The Point Page 18

  Whereas my desire was for knowing, and that is a matter of infinite complication. But that is what computers do well. Finding ways of dealing with infinitude and complication. Not repeating, but developing. I was getting there, I was sure of that. Sure, and rejoicing in that fact.

  There are words for these things. Greek words; it is not new this. Hubris. The arrogance, the insolence, to think to do what only gods can. Tragedy was the outcome, then. In our time we did not pay attention to those words, and tragedy is not something one stars oneself in, tragedy is for others.

  Well, I was going home. Had had my evening chat with Laurel, and asked as I did not always about Oscar. She was pleased with him, he was working hard, spent hours at his computer, his final essays a breeze, he said. Her smile when she said these things touched my heart, its brave but rather doubtful hope. That smile always made me remember Oscar’s, that Daedalean curve to his lips, which smiled for itself, not others. Laurel brought my overcoat, she did not actually button me into it, but I felt tucked up by her against the outside world. Warm in my own cocoon. I put on my gloves and wound round my scarf. I intended to walk quietly but briskly, pondering my dinner and the work I was going to do, enjoying the anticipation of the moment of sitting down at my terminal. I was just slipping away when Terry Feldman called to me. He’d been with a party, but now was on his own. He paused outside the door of The Point and lit a big cigar, I’d noticed he always had one ready as he left. He was wrapped in a vast camel-coloured overcoat, with a belt around his stomach. Are you walking, he said. Can I come with you?

  Imagine my saying no. I wanted to. He took my arm and drew me down towards the lake. There’s something rather sinister about water at night, he said, don’t you find? I rather enjoy it.

  I suppose it was being a lobbyist that made Terry a one-man conversation. I was resentful at losing my quiet walk, and not inclined to talk much, but Terry didn’t need me. He provided the words and the animation. Every now and then he would stop and take my arm, our rather sausagey arms in their layers of wool, and pull me to him, turn me round to face him, his body as well as his voice talking to me, and not seeming to notice that I hardly responded. The scent of his cigar hung in the cold still air. I quite like the smell of cigars as classy as Terry’s, the rich vegetable perfume of them. I expect he would have drunk quite a lot of wine, but he was not drunk, he was coherent and intelligent and warm. At moments he would stop and lean on the parapet. He was looking over the edge and discoursing on the nature of river water and blackness and I was a little behind him, bored and irritated, wanting to think my own thoughts. He was standing – continuous past, notice, he was standing … and here it comes. The thump of suddenly running feet, whoops, yells, a weapon flailing the air. I think it hit Terry flat across his back and he fell against the wall. There was a crunching sound, and I heard him give an urgent coughing gasp, as though all the air had been knocked from his body. Our attackers, I didn’t know how many, there seemed a mass of bodies, heaved him over the edge. I heard his heavy splash. A voice shouted, I thought it said, Swim on, chocolate soldier.

  Then I was hit, and fell, and understood no more. The rest of the story is as told to me. So it is doubly recounted.

  I woke up in hospital. The blow from the bat – that was the weapon, a baseball bat, the infamous baseball bat – had caught me against the neck. I’d somehow hunched my shoulder against it, and it had not cracked my skull as it ought to have done. But I lost consciousness, and the muggers had hauled me half over the parapet when they were interrupted. Stinking poofters was apparently what they were shouting. Overboard with all bum bandits.

  Laurel came to see me in hospital and she it was who filled in the details. And so I suppose this is triply recounted, since of course she wasn’t there, it was reported to her. Who’d done it – allegedly, I suppose the newspapers would have said. A gang of kids. Poofter bashing a hobby of theirs. She knew a bit about them because one of them was the brother of a friend of her son.

