David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Clay produced in response one of her brisk salutes, a real one made by bringing two fingers of her right hand up to the temple and flicking them sharply away. It was her trade-mark; from the days when she had modelled little suits of a military cut for Molyneux in Paris and was considered a sport. It too was a leap in the dark since Eleanor couldn't see it. But she made the gesture just the same — as an acknowledgement to herself of the old, the unkillable Clay McHugh, since there was, God knows, so little left of her.

(She had taken to avoiding herself in mirrors and in ghostly shop windows; her eyes were too sharp; she hadn't, like Eleanor, developed the habit of not-seeing-clearly-anymore. But at some point back there she had let her attention wander, lost her grip on things, and the spirit of disintegration had got in. Well, she was fighting it — tooth and claw— she was holding on; she got tired, that's all. Your attention wandered. You got tired.)

She came quickly to the alert now. Eleanor was making a play in the air with her fingers that meant they should meet later and share a taxi home. They would — they always did — and Eleanor, who was generous and tactfully tactless, would see to it that they did not share the fare.

They were neighbours. Eleanor, Mrs. Adrian Murphy, lived in a unit-block three doors from her own, and once a week, on Fridays, they went down in the Daimler (Eleanor drove only in daylight now) and had coffee together: down among the heavy-eyed Viennese, all reading air-mail papers that were two weeks old, and those deeper exiles who had been born right here, in Burwood or Gulgong or Innisfail, North Queensland, but were dying of hunger for a few crumbs of Sacher Torte and of estrangement from a life they had never known. What a place! What a country!

Years ago, in Brisbane, where they had been at the same convent school, she and Eleanor Ure had hated one another. “That stuck up goody two-shoes" was the phrase she found herself repeating in her twelve-year-old's voice; though she couldn't recall how Eleanor, who had been mousey, could have deserved it — not then. It fitted her better twenty years later when the dreaded doctor appeared.

But that period too had passed; and now, with nearly sixty years between them and the girls they once were, she could accept Eleanor Murphy for what she was: a spoiled and frightened woman, too insistent on her own dignity, but generous, loyal, and very nearly these days a friend.

That first winter after they found themselves neighbours, Eleanor had slipped and broken her leg. Clay had gone across each afternoon to sit with her: not in the spirit of a little nursing-sister — she had none of that — but in a spirit of brisk cheerfulness, of keeping one's stoic end up, that revived the bossy schoolgirl in her. Eleanor was happy to be organised. They spent the afternoons playing cards (rummy) while the westering light touched with Queensland colours the baskets of maidenhair and the tree-orchids and staghorns of Eleanor's rainforest loggia, and Mrs. Thring, who came in to clean, and who served when Eleanor entertained, made them scones and tea.

Things had levelled between them. She was no “that Clay McHugh,” unmarried and trailing clouds of dangerous appeal. And Eleanor, with the dreaded doctor gone, was no more the gilded and girlish dependent of a Household Word. They were alone, alive (widowed or not, what did it matter?) and had no one close but one another.

(Eleanor in fact had a son whom she doted on, worried over, and never mentioned; a forty-four-year-old hippie and no-hoper called Aidan, for God's sake! who wore beads, wrote unpublishable poetry, had two broken marriages behind him, and lived in a rainforest — a real one — on sunflower-seeds, bananas, and old rope. Eleanor's bedroom was full of photographs of him when he was an angelic six-year-old. Clay knew all this, but was meant not to. There were days when all Eleanor had to say in the long silences between them “Aidan, Aidan, Aidan, Aidan.” It was hard then not to cry out, "For God's sake, Eleanor, I thought we were friends, why can't we talk about him?” "About who?” Eleanor would have said. “Who can you possibly mean?")

The Year of Eleanor's Leg had been followed by The Year of the Rapist. For five months their Point was at siege. The rapist specialized in high unit-blocks and only assaulted older women (they had shared, she and Eleanor, a phone code that made Eleanor at least feel safe) and had turned out to be a twenty-two-year-old cat-burglar, so round-chinned and mild-looking that nobody believed it was really him.

Clay did. Standing at the glass door to her balcony, with her old dragon-robe about her, she had come face to face with him. He was spreadeagled against the wall, his cheek flat to the bricks. There were only feet between them; he in the cold air, high up above the fig tree and its voracious flying foxes, she safe behind glass. Below, the whole Bay was lit. The police were on to him. Their searchlights crossed and re-crossed the fern-hung balconies.

Let me in, his eyes had pleaded. He was blond, with a two-day growth that made a shadow above his lips. She shook her head.

He had smiled then and nodded; as if she were some silly old girl who could be fooled by a soft look and didn't know he was a tiger, a beast of prey, and these tower blocks were his jungle. Nervously his tongue appeared, just the tip, and slicked his lips. He was perplexed, he was thinking with it.

If she hesitated a moment then it wasn't because she was fooled but because she saw his animal mind at work. They were a pair. She too had “out there.”

She didn't let him in. Another night she might have, it wasn't final; but not that one. She stood and watched the searchlight play across the balcony; go on, back-track, then stop, isolating him like an acrobat, an angel, in its glare. He had his eyes closed. He was pressing his body hard against the wall, pretending, like a child, to be invisible.

Being more vulnerable than ever at that moment she had turned quickly away …

So there was Eleanor, safely settled in the stalls. And there, in their box, were the Scarmans, Robert and Jeanette, who always appeared for the first half but seldom for the second. Cool ash-blonds, very still and fastidious, they tried again and again but real players never came up to what they were used to on Robert's equipment. Robert had been Karel's favourite student (that was how she knew them), but he was fonder now of Jeanette.

She caught their eye, and Jeanette made little window-cleaning motions that meant See-you-later-in-the-usual-place. (That was the Crush Bar on the harbour side.)

All this was ritual. She watched Jeanette wave to the Abrams, and the Abrams a moment later caught her own eye, and Clay gave them her salute. Then Doctor Havek, whom she had known in Paris before the war, then in Cairo, and who was now her doctor at Edgecliff, shuffled to his seat in the third row — down in Middle Europe among the garlic and ashes; but before he was seated, he too waved to the Abrams and then leaned over and shook hands with the Scorczenys, whom she had also known in Paris but had nothing to do with here.

She began to tap her foot. Karel hadn't arrived. They had spoken on Thursday — no, Friday, and he had said yes, he definitely was well enough, he would be here.

It was just before eight. Downstairs the last bleeps would be sounding, like a nasty moment in a beleaguered submarine. But the seat between the blond woman and the couple who hummed, Karel insisted, through all of Mozart and Beethoven and most of Schubert (though they were pretty well stumped by Bartk) was empty, the only one in its row.

“Would you like to see the programme?” the young man on her right was enquiring. He was a sweet rather effeminate boy who had struck up a conversation at the start of the season and chattered on now whether she answered or not. She thanked him, turned the pages politely and handed it back.