who have the vote now. Not educated enough.'

‘Having the vote forces people to confront their lives. That's why I was for compulsory voting,' Edith said.

‘Ah, see—you are happy to force some things on people.'

‘I don't mind forcing them to think. No. Not
what
to think but
how
to think. At least encouraging them to.'

‘H.G. Wells doesn't think democracy has much of a future,' Alva continued, as though ignoring Edith. ‘I believe that the world's population will go on expanding, putting those who rule further and further from the control of the populace. And more self-governing nations will have to be created and the more nations you have, the more conflict you have. I think, deep down, people would rather serve than dissent all the time. Even Australians. That's where I found your rebellion at college so tiring. You were dissenting all the time. I would rather belong in a great cause than be a lonely spoiler.'

In confusion, Edith realised that she had the same feeling, the same desire to be part of a Great Cause. ‘But the great cause, Al, has to meet the requirements of our reason.'

Before Edith could find an extended, more robust position in the messy conversation, a strange male voice intruded. ‘Edith, Alva—haven't seen either of you for years.' It was like the voice of a gramophone with a worn needle.

They looked up at a man dressed in a faded, brown
corduroy suit and beret, a returned soldier badge on his jacket, and with a face that looked like that of a mummy. It had obviously been surgically rehabilitated. The skin was tightly stretched, emphasising the cheekbones which seemed about to poke through the unnaturally brown skin. The eyes seemed to be glass but he was obviously not blind. He had no eyebrows or eyelashes.

They both stared at him and then Edith glanced at Alva for help in recognising the man.

‘You're a fine couple of friends—not remembering an old mate.'

The voice was sardonic.

Edith remembered the voice, even if a damaged version. But couldn't find a name for it.

‘Scraper Smith,' he said.

‘Scraper!' Edith said, furiously trying to find the old university friend in this spectre, rising to her feet and shaking his crumpled hand. ‘It's been so long I didn't recognise you at first.'

Alva also rose and shook his hand. ‘Scraper—good to see you.'

‘You don't have to be so polite. I know I look like an Egyptian mummy. It shouldn't be good to see me.'

Edith and Alva stood, rendered mute.

‘Oh, sit down, sit down, no need for all these Red Cross faces—stop being solicitous.'

They sat down in a shot, like schoolgirls. He dragged over a chair.

He seemed to have to close his eyelids more often than normal. His hands were bent and buckled, also reconstructed in some surgical way, looking like hen's feet.

Edith's mind flashed to the
mutilés
at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva in '32.

She couldn't remember his first name. He'd been nicknamed Scraper because of his height—skyscraper.

‘Skyscraper,' she said to Alva. She caught herself talking about the student boy, Scraper, as if he was unrelated to the form of this disfigured man seated with them.

‘Half the students thought it was skyscraper and half thought it was bootscraper,' he said. ‘Useful. Let me know who were my friends and who were not. Scraping the bottom of the barrel is another way I think of it. Scraping the bottom of life's barrel.'

‘Sit down with us,' Edith said, unnecessarily, bringing herself back to self-control, and taking him at his word about excessive politeness, adding, ‘though you seem to have done so, already.'

Laughing from unease.

Scraper ordered tea. The waitress seemed to know him well.

He looked Edith over, a disconcerting experience because the appearance of his face made him seem to find looking an act of some effort. His neck did not move freely. ‘You're a big wheel in the League of Nations, Edith—that's what I hear.'

‘Edith gave a stirring talk this afternoon in the history lecture theatre,' Alva said.

Was this Alva being sarcastic?

‘Would've come if I'd known. Interested in the future of war.'

The three of them lapsed into another silence. The tea arrived and when the waitress had left them, Edith offered cognac and he accepted with alacrity. She gave Alva and herself another boost in their now empty cups.

‘Tell me what you've been doing, Scraper? You did law?' Edith said, now slowly recalling the student named Scraper. ‘You were a couple of years ahead of us?'

‘Well done, Edith! I practise law in a small way. A very small way. I practise away from the public gaze. Whatever scraps of work are thrown on my plate. And I write, you know.'

‘Novels?'

‘Verse.'

‘I'm sure my father warned me about lawyers who practise a little law and who write poetry,' Edith said, laughing, trying to be light-hearted in the presence of such physical tribulation. ‘Married?' she asked, immediately regretting the almost certain insensitivity of the question. No one could live with that face.

He laughed darkly. ‘Stop being conventional, Edith. You never were before. Or was it a cruel question? And, no. The answer is no.'

‘Alva hasn't married either,' she said, disobeying his rule on convention, and realising that, in a more conventional situation, it would be a horrible joke towards matchmaking. Oh dear, what a day. She couldn't get control of her conversation.

