The Point Read online

  Exactly. And that’s not legal, is it. So you could have a look in his computer and find them, and goodbye Clay Brent.

  Hang on, Flora, I’m not a hacker.

  Sometime when you’re doing a bit of work for him.

  But he’s not a client of mine.

  Oh, I thought everybody was. Well, maybe we should just report him to the police and let them find it.

  And the evidence? You have to have some evidence to suggest the police might be interested.

  Pity. Flora yawned. You’ve only got to look at him, really.

  Let’s not even think of him any more. He makes me feel dirtied.

  What about you, she said, suddenly sharp again. You have a lot of the same clients as the restaurant. Do you worry about them and their crassness?

  Food is so much more intimate, somehow.

  No it’s not. It’s a commercial transaction. And when art becomes a commercial transaction you lose control over it. I can choose who I invite to dinner in my house, but not in the restaurant. Like a composer, he can’t keep the Bonds or the Skases or any such corrupt money grubbers out of his performances, or a novelist, she can’t say she doesn’t want child molesters to read her books.

  If Skase came to The Point would you serve him?

  Maybe I’d ask for cash in advance.

  Jerome laughed. Then he said: Oscar’s a hacker.

  What! Laurel’s Oscar?

  Mm. One of the best in the business, I gather. One of a handful worldwide.

  Are you suggesting I get him to hack into Brent’s computer?

  Oh no. No. He’s going straight. Wants to save the industry from hackers and viruses, not do it, any more.

  Poor Laurel, no wonder she looks worried.

  Of course, I suppose you might say the end justified the means, if hacking catches a child pornographer. Set a child to save a child.

  Not Oscar.

  No, not Oscar.

  He does a good enough job breaking Laurel’s heart without us encouraging him.

  He’s a beautiful-looking lad.

  They’re likely to be the worst. Flora was silent for a moment. It’s the beautiful ones that have the power to make you miserable. He’s been on drugs …

  What, heroin?

  I don’t think he’s gone that far. Speed, and those sedatives kids use to chill out. But he’s supposed to have given all that up.

  Along with hacking.

  He’s working hard at university, doing well, Laurel says. Could have a brilliant future.

  If he can overcome his past.

  Would you give him a job?

  For his mother’s sake?

  Or his own?

  Depends, I suppose. If I could be sure he’d given up his wicked ways.

  Do we ever give up our wicked ways, said Flora, drowsily, and closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed as though she was going to sleep but Jerome guessed from the tautness of her body that this was a matter of desire rather than fact. He wondered about giving Oscar a job. He’d fit in quite well with his children. It would be a way of saying he trusted him. When the question arose, it wouldn’t until Oscar finished university, he could consider it. He laid his hand across the sharp bones of Flora’s pelvis and closed his eyes, but suddenly the sun was gone and a chill crept over them.

  Time to go, said Flora. The sun has spoken.

  16

  Jerome

  Once I said to Clement, If you could call up any woman from history, who would it be?

  You mean, like a hologram?

  Well …

  Some kind of virtual reality thing? I’m not really into that.

  No, not exactly. I was thinking more of magic. A spell. A conjuration.

  Yeah?

  Suppose you could call up any woman who’s ever lived …

  How do you mean?

  Well, the most beautiful, say, Helen of Troy.

  Why? said Clement, wrinkling his small eyes at me. Why out of history? Why not now? Madonna, say. Or Sharon Stone. Nah, they’re a bit old. Gwyneth Paltrow? Cameron Diaz? But really, why would you bother? You can see them on the screen any time you want.

  But Helen of Troy: The face that launch’d a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.

  Topless Towers? Sounds like one of those bars where the waitresses go naked to the waist. You dunno where to look.

  It’s Helen causing the Trojan War, I said. With a sigh of patience, I have to admit.

  Oh, said Clement. Well, the thing is I’m going with Emma, I don’t really need to think about that sort of thing. Other women.

