Slow Man

TWENTY-FIVE

IT IS SATURDAY. Marijana has closeted herself in the study with Drago; the two are having what sounds very much like a row. Her voice, rapid and insistent, rises every now and again above her son's, beating it down.

Ljuba is on the stairway, hopping up and down the stairs, making a clatter.

'Ljuba!' he calls. 'Come and have some yoghurt!' The child ignores him.

Marijana emerges from the study. 'Is OK I leave Ljuba here? She stay with Drago. No trouble. I come back later and fetch her.'

He had been hoping to receive from Marijana a little more of what he pays her to provide, perhaps even another session of body-care; but evidently that will not be forthcoming. Twice a month, like clockwork, a little mechanism at the bank switches money from the Rayment account to the Jokic account. In return for his money, in return for the home from home that he provides for Drago, he receives – what? A shopping service, more and more irregular; infrequent ministrations of a health-professional kind. A not unadvantageous bargain, from Marijana's point of view. But then, as the Costello woman keeps telling him, if he wants to be a father he had better find out about fatherhood as it really is, fatherhood of the non-mystical kind.

Marijana has barely gone off when there are voices from the stairwell and Ljuba reappears with the Costello woman and Drago's friend Shaun in tow, Shaun clad today in a slack T-shirt and shorts down to his calves.

'Hello, Paul,' says the Costello woman. 'I hope you don't mind us breezing in. Ljuba darling, tell Drago that Shaun is here.'

He and she are alone for a moment, the two seniors.

'Not quite in Drago's class, is he, our friend Shaun,' says Costello. 'But that is how gods and angels seem to be: they choose the most distressingly ordinary mortals to consort with.'

He is silent.

'There is a story I keep meaning to tell, that I think will amuse you,' she continues. 'It comes from the distant past, from the time of my youth. One of the boys on our street was very much like Drago. Same dark eyes, same long eyelashes, same not quite human good looks. I was smitten with him. I must have been fourteen at the time, he a little older. I still used to pray in those days. "God," I would say, "let him bestow on me just one of his smiles and I will be yours forever."'

'And?'

'God paid no attention. Nor did the boy. My maiden longings were never requited. So, alas, I never became a child of God. The last I heard of Mr Eyelashes, he was married and had moved to the Gold Coast, where he was making a killing in real estate.'

'So is it all a lie then: Whom the gods love die young?'

'I fear so. I fear the gods no longer have time for us, whether to love us on the one hand or to punish us on the other. They have troubles enough in their own gated community.'

'No time even for Drago Jokic? Is that the moral of your story?'

'No time even for Drago Jokic. Drago is on his own.'

'Like the rest of us.'

'Like the rest of us. He can relax. No spectacular doom hangs over his head. He can be sailor or soldier or tinker or tailor, as he chooses. He can even go into real estate.'

It is the first exchange that he and the Costello woman have had that he would call cordial, even amiable. For once they are on the same side: two old folk ganging up on youth.

Might that be the real explanation for why the woman has descended on him out of nowhere: not to write him into a book but to induct him into the company of the aged? Might the whole Jokic affair, with his ill-considered and to this point fruitless passion for Mrs Jokic at its centre, be nothing in the end but a complicated rite of passage through which Elizabeth Costello has been sent to guide him? He had thought Wayne Blight was the angel assigned to his case; but perhaps they all work together, she and Wayne and Drago.

Drago pokes his head around the door. 'Can Shaun and me look at your cameras, Mr Rayment?'

'Yes. But take care, and put them back in their cases when you have finished.'

'Drago is interested in photography?' murmurs Elizabeth Costello.

'In cameras. He has never seen anything like mine. He knows only the new, electronic kind. A Hasselblad is like a sailing-ship to him, or a trireme. An antiquity. He also spends hours going through my photographs, the nineteenth-century ones. I thought it odd at first, but perhaps it is not so odd after all. He must be feeling his way into what it is like to have an Australian past, an Australian descent, Australian forebears of the mystical variety. Instead of being just a refugee kid with a joke name.'

'That is what he tells you?'

'No, he would not dream of telling me. But I can guess. I can sympathise. I am not unfamiliar with the immigrant experience.'

'Yes, of course. I keep forgetting. Such a proper Anglo-Adelaidean gentleman that I forget you are not English at all. Mr Rayment, rhyming with payment.'

'Rhyming with vraiment. I had three doses of the immigrant experience, not just one, so it imprinted itself quite deeply. First when I was uprooted as a child and brought to Australia; then when I declared my independence and returned to France; then when I gave up on France and came back to Australia. Is this where I belong? I asked with each move. Is this my true home?'

