The White Body of Evening
F
OR
R
OSA
The white body of the evening
Is torn into scarlet,
Slashed and gouged and seared
Into crimson,
And hung ironically
With garlands of mist.
FROM “SUNSETS”
BY RICHARD ALDINGTON
(1892—1962)
O
n the day of his wedding, Albert Walters conquered his fear of strong spirits and drank everything that came his way. What, after all, was the point of restraint? Every step he’d taken towards the altar had been reckless and now, after an engagement of barely a fortnight, the thought of decorum just for the sake of good form seemed absurd. Anna, sure enough, had reverted to a demure Lutheranism, despite being two months pregnant, and the small bluestone chapel in East Melbourne had lent itself to the illusion of considered matrimony. But by late afternoon, as the party left the tranquillity of the ceremony behind it and headed to a wine saloon in the Eastern Arcade, Albert was ready to cast off the pretence and, with embittered enthusiasm, embrace the comedy of his fall into rectitude.
The wedding party’s short journey to the Australian Wine Shop could not have involved a sharper contrast. In the spring of 1891 East Melbourne was a calming place, protected from the city by the Fitzroy Gardens and at a safe enough distance from Richmond and Collingwood not to be disturbed by the larrikin element. It was an appropriate place for an afternoon marriage. A dignified Lutheran chapel in a quiet street, followed by a pleasant stroll through the neatly laid out gardens should have supplied a leisurely sense of ceremony in keeping with the demands of middle-class propriety.
The Eastern Arcade, in the city proper, belonged to a different world. Connecting Bourke and Little Collins Streets, a narrow passage of shops and saloons formed an enclosed court covered by a domed glass roof. Rickety wooden stairs at either end sagged and warped underfoot as they led to a second storey, where another lot of shadowy businesses framed a balcony overlooking a flagstone pavement turned black with filth. The shops on both levels were of a dubious character. Spiritualists and phrenologists with exotic names, nondescript booksellers and stationers, a billiard parlour and a few unmarked windows draped mysteriously with crimson velvet, vied for the attention of the loiterers who, initiated into the dreamlike caverns of the city, were disinclined to scurry through to the more populated streets.
The Australian Wine Shop was a double-fronted saloon partitioned into a bar and a parlour by a makeshift curtain. In these shabby surroundings the wedding celebration was attended by no more than a dozen people selected without much conviction from Albert’s meagre circle of acquaintances. Most of them were clerks and salesmen from Citizen’s Insurance. Sid Packard, Albert’s immediate superior in the accounts department, had brought his wife Sadie, and a couple of other blokes were accompanied by sullen-looking young women too lazy to conceal the occasional yawn.
Both of Albert’s parents were dead, and apart from his older brother, Robert, there was no one present who could be considered family. Anna found this disheartening. Her parents were still in South Australia and could not afford to come all the way to Melbourne for a wedding they thought hasty and ill-considered to begin with. She hadn’t expected a conventional wedding, but nor had she expected the whole thing to be as perfunctory and disenchanting as it was. By the time the party had walked through the gardens to the edge of the city, the hot sun, the utter lack of civility, the lukewarm congratulations from people she hardly knew and the weary sense that the day had turned out to be just as tiresome as every other, left her on the verge of tears. But walking into the half-light of the arcade was like entering the crystal world of a fairytale, and for a moment she was overcome with its fantastic squalor. Murkily refracted rays of sunlight dripped down from the ceiling and slid off the plate-glass shopfronts and she imagined she was in a subaquatic city. But a moment later, led into the wine saloon by her new husband, her heart sank again.
The men gathered around the cramped, horseshoe-shaped bar drinking Albert’s health, a few women congregated by the window and Anna was left alone, between the two, desperately wanting to be part of something on her own wedding day.
“Are you all right there, love?”Albert shouted.
Anna smiled limply and tried to work her way closer to her husband, to take his hand in a gesture of warmth.
“What have you got planned then, Bert?” a pimply young man asked with a suggestive smirk.
“Booked over the way, haven’t we, Anna?”
“That ought to be a bit of luxury,” someone added.
“Not that residential job on Bourke Street?” someone else said with a laugh.
“Don’t be crass,” Albert said.
Anna slunk back towards the women. Her mother had warned her about the boorishness of Australian men. According to a kind of mental reflex, she always spoke about this in conjunction with her first image of South Australia as a place of hard, dry ground, denuded eucalypts and miserable slab huts that made the simple peasant cottages of the German countryside look like palaces.
“What would you like to drink then, love?” asked Sadie Packard as she gently led Anna into the parlour. The two other young women, Mavis Day and Sophie Adams, had already cautiously retreated, suggesting that an arcade wine saloon was uncharted territory for them as well.
At the sight of the nervous, unfamiliar faces welcoming her, Anna began to sob.
“They don’t do it like this in Germany then, love?” asked Sadie, trying her best to console her.
“No, not really.”
“Never mind then. They don’t do it like this here either.”
For a moment the sound of festive male voices from behind the curtain overwhelmed the four women, and an awkward silence ensued.
“What part of Germany are you from, Anna?” asked Mavis, finally.
Anna wiped her nose on a handkerchief. “I’m not really from Germany. My parents are. But I was born in Hahndorf, near Adelaide.”
She spoke crisp, accent-free English. Yet the absence of local idiom and inflection still suggested a vague kind of foreignness that, to the uninitiated, would have been impossible to trace.