He seemed to examine the question and the additional statement for possible motive. And then he became black as a storm. ‘Don't pretend I'm normal. And don't pretend to flirt. I have no stomach for that.'

Flirt! Edith could not imagine anything more remote from her intentions.

He then changed immediately, the black cloud passing, looked at them and laughed, ‘ “The Newtown Tarts.” '

‘You remember!' Edith exclaimed. She turned to Alva, ‘See, he remembers.' She turned to Scraper, ‘We were talking about that just now. Alva claims not to remember. I think it's because she's a reformed woman. Putting her wicked past behind her.'

‘I may indeed be a reformed woman,' Alva said laughing, but her voice indicated that she too was heartily dissatisfied by the way the conversation had gone and with the inclusion of herself in the repeated references to tarts.

Scraper slurped down his tea, holding the cup in both hands, wanting the brandy, impervious to the heat of the tea.

Alva chose at this time to excuse herself, looking deliberately at her watch and saying, ‘Time flies.'

The coward. How could she!

Edith had also enough social life for the day. Regardless of how callous it seemed, she also grabbed at the opportunity to leave. ‘I suppose I should go too.'

He looked at them with a cynical smile. ‘Don't like the look of the face of war?'

Alva and she both coloured.

Edith made no effort to leave, knowing that it was now impossible. ‘The war is a long time over,' she said, rather harshly.

‘For me it's never over.'

‘
Touché
.'

Edith gave in to the idea that she was stuck.

‘Please stay,' he said in a more courtly tone. ‘Conversation is hard to snare these days. And you are just as I remember you, Edith. If you take away the conventional gambits.'

Edith now began to picture Scraper before his injuries—the boy Scraper was now back in her memory. He'd been so cocky, and so much a son of the sheep station.

Alva held to her resolve to leave, gathered her things, shook Scraper's hand and then held out her hand to Edith. ‘I hope we can all get together again before Edith goes back to her fine life in Geneva. And, Scraper, you must look me up—I'm working at the Commonwealth Laboratories. Call me some time.'

‘I do hope we have another chance to talk, too,' Edith said, feeling trapped and abandoned.

Alva left, saying to Edith, ‘I'll contact you at the Victoria Club tomorrow.'

‘Do that, Al, please.'

‘I will.'

Scraper turned to Edith. ‘Don't stay from compassion.'

‘Why not from compassion? Won't that do?'

He moved his mouth in what was probably the shadow of a grin. ‘That's better. Edith, the implacable foe of cant and humbug. Compassion will do. Anything that wins me a conversation will do. Some days I feel I would be happy to pay for conversation.'

‘You aren't married?' he asked.

Edith to her consternation again found herself considering her answer.

‘I am,' she answered, as firmly as she could.

‘Australian?'

‘British.'

‘In the War?'

Must the War remain the pivot of all their lives? Yes. ‘Dardanelles. Lancastershire Fusiliers.'

‘Rank?'

‘Captain. He was wounded at the Dardanelles. Shrapnel.'

‘Are you happily married?'

She again considered her answer. Some people did not deserve to be trusted with the truth. Could this freakish man
be trusted with her truths? She decided that she had better carefully lie to him. ‘Yes, perfectly.'

He looked down at his tea. ‘Perfectly.'

He made a smile with his tight, unnatural mouth. ‘Why no ring?'

She gave her explanation about having forgotten to put it on after hand washing.

He smiled his twisted smile. ‘Have you read much Freud?'

She nodded. ‘I've been analysed,' she boasted.

‘You must know about forgetting things and losing things—they are signals to ourselves.'

‘Sometimes.'

The waitress cleared away the things. ‘Leave them,' he said. The waitress shrugged as if accustomed to his ways, and went off. ‘Have you any more of that cognac?'

Edith took out the flask and poured them two more drinks in the cups. She left the flask on the table.

‘I like a little harsh honesty. It's how I remember you. Given the way I am, I'm denied anything to do with honesty. Except by the mirror. Are you back here because the League is finished?'

How astute he was. He was not so far submerged in his self-pity that he was unable to see what others were doing around him. And by praising her honesty he was demanding it from her.

He pointed his question more sharply. ‘Jumping ship?' he said.

She would have to work out soon—in reasonably honest conversational form—just what it was she was doing with herself back here.

‘Very interesting. Your answer is a long time coming and I can't read your mind on this,' he said. ‘Ah, we have an interesting case here in our dashing Edith. You can have time to answer and you may also revise your answer to the marriage question.'

‘I can't read my own mind. I'm here on home leave. I'll go to Canberra to look at the possibilities of working there. Yes.'

