The Drowner Read online

  ‘The desert?’

  ‘The dryness, the healthy air. I was led to believe the desert might be helpful for her disorder.’

  ‘Disorder?

  Her voice was as thin and light as a husk. ‘The absence of water was a factor. She is a marionette joyeuse.’

  These happy-puppet children, Angelica explained, were marked by common characteristics. Heightened activity, insomnia, limited speech, a lack of coordination and muscle tone. Despite these mental and physical handicaps they were happy children with very lovable dispositions. They laughed all day long.

  At three the child still couldn’t walk. She was floppy. When she was excited she flapped her arms up and down, her elbows flexed like a marionette.

  ‘The doctors say she will probably walk by the age of five or six,’ Angelica said. ‘Meanwhile she needs us to pull her strings.’

  His head was swimming. ‘She’s so fair and pretty,’ he murmured. The blue-white eyes, milky skin and flyaway gold hair. A picture book angel. Needless to add: and no resemblance to him. Or, for that matter, to her. Both he and Angelica were olive-skinned by comparison.

  She couldn’t avoid his questioning look. She said, ‘Marionettes joyeuses resemble each other more than their parents.’

  He could see deep into the grey-green depths. No trace of blue in the irises. He saw her floating back in the dark estuary. The thick, sluicing river water. External cold, internal heat.

  ‘I knew the instant of her conception,’ she said.

  Was she remembering the surroundings, the conception’s furnishings and accompanists? Midnight algaes fluttering against her thighs. The cool brush of scales and jelly in the black river. Did she hear African water music that night?

  ‘You were ill,’ he said. ‘The blackwater fever.’

  She was still looking at him, though her face was expressionless. ‘Maybe that, too.’

  The little girl was named Ada.

  Ada has a vocabulary of six words. Four of them are to do with liquid. In her obsession, a bowl of brown Windsor soup equals the Indian Ocean for excitement. She tries to climb into seaside picture books, into illustrations of streams and ponds. Her jaw is determined as she endeavours to submerge herself in flowing inks and colours, to plunge into paper and cardboard.

  Diving into books of water, she blinks and smiles and thrusts out her tongue in pleasure. Apparently the tongue-thrusting is another characteristic of the happy-puppet children. She pushes it through a little gap in her front teeth.

  To hear her mother talk. Ada is a formidable personality. In Wiltshire, he thinks, such a wispy fairy child would be called a killcrop, a changeling. He wants to buy her books to swim in.

  ‘Please don’t come to the room again,’ Angelica says suddenly.

  ‘I must.’

  ‘The situation is difficult. I have lots of lines to learn for this play. Rehearsals to attend.’

  ‘I want to see Ada. And you.’

  ‘I am a different person.’

  Nevertheless it seems perverse not to touch her. He strokes her cheek as he stands to leave. The briefest brush of his scarred hand.

  She rises, too, and stands motionless. ‘Goodbye.’

  How oddly quiet it is. The splashing in the next room has ceased, the hum of drinkers not yet risen up from the public bar. The walls, the furniture, watching and listening. His pulse drumming in his head. Conscious of his exposed back, but heedless of any gunshot, even inviting it, he walks slowly out the door.

  Now his poem is under way, Felix Locke writes as soon as he rises each morning. Coming to his desk straight from sleep, fragments of dreams still clinging to his quieter mind, he allows the process of writing to properly wake him. Before his morning coffee, before he begins work, before he has seen a single body or run the chamois and Fowler’s Polish over the rosewood coffins which now arrive twice a day on the Perth train, he sits down and begins to write.

  It’s a big poem. It tells of unrequited love and of the death of an old drinking companion. It’s neither bush ballad nor traditional lyric. Something different? He hardly knows, but he likes its images. He likes the way he has scattered figures in his own personal landscape. (An odd effect of the poem: from the moment he began to write it his imaginary illnesses dropped away.) It tumbles along, encompassing the simplest and grandest topics in his experience. Lust and loneliness, fevers and fortunes, the mysterious disguises of the private self. Romance in a time of gold and typhoid.

  He is as avid a reader of the poem as he is its writer. He’s keen to see where it is leading.