“So you’re a native of the place, well and truly.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
She wondered what it would mean to be a native of a country like Australia. The thought had never occurred to her before, but it met her now with an unnerving clarity.
“I’ve never thought of myself as Australian,” she said. “I suppose I always thought we’d one day go back to Europe. My mother always talked about it, though she’s lived here now for more than twenty years.”
Now that she was married and, more to the point, expecting a child by the winter, Anna wondered if she’d ever see the German countryside for which her mother pined.
“Well, it’s a mighty good time to be an Australian anyway, ain’t it?” Mavis said.
“Yes, I suppose,”Anna said, not quite following her drift.
“How’d you end up over here?” Sadie asked. “Coming from so far away, I mean.”
“My aunt moved here with her husband years ago. They went to Ballarat first, but soon gave up prospecting and settled in Melbourne. After her husband died, she fell ill. She was too sick to travel, so I came down here and looked after her.”
“That was good of you,” Mavis said.
“She didn’t really have anyone,” Anna went on. “No children, I mean.”
“Is your aunt well enough now?”
“She died during the winter.” Anna hadn’t wanted to say this. She knew it would cast a further pall over the proceedings and again the women fell silent.
A few moments later, Robert Walters, her new husband’s brother, appeared at the table, lightly touching Anna on the shoulder.
“I’ve got to get going,” he said. “Have to be at the paper by four. Albert won’t be much longer, I made him promise. I hope it works out well for you both.”
“Thank you, Robert,” she said.
“Look, Anna, I’m sorry about all this. I should have had more of a hand in the whole thing.”
“Don’t be, Robert.”
With a hunched posture he walked back through the curtain and out into the arcade. He touched his hat at her through the window and slowly moved off towards the street.
“I think he might be carrying a flame for you, Anna,” Sadie chirped.
“Might have fancied it himself, you reckon?” said Sophie, following Sadie’s lead.
Anna tried not to take much notice, but was grateful for the attention of the three women who now seemed determined to make the best of a bad situation. Sadie went into the bar and a moment later reappeared with a bottle of champagne and four glasses, fending off the vulgar attentions of her husband, who lingered for a moment at the parlour entrance.
“Get back in there, you lout,” she said, pushing him away with her foot.
It might have been the effects of the sun on her pale skin earlier in the afternoon, but after her first glass of champagne Anna felt giddy and hot. As the mood became more relaxed she knew she was still delicately poised on the edge of some melancholic slough, and strove to hold herself clear of it. She could have hugged Sadie, who guzzled down glass after glass of champagne with a stoical commitment to the spirit of debauchery coming from the bar.
It was twilight by the time the toasts were made and Albert, red with whisky and reeking of cigars, was ready to leave.
“C’mon love,” he said, holding his arms out to Anna as they stumbled from the saloon into the musty gloom of the arcade.
Leaving the others assembled at the entrance, the newlyweds walked back towards Bourke Street to the cheers of the little crowd gathered behind them. Out on the road Albert hailed a hansom and ushered Anna onto the worn leather. As they started moving, he worked his lumpish hands into the folds of her dress and over her thighs. She kissed him. She felt it was the right thing to do, though her heart wasn’t in it, not right now. She was tipsy, and could sense the tiredness that comes from disappointment welling up in her again.
“Do you really love me, Albert?” she asked, pushing him away from her.
She knew the question was both contrived and conventional, but still it seemed important to try to summon forth the ideal conception of love and marriage, if only to reconcile herself more quickly to the fallen reality.
“What kind of question is that? Of course I do.”
“It’s not just the baby?”
“Of course not,” he answered, though he too knew that his words were part of a thin surface barely concealing his doubt.
He proceeded with his clumsy groping, to which she submitted in a passive, distracted manner, glancing out the window at the crowds moving along Bourke Street. He could see she had lost interest and followed her eyes out onto the passing verandahs, noticing the building that used to house the waxworks he’d go to as a boy. Sohier’s it was called.
Albert sank back into the leather, lazily swaying with the movement of the carriage, thinking about the displays that used to fascinate him all those years ago. He remembered a smooth, bald head split open by an axe still embedded in the skull, and a beautiful young woman lying on a bed in a state of partial undress with her throat hacked through to the spine, and two knife-wielding Chinamen lingering like vultures over the bloody corpse. The image still unnerved him. He couldn’t get the frozen stare of the murdered woman out of his mind, the dead eyes fixed obsessively on his.
He looked back at Anna, who was still gazing out the window, and was impressed by her gentle pallor, coloured by the sun and the glow of pregnancy. He couldn’t help but compare it with the hard, jaundiced skin of the two wax murderers. Anna’s flawless, white complexion and her occasional wandering look of indifference fascinated him. It was what had attracted him to her in the first place. Someone had said that she looked pagan, and though he didn’t really know what that was supposed to mean, the word had a mysterious implication which drew him to the pale German. Initially he dreamt of her giving in to a sterile, depraved kind of lust. But when she finally did surrender, in a moment of weakness or perhaps apathy, it was with a prudish frigidity that he hadn’t counted on. Later, when she told him that she was pregnant, he was moved by her nervousness and replied, with barely a moment’s hesitation, that he was in love with her. At the back of it all, through their brief engagement and now the day of their marriage, was the dull regret, a longing for the brutal act of conquest that she had never quite allowed him.