  Those kids, they hang about on the grass slope behind the restaurant, she said. One of them’s called Chad, his brother Hamish is a friend of Oscar’s. I used to think, how pleasant. Boys with a bat off to have a game. And it turns out to be a weapon. They’re the ones who bashed the willow sculpture – I’m certain, even if the police can’t prove it. I knew that Chad was a pretty nasty piece of work, but somehow, seeing them there on the grass, romping like children, I did believe they were playing a game, with rules …

  Where I was lying in bed I could see over the treetops of the remnant of forest that surrounds this place. All greeny grey, more grey than green. I know people say eucalypts have a myriad subtle colours in them, if you have eyes to see, but that day I did not. I lay stiffly propped in the high bed and the landscape was grey, under a grey sky full of lumpy clouds like heaps of damp ash.

  Beside me was my dinner, I hadn’t even lifted the lid to look at it. You should eat something, said Laurel. She’d brought me some tiny pastries made by Kate. Maybe later, I said. It’ll be cold, she said.

  A woman came in, wearing a low-cut black dress and a white lace apron, pushing a trolley loaded with frilly cakes and tall glasses with jellies in unlikely colours and bowls of chalky custard. A dessert trolley. The kind that after one glance doesn’t even deceive the eye. No, no dessert. A glass of wine? Maybe.

  The just desserts, I said to Laurel. That green, the jelly. It’s the colour of poison.

  Try Kate’s, she said. Madeleines. They’re real. Laurel was looking at me anxiously.

  What is it with those kids, I said. They’re monsters. Have the police caught them?

  Yes. They were driving round in a VW, one of those convertibles, you know? With the roof down, far too many, piled in. The police stopped them in Manuka, lucky there was a lot of traffic so they didn’t have to chase them. Imagine, a high-speed chase in that, all those kids stuffed in. She shuddered. The police found a baseball bat shoved under a seat. A couple of them were already in trouble, they got caught stealing cylinders of nitrous oxide from a yard in Queanbeyan and were already down for a good few hours of community service. Presumably they were on something that night.

  Laurel’s voice when she told me this was flat, precise, without emotion, getting all the details in. Colourless as the grey forest outside, and just as camouflaged. She kept gazing at me with her anxious eyes. I didn’t ask after Oscar. Not in that context.

  That is my part of the story. Terry died.

  It would have been quick, they said. The water is so cold at that time of the year you freeze to death within minutes. But you probably drown first. As you hit the cold water you gasp, you suck in your breath and with it a lungful of water, and drown. The water wasn’t deep, we were meant for ducking not drowning, was one defence. Terry had hit his head, probably after he was tumbled over the parapet. And the heavy wool coat, encumbering, he didn’t have a chance. They’d heaved me half over when they were interrupted. Earlier I wrote, tragedy is for others, the grand, the noble, the flawed, characters in a story, an histoire. Not for us. But Terry was one of us; tragedy came to him. I saw it in the faces of his wife and children at the funeral. She did not go lobbying with him, but there in the huge dry grief in her eyes, I could see how she loved him.

  Tragedy. Clumsy fate. The blind scissor women.

  Oh yes. Don’t think I haven’t paid attention to that. Terry died, I didn’t. No desert involved. Accident. Luck. If those creatures had succeeded in shoving me over the edge I doubt I’d have made my own way out again. Sometimes when people nearly die in a situation where it seems certain they would have, they see an act of grace. I just see blind stupid luck.

  It was the interruption that saved me. Even that not by any means inevitable. A solitary man, shouting at them. They could have taken no notice. Could have set upon him and chucked him over too. Especially as he turned out to be some sort of tramp. A homeless person. Laurel had seen him around. I’d never registered him, though she said he was about t
he place a lot. I think that is perhaps a habit of mine. Not noticing things.

  The cockatoos are squawking. Ludicrous idiotic unnaturally ugly sound. Not like the mournful death caw of the crow. I am filled with an infinite boredom as I write this. The horror of it, the terror of it. The dreary dreadful process. That it should be so mindless, that comprehension could not be an option.

  I think this is the beginning of the changing of everything. But there’s a lot more to tell, and I am finding the chore wearisome. I am not sure that I can bear it.

  The sunlight has gone. Leonie has disappeared. For she is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly. Christopher again. The courtyard is darkening in the late twilight of summer. The air is a hot breath through the window.

