Charades (16 page)

She thinks she remembers this, however. She thinks she remembers that Verity held out a handful of raisins and that she took one. They both partook and ate.

6

Bee in Her Bonnet

Once upon a time, Charade tells Koenig, Bea made a telephone call from a pub called the Duke of Wellington …

“No,” Katherine says. “I won't meet you there. Why don't you come here? Or out to uni?”

“Prude,” Bea taunts.

“It's got nothing to do with that. I just feel … conspicuous, that's all. I feel alien. I
can't
go there.”

“Oh,
conspicuous.”
Bea slides into her exaggerated imitation of educated Australian; pom-talk, she calls it; or uni-talk. ‘Too la-de-da
alien
for the Duke. What the hell does
alien
mean? Well, uni is too la-de-da for me, Lady K, and I can't come home.”

“Why not? Oh come on Bea, don't be silly. We haven't seen you for months. Mum and Dad aren't —”

“No. You'll see why. The kiosk at the Gardens, then. Two o'clock, I'll be waiting.”

And at the Botanical Gardens, Kay does see why, and feels suddenly faint. She has broken into a run at the sight of Bea's unkempt curls through the latticed arch of the arbour beside the kiosk. Arms outstretched, she has the sense of running toward a missing part of herself. She stops short. She reaches for the kiosk railing and slides onto the bench. “Oh my God, Bea,” she whispers.

Bea is pregnant.

(Down at the Duke of Wellington,
a voice plays itself in Katherine's ear.
Roistering. Playing Villon.)

The pregnancy is in the early stages, but still, given Bea's flamboyant body and her taste for tight clothes, there can be no mistake.

[“How can I explain to you, Charade?” Kay asks decades later. “That time and that place, it's not possible to … How can I convey the impact? If you wore a placard saying AIDS around your neck perhaps, you'd have some equivalent idea.”]

“Thought I might shock you,” Bea laughs, blowing cigarette smoke between them.

“You don't shock me.” Katherine means to seem blas
é
, but sounds prim. Her lungs are sealed off, black motes dance in front of her eyes.
(Down at the Duke of Wellington he's mine, he's roistering mine, and after I finish grade eight we'll be playing Villon.)

Bea is watching her closely. “Father's nobody you know,” she says. And Katherine's breath comes back, stumbling on its way in. She turns away and breathes slowly, counting two three four, calming her jerky pulse. “A farmer from up Tamborine way,” Bea says. “He's okay. Got a place up on the mountain, so I'm going.”

“Going?” Katherine echoes faintly. Away from the Duke and Villon?

“Oh stop looking at me like that. And there's no need to tell Mum and Dad,” Bea says. She lights a cigarette from the one between her lips, and tosses the butt into lantana bushes. Instinctively Katherine flinches and half moves to pick up the litter. Bea laughs noisily. “Jesus. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, and always pick up after yourself.” But she stubs out the new cigarette on the bench and walks across to the rubbish bin. “There!” She tosses it in. “Got to quit anyway, I guess.” She pats her stomach, then asks, looking out over geometric swirls of begonias: “Mum and Dad ever ask about me?”

“You are mentioned every night at family prayer.”

“I'll bet.”

“They love you, Bea. We all do.”

“Yeah, I know.” Compulsively she lights another cigarette, sucks greedily, three, four puffs. “Oh hell.” She stares at the Camel (no filter) as though it were a parakeet that has somehow alighted and got itself caught in her fingers. She drops it and grinds it with her heel. “Oh for God's sake,” she says, “you don't have to look at it like that.”

“Like what? I wasn't … Sorry, I wasn't even conscious …”

“I know you weren't, you ninny.” Bea makes a gesture of helplessness with her hands. She picks up the smashed cigarette and sends it on a long slow arc into the bin. “Oh Jeez. What a mess-up eh?”

“It's kind of exciting,” Kay offers awkwardly. “A baby. Getting married.”

“Jesus, I'm not getting married. I'm not
that
stupid.Just shacking up, that's all. You can't have a bun in the oven at the Duke. Not proper, is it?” She laughs. “I've been fired.”