  His images? Women wearing parrot feathers and cringing from an undertaker’s grasp. A body’s hands folded for burial. A droll, exhausted nurse flicking hair from her forehead as dawn rises over deaths in the desert.

  Life nevertheless prevailing. Time for a joke now and then. A drink. Always the prospect of love. He is an optimistic man (an American, after all) and he has the help of Whitman and Thoreau.

  Inez lets herself into the studio. It is dustier, otherwise unchanged. The same theatrical backdrops. The same sky streaming placidly across the skylight. The same familiar smell. Her throat prickles, constricted not only by this odour of Axel—which still clings to the walls and photographic equipment and furniture, still hovers in the cool, monochromic air—but by the shocking idea of his smell outlasting his body.

  As executors of Axel’s estate, Dr Malebranche and Felix Locke will be coming to inspect his property, all his equipment and belongings. To add everything up. But she has the keys. She was his nurse. She was …

  ‘Tell me something,’ Dr Malebranche had asked her that day at the Prince of Wales Hotel after they admitted Axel to hospital. The doctor was gently matter-of-fact about the revelation, and concerned only for Axel’s health. His tone was kind, of course, professional, but—it must be said, as they stood to go, after perhaps one drink too many—also inquisitive. ‘His famous cream suits, naturally. But what—ah—other form of subterfuge did Axel use?’

  She looked at him and looked away. Felix was pink with embarrassment. She could hardly speak, and was prim when she did so. ‘I have no idea.’

  Now she sits on the sofa where … She goes into the bedroom where …

  She fights off visions of herself as she pulls open each drawer in the chest of drawers, as she draws out the trunk from under the bed and unlocks it, as the smothering intimacy of his belongings, of his lingering personality, almost floor her.

  There she is. She collects the photographs of herself from the trunk. His other photographs.

  In the chest of drawers she finds three of the padded leather things. What are they called again? Cricket protectors, the cupped leather shields that batsmen and wicket-keepers wear under their trousers to protect their balls from cricket balls. The leather is worn and wrinkled, the edges creased and stained with sweat. There are a lot of straps. She briefly holds one against her pelvis, gives herself a bulge.

  How uncomfortable in this climate, she thinks.

  She carries the photographs and protectors out to the backyard.

  Dr Malebranche had sighed, ‘How hard for a … woman to keep up that masquerade all these years.’ All three of them on the hotel balcony flinching at the sharp emotion of the word. Woman. It was impossible to imagine changing Axel’s pronoun to she. They looked intently at her.

  ‘You know he’s tall and wiry. His manner is masculine … in a foreign sort of way.’ She sounded defensive to herself. ‘He’s an adventurer and a traveller. He feels at home in raw, dry places. Places with new people.’ She didn’t say he wasn’t the only one choosing to escape too-moist-and-emotional Europe. That the unconscious mind of many an outsider needed to dry out in a fiery male domain. Or even that the Western Australian desert in summer wasn’t a million miles from hellfire.

  She glared at them instead. ‘What’s the matter with his cream suits? Should he wear bloody sequins?’

  The men were mortified. It was an uncomfortable moment.

&nbs
p; Axel is dead now, but there is no reason for further embarrassment. She drops the photographs and the leather groin protectors in the incinerator, douses them with paraffin and sets them alight.

  Watching the oily smoke curl up, she feels a thin, sharp emotion, something between guilt and grief, escape her. She lets it pass away, turning from it as she turns her face from the smoke and the stink of burning leather. Surely that hadn’t been her, Inez, here?

  She takes a last quick look around the studio. Having closed doors on affecting memories before, she has hardly any trouble doing so again.

  Why then does she feel compelled to pause by the bust of the Unknown Woman from the Seine? To finger a cool eyelid, to pick it up, with some difficulty—it was surprisingly heavy—and take it with her?

  When he had walked out of the hotel room Angelica stood for a moment staring at the closed door. A scene already seen. And a scene she knew wouldn’t be repeated.

  The brush of his hand on her cheek.

  The sound of her sob surprised her.

