Trio Read online

  And Daglish was a sleepy suburb with a dinky railway station, halfway between the sea and the city where the main theatres were. The night at the opera was their celebration of the end of a season Marcia had been doing at the Playhouse. They’d had good houses and even better reviews but it came at a cost – working six nights and a matinée. She was looking thin at the end of it. At the kitchen table on Sunday they were having brunch, Mickey, unshaven and bleary-eyed, reading the paper. Celia wondered whether he had bothered to wash his face that morning.

  ‘Listen to this,’ he said, looking at Marcia. ‘Marty Stevens has a bit about you here.’

  ‘Mm, I’ve seen it,’ said Marcia.

  ‘It says …’

  ‘I’ve seen it,’ she repeated, low but icy. It altered the very air in the house.

  Mickey stood up, carefully folded the paper, placed it beside his plate and took himself outside to the hammock, walking stiff-legged and absurd in his threadbare dressing gown and bare feet. Celia wanted to throw herself after him and put her arm through his.

  ‘Marcia …’ said Celia, reaching a hand across the table.

  ‘Any more tea left in that pot?’ said Marcia, lifting her chin and taking up the paper. It was the nearest to a show of incivility Celia had ever seen in her.

  6

  Perth, 2000

  Who had put the idea into her head? Celia woke up in dread, overheated and sweating. Layer by layer her mind cleared and she pinned down the whisper: her old friend, former ally and stalwart was ailing, indeed getting ready for the mortal heave-ho.

  But why this foolish, arch tone, even in her head, when the very idea wrenched at her? And why hadn’t she already picked up the phone to make the (after all) local call? The one she had heard it from – surely James? – was convinced that their mutual friend should go for more surgery. Further punishment, in other words. It was possible he was deluding himself. Clearly he’d grown even fonder of Marcia these last few years. He was possibly very frightened himself.

  Well, Celia knows this much: deep longing, misplaced faith and false logic can’t salvage the inevitable. She’d thought about praying; it’s hard not having a God to blame, or appeal to, or curse. Yet what religious people do when they are thwarted, their prayers not answered, she has noticed, is to still hang on to the idea that they haven’t been ignored. Those believers with impossibly difficult lives – having lost the power of speech, the use of their limbs, suffered disfigurement – will say even so that God has looked after them and they are blessed. It had always puzzled her, that the faithful could be such good sports.

  So. Marcia. Not seen for some years (and was it possible that Marse would be about 60?) because Celia had only just returned, finally, to Perth, and was living in Fremantle. But this was a possibility that she, Celia, had to face. The task ahead was to muster her courage, so as to confront the most banal and inevitable thing one has to do several times throughout life: consider the matter of death. Up to now she’d got away with giving the matter barely a passing thought.

  Her ancient transistor was playing a version of Rhapsody in Blue that was so fast you’d swear the pianist had a pressing appointment elsewhere. What could he be thinking of (and why he)? – tearing through the questioning passages, thus missing all those precious lonely moments. She thought of the long-ago performance of Jeremy’s and how it had seemed perfect to her, though James wouldn’t have agreed.

  The piece finished and it was announced that Gershwin himself had played it. Celia shrugged, momentarily glum. Oh well, what would she know. Still, it was possible that a great performer was able to realise a work more persuasively than the genius composer.

  She decided to take one of her early morning walks down to the river and back. A crystal day was coming up, the sun heaving over the rim just above the betting shop. Down her side path where the port-wine magnolia almost caused her to swoon with its scent. Across the road and down a bit, Elena waved to her in great sweeping semaphore mode, as if she were guiding in an errant plane. Further on the Sicilian whose garden vegetables on the footpath verge were under constant care bade her buon giorno. Italians everywhere – on her evening walks she’d often get the unmistakable tang of peppers cooking in olive oil.