‘From Geneva to Canberra?' He seemed to find this incomprehensible. ‘You may be the first person to go to Canberra voluntarily.'

She grimaced slightly. ‘I may return to help build the nation.' She tried to make it sound sardonic.

‘It'll need some help.' He said this through the circular black, seemingly toothless hole of his mouth, a joyless laugh.

‘I could give it a push,' she said.

They then chattered lightly about the university days which helped her remember further, his brilliance and his gangly sort of handsomeness coming back to her. And the arrogance of an older student.

He looked across at her and smiled, his smile now appearing like a crack in a plaster wall. He touched the flask, which she didn't like him doing. ‘An elegant flask. I like a woman who carries a flask. Of all that crowd you would've been the one I'd expected to carry a flask. And to wear a cape and gauntlet gloves.'

‘Really?'

‘You were going places even then.'

‘I thought of myself as a rather earnest undergraduate.'

‘You were that—and more than that. You were dashing. Dashing is the word.'

She was rather flattered to have a glimpse of her younger self and to have been remembered so. She looked down at her flask.

‘And the flask?' he asked.

She touched it. ‘A special memento.'

‘And not of your husband.'

She smiled at his observation and at the same time had a flash of recall about Scraper. ‘I remember now—you were friendly with Arthur Tuckerman.'

‘That's right,' he said softly. ‘Poor old Arthur.'

Ye gods, what dreadful thing could have happened to Tuckerman that would make Scraper feel sorry for him?

‘He was so good looking and he got those impressive marks for essays as well,' she said.

‘He was a rare spirit, old Tuck. He's dead you know, Edith.'

‘I didn't know. What happened?'

‘He did himself in.'

‘But potential always
gleamed
out of him! He shone with it.'

‘He had a breakdown remember, and then he went back a few years later.'

‘I went to Melbourne—lost touch—and you were both older.'

Tuckerman came rushing back to her mind. ‘Everyone wanted to be around him and to talk with him. For him, each conversation was a playlet and everyone had a part.'

‘He was doing brilliantly and then broke down again and went to work the land. He built something of a pretty little orchard out of nothing near Windsor. He thought simple work might save him but he slipped into the mental shadows and never recovered. He took his life with a shotgun.'

‘I didn't hear.'

She found herself wondering why Scraper hadn't taken his life.

‘You are thinking why is it that I haven't taken my life?'

She opened her eyes wide. He was impressive. ‘Oh Scraper, you're dangerous. I know nothing of your life. Tell me.'

‘It's a rotten life. And I often think of joining Tuck.'

‘It must be hard. How'd you become a mind reader?'

‘It does me no good—mind reading.'

‘But it means that there's no need for me to speak. I'll sit here and think and you can read it.'

He stared at her. ‘You want to know how and where I live?'

That wasn't on her mind. She said, ‘Ah, you have two sorts of occult: you can read minds; and you can implant thoughts.'

‘I've a third sort of occult, as you call it, but that will be revealed.'

She didn't care for occults of any sort.

‘Let me show you my poet's garret. I live around the corner in Macquarie Street.'

He stood up fumbling for money with his bent fingers. She thought it was probably exaggerated to avoid getting the money from his pockets. Don't be like that, Edith.

‘Let me pay,' she said, reaching for her purse.

‘Let the world pay? I like that idea. But a gentleman pays, crippled or not.' He found coins and a note in his pockets. He appeared to carry no wallet or coin purse. ‘I'm not poor. I'm rather well off. I do not play a musical instrument on street corners and I do not have to operate a lift. Or run a tobacco shop.'

She apologised that she couldn't visit his garret that day—perhaps some other time? She was fagged from the talk and the whole damned day.

‘Where are you staying, Edith?'

‘At the Victoria Club. Which is also just around the corner.'

‘I'll walk you home.'

She laughed.

‘That's about all I'm capable of—walking.'

‘What happened to you during the War?'

‘I was blown up in France and when I landed, everything was broken or missing. The War only lasted another two months.'

He was a walking entitlement for charity and indulgence. A requisition on humanity. He
was
the damned War.

‘Macquarie Street's hardly a starving artist's garret.'

‘Inherited the flat. Come on, Edith, pay me a visit—for old times' sake. I want to hear about the League and France. And let me in on the secret about when the next war is to
start. I may rejoin. I have precious little to lose. A pre-dinner drink and then you can go. I haven't had a chance recently to talk with someone fresh from Europe.'

‘I couldn't face a dinner table, I'm afraid.' The word face had jumped into her conversation.

‘You mean to say you couldn't face me over dinner. I won't press dinner on you, promise.'

She let that pass. His bullying of the conversation was becoming tiresome. She was sick of his guesswork as well.

