The Idea of Perfection (39 page)

It was true, though, and Marjorie was not here to listen to him thinking it. He was flimsy, trussed around, bolted stiffly together into an ugly rigid muddle of members to disguise the basic weakness of the structure. But she had both the strength of the concrete and the flexibility of the reinforcement. The greater the load, the stronger she would get, standing planted solidly in bedrock. She would be able to stretch under tension. She was not brittle. She was flesh and bone together, bending without breaking. It was what he loved about her.

The thought took him by surprise.

Love.
He did not know if this was what was meant by
love.

He had felt something for Marjorie which he had always thought must be
love.
There had been the feeling that she was something very special, and fragile. It was a privilege, being her husband, and the husband of such a woman had to show he deserved it.

He never had deserved it, and so it had seemed only fair when she left.

The feeling that he had had for Marjorie, which he had always thought of as
love,
was not the feeling that he had now, watching this woman through the window, her hands deft under the pool of light.

She was standing now, holding up the thing she had been working on, so he could see it was a patchwork, and he could make out the squares and rectangles of light and dark, and some kind of dark-on-light border around the edge. She flung it out over the back of the couch and stood back with her head on one side, looking at it severely, her mouth a grim line.

You could see she was the kind of person who would be inclined to see the faults in a thing. The patchwork looked all right to him, but he could see that she did not think so.

He imagined saying something to her about it.

That would sound patronising.

That would sound as if he found it
boring.

That would sound as if he thought it was
extremely boring.

You could hardly go wrong with
fantastic workmanship.

The only thing was, she might ask him exactly what it was he found so
fantastic.

Also, she might think
fantastic workmanship
was sexist.

Anyway, she would not be fooled. She would know he was only trying to curry favour.

He remembered the way she had laughed, enjoying the company of the man next to her on the bridge. How coldly she had watched him, standing there with the petition in his hand. Thinking about it made a kind of emptiness inside.

As he watched she turned and came over to the window. He stood frozen beside the bottlebrush, not breathing, looking straight into her face. They were separated only by a few metres of warm night air and a pane of glass. He was close enough to see the light winking on the pins between her lips.

She reached up above her head, pulling at the curtain. It did not move and he held his breath as she jerked at it. From this angle her neck was cabled with powerful tendons. The curtain suddenly gave and jerked across the window in front of his face.

The dog panted up at him. He could feel its tail beating against his leg like a code and bent down to scratch the hair behind its ears. He felt as if he had lost or forgotten something. There was the feeling of a gap, where something important belonged. Something was floating away from him. It was tapping him on the shoulder: going, gone.

He supposed it would be like this now, for the rest of his life. Outside, with the curtains shut in his face. Outside, looking in.

IT SEEMED THAT Freddy was starting to enjoy all the secrecy. He made a big thing of play-acting when they met in the street.
Morning, Mrs Porcelline!
he always called in an exaggeratedly casual way, as if she was just the same to him as any of the others:
Morning, Mrs Trimm!
or
Morning, Mrs Fowler!

Then he started embroidering it:
Morning, Mrs Porcelline, school holidays coming up are they?
or
Morning, Mrs Porcelline,
he’d call,
lovely light for a photo today,
and gesture around as if he meant Parnassus Road.

Now, perversely, it seemed she was never alone in the shop with him: now, when she did not want anyone there, Lois or Fiona dawdled for hours over their lamb’s fries and sausages. She could see Freddy enjoyed it.
I do a good sausage,
he’d say seriously.
Though I do say it myself.
He would catch her eye through the gauze then, and wait until Fiona was glancing away. Then he would give her a wink. I
like a nice fat sausage, don’t you, Mrs Porcelline?

She was there with William one day, asking for
six short-loins,
not half an hour after he had been making jokes upstairs about how
long
his particular
short-loin
was, and he gave her a big rude wink through the fly-wire. William had not seen the wink, she was sure, and anyway he was much too young to put two and two together. But it was a risk.

It was bad enough that she had to go the back way to the studio, along the dunny-lane behind the shops, wearing her big hat pulled down low over her face. It was actually more dangerous doing that, in a way, because the windows at the back of the shops and the hotel overlooked the lane, and if anyone had seen her, it would have been hard to explain what she was doing there in the dunny-lane in the middle of the day.

It made her tired, just thinking about it.

But she could see that he loved all the scheming. Upstairs in the studio he had worked out a way of balancing a screen across the top of the stairs so it would make a lot of noise if anyone tried to come in, and had got interested in the idea of a trip-wire and a bell, even drawn a lot of diagrams. Then he had wanted her to get involved with a complicated system of signals in code, based on the arrangement of the things in his shop window.
If the tins of tongue are on the right ofthedripping, it’s okay for you to come up,
he explained,
even if it says Closed. If they’re on the left, it means I really am.

He had laughed at his own ingenuity, and she had seen the tongue in his mouth as he laughed: strong, red, muscular.

But codes and secrets were no part of her pleasure. They meant that you knew what you were doing, and that was exactly what she did not want to know.