  There had been a little gathering at her own house last evening where she served Mediterranean food. Good company all five of them, on the whole, bar a jarring note or two, but making each other laugh: Sally an old school chum from around the corner, plus Elena and Trudy – an item, that pair – and James. The women outnumbering the man four to one, as they should. Not all of them took time to taste her food, to savour the wine.

  She often judged people by their table manners, even though her own were imperfect. Certain individuals she knew had a way of eating their food that was, well, deplorable wouldn’t be putting it too harshly. When did this sensibility to oral habits first take its hold on her? Probably when she was four. She did remember not wanting to kiss people when adults leaned in for a peck on the lips, especially uncles with moustaches. No, she’d say, I’m out of kisses – which would make them roar. Yet she loved being cuddled. But her mother she remembered was pretty strict about table manners: no talking and no singing at the table – something she did like to do when her mouth was empty.

  Another cause nowadays for Celia to look the other way was an aversion to movies – usually the variety made for mass appeal – where characters were shown in close-up (by a director not yet past that Freudian phase), popping pills or gobbling grossly at their hot dogs as they walked along the street, stuffing half of it into their mouths and then talking to a companion, cheeks bulging. Maybe it was an American thing. Why did the camera have to zoom in to press home these facial phenomena: a screen filled with the face of a none-too-lovely actor evincing surprise by letting his wet lower lip hang open. Is that what they called acting now? Scenes of people shown in the bathroom (and this would certainly even make Marcia click her tongue) brushing their teeth and having a disgusting spit, facing the camera to answer someone else’s question, white ring around their mouth. This cinematic technique, naturalism, realism, God knows what, possibly there to show the audience that it was viewing flagrant thumbing-the-nose on celluloid and that we mustn’t expect any decorum from the protagonist, or from the cameraman.

  But she wanted to revert to her own dining indiscretions. These were of a lesser order, in her opinion. The habits she indulged on a regular basis that wouldn’t have been borne by her mother were: elbows on the table (Celia justifies this by claiming enthusiasm, she’s eating with gusto); and, cards on the table now, speaking of tables, when she was alone, a surreptitious licking of her knife could occur. She was aware of this little vice and didn’t do it in public.

  Ah, but other people’s mannerisms, call them unconscious aberrations, were pretty bad: lowering the head to the dish – almost into the plate, one woman she used to know – before starting to shovel. While everyone else is passing the condiments, stopping for a little rest, saying yum and wiping their mouth, making a spot of eye contact with someone else, the fast eaters are obliviously getting those victuals into them presto. Early childhood deprivation could be to blame. Elena, it turns out, sucks her teeth and when that fails, starts to gouge the back molars with her little finger, licks the back of her spoon. She might as well be on her own, in a cave.

  Then there was Mickey. How could Marcia not have noticed his slurping, lip-smacking and general dribbling of items onto his chest? Celia could never reconcile this snout-in-the-trough conduct with the impeccable level of good taste – ear and eye consciousness – that he demonstrated in other areas of his life. No – at the table he was autistic, an underfed infant who had to grab and snuffle. Possibly an affectation? – now there’s a thought. It got to the point where Celia would make excuses to leave the table or find that she had to eat at another time. Marcia had loved him, Celia supposed, so she looked on this show with a benign tolerance. Also, it had to be said, Marcia was a very nice person.
And probably still is.

  She, the woman who once, for some years, took central place in Celia’s heart but not in her bed, even though she was in a manner of speaking with Mickey – was the opposite. Marcia ate slowly and carefully, ever watchful that she might make your meal more comfortable, more colourful, that you had everything you wanted. This is not to say that she nibbled or picked at her food – she ate quite a lot for a slim person, and would sometimes take a second helping if offered. Marcia had become, over the years, by observation and inclination, a good cook herself. It hadn’t been part of her upbringing, but in time – and with Celia’s encouragement – she developed a flair for that hint of garnish in a dish, the whiff of a herb. She carried off even small occasions with attentive decorousness, giving due attention to the jokes, to the food and to her companions.

