David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“You mean to go?” she asked.

I tried to laugh it off.

“Oh well, it depends, doesn't it? On how the morrow feels. I mean, you never know, do you? Perhaps it will be a Mrs. Judge day.”

She seemed to find this very comical. I did a little jig as if I too recognised the absurdity of the thing; and experienced a wave of nausea at my own impiety. The bishop's wife, no doubt, had other notions of what was holy.

But I had saved myself, that's what mattered, and looked on the three sausage rolls I forced down, and the two slices of pavlova, as a proper expiation, and a proper snub to my hostess, who had assumed that in the matter of pavlovas at least there would be a certain complicity between us. In fact I loathe pavlova; but this is a question of taste, not Taste, and I took two slices very willingly to make amends. It was only when I got outside at last, and felt the dense sub-tropical night about me, the restless palm leaves fretting and rising, the low stars, the beating of wings and bell-notes in distended throats, the heavy scent of decay that is also the sweet smell of change — it was only then that I let myself off the leash and felt my heart quicken with a sense that even the dreaded Karingai might be the site of a turn in my fortunes, some unique and unlooked-for revelation. A magic name had been spoken and Mrs. Judge's address was burning above my breast.

But of course I would go!

3

I found the house easily enough. One of five unpainted weatherboards on high stumps, it stood apart from the rest of the town on a narrow ridge. The other houses belonged to Indians. Plump dark children, the youngest of them naked, splashed about in mud-puddles in the front yards; chickens rushed out squawking; a lean dog tied to a fence post stood on its four legs and yowled. Morning-glory, running wild in every direction, hauled fences down till they were almost horizontal, swathed the trunks of palms, was piled feet deep above water tanks and outhouse roofs. The big purple blossoms were starred with moisture. From beneath came the faint hum of insects and the smell almost over-poweringly sweet, of rotting vegetation.

Climbing the wooden steps, which had long since lost their rails, I paused at the lattice door and prepared to knock.

The woman was there immediately. She must have been waiting in the shadows beyond. Darker than I remembered, she had, in the clear light of day a driven look, as if she had been hungry for twenty and maybe thirty years for something that had hollowed her out from within and which the black eyes had slowly sunk towards. She wore the same blue floral, but it was beltless now, and her feet on the dry verandah boards were misshapen and bare.

“Come on in,” she said, peering over my shoulder to make sure there was no one with me; then stood and smiled. “I reckoned you wouldn’ let me down.” She turned into the hallway with its worn linoleum. “Come on out t’ the kitchen an’ I'll make a cuppa.”

Indicating a chair at the scrubbed-wood table, she used her forearm to push back mess — jam-tins, scraps of half-eaten toast, several dirty mugs; then filled a kettle, scooped tea from a tin with Japanese ladies in kimonos on each of its faces, and sat. Behind her, on the wood stove, the kettle began to hiss.

“As I was sayin',” she began, as if our conversation of the previous evening had never been interrupted, "I got information t’ give, seein’ as yer interested in ‘er.”

“Alicia Vale?”

She laughed. “Well I don't mean the Queen a’ Sheba.”

She glanced round the smoke-grimed kitchen, cleared a further space between us, as if she were preparing an area amid the chaos where large facts could be established, and with a new light in her eyes, thrust her hand out and opened her fist.

Coiled in her palm was an enamel bracelet of exquisite red and gold, in the form of a serpent. Beside it, two tiny Faberg eggs.

She was delighted with my look of astonishment and gave a harsh, high-pitched laugh.

“There! You didn't expect that, didja? I thought that'd surprise you.” She set the three pieces down and turned away to haul the kettle off the stove. “You oughta know that piece if you're an expert. She wore that in Lakm. New York, nineteen o-five.”