  She hurried to the door and opened it. A gust of bluff, yeasty air struck her face as she looked out along the empty corridor. She closed the door and sat heavily on the bed—the bed they had avoided sitting on, the bed they had treated as invisible—while the framed photographs on the wall danced in front of her.

  Photographs by THE AXEL BOEHM STUDIO. Sepia mining scenes. Afghans and camels in ceremonial regalia. Two dimpled coquettes in sausage curls and party frocks struggling to hold up a gold nugget. Submerged in the dusty landscape, a filthy moustached dryblower staring at her with burning eyes.

  In the adjoining bedroom, still wet-haired and snoring quietly: her naked father and daughter, actor and puppet, sleeping in each other’s arms.

  A mystery to her was how a photographer could capture such picturesque proof of human existence, its industriousness, optimism and diversity, could even make it decorative, whereas she walked from the sleeping pair to the window, looked out into the stark world and saw nothing at all.

  THE RESERVOIR

  TIME WAS SLOW and hot here. Was it only two weeks since the photograph? Since they had dropped down a mine shaft half a mile into the earth? Since his incandescence?

  Only their second day in town, and the Chamber of Mines was already urging the ‘noted visiting thespians’ to go down a mine. To see the workings, view fabulous reefs of gold and, of course, be photographed adventurously doing so. The Chamber’s reasoning was clear enough: Hammond and Angelica Lloyd were famous London actors, and the head offices of most of the big mines were in London. (The only goldmine with a postal address not in E.C. was in Glasgow.)

  That photographer, Boehm, accompanying them and Mr Winterbottom, the mine manager, was a German judging by his accent. His sighs and hair flicks and odd languid manner making it clear that photographing celebrities in the bowels of the earth was a commonplace assignment. But this time his photographs would have extra newsworthiness. As the enthusiastic Winterbottom kept stressing to them, ‘Miss Lloyd is the first woman to go underground!’

  Helping her into the cage at the shaft head, Winterbottom set the tone for the peculiar day. The cage jerking a yard upwards before it dropped. Winterbottom’s skin trailing sweet varnish-whiffs of alcohol as he offered her his peppermints. ‘You might note that our impending descent is the equivalent of climbing to the top of the Eiffel Tower three times. In reverse, of course.’

  The image clearest in her own imagination: Aladdin’s cave. Expecting to step out into a glowing cavern of gold and riches. Dripping pearly stalactites. Somehow even diamonds, rubies and sapphires weren’t beyond possibility.

  Instead, stepping from the cage into a rock dining room. Eight hundred feet below the surface of the earth, thirty miners stolidly eating their midday meal. Ore-coloured men sitting primly on stools of rock, their pannikins glistening in the candlelight, munching bread and beef and fruit cake, sipping their tea. Hardly looking up.

  Down again, another two thousand feet. A narrow-gauge rail line curving into infinity. Along the rails the ash-faced men pushing small trucks loaded with ore. Above and below and beside them, jackhammers supposedly drilling and dynamite allegedly exploding. But, she thought, you would never know of these whirlblasts within the rock. The phlegmatic rock giving no hint of its interior turmoil.

  Its silence was threatening enough. Its colossal weight. She felt enclosed by rock, down too deep, jammed in rock like a fossilised leaf. At the bottom of this hard and pressing sea the dark air was so thick and cloyingly warm that the Annexe for the Less Lunatic sidled into her mind. And around the bend here was black nothingness.

  Was it this sickly warmth so affecting the photographer? Making him so pallid and sweaty as he tramped around the rubble in his search for clarity, for a spot to set up his tripod away from the dust of drilling? Positioning them eventually by a cavernous rock wall supposedly bursting with gold. Gold? All she could see by candlelight were distinctive green veins of something—did Winterbottom say vanadium? And the photographer’s hands starting to shake.

  Of far more news interest than a woman, even a London actress, going underground—to judge by the disbelief, then panic, bright on Winterbottom’s face—was the magnesium flare exploding and igniting the head of Hammond Lloyd.

  The famous actor was carted on his back in an ore truck, kicking and howling, to the shaft. Pushed into the cage, willed upwards to the blissful stinging glare and sky.