  Perhaps that’s why Celia inclined towards her. A civilising talent such as this was the result of a good nature. And Celia had always been drawn to people who had these qualities of courtesy and restraint, feeling herself to be often lacking in same. Where Celia, when enjoying herself, would be writhing in laughter, Marcia’s amusement was expressed in that silent drawing in of her breath, rather than letting it out, not even showing her fine teeth very much, ending on a slight expulsion of air. This made Celia laugh more. How lovely Marcia was in those days, the Swinging Sixties in Chelsea! Wearing her long-length silhouette Laura Ashley dresses, walking along the Kings Road, slender and nonchalant – a girl made for modern London. And she taught Celia a thing or two about style in clothes. Celia returned the favour with a copy of Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking.

  Of course there’s more to life than sitting at the table. When you live with someone, you learn to know what it’s like to shop with them, work together in the garden, sit side by side at the cinema and at concerts, walk in the park as a couple and make music together. It’s a lot to ask of a pair, to participate in all of these activities in complete harmony. Some people work it very well, by making little compromises where they must, keeping their secrets from the other, indulging in dalliances every so often, or else they engage in harmless flirting. Others do not. With some partners you care about – might as well say it, whom you love – despite harmony on some fronts, there is yet an undercurrent of intention to cut loose from the other one day, because of certain tensions, wounds, that are, in the end, insupportable. And without warning it happens, though there have been faint rumblings – if only one had been attending – that it’s all over.

  Past failures came to mind easily. Yet they had to be stacked up against the successes. Modest enough triumphs. But how difficult it was to get along with people all the time! Except Marcia. It was usually men who incensed Celia, brought out of her a red-hot invective whose unleashing dismayed all who heard it.

  As a youngster, she had felt awkward with those of her own age. On the school bus she had thought other kids childish when their noisy skylarking interrupted her stream of thought. A potential, natural-born spinster, migrated from the nineteenth century, she was destined to become a responsible, serious-minded woman who would take care of her mother, apparently having no fun at all. But the way life turned out for Celia it was Grandma who taught her to laugh, who told jokes and imitated everyone. Celia had plenty of fun going on inside her head, and ideas thatched into her dreaming. While her outward life was fairly still, inside she was frequently in an uproar of wild mirth, a legacy of Grandma’s sense of the ridiculous.

  In sober moments she worried, never understanding why some people were not bothered about films that ended the wrong way – the bad guys not getting their comeuppance. It troubled her that men like John Wayne, after a hard day’s slog killing Injuns, had no thought of the blood he had spilled, but would wash his arms, face and neck vigorously at the trough, and no hint of his washing the more important bits. Then he’d kiss the girl and young Celia knew it wouldn’t stop there.

  But getting back to her fights with men. In the past four weeks she’d had three separate altercations with different men, each aged in his 60s, each surly, fed-up, dissatisfied, truculent, rude without provocation. One bullied her over a roadblock when she’d misunderstood his directions; another woke her up early one morning with heavy-duty machinery outside the bedroom window, then turned nasty when she asked him when it would stop; one blocked her car at a nursery, looked disgusted for her not parking in a ‘strategic’ way, then he refused to budge. What was wrong with them? It could be they detected in the space between them a hostility she didn’t even know emanated from her, little indicators of naked ire, just a trace. Dogs and cats receive that sort of thing easily, catch it on the air, and some people too, it would seem.

  In each of these quarrels waves of hatred surged through her breast. It was clear that instead of becoming mellower, men were becoming angrier. Some men. And so was she. Was she the only one who didn’t understand what was going on? In every one of these incidents she won out, becoming more fluent and voluble by the second, trouncing them, getting the last cutting word. The odd thing was: instead of savouring the thrill of triumph, she felt miserable and defeated herself, for the rest of the day.