It looked even more extraordinary among the breakfast litter of the table than it might have done in the museum where it belonged: one of those elaborate pieces that were created for her first by Lalique and later by Tiffany — lilies, serpents, salamanders, birds of paradise, all in the blue-green or red-gold of the period and intended to be worn offstage or on, tributes to the fact that her own plumed splendour was continuous with that of the creatures she played, and that these ornaments of her fantasy-life in Babylon or India belonged equally to the world she moved in at Deauville and Monte Carlo, at Karlsbad, Baden-Baden, Capri. The thing writhed. It flashed its tail and threw off sparks. It was solid metal and had survived. I turned it and read the signature.

“Oh, it's genuine alright,” she told me, pouring tea. She gave a wry chuckle. “I took one look at you and I reckoned you'd be the one. I knew it right off. This one, I told meself — he'll believe, if on'y the bracelet. And he does! Here, young feller, drink yer tea.”

She sipped noisily and watched me over the rim of her cup.

“Y'see,” she said, suddenly serious, "I trustcher. I gotta trust someone and you're it. I've decided t’ come out a’ hiding.”

She let this sink in.

“I s'pose you know she was back ‘ere in o-six.”

“O-eight,” I corrected, glad at last to prove, after so many surprises, my expertise. “There was a tour in o-three and another in o-eight— Lucrezia, Lucia, Semiramide, Adriana Lecouvreur” I had it all off pat.

“Yair,” she said. “Well she was ‘ere in o-six as well, that's what I'm tellin’ yer. O-six.”

I was in no position to argue. Nobody in fact knows where Vale was in nineteen hundred and six; the whole year is a blank. In o-five she was in San Francisco, New York, Brussels, London, Paris, and St. Peters- burg. In o-seven in South Africa, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, Berlin, and was back in London again to close the season. But in o-six nothing. The theory is that she had a minor breakdown and was hiding out in the south of France. More romantic commentators suggest a trip to China in the company of a Crown Prince, or a time in Persia with an Armenian munitions manufacturer who later, it is true, bought her a house in Hampstead and her first motor. But no one, so far as I know, has mentioned Australia.

“She spent the time,” the woman informed me without emphasis, though her little black eyes were as lively as jumping beans — she was enjoying her moment of triumph—"in a suite in the Hotel Australia in Melbourne. And that's where us twins were born, me and a brother. I am Alicia Vale's daughter!”

She opened up like a fist and presented herself, as she had previously presented the bracelet; all without warning, a glittering jewel. As if to say: "There! If you believed in that you should believe in me. We're all of a piece.”

She sat back sucking her gums and grinning, delighted at having played her little scene with so much skill, and at having, for a second time, so convincingly set me back.

“You can put that down now,” she told me, indicating the bracelet. “We're talking about me.”

I HAVE SPENT nearly twenty years following the career of that extraordinary woman, through newspaper articles, reviews, programmes, opera house account-books (my little paper is a run-up to what I hope may be a full biography), and had, even before I made my first venture upon the documentary records, been spellbound for another twenty by the legend of her and by the thin, pure voice (unhappily a mere ghost of itself) that comes to us from the primitive recording-machines of the period. She was still singing after the war — after 1918, that is — but only small things: a Schubert lullaby, "Home Sweet Home.” Such is the magic of her art that even these become, in her rendering of them, occasions of the most poignant beauty; as if the simple melody of “Home Sweet Home” were being plucked out of the air by an angel banished for ever from the forests of Ceylon or the Gardens of Babylon, bringing with it, out of that lost world, only a radiant and disembodied breath. As an adolescent I would listen to those recordings with locked eyes; imagining from photographs the exotic realm out of which it was climbing, in which a common farmgirl from the South Coast had been transformed by her own genius, and elaborate machines for making ground-fog, clouds and columns that can dissolve before the eyes on a view of endless horizons, into a creature of mythical power and beauty, a princess with the gift of immortality or abrupt extinction in her, a bird of paradise, an avenging angel — though she might also on occasion, and without one's sensing the least disjunction, appear in the pages of an international scandal-sheet, where her notorious language and ordinary, not to say vulgar affairs, like the exploits of the gods in their earthly passages, were transfigured and redeemed by the glory that came trailing after.