  In the clattering, apologetic rush to the cage, to the sick bay and back to the hotel to await a thorough medical examination, she forgot, then recalled, the photographer white and mortified, doubled over his case of plates at the bottom of the mine.

  ‘Accidents do happen. Of course Mr Lloyd was a sport about it.’ This was Mr Winterbottom to the local reporters, urgently attempting to sidestep lawsuits on two continents, glowing around his collar at the thought of adverse publicity and the please explain telegraph from head office in Bishopsgate.

  Ham in fact cursing and tearing furiously at his smoking eyebrows every foot of the half mile to the sunlight. Coming up from the depths, the smell of his hair like burning goose feathers in the cage.

  But the attending Dr Malebranche said he had seen the desert sun do far worse damage to the tissues of a face. And just a bland paragraph appeared in the Miner and Express below the photograph: ‘Miss Angelica Lloyd Breaks Convention by Going Underground at the Golden Kingdom Gold Mine’. (A blurry Ham-on-fire cropped from the picture.)

  The impresario Marcus Doyle, putting his faith in makeup and professionalism, and the healing passage of a fortnight, said his only concern was for the comfort and wellbeing of Mr Lloyd. (Of course the play would go on.)

  The actor’s daughter? She had seen him underground crowned in shocking radiance, and she could see him curled up baby-naked now, his arse crossed by a rectangle of sun.

  God, he had seemed to implode. The sane air burnt right out of him.

  Will’s fantasy is to set fire to the theatre on opening night. His Majesty’s: a new wooden building, dry heat, combustible materials. No water supply. Such a blaze could never be contained. To strike a match against a simulated outback heatwave backdrop—still damp with turpentine—and see the place consumed from stalls to gods.

  He wants all the drama of the theatre. He wants to see this exuberant form of death piercing the sky with its arrows. Catch Ham in his dressing room before the audience arrives. (The surrounding stores and banks are vacant after-hours. No need for innocent first-nighter deaths.)

  How tragic and ironic! The water here at last, but not yet piped to town!

  The fire brigade could try fighting that one with their long-handled shovels and natty red sand buckets!

  Earlier, sleep had put him and Angelica back in the bath at Bath. In this fantasy his dry hands peeled and blistered with lost opportunities. Of course he tried to stroke her softest flesh. Naturally she pulled away. They walked home along the canal path as tortoises galloped up the ban
ks and children skimmed stones at them across the canal. Stones scudded by, smashing windows, scattering splinters of glass.

  He wakes then, thinking instantly of her, and can’t sleep again. The theatre conflagration is only the latest of three years’ vengeful three-o’clock fantasies. Except in this one her fate is ambivalent and cloudy. She’s the merest whiff of turpentine on silk.

  Now there is the child.

  In realistic noonday life he takes a different decisive action. On his way out of the hotel he leaves an envelope for Angelica at the front desk. An invitation—for her alone—to the opening ceremony of the water scheme. Then he catches the afternoon train to the coast.

  Can he bear the suspense? A week of constant train travel and official celebrations and band music to endure before the opening ceremony.

  First the arrival of the Royal Mail Steamer Britannia in Fremantle harbour with the official guests from the eastern states: the federal ministers, state premiers, army generals, business leaders—even sportsmen and famous artistes. And Forrest of course, now Lord Forrest, Minister for Defence in the first national government. Greeting them at the wharf is a buffeting January heatwave. And then there is the bustle to Perth, the special trains carrying them up into the ranges, into the teeth of the hot easterly, for the opening of the dam, with Lady Forrest officially starting the pumping machinery at the number one pumping station at Mundaring Weir as the Bavarian Band strikes up ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’.

  Inside the great white marquee erected on the stony floor of the valley the temperature is rising past 105 degrees. Even with the sides of the tent open to catch the air, the distinguished visitors look dazed, kept awake only by the constant activity of brushing flies from their roast beef and wine glasses and their dripping foreheads and collars. As the after-luncheon speeches run on, Dame Nellie Melba, the operatic soprano, fans herself with her programme and says something sotto voce to Mephan Ferguson, the inventor and manufacturer of the revolutionary locking-bar pipe, and he laughs out loud.