'You went back to France – I forgot about that. One day you must tell me more about that period of your life. But what is the answer to your question? Is this your true home?' She waves a hand in a gesture that encompasses not just the room in which they are sitting but also the city and, beyond that, the hills and mountains and deserts of the continent.

He shrugs. 'I have always found it a very English concept, home. Hearth and home, say the English. To them, home is the place where the fire burns in the hearth, where you come to warm yourself. The one place where you will not be left out in the cold. No, I am not warm here.' He waves a hand in a gesture that imitates hers, parodies it. 'I seem to be cold wherever I go. Is that not what you said of me: You cold man?'

The woman is silent.

'Among the French, as you know, there is no home. Among the French to be at home is to be among ourselves, among our kind. I am not at home in France. Transparently not. I am not the we of anyone.'

It is the closest he has come, with the Costello woman, to lamenting his lot, and it sickens him faintly. I am not the we of anyone: how does she manage to extort such words from him? A hint dropped here, a suggestion dropped there, and he follows like a lamb.

'And Marijana? Are you not desirous of joining the we of Marijana and Drago? And Ljuba? And Blanka, on whom you have yet to lay an eye?'

'That is another question,' he snaps. And will not be drawn further.

Noon passes, and Marijana does not show up. Drago has strapped a doll to his little sister's back with rubber bands; she trots from room to room, her arms stretched out, making a droning noise like an aeroplane. Shaun has brought along some kind of electronic game. The two boys sit in front of the television screen, which emits low whoops and buzzes.

'You know, we don't have to put up with this,' says Elizabeth Costello. 'They don't need to be babysat, these young folk. We could make a quiet exit, go back to the park. We could sit in the shade and listen to the birds. We could look on it as our weekend excursion, our little adventure.'

He is prepared to accept a helping hand from Marijana, who is after all a paid nurse, but not from a woman older than himself. He sends Costello to wait in the entranceway while he negotiates the stairs on his crutches.

On the way down he is passed by one of the neighbours, a slim, bespectacled girl from Singapore who with her two sisters, quiet as mice, occupies the flat above his. He nods to her; the greeting is not returned. In all their time on Coniston Terrace the girls have never acknowledged his existence. Each unto herself: that must be what they are taught in their island state. Self-reliance.

He and Costello find an empty bench. A dog trots up: it gives him a quick, jaunty once-over, then moves on to her. Always embarrassing when a dog pushes its snout into a woman's crotch. Is it reminding itself of sex, dog sex, or is it just savouring the novel, complex smells? He has always thought of Elizabeth as an asexual being, but perhaps a dog, putting its trust in its nose, will know better.

Elizabeth bears the investigation well, letting the dog have its way with her, then pushing it away good-humouredly.

'So,' she says. 'You were telling me.'

'I was telling you what?'

'You were telling me the story of your life. Telling me about France. I was married to a Frenchman once. Didn't I tell you? My first marriage. Unforgettable times. He walked out on me, in the end, for another woman. Left me with a child on my hands. I was, according to him, too mutable. Vipère, was another of the terms he applied to me, which in England is an adder rather than a viper. Sale vipère, those were his words. He never knew where he was with me. Great ones for order, the French. Great ones for knowing where they are with you. But enough of that. We were talking about you.'

'I thought you thought the French were great ones for passion. Passion, not order.'

She turns a reflective eye on him. 'Passion and order, Paul. Both, not one or the other. But proceed with the story of your love affair with France.'

'It is not a long story. At school I was good at science. Not outstandingly good, I was not outstanding at anything, just good. So when I went to university I signed up for science. Science seemed a good bet in those days. It seemed to promise safety, and that was what my mother wanted above all for my sister and me: that we find some safe niche for ourselves in this foreign land where the man whom she had followed, God knows why, was retreating more and more into himself, where we had no family to fall back on, where she floundered in the language and could not get a grip on local ways of doing things. My sister went into teaching, which was one way of being safe, and I went into science.

'But then my mother passed on, and there no longer seemed much point to putting on a white coat and peering into a test tube. So I dropped out of university and bought a ticket to Europe. I stayed with my grandmother in Toulouse and found a job in a photo lab. That was how my career in photography began. But don't you know all this? I thought you knew everything about me.'

'It is news to me, Paul, I promise you. You came to me with no history attached. A man with one leg and an unfortunate passion for his nurse, that was all. Your prior life was virgin territory.'