“Oh Bea.” They stare at each other. For a crazy second Kay thinks of Gene the sailorman from Tennessee. “Remember that sailor?” she asks inanely. “In Melbourne. When we were kids.”

“What sailor?”

“The baddleship man … Don't you remember? In the buttercup patch?”

“Jesus. The buttercup patch. When me dad was still …”

“And a sailor came. He was going to take you to Tennessee.”

“Sounds like one of your tall stories. Or one of mine. The stuff I made up, that you believed! God, Kay, I could tell you anything, you were so stupid.” Bea laughs. “Oh Jesus, I gotta be getting back to work. I got till the end of the month, and we need the dough.”

“Do you have to rush off?” Kay bites her lip, hesitates, then says, “Oh heck, you dreadful woman, I miss the mess in my room,” and throws her arms around Bea. “I'll be an auntie,” she says. “Just think.”

“Struth,” Bea says gruffly. “Poor little bugger. He'll be shanghaied for Sunday school if he doesn't watch out. He'll have to mind his Ps and Qs.”

“And his Bs and Ks.”

“And now a word of prayer …” Bea flutters angelic eyelids, mimicking familiar rituals.

“For our wayward sister Bea,” Kay intones.

“And the child she conceived in sin. Hey, what
is
this? Are you laughing or crying or what?”

“Yes.”

“C'mon, Kay, it's no big deal. Just another bee in my bonnet. Jeez, I gotta have a smoke. I'm sorry.”

“Bea, as if I care.”

“As if you don't, you ninny. So. How's uni then?” She sits beside Kay on the bench.

“Oh Bea, I love it. I have a carrel of my own in the library — well, it's not mine, but no one else uses it, down in the stacks … and I just read all the time.”

“Yeah. So I hear.”

In one instant all the nerve threads in Kay's body are tugged tight, but something is pushing up up and through her like a geyser. Her voice bleats itself out, as proper and vinegarish as Sunday: “From whom do you hear?”

“From whom do you hear,” mimics Bea, exaggerating, sticking her tongue plummily into her cheek. “From who'd ja think, you brainy K-storm?” She begins to pace around the octagonal latticed arbour, sucking hard on her cigarette, smoke dragoning out of her nostrils. She says suddenly, offhandedly, passing on dubious information, “Nicholas says you're bloody brilliant.”

Kay is stunned into speech. “Nicholas
talks
about me?” She means: Nicholas notices me? Of all the students in his seminar, I am actually more than a name on French assignments? Nicholas actually notices, knows, links me to …? Oh God oh God, does that mean it is so embarrassingly obvious that I … ? Does it show when I look at him?

Katherine would like to die quickly and neatly of shame. “Do you mean —”

“He's got a thing about brains. You and the Ashcan, that prissy sheila. Don't catch
her
getting caught with her pants off.”

This coded and convoluted piece of information hits Katherine like a football in the soft hollows of her obsession. She thinks, winded: And your cock-and-bull story about the farmer from Tamborine …?

“Oh for God's sake, stop staring at me like that,” Bea says, sending up smoke tornadoes from mouth and nostrils. “It's not his. I know that for certain, worse luck. He was away with the Ashcan woman.” Smoke floats in a screen between them. “Uni holidays,
you
should know. Three bloody weeks at the crucial time, so that's that.” She makes another circuit of the carved central pole and comes to a halt in front of Kay. “Believe me,” she says, jabbing at the air with her cigarette in emphatic punctuation, “when it's his I'm gonna have, I'll tell you.”

Katherine might as well be on the Big Dipper at the Brisbane Show, so many waves buffet her, so many peaks/troughs/peaks/troughs giddily passing, so many slivers of hope and anguish. She kneels on the bench and leans over the latticework to face the tangle of lantana, the sweep of lawn, the distance noisy with exotic botanical colour. She is afraid she might actually be sick. She feels foolish.

“Kay,” Bea says. “Kay …” She hooks one arm over the lattice and puts the other roughly around Kay's shoulders. “Look at me, you silly ninny.
Look
at me.” But Kay, resisting, brushes her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Oh Kay,” Bea sighs. “You can't have
everything
.” And when Katherine, startled, turns to face her: “You can't have
everything,
Kay.”