  I gave up. At the time I thought he lacked imagination. Didn’t know his own history or literature, and what riches were held in their words. As well as having a touching kind of innocence which I supposed came from dealing with computers instead of the real world. And the real world as writers have shown it to us.

  But then I started going with Flora, and I knew what he meant.

  Going with. Funny phrase. But I liked it. The ordinariness of it. And yet the immense simple power of it, too. It made me think of how life is a journey, and the most important thing is who you go with. And I knew that I could happily travel the rest of my life with Flora. Better to travel hopefully than arrive. I could travel hopefully with Flora.

  I was already in the habit of going to The Point at least a couple of times a week. I started ringing up Laurel to find out who else would be there, looking for nights not too busy so Flora could come at the end of service and sit and drink wine with me, and we could walk home to her place or mine or when the weather was lousy or she was tired take a taxi. I liked to avoid nights when Feldman was there, so I didn’t have to hear his Fleurissimas. I sat at my usual table and read a little, and left it to Flora to send out whatever dish she wanted me to eat, and watched and listened.

  I wondered if Marion Mahony had known what she was doing with the acoustics of this place. You could eavesdrop on a whole lot of people. I’d sit, pensively, apparently miles away, listening to conversations. Rarely though were they very interesting. Salutary, sometimes. A thing that was going on at the time was one of the phone card scandals, the foreign affairs minister giving his PIN to his mistress, and her giving it to her husband, who gave it to his secretary, who gave it to her boyfriend, and so on, altogether racking up several hundred thousand dollars worth of calls. At the taxpayer’s expense, was the righteous cry. It was Anton Boyer’s mistress of some years ago, this had happened over a period of time. You’d have expected him to resign, but of course ministers in that government didn’t, they just hung on while scandals broke about them. This night Boyer was there with his personal assistant, I supposed she was, a painted-up woman in short skirt and tight jacket, and their conversation was mainly about various journalists and other scum, somebody called the poison dwarf seemed to feature a lot, the whole thing a kind of litany of complaint. A threnody, a song of lamentation for the dead, only it was they who were dead, dead to any vision, or ideas, or momentary sparkling wit. You see how I had got bored, my own thoughts were more interesting.

  The Point was never associated with any one political party. Each had its headquarters restaurant, but all sides came to The Point at one time or another. It was fun to see Boyer and the shadow minister for immigration running into one another and amiably chatting, while you recalled the slanging matches they fought in parliament. I always felt the Opposition indulged in the uncovering of scandal with a mixture of glee and fear: glee that their own misdoings were still hidden, fear that they might suddenly cease to be.

  Martin brought a plate with a small cup and a shallow bowl, with an air of solemn delight waiting to watch me take a mouthful. I dipped the teaspoon into the cup and didn’t need to pretend. It was a custard with a delicately fishy flavour, not sea fish. Marron, said Martin. And here is some of the flesh, in a beurre blanc with a bit of tarragon …

  I was glad that I wasn’t a restaurant critic. I’d’ve been giving words like sublime, bliss, heaven
a bit of a bashing. Not proper vocabulary for a former Franciscan, but what else would have done justice?

  I heard Boyer say, Have you ever seen such tits? I’ve never seen tits like that on a woman. Not with such a small bum.

  She’ll end up with back trouble, said his companion.

  Tip over, flat on her face. Boyer giggled.

  Arse over tit, said the woman, and Boyer giggled louder.

  I stopped listening, that’s a technique I’d learned in my convent days.

  Martin brought veal. Miraculously young, he said, milk fed. Not bled, of course, Flora wouldn’t have that, even if it was legal. With a sorrel sauce.

  I thought of my father taking me to Cahill’s, when I was a kid. In the city, somewhere, I didn’t know Sydney then. It was such a grand place, the tablecloths, and all the chairs matching, and heavy curtains. We ate Viennese schnitzel, very smart and foreign, crumbed veal, with pickled red cabbage and potato salad, and for dessert their famous caramel sauce on ice-cream. You could buy it to take home, I think, or was that later, in a little cardboard bucket of the kind that you got ice-cream in; anyway, we didn’t. And only a few years ago there was a correspondence in one of the newspapers, concerning what the recipe was; it got quite heated, disagreements flew back and forth, people accused one another of being totally wrong about it. Interesting to see passions running so high over cardboard cartons of caramel sauce.

