Peter Carey - Illywhacker

"What fellow?" She had been watching Wysbraum and thinking that he was, after all, in love with her father, that he spoke in this embarrassing obsessive way because he loved Sid Goldstein more than anyone on earth and that, she realized, was how he had always spoken. He had spoken in exactly this tone at the dinner table in Malvern Road but then, when she was younger, it had seemed the way things were, and everyone had smiled at Wysbraum, but now it seemed a rudeness, that he should have made love to Sid Goldstein at Edith Goldstein's table.

"What fellow?" she asked, not really thinking about the question, but seeing the abnormality of her family and shuddering mentally to feel herself free of it.

"Badgery, this fellow you have been in business with. You are through with him?"

"Oh no, Wysbraum. No, I very much doubt it."

"But", said Wysbraum, tucking his table napkin into his collar and picking up the menu, "you are returning to your husband, so your father said, who has been in trouble with the police. His photograph was in the paper. A nice-looking boy," he said. "Your father has been very worried for you."

"Wysbraum, Wysbraum," said Sid Goldstein. "Leah, don't listen to him. She writes to me every week, sometimes three times," he told Wysbraum, tugging at the menu to make him listen. "She writes to me. She tells me everything."

"You showed me the letter," said Wysbraum. "Very nice," he told Leah. "Very brainy."

"I showed him one," Sid told Leah apologetically, polishing his glasses with his handkerchief and leaving his big eyelids as soft and vulnerable as a creature without its natural shell. "How is your husband? He will have no use of either leg?"

The Brandy Cruster arrived at this moment. Leah looked at it doubtfully. She shook her head to her father's question while Wysbraum made some fuss about the Scotch. Her father would not ask, she knew, the extent of the injury; it would be something they could write about.

"Where is Mother?"

"At home," he said, again embarrassed. "She sends her love, and Grace and Nadia also. Nadia is doing very well in her secretarial course."

"You told me," Leah said. "Why didn't they come?"

"It is my fault," Wysbraum said. "Tonight is the night, Tuesday; every Tuesday your father and I have a meal in the city."

"So why couldn't Mother come?"

"It is Tuesday," said Wysbraum firmly and Leah saw her father's uncomfortable look, the way he cleaned between the tines of the fork with his napkin, a boarding-house habit he still exhibited when nervous or agitated. It was Wysbraum's night, just as it had been Wysbraum's suit, and it could no more be taken from him than the suit could.

"You have all this," Wysbraum would have said. "Monday, Wednesday, all the days. I, I only have Tuesday."

"So tell me," her father said. "How is Mr Schick and what will happen to Mr Badgery now that he cannot perform with you?"

And she managed, in spite of her irritation, to construct a story for him, not in the form of conversation, but as a letter. Sid waited silently, patiently, his hands in his lap while his daughter answered the question and even Wysbraum tried not to interrupt, although there was the fuss about oysters, and then the discussion about pork, which Wysbraum ordered very ostentatiously, so loudly that the group at the next table, a large flowery lady of sixty and two younger gentlemen in suits, all giggled and began – Leah heard them – to tell a joke involving Jews and pork.

"Ah," said Wysbraum, "I like a good piece of crackling," which sent their neighbours off into fresh peals of laughter.

"In any case," Leah said, "I would like to talk to Mother, on the telephone."

She pushed her Brandy Cruster away from her, as if the thing was now too expensive, too frivolous, something she had merely imagined she wanted, like a spoiled child crying for sample bags at the Easter Show. She rose from her seat awkwardly. "Please," she told the men. "Excuse me a moment." And when she saw her father begin to stand: "Telephone, that's all."

But having descended the grand stairs to the front foyer where she intended to telephone, she found her father, his napkin still clutched anxiously in his hand, right behind her.

"Please," he said. "Please, no."

The foyer was a large open space whose floor was chequered with squares of black and white marble. They stood next to each other, like pieces opposing each other on a chess board, oblivious of the interest of the ageing porter with the Lord Kitchener moustache and the Harris-tweed squatter who sat in tall uncomfortable chairs in the shadow of the grand stairs.

"She does not know," Sid whispered.

"Does not know what?"

"How could I tell her? Imagine the trouble I would have." He tried, unsuccessfully, to hide the table napkin in his trouser pocket. The pocket was too small or the napkin too big; he withdrew it.

"What trouble? How?" demanded imperious Leah beneath Nathan Schick's Panama; she took the napkin from her father and folded it carefully.

"It is Wysbraum's night. I told you already. Come over here, we are in the road. Here, Leah. Wysbraum is a poor lonely man. There is nothing else in his life. You cannot take away his Tuesday. He would not permit it."

"Here." She gave him back his napkin, tightly folded. He took it absently.

"Leah, you will see your mother again, soon. We will visit. I promise."

"Why can't he have his night, and Mother be here too, and Nadia?"

Her father could not meet her eyes. He was ashamed but also not ashamed. "Leah, they are all listening."

"Let them listen." She failed to stare down the porter who insolently refused to hide his interest. "You mean," she whispered, "Mother does not know that I am in Melbourne?"

"He is a strange man, Leah. Every year, by himself, stranger and stranger. No one else will bother with him. For everyone else he is too much trouble. About everything he is difficult, and proud, too proud."

"But I always thought you liked him."

"Yes, yes. Like him. A fine man, and very kind. But you must not phone your mother from here. I will give you money and you telephone her from Sydney. Have a good talk, an hour if you like. Here, ten pounds. Talk to her from Sydney with this."

"Here it is cheaper." She was already shocked by the prices on the menu in the dining room. "I will ring from here and say it is Sydney."

"No, no," said Sid Goldstein, truly shocked. "You must not lie to your mother, not ever."

Leah sucked in her breath long enough to stop her telling her father that he was a hypocrite. She contented herself with saying that she did not understand him, a suggestion that made him irritable.

"How can you not, my darling? How can you not understand? We write a hundred letters to each other and you say you do not understand. You have a brain. You have imagination. You think about things. Well, think, please. If you think about Wysbraum you will understand why you should not telephone your mother, why I could not tell her, why he could not have her here. Think, please."

"Father, I don't understand. I really don't."

Now it was his turn to suck in his breath. "You are going to look after your husband who you do not live with. Why?"

"It's obvious," she said angrily.

"Yes, he needs you. You love him, only, in the most general sense."

She tried to demur but now it was she who could not hold his eyes. She tried to remember what confessions she might have inadvertently made.

"In the most general way," he insisted. "In the sense that one loves one's fellows. I am not belittling this love. He is a human being, in trouble, and naturally you must go. I am proud of you that you should go."

"It is not to be proud of," she said defensively.

"And in my case," her father smiled palely, "it is just the same."