Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

I was walking across a tightrope. I moved through the soldiers’ defences until the moment, the famous moment, when they were sated, and I had the sharp knife in my hand.

‘Bravo,’ my mother said. ‘Bravo.’

I looked, dazed. Wally and Roxanna were standing by the door to the foyer, swaying, arm in arm, their glasses raised.

‘He actually has some talent,’ my mother said, and hugged me.

Then Vincent stepped up into the ring and spoiled it all.

He fetched my mother’s skirt. He held it out to her. She took it. He brought her case. He picked up my mother’s shoes and placed them by her feet. He gathered the rakes.

My mother always hated to be organized by others, but when Vincent came on to the stage to take her away, she surprised me by being no longer angry with him.

‘I left all my stuff in the hotel bathroom,’ she said.

Vincent was so paranoid, not only about his wife. He lived in a world of secret agencies. VIA, DoS, conspiracy, misinformation, destabilization. Four days into the campaign he had my mother sleeping in a different hotel each night. ‘It’s all been packed,’ he said brusquely. ‘It’s moved already. Come on, you have to sleep. ’

My maman walked obediently off into the wings and came back with her skirt on. She was the Kroon Princess again — conservative, trim. She was about to kiss me goodnight but then I saw her soften, change her mind.

‘Stand on the other side of the ring,’ she told me.

‘Felicity!’ Vincent said.

One can easily sympathize with Vincent’s agitation, but look at my mother — no matter what mistakes she may have made in raising me, you can never doubt her feelings for me. Now she was committed to making me an actor, she behaved as if each moment were precious.

‘I’m so sorry, mo-chou,’ she told Vincent.

Vincent looked at his wrist-watch and shook his head.

My mother looked at her own watch. ‘Roxanna,’ she said, ‘would you help us?’

The older I get, the more amazed I am by the number of people who spend their whole life waiting for a chance to jump on to a stage. Before my mother had finished speaking, Rox was inside the ring, kicking off her shoes, tugging down her skirt, fluffing her hair, looking for a place to put her champagne glass.

Vincent went and sat on a Starbuck. My mother’s eyes never lost their focus on me. ‘Tristan,’ she said. ‘This is an acting exercise you can do without me. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘You can do it as often as you like. What I want you to do is move very slowly towards each other. I want you to look straight into each other’s eyes. When you reach a point where this makes you uncomfortable, I want you to stop and explore the feeling. Then, when you are ready, come on forward again. Roxanna, maybe it would work better if you could kneel too. Could you manage that?’

‘Sure,’ Roxanna said. She kneeled.

‘You’re wearing stockings. Take off your stockings.’

Roxanna stayed stubbornly kneeling.

‘You’ll wreck your stockings.’

But Rox had her ankles hid in sawdust. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘leave the stockings to me. OK?’

‘OK,’ my mother said.

As Rox and I edged across the ring towards each other I was, at first, aware of everyone. It was half past two in the morning. I could feel Vincent’s agitation, Wally’s happiness, my mother’s exhaustion.

Roxanna came towards me, smiling crookedly, holding her skirt in an odd little curtsy.

I looked at her eyes. I concentrated. I could feel her so personally. I felt myself being looked at. When I stopped, it was not from calculation.

‘Explore it,’ my mother’s voice said.

‘It’s like a pain,’ she said. ‘Get used to it. When you can stand it, come closer. I’m leaving now,’ she said.

I was now in the scary world of Roxanna’s eyes. It was like holding your hand in a flame. My ugliness was all around me. I was vile, on my own stage, in my own home.

I did not even hear Vincent and my mother leave. I did not see her walk out into the dangerous dark.

Roxanna had promised herself she was going to marry a rich man, and there was nothing on earth — not Pigeon Patissy , not sex, not French champagne, not the tender feelings she had begun to engender in her breast towards Wally Paccione — nothing that would make her change her mind.

She was going to marry a rich man. She was going to meet him at an auction — it was all she had lived for for two years, and yet, after five minutes in the auction room, Roxanna believed that her plan had failed.

She stood in front of two flat lead figures — soldiers of the French Colonial Native Cavalry. She knew these figures from the catalogue, but now she hardly saw them. She was sick, disappointed, angry. She had spent two years of her life preparing for this, and the thing was: she was so damned stupid. She had bought a pig in a poke, a cul in a sac.

Her new dress was black with thin shoe-string straps and a camisole top. Her stockings were seamed. She had a small clutch bag. Her hair had been cut, coloured, permed. She had spent every penny of the 650 dollars for this moment, but when she walked into the wide echoing room, she was very disappointed to be the most dramatic person in it.

The auction room was filled with nerds, wimps, frumps, stooped men with leather patches on tweed coats, women with string bags.

She had not allowed for this, had not even considered the question of the husband’s face, body, personality. She had not thought of sex. She had thought it was frivolous, unimportant, but now, as she walked around the exhibits with her annotated catalogue, she began to panic.

A calmer personality might have thought that she should wait a minute or an hour, to see what other fish might enter the trap, but a calmer personality would not be in the place Roxanna was now in, would not have married Reade, torched the house, travelled to Chemin Rouge, accepted a proposal of marriage from Wally Paccione and then rejected it next morning.

Her hands were damp. She could feel sweat between her shoulder blades. She looked at the lead figures and thought she would like to melt them, see them droop and bend, see the red paint drown and burn inside the bubbling metal.

When she felt the attentions of the collector next to her a shiver of irritation passed up her spine and into her hair. She felt him move around her, stand on one side of her, then the other. He was a guy. He was doing the guy-things that her entrance had encouraged him to do, but Roxanna was not attracted to these nerds.

‘So what do you think?’ the man asked. He spoke English with a Voorstandish accent, but she did not look at him. She could feel him at her side, in her space — short, tweedy.

‘Think of what?’ she said. She was so pissed off.

‘The Hilperts,’ he said.

He meant the figures.

‘Don’t look like bloody Hilperts to me,’ Roxanna said.

She had seen few Hilperts in life, but many in photographs, and when she looked at these two figures in the harsh neon light the precision of the colour and the details of the moulding confused her.

‘The curator says they’re Hilperts.’

‘Bully for him.’

‘What do you think they are?’

She looked at him more closely. He was wearing tweed, it is true, but not in that nerdy way. He was wearing very precise cuffed corduroy trousers and soft Italian slip-ons. He was, in short, the image of a rich man on a Saturday. Also, now she looked at him, she saw he was actually good-looking — he had chiselled lips and intense, dangerous, blue eyes. He was looking at her, up and down, but subtly at least. ‘It says here’ — he held up his catalogue — ’that they’re “bloody” Hilperts.’