The worst time was the day she had come out of the shop, after she had been alone in there with Freddy and he had wanted to fondle her through the flap in the gauze. She had come out a bit flustered, feeling red in the face, and the old woman, Mrs Trimm, was sitting in the gutter right outside. She was a funny old thing, half gone in the head. Ninety-eight, someone had told her. She sat there with her sandshoes in the gutter — in the city you would think she was an old wino, but the Trimms were a good family in the district, apparently — and when Felicity came out she twisted around to look up at her from under her old straw hat.

Hello, dear, she said out of a face that was a web of deeply scored wrinkles. I’m just waiting for my lover to bring the car around.

She slapped her thigh, laughed.

I mean my mother!

She laughed again, stamped one of the sandshoes on the ground.

No, no, I mean my daughter! I’m waiting for my daughter!

And there she was, the daughter, a weather-beaten middle-aged woman driving up in a truck.

Mrs Trimm got up and smoothed down her shabby old skirt as if she was the belle of the ball.

I’m losing my marbles, she leaned close to tell Felicity confidentially. On and off, like a light-switch on the blink.

But just before she turned away to climb up into the cab of the truck she gave Felicity a wink, and when she was up in the seat, she looked out the window at her and did something with her finger against the side of her nose that might or might not have been waving away a fly. Felicity stood in the midday glare, watching the truck shrink away down Parnassus Road.

There were times when the light in the country seemed bright enough to burn the flesh right off your bones.

CORALIE HAD TOLD Harley about a swimming hole down at the river.
Never been measured, it’s that deep,
she had said.
There’s a fault, type of thing. Some bloke come and said.

When she set out it had seemed a pleasant enough day, but long before she got near the river she was hotter and crankier than she had ever been in her life. It was turning out to be a city person’s silly idea. The day had become a scorcher, with an angry little dry wind that burst out of nowhere, funnelling along the valley, whipping her along so that she could feel the back of her skirt snapping against her calves. Every gust was like a blow. The ground along the road was littered with switches of leaves ripped off and flung down. Birds were frantic, darting and wheeling low in the sky, blasted by a gust, then dropping into a hole of stillness.

The sky had a strange bruised look to it, and things seemed to have gone a funny colour. Somewhere away in the National Park there was a bushfire, Coralie had said, and even so far away it was having an effect on the sky above Karakarook. Shadows were not right. Everything was very sharp and small, like things looked at through someone else’s glasses.

She was angry with herself for the words she was finding for the wind. Like the breath
of a furnace.
But she had never felt the breath of a furnace, so what did she mean? Like
opening an oven door.
But it was nothing like opening an oven door. This was not a wind that was going to be domesticated by words.

She hated the wind, the way it hurled itself at her in raw gusts of heat. She hated the grasshoppers, humming hoarsely out of the grass. She hated the cicadas, the pressure-waves of drilling that felt as if a blood vessel in your head was about to burst. She hated the dog, trotting now in front, now behind, panting noisily. She could not bear to look at its tongue, red and desperate, hanging out, drying.

Anyone with any sense was inside on a day like this, behind closed curtains, stretched out on the couch. Only she was the city fool, inching along a dusty road towards an inadequate river.

She could see now why Coralie had given her a funny look when she said she was going to walk out to the swimming hole. She should have climbed off her high horse, asked her advice.
Don’t you think I should?
It would have been easy, and nicer than making her face go glassy when Coralie was obviously waiting to advise her.

Serves me right, she thought grimly.

The funny light seemed to have done something to the way she was moving. Her arm, swinging out in front of her as she strode along, seemed too big, or was it too small? She was conscious of her knees going up and down like piston-ends under her skirt. There was a sense of things having stopped, except for the sound of the blood in her own ears, and the way her knees were continuing to move up and down.

Somewhere in the distance, in between the blasts of the wind, she could hear a dog barking, on and on, and a rooster crowing reedily as if the strange light made it think it was dawn.

Behind her she heard a car approaching, and she moved over on to the stony verge to let it pass. But it did not pass. It slowed down and followed her at a walking pace until she looked around, annoyed. It was a white ute, but she could not see the driver behind the reflections of trees in the windscreen. She stared, and with a jerk it accelerated and stopped just ahead of her. Dust billowed around, fell on her face, her mouth, went up her nose. She was sneezing and coughing at the same time and wiping tears out of her eyes, feeling the grit on her face turn to mud, when the driver got out of the ute and she saw that it was Douglas Cheeseman.

He got out and came over to her, frowning.

Sorry! he cried.

He was flushed, whether with the heat or self-reproach she did not know.

Sorry about the dust! he cried.

He swiped at it with his hat, stirring up more.

Making it worse! Sorry!

Something was tightening in her. She looked away from him. She wished another car would come along and rescue her from the closeness of him, the way he was watching her now.

Just wondered if you’d care for a lift, he said finally.

The words had a stiff rehearsed sound. He met her eye for a moment, then looked away.

You know, in this heat.

He was apologetic, but there was something dogged about the way he stood there in front of her. He was not a man who would give up easily.

She should have said no, right from the start.

Her throat felt full of dust, drying out the words. She shook her head and made some kind of gesture with her fingers, and finally swallowed enough spit to speak.