  Martin said that Kate had made some tiny bombes Alaska, if I’d like one for dessert. Her orange ice-cream faintly flavoured with cardamom is a wonder, he said. I remembered the waitresses at Cahill’s, those tired women, stout and a bit lumbering as though their feet were always sore, but good-natured usually, and my father saying, Poor things, it’s a beggar of a job, and it struck me that being a waitress then was a class thing, we were nice to them but in a quite hierarchical way. Whereas now, look at Martin. And a few days before I’d been served coffee by one of the Prelec girls, Cressida or Candida, pretty names, pretty girls, I never did get to tell them apart, it was one of the terrace cafes in Manuka, and she was working there two nights a week, she said, she was doing law at university. Slender charming young people with light feet and no fear of dead-end jobs. Not like the big-busted plodding sober women of Cahill’s. Where are they now, now the elegant daughters and sons of the middle class are doing their jobs? Not the actual women, of course, happily retired, we hope, quite likely dead. But the women like them, what do they do? Or aren’t there women like that any more?

  I made a mental note to ask Flora, but never did remember to.

  I went off into a brown study, mutatis mutandis, tempora mutantur kind of thing, until I heard the words ‘white picket fence’. It was Di Caprio, the shadow minister for immigration, dining with an English politician, he’d had his picture in the paper that morning, and a colleague.

  You’ll notice it’s not a core promise – he won’t keep it, Di Caprio was saying.

  Won’t there be an outcry?

  Oh yes. But nothing will happen in the end. It’s quite amazing. He keeps making promises, people believe him, then he breaks them, says, Oh well, that wasn’t a core promise. You wonder how long he can keep it up.

  The colleague said, How long’s he kept it up now? Two terms! He reckons he can do it for three.

  I notice he doesn’t believe in ministers resigning when they get caught in scandalous behaviour, said the Englishman.

  When he was out of office he did, said the colleague.

  You see the evidence before your very eyes. Di Caprio jerked his head very slightly in the direction of Boyer. There’s one as ought to have gone if there was any integrity.

  I got thinking of white picket fences. I grew up behind one, but I doubt it had much effect one way or another. It’s a flimsy kind of emblem. Didn’t keep much out; a decent-sized dog or a kid could jump it, didn’t take much to knock a few palings off, or trample it down if you put your mind to it. Not even really Australian, an import. The perfect image of small-minded unquestioning nostalgia.

  Whereas Canberra, now. A place where fences are illegal. Don’t fit with the concept of the garden city. You can have a hedge, which in the old days the government cut for you. And of course people break the law. High walls round courtyards, iron grilles, brushwood, all designed to fortify and exclude. I sometimes wonder, what if government cracked down, made everybody demolish them? Of course it doesn’t, it turns blind eyes. And not everyone is nervous, or shy, some have lawns to the street.

  And the bugger won’t even live here, Di Caprio was saying. What message are you giving, when the government of a country chooses to build itself a capital – and does a pretty good job of it, let me tell you, had a chance to look round yet? – and the PM of that government won’t even live here?

  Why, asked the British politician, who seemed a rather taciturn man but I suppose he was on a fact-finding mission.

  Di Caprio pressed his finger to the side of his nose. Rumour has it, he said, and don’t ask rumour to explain itself, or confirm, because it’ll back right off, but rumour has it that the good lady wife of the bloke in question, she said, Not while that woman lives there.

  So … because the PM’s mistress lives in the capital, the PM’s wife refuses to let him do so …

  Exactly.

  How bizarre. The Britisher looked truly astonished. Where would a wife expect a mistress to live?

