Chaconne. Diana BlackwoodЧитать онлайн книгу.
had not thrilled to his kisses and fumblings, but then she had hardly expected to. Penetration, on the other hand, surprised her: bloodless, unalarming, almost impersonal, it nudged towards future pleasure.
By the time Mavis came home, they were fully dressed and listening to the Opus 127 quartet.
There was a pause in the dinner-table conversation while Mavis served steamed golden syrup pudding. She had even found the patience to make real custard. Pudding had always been Eleanor’s grandmother’s domain, an unspoken contract of indulgence between grandmother and grand-daughter. Steamed golden syrup pudding, made only on the wintriest of days, had been the most special of all.
“Ethnic enough for you?” said Eleanor to Ruth.
“Oh, it’s heaven. The best.”
“Very fattening.”
“My mother’s was better,” said Mavis.
Something’s going on, thought Eleanor.
“We have some wonderful news,” said Audrey, turning to smile at Mavis, who beamed encouragement. Ruth looked up from her pudding like someone eagerly expecting the announcement of a wedding or a longed-for pregnancy. Her expression was so silly that Eleanor might have been tempted to kick her shins had they not been out of reach. Instead she slumped in her chair, sullen as a teenager.
“We’re buying land together on the far south coast near Cobargo – 160 acres. It’s half cleared, half bush, with a big tin shed we can sleep in. We’re thinking we’ll build a mudbrick house and live there one day.”
So that was it. It was what her mother had always wanted: to buy back the farm. They would turn their land into a commune for ageing widows and divorcees. Mavis chattered about organic farming and conserving native vegetation and wildlife. Audrey described the creek that ran through the property. It had a clear pool, edged by tree ferns and remnant rainforest, that was deep enough to swim in. Ruth’s eyes shone. What was the matter with her? Mavis and Audrey had obviously given up on ever finding men! It was pathetic, especially as Audrey was quite pretty in her wholesome, earth-mother way.
Later Audrey suggested that she and Eleanor do the washing up. She asked how Eleanor was getting on at the university with her languages and talked about the ups and downs in the lives of her grown-up sons. When she had rinsed the last dish and stood it in the draining rack, she removed her rubber gloves and quietly closed the door to the dining room.
“You must have noticed how happy your mother is, Eleanor,” said Audrey, sounding like the teacher she had once been. “I want you to know we’re very much in love, devoted to one another. And that means, as you’ve probably realised, that you’re free to live your life without having to worry about her any more. It’s a freedom neither of us had, I can tell you. Use it well, my girl.”
It had never occurred to Eleanor that she should worry about her mother, and somehow Audrey knew it. She also knew that Eleanor had not twigged that she and Mavis were lovers. The canny gleam in the older woman’s eyes, the tiny, exultant twitch at one corner of her mouth, unmasked Eleanor as a pretty little fool, self-absorbed and unworldly. Her cheeks flamed; she wanted to fling the damp tea towel at Audrey and run screaming into the chilly night. Why hadn’t Mavis told her that she’d found someone, that she wasn’t alone any more? Why had she left all the announcements to Audrey? But that was just what Audrey would want her to ask, and Eleanor was not about to give her that satisfaction.
“I’m very happy for you both. I think it’s great, I really do. I can’t wait to see the property, even if there are leeches in that patch of rainforest. Shall we see what Ruth and my mother are up to?”
For as far back as Eleanor could remember, her room had contained a spare bed for those occasions when a friend slept the night or a girl cousin from North Queensland came to visit. The older Eleanor grew, however, the more she had preferred not to share her private space. Tonight she wanted full possession of her old refuge, but Ruth was in the other bed, alert as a scalpel.
“Are you all right? You were awfully quiet over dinner. You don’t mind about …”
“About my mother being a lesbian? Of course not. But I do mind about her not telling me.”
“You don’t tell her things, so I suppose she thought …”
“But she’s my mother, for Christ’s sake!”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Anyway, I think they’re sweet together. Audrey’s a dear. There goes her car … Listen, I found out something about your father.”
“You what?”
“Just listen, okay? Apparently the drinking started after a visit from a couple of Lithuanian men from Adelaide. Actually she said Balts, but they spoke his language. They talked and drank all after-noon and into the night. Mavis thought they were mates from the old days, so she left them to it. But it was after that visit that he became seriously depressed and hit the turps, as she put it. He refused to talk about what was troubling him, said no one would understand, so he just drank himself into a stupor every night.
“One morning he left for work – you know this bit – and never came home. The police weren’t much help, but eventually he started sending money from Darwin. Maybe you know that bit too. But that stopped after about a year, and she didn’t go after him for it. His demons got the better of him, she said, and she didn’t want you to have anything to do with him.”
“Why did she tell you that and not me?”
“For a start, I asked. You should try it some time. Handy things, words. Anyway, while you were a child I imagine she was protecting you. Dropping your bundle isn’t something to be proud of in her view, is it? She’s all for dusting yourself off and getting on with it. She didn’t really talk about it to anyone until she met Audrey. I think she has only the vaguest idea about what he might have seen or done during the war. It’s hardly common knowledge that this country is harbouring war criminals. Now she’s probably just scared of you, and I can’t say I blame her, sometimes.”
Eleanor snorted. “That woman has never been scared of anything in her life.”
Last year, after Ruth’s father had referred in passing to the massacres of Jews in the Baltic states, Eleanor had searched the library and found enough references to Lithuanian barbarity and enthusiasm to freeze her blood. A sickening dimension was added to all the wondering about her father, and until today she had not voiced it to anyone. Which was the greater torment, knowing or not knowing? She would probably never be able to answer that. Eleanor had long understood that she must learn to accommodate loss and uncertainty, even as she had continued to blame her mother, through all the yearning and chafing of adolescence, for such burdens. But tonight the words seriously depressed had flared like a struck match in a dark room. In their brief illuminating of anguish – and possibly also shame and remorse – they summoned the shadowy, sonorous creature of her imagination and gave him a prickly kind of substance. They did not exculpate him, if indeed exculpation were called for; but they made of him yet another human being, innocent or guilty, whose life had been blighted by war. In revealing the man’s inability to forget, those two words saved him in his daughter’s eyes from monstrosity. As for his wife, she might perhaps have done more to help him, but not even Mavis could stare down history.
Ruth yawned and said it had been quite a day. She was so glad to have met Mavis and Audrey and the chooks at last. Good night … Eleanor closed her eyes on the day’s unruliness and let her mind drift with the sound of the sea. But memory kept tugging at her like an undertow, and she was too tired to resist. Here she is, fifteen years old, sprawled on her bed reading a romance novel – the sort of book Mavis calls deplorable rubbish, or even female pornography. She has ignored her mother’s suggestion to leave her maths homework till later and get out and enjoy the spring sunshine. Her grandmother’s sewing machine whirrs in the dining room, where she is making a summer dress, cornflower blue, for Eleanor. The jasmine-scented air caresses the girl’s skin. From the back garden comes the thwack-thwack-thwack of the mattock, a regular pulse to her illicit reading. Then it stops,