* *

Katherine stares at the note that is paper-clipped to her French assignment. It is possible that the entire morning has swum by, she cannot tell; it is possible that if she were to surface from her carrel deep in the stacks, there might be stars above the cloisters and the quad. The note is in red ink from a ballpoint pen, the same ink that has made marginal comments on her assignment and that speaks in a stylish scrawl and clipped Brit accent (pom-talk) from the lower half of the last page of
her essay:

An unequivocal A. Nice work, Katherine
 — 
though I'm not sure your evidence is conclusive for the link between Moli
è
re, Act I, sc iii, and the incident in Madame de S
é
vign
é
's letter. Provocative, nevertheless. And since you've discovered the letters, you might consider doing your next major assignment on them, instead of on the set topic. See me about this.

See me about this. Wouldn't that have been enough? That alone could have sent her into a trance. And then in addition — would you call this afterthought or forethought? — there is the paper-clipped note.

Katherine:

We seem to share an obsession with Verity and I thought perhaps you could help me. I'd be interested in knowing what your sharp and perceptive mind brings to bear on the problem. I understand from Bea that you don't care to frequent the usual student joints. The refectory then? A dinner for your insights? Thursday at six. Let me know if that doesn't suit. Nicholas.

PS. Trust you'll forgive this unorthodox request.

Your sharp and perceptive mind, Katherine thinks, dazed.
I understand from Bea … Your sharp and perceptive mind.
Bea says you don't care to frequent …

How dare Bea talk about me like that? she fumes; as though I were one of her beers on tap at the Duke.

Then she thinks: Nicholas asks her about me.

Because of Verity, of course. Still.
Your sharp and perceptive mind.
Why does he link me with Verity? Does Bea tell him that? Is it possible that Verity herself … that Nicholas and Verity actually discuss …? No. Not possible. Put it down to tattletale Bea.

When Katherine finds herself dreamwalking along Coronation Drive toward the Adelaide Street trams, having got off the university bus one stop too early, it is mid-afternoon. But is it still Tuesday? — because she knows time can bolt — it has happened to her over and over — while she merely stops to pick a wayside thought. Here's something new, however, the reverse, an Einstein knot: the way time can baulk in its tracks, the way the spinning world slows, takes a smoko when heavy business is afoot, buggers off for a day.

How has Katherine arrived on lower George Street, beyond the reach of the tramlines, when she has a tram to catch? She walks past the Duke of Wellington, round the block and past it again. If she does it one more time, Bea might see her, and what are her motives for consulting Bea? On the third circuit she keeps going and gets a tram at the corner of Adelaide and George.
How will the time pass until Thursday at six? Will it pass?

The time does pass,
mirabile dictu,
and here they are at a corner table. Beyond the window, allamanda and bougainvillea, brash siblings, clamour at the sun from trumpet throats, and the lawns fall down toward the river where the racing eights come and go in a bright flash of oars.

“Has she ever talked about it?” Nicholas has asked. He means Verity.

And Katherine, silent, has gone on staring out toward the river. I can never speak of that day, she thinks.

“I've pieced fragments together,” Nicholas says. “I know her parents. I mean the ones who had her brought out here in '46, the De L'anneau family, the ones who adopted her. No one knows what happened to hers. The De L'anneaus have a document:
Believed dead, Auschwitz 1943,
but that's all.” He leans over to the next table. “Mustard? No? I find I have to douse refectory food with something.

“Yes,” he says. “That's how I met her, through the family, when my father absconded and brought me out with him.” He looks out the window, reflective. “I still remember that night, the midnight train to Dover. It seemed like a huge adventure.” He laughs. “Younger sons, you know; gambling debts and whatnot. My father, who continues to cut a somewhat shady swathe through Sydney these days, thought it was a kindness to his older brother, the seventh earl. I don't know what my mother might have thought. She was left behind with a baby. Anyway, one of the De L'anneaus married a second cousin of mine at three removes, or some such thing.”

Katherine's memory, dizzy, is tossing up random images: Gene the Sailorman; the blue stripes on Patrick's legs; Merv Watson with the megaphone in his hands; Nicholas under the mango tree in Finsbury Park. At last, she thinks, the notes of his recorder are reaching my ears.