  This made me reflect; I stopped listening, in my own thoughts again. It is true that we don’t have sex scandals the way the Brits do, the whole circus of suspender belts and crotchless knickers and strangulation orgasms, but we doubtless do have like events (I don’t imagine that we are less decadent than old Mother England), it’s just that journalists don’t report them in this way. Are they lily-livered, or is it some elegance of mind? Hard to believe, that. More likely some sort of tricky bargain.

  I was staring at the window as I thought this, my eyes not focussed, when they registered a pale face against the glass. Looking in, intently, it seemed, when I blinked at it. A disembodied face, just floating there; it was very strange, though maybe I could discern the faint shape of a body below. I squinted and blinked, the face floated, pale, bluish, the face of a ghost, and receded, faded, disappeared.

  Is the restaurant haunted, I asked Laurel, but she had never heard of such a thing. I don’t believe in ghosts, she said.

  Well, of course, I don’t either. But I had seen that face, I knew that. Some lost energy, perhaps, or shattered, scattered by violence, haunting its old place, taking shape for a moment … I think there is more in the world than we know.

  Martin came to take my empty dessert plate away. That was superb, I said, meaning it, I’m not a great one for sweets and this one had a wonderfully complex unsweet quality. Please tell – Kate, isn’t it? – just how brilliant I thought it.

  Martin looked as pleased as if I was complimenting him.

  Kate is your … intended, is she?

  She’s my partner, said Martin.

  In life?

  Yeah, we live together.

  And in art?

  I suppose so. We want to open a restaurant together one day.

  I think it will be very good. I would like to come to it.

  Martin gave his waiterly bow. It’s a matter of finding the money, to begin, he said, and then walked away quite quickly.

  When I look back on myself at that time I see that I often confused people. Or at least, gave them to think. Indeed, I suppose I did it on purpose. I thought it did no harm for people to have to relate to a somewhat eccentric figure; it stretched their minds. There I was, finely suited, with my silk shirts and bow ties – silk too of course, and of course tied by hand – and saying things that puzzled. I’m sure they thought, queer old bird – well, not queer, weird – old fogey, old bore even. But maybe they took in the words, a bit formal, a bit unexpected, and possibly they thought about them.

  A partner, in life and in art. What a charming thing. Like Ted and Julia, th
e willow weavers. They met on the job when they were apprentices in England and came to Australia in that New World way, the young so filled with desire for it and who’s to say they are deluded.

  Whereas Flora and I were not partners in life yet, and would not be in art. In obsession, maybe, in our separate pursuits of our separate ultimates, partners we could be in that.

  When Flora came to sit with me, finally – Di Caprio had taken an age to leave, calling for Flora, introducing her to his guest, raving on, at least Boyer had the grace to slink out quietly – and she’d taken deep mouthfuls of the white wine she liked to drink at the end of the evening’s work, she said in a sad voice, There’s money missing.

  From the till?

  I keep it in a drawer. Not a lot. Missing, I mean. Not all of what was there. But a considerable amount. Laurel discovered it.

  Have you told the police?

  I don’t want to. I think it has to be somebody from here. Laurel wants to make it up, but I wouldn’t let her. Told her I’d start to think she’d done it if she insisted.

  You don’t think … it’s Oscar?

  No, I don’t really. I don’t see how he’d have had a chance. Or that he would. I think it has to be somebody that’s around. But I can’t bear to think it of any of the staff. And I’m afraid that Laurel thinks it might have been Oscar.

  You don’t think it would have been a customer?

  How could it? They’re never alone. Laurel’s always there. And how would they have known?

  A person from outside?

  But there’s always someone here.

  You do need to find out who it is.

  I know.

  Your fancy dishwasher?

  Joe? She bit her lip. I thought I might call everybody together and say I know and I’m worried and I don’t know what to do. And stop keeping money in the drawer.

  It’s unpleasant. Having to be suspicious.

  Horrible. And I’m not going to think about it now. She put her finger on my cheekbone. Now is a kind of magic time, for me, a kind of out-of-category time. I want to enjoy it, while it lasts.

  I want it to last. I want it to be normal, too. Magic, yes, but normal as well.