Scraper went on, ‘We were talking about Tuckerman. He was a manipulator of glamour. I'm a manipulator of the gruesome. And I manipulate through close observation.'

His candour made her laugh genuinely and with relief. She reversed her idea of him—for the first time she could see the possibility of liking him. But only the possibility. ‘That is the first time I've ever heard anything honest about Tuckerman. When he was alive he was constantly given what he sought so desperately to get—popularity. You are so right.'

‘Popularity instead of love. Charm instead of fame. I'd settle for it. Either.'

She tried to remember how popular Scraper was before. Not very. ‘You had friends but you weren't popular,' she said.

‘At university, no. In the army I was accepted. If you didn't shirk you were accepted and that was something special. It meant you were taken in and you belonged regardless. The army life was good for me. The belonging. I miss it more than anything. I think it was the nearest I got to marriage. Living with a platoon of men.'

She turned to him, ‘Please, I don't like calling you Scraper and I can't think of your first name.'

‘Warren.'

‘I shall call you Warren. It's a little more grown-up.'

‘No one ever calls me that. I am forever Scraper. It's perhaps easier for people. Makes me something other than a man.'

‘I will call you Warren.'

His flat was surprisingly pretty. He had done much the sort of thing she would have done if she had been living in the flat. Curious. It had the smell of male hair oil and strong soap and shaving lotion.

‘Oh,' she said involuntarily.

‘What is it?' he said.

‘Nothing, I like the place—it's what I might do with it. If it were mine.'

He was opening a bottle of cognac and pouring out large drinks for them both.

‘That's more than enough for me. I was dosing the coffee all afternoon.'

He didn't accede to her request and went on to fill the glasses generously.

‘That wasn't why you gasped,' he said. ‘You gasped at the lithograph of
Les Deux Soeurs
. Why did you gasp?'

‘I like the lithograph. I'm surprised that you have a Laurencin print on the wall.'

He looked at her, head to one side, and with his damaged smile. ‘You have the same lithograph!'

She was reluctant to confirm it but said, ‘Yes.'

She sometimes thought of the faces of the two sisters as Ambrose and herself. Ambrose's feminine self. At least Scraper had not been able to read her mind about that.

‘You like her work?'

‘Yes.'

She did not want to establish another connection with this man. This man who was once a boy and then disappeared to reappear as a … wreck. ‘May I ask why you are attracted to her work?'

‘When I was in France.'

‘You had time for art as well as soldiering?'

‘I had time for art. During convalescence. Much time for art. I like her hardness. I suppose I like the idea of hard women.'

She sat, deliberately choosing a chair rather than the couch. She had one sip of her cognac and then stood up again and walked around. ‘I think you've made the flat a work of art.'

‘By fastidious decorating of the flat I'm compensating for what I am.'

She looked again at the flat—its resemblance to her own taste and its painful contrast with his disfigured self appalled her.

‘I should be off. I've had a rather straining day.' She put down her unfinished drink.

‘Please stay. Indulge me for a few more minutes.'

She sat back in the chair. The flat was, in fact, another way he drew attention to himself, to his disfigurement.

He went on, ‘Don't sit all the way over there. Come and sit beside me, here.'

‘I'm comfortable where I am, thank you.'

‘I am hard of hearing.'

She thought it a lie but there was no reason to think it a lie.

She tried to find a way of responding to this monstrous visage which, in turn, had become something of a monstrous personality.

Reluctantly, she stood up and went to sit on the couch with him, as a nurse might.

‘You are like Tuckerman. You are right to compare yourself with him,' she said.

Harsh.

‘Manipulators?'

‘Yes.'

What she had intuitively but not consciously suspected but had dismissed as beyond the bounds, now began to happen. Something so far from being humanly legitimate or acceptable as to be, itself, monstrous.

He had moved his leg next to hers.

She plunged into a confused swirling of feelings, of
compassion and of indignation. And, just as unacceptably, she felt a twitch of carnality in herself from the touch of his leg.

She moved her leg away and said, ‘Regardless of how life has treated you, Warren, you should perhaps hold on to the conduct of a gentleman. And of an old mate.'

‘I long ago jettisoned all that. It did not serve me. I thought you might play the tart for me, Edith?'

‘I am not a tart in any way, shape or form, Warren. Please remain courteous.'

He then took her kid-gloved hand and placed in on his lap.

She felt him rigid under her open palm. He held her hand there as she tried to move it.

‘Please Edith. We're both people of the world, you and me. You've been in Europe long enough to know the ways of the world. We are miles away from Alva. And I'm forever placed beyond the boundaries of conventional nonsense. You know that people shun me. Have you ever been shunned?'