  At the time it was Flora that I could not bear it for. For Terry Feldman too, of course, but he was past fear by then. He had been her customer, her guest, he was there for her food. What ought to have nurtured him ended in his death. It isn’t your fault, I said. You can’t blame yourself. You mustn’t feel guilt over what happened.

  I know you’re right, she said, of course you are. I know nobody blames me. I know I shouldn’t blame myself.

  All of this meant that knowing she shouldn’t didn’t mean she didn’t. She became paler and thinner even than she had been. When I put my arms around her I could feel her thin bones in their frail envelope of skin. She cooked harder than ever.

  The legal proceedings took an age and were a travesty. The good lawyer, father of Julian who was one of the boys involved on this occasion too, argued and queried and cast doubt. A baseball bat? Why not? They play the game. In a car, at night? Lazy boys, never put things away. Where’s the ball? Lost, lost balls are such a hazard. Somebody hit it extra hard and it flew into the lake. Forensic evidence? Wool fibres on the shaft? So? They wear overcoats, carry it under their arms.

  So unctuous the performance. So inexorable. Contradictions emerged. No responsibility, diminished responsibility, youth, the corruption of peers, the whole thing eddied and muddied. Evidence? Evidence was drowned deeper than the lake, held down by the barbs of clever lawyers until there was no life in it. I was reminded of some primeval segmented creature writhing in a swamp. Finally the jury could not be certain. And the boys, all of good family, of good character, if a little wild. Like their clever lawyer fathers.

  Not that justice would have helped Terry. He was still dead. I still can hear him, so cheerful, his boomy voice prattling on about the blackness of water, how river water damned up to make a lake has a quality of velvety deep blackness that absorbs, while water in the sea is never quite so dense, so dark, it always glitters, as though the salt in it sparkles in a kind of marine starlight. I didn’t listen, I was bored, I did not engage in this theory-playing of his. Now, well, who knows, maybe he is right. I’ve often thought of his words. Blackness is not simple.

  25

  Clovis was watching the sky above the lake. The water jet was spraying high into the air as is its habit. The sky was full of clouds moving in billowing masses. The wind blew the water of the jet sideways so that instead of spurting up it turned into clouds of water that billowed into the real clouds; it looked as though the water jet was producing these roiling masses that filled the sky. Clovis was thinking: roiling, moiling. Wondering if moiling was a mixture of milling and boiling. And roiling of rolling and boiling. That fitted these clouds. The blowing of the water through the air: he thought, plume, spume, fume. The words a pleasure to sound in his head. Was this how poetry began? Words colliding. And colluding. Plume spume fume, he said aloud. That would make comic verse. This needs something noble.

  Water, wind, air, clouds. It’s a display, a performance. He can stand and watch it. It goes on and on. Never repeating itself, and yet the elements always the same. Its scale grand enough for him to see quite easily. The grey air has a cold watery smell. The waves slap softly, one of those natural sounds that are part of silence. Sight, smell, sound: these are what there is. He is understanding: these are what there is.

  The lake, not deep or rough, is deadly. But only when humans make it so, not left to itself.

  He hears a light footfall behind him, and turns, to see a small person, in black check trousers and a white top. He would have expected Gwyneth, but sees quickly that it isn’t her.

  Hello, she says. I’m Flora Mount. From the restaurant.

  He knows that. Good afternoon, he says.

  I wanted to come and thank you. For saving Jerome.

  Oh, he says, and shakes his head. He thinks of saying, it wasn’t anything, but doesn’t want to, it isn’t true, he knows he made the louts run away and if he hadn’t the second man, this Jerome, wouldn’t be alive. You don’t need to thank me, he says.

  I want to, says Flora. You were very brave.

  Yes, I was. Because I was very scared. I thought they’d turn and attack me, why not? Throw me in too.

  Flora looks at him. That’s supposed to be true bravery, isn’t it. To understand the danger, and still do it.

  And I should be grateful for the opportunity to find myself so, don’t you think? I should thank you.