  This churlishness of other people was causing her to become misanthropic. She thought of someone who had ‘dropped’ her recently. That was decidedly one way of dealing with unpleasant home truths on both sides. You could drop people, as in this case, by simply not returning their phone calls – a distressing tactic but non-adversarial. Or you could do it by sending a non-committal response to an invitation. Wishy-washy – she didn’t care for that method.

  She knew what she was doing of course. Assiduously letting her mind meander all over the place instead of addressing the subject of her old friend.

  Back from her walk, she wrote down an idea for a long poem then prepared lunch: avocado, tuna, tomato, basil. Perfect. The English are famous for dropping people. ‘I’ve broken with Cyril,’ they’ll say, without shame or regret. In triumph, indeed. Celia thought that all things considered it wasn’t a bad idea to have done with people who had betrayed you, or offended you without making an apology or without any explanation at all. Why keep putting up with them? You had to weigh their good points of course and then determine, on balance, whether it was more harmful to yourself to keep them or not. She came to realise that hanging on to people for the sake of an illusory sense of good faith was not a virtue. When she realised this and acted upon it (dropped two people in one year who had not got in first and dumped her) she felt all the better for it. She reconsidered it all, taking a mouthful of wine and holding it on her tongue. Quite suddenly she wondered what Marcia was doing, right this minute. How Celia had enjoyed drinking wine with her! She would find the number and ring her. It surely wasn’t true, the rumour. She knew Marcia was still living in Perth, had even tried to look her up in the phone book, to no avail. That was Marse, reverting to type, guarding her privacy.

  Anyway, at this rate, she, Celia, would be out of friends altogether by 2005 and that might be a great relief. She reached for the cheese. Life wasn’t a matter of marching to an even beat but rather proceeding at a steady, confident gait, then a stumble and catching your balance again. Consider – she told a non-existent companion – all the good songs, romantic ones mainly, of being on your own: All by Myself; Deep Purple; All Alone. So many lyricists had written so many top quality songs about gut-gripping, agonising loneliness, songs by Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Jimmy Van Heusen, that she knew she was in good company, in a manner of speaking.

  All of these minutiae were rolling around the edges of her mind, evading this real matter she had to now reflect on.

  It was probably idle gossip, as you get among actors and musicians. Or maybe not. Who had mentioned it? Ah, of course, it was James; he still lived not far from Marcia after all and he’d even given Celia the private phone number. He no longer since his return from the wild north – Broome in Western Australia – lived next door to Marcia. Possibly they didn’t see much of each oth
er, Marse, she suspected, being a bit of a recluse. Perhaps they were all going a bit odd with the passing of time. The best thing she could do now was clean up the back garden, including the roof gutters. Expend some physical energy.

  It was early evening and she stepped outside to empty coffee grounds into a tub and saw the sliver of a new moon up there, rocking on its back without a care. A smell of burnt honey on the air. There were a few people you could appreciate sights and smells with. James for one. But he got distracted by minor irritations. At lunch with him recently, here at her house where you could catch a glimpse of the sea and all should have been blissful, he was incensed, talking about a woman colleague who had spilled the beans, again, about something he’d entrusted to her ear only. She stands on top of buildings with a loudspeaker! he said. Then in a change of mood he told Celia that if he ever wanted something promulgated he’d made a point of telling it to this woman in confidence.

  Not surprisingly he’d lately retreated into himself rather, taken to strange pastimes.

  ‘Did you know I have a new pet?’ he said. ‘I have a lizard that comes in every day and snoozes by the fire.’

  ‘Good God, a goanna?’

  ‘No. A small lizard about three inches long.’

  Time is taking its toll, she thought.

  Celia sat near the window of a house in Fremantle, not too far in space from Daglish. This time in history, and the nation’s psyche, was on her mind. Australia which, when asked, she had always described to others as a freewheeling place where everyone assumed they were on equal terms, had now become a place that kept foreigners out, at all costs, no matter what their plight, through lies and false fear-mongering from people in the highest places.