  You could do that by coming to the restaurant for dinner.

  You want me to be even braver?

  Flora smiles. Clovis looks at her intently.

  All right, he says. May I bring a friend?

  When he sees Gwyneth he tells her the time for scrubbing up is at hand. We will go to Mancare, he says, and buy ourselves clothes for dining in.

  I’m not going, says Gwyneth. I don’t know how to eat in grand restaurants.

  You’re scared. I’m scared too. That’s why we have to do it. And I can teach you.

  I won’t know what cuttle-ery to use.

  Say cutlery, and then it will be easier. And remember, be neat, be fastidious, smile your sweet smile, and you’ll get away with murder.

  No, I can’t come, what if I’m recognised? They’ll send for the police and arrest me.

  Not in this context they won’t. Nobody will guess you’re Gwyneth Whatever, runaway felon, wanted on seven continents. Not in this classy establishment.

  It’s not a fucking joke.

  No. It’s serious, and you’ll be perfectly safe.

  Flora asks Elinor and Ivan to come too.

  Is it a good idea, says Ivan to Elinor. Tramps for dinner, in the restaurant? Won’t it embarrass them?

  I don’t know, says Elinor. Flora says she decided to ask him on the spur of the moment, because she liked his conversation. And besides, it’s the first time she’s ever invited us to the restaurant. I think she’s doing some sort of banquet.

  Oh of course we’ll go. It’s her restaurant, she can ask whom she likes. Ivan is silent for a moment. I hope she doesn’t mean this tramp’s conversation was interesting because it was crude and vulgar and oh so cute.

  Oh come on, Ivan, that doesn’t sound like Flora.

  True. Flora’s far too fierce to find that kind of behaviour cute.

  When Gwyneth with Laurel’s help slides out of her large and matlike cardigan she is wearing a long silvery-grey dress of some silky fabric that hangs in flutings, like a column, a most elegant dress, cleverly cut, narrow, and a surprising thing to find at a Salvation Army op shop, you might suppose, until you thought of a wealthy woman getting too fat for its slenderness and stuffing it in a charity bin in a fit of denial. For it is a cruel dress, unforgiving of any bulges or even much in the way of curves. Her hair is clean, hanging straight and fluid, the tidemark of its blonde dye lower down now, and above such a dress the striped effect is interesting, not messy; it has the charm of intention. The sleeves are long, the neckline skims her shoulder blades, and something about its colour or maybe it is the shadow of her falling hair sculpts her cheekbones and makes her eyes cavernous and dark-shadowed in a way that is beautiful rather than desperate. It isn’t make-up, that was too hard, she isn’t wearing any. Clovis reckoned she doesn’t need it.

  Heroin chic, wouldn�
��t you say, mutters Kate to Martin, and then is horrified to realise from Laurel’s frozen face that she has heard. It’s the look of a lot of supermodels these days, she prattles. They make themselves up like that.

  Clovis on the other hand knows he will be wearing the suit of a dead man. The widow hastily bundling up his clothes and sending them off to the Sallies. A man slightly more portly than he, but it is fine wool and double-breasted and drapes in a pleasant way across his lean stomach. He’s wearing a black tee-shirt, not a look he favours, but one he can manage. He feels like someone in advertising. His beard fills in a fair bit of the space at his neck, which shows brown and corded above the collar of the suit.

  Laurel seats them at a round table not far from the fire. It is quite black outside, nothing can be seen of the hills or the city on their rim. The dark windows reflect them, the guests, the firelight, the glasses and cutlery darkly gleaming. We are in the lantern, says Clovis to himself. Now we are the light, and the darkness outside is entirely mysterious to us. He sees himself hand Gwyneth to her chair, sees the reflection in the mirror but also from himself as observer. He doesn’t remember feeling detached like this in the days when visiting restaurants was a habit. He stands to greet the others. Gwyneth is too tremulous to smile much, which makes her even more elegant. Elinor rushes into hectic speech about the taxi failing to come which made them late. Laurel brings champagne. Jerome proposes Clovis’s health.