'I stayed with my grandmother and made overtures, as far as I could, to my mother's family, because in the France we came from, peasant France, family is everything. My cousins might be car mechanics and shop assistants and station foremen, but at heart they were still peasants, only one generation away from black bread and cow manure. I am talking about the 1960s, of course, a bygone age. It is different nowadays. All changed.'

'And?'

'I was not successful. I was not, shall we say, embraced. I had missed too much of what should have been my formation: not just a proper French schooling but a French youth, including youthful friendships, which can be as intense as love, and longer-lasting. My cousins and the people I met through them, people of my age, were already settled into their lives. Even before they left school they knew what metier they were going to follow, what boy or girl they were going to marry, where they were going to live. They could not work out what I was doing there, this gangly fellow with the funny accent and the puzzled look; and I could not tell them because I did not know either. I was always the odd one out, the stranger in the corner at family gatherings. Among themselves they called me l'Anglais. It came as a shock, the first time I heard it, since I had no ties to England, had never even been there. But Australia was beyond their ken. In their eyes Australians were simply Englishmen, mackintoshes and boiled cabbage and all, transplanted to the end of the earth, scratching a living among the kangourous.

'I had a friend, Roger, who did deliveries for the studio where I worked. On Saturday afternoons he and I would pack our saddlebags and head off on our bicycles to Saint-Girons or Tarascon; or deeper into the Pyrenees as far as Oust or Aulus-les-Bains. We ate in cafes, spent nights in the open, rode all day, came back late on Sundays exhausted and full of life. We never had much to say to each other, he and I, yet now he seems to me the best friend I ever had, the best copain.

'Those were the days before the French romance with the automobile had taken off properly. The roads were emptier; roaming the countryside on a bicycle was not such an odd thing to be doing.

'Then I got involved with a girl, and suddenly I had other uses for my weekends. She was from Morocco: that really set me apart. The first of my unsuitable passions. She and I might have married if her family had not made it impossible.'

'Struck by the lightning bolt of passion! And for an exotic maiden too! Material for a book in itself! How magnificent! How extravagant! You astonish me, Paul.'

'Don't mock. It was all very decorous, very respectable. She was studying to be a librarian, until she was summoned home.'

'And?'

'That is all. Her father summoned her, she obeyed, that was the end of the affair. I stayed on in Toulouse for another six months, then I gave up.'

'You came home.'

'Home… What does that mean? I told you what I think about home. A pigeon has a home, a bee has a home. An Englishman has a home, perhaps. I have a domicile, a residence. This is my residence. This flat. This city. This country. Home is too mystical for me.'

'But you are Australian. You are not French. Even I can see that.'

'I can pass among Australians. I cannot pass among the French. That, as far as I am concerned, is all there is to it, to the national-identity business: where one passes and where one does not, where on the contrary one stands out. Like a sore thumb, as the English say; or like a stain, as the French say, a stain on the spotless domestic linen. As for language, English has never been mine in the way it is yours. Nothing to do with fluency. I am perfectly fluent, as you can hear. But English came to me too late. It did not come with my mother's milk. In fact it did not come at all. Privately I have always felt myself to be a kind of ventriloquist's dummy. It is not I who speak the language, it is the language that is spoken through me. It does not come from my core, mon coeur.' He hesitates, checks himself. I am hollow at the core, he was about to say – as I am sure you can hear. 'Don't try to load more onto this conversation than it will bear, Elizabeth,' he says instead. 'It is not significant, it is just biography of a rambling kind.'

'But it is significant, Paul, truly it is! You know, there are those whom I call the chthonic, the ones who stand with their feet planted in their native earth; and then there are the butterflies, creatures of light and air, temporary residents, alighting here, alighting there. You claim to be a butterfly, you want to be a butterfly; but then one day you have a fall, a calamitous fall, you come crashing down to earth; and when you pick yourself up you find you can no longer fly like an ethereal being, you cannot even walk, you are nothing but a lump of all too solid flesh. Surely a lesson presents itself, one to which you cannot be blind and deaf

'Really. A lesson. With a little ingenuity, it seems to me, Mrs Costello, one can torture a lesson out of the most haphazard sequence of events. Are you trying to tell me that God had some plan in mind when he struck me down on Magill Road and turned me into a hobbler? What about yourself? You told me you have a heart condition. Interpret your heart condition to me. What lesson did God have in mind when he struck you in the heart?'

'It is true, Paul, I do indeed have a heart condition, I was not telling a fib. But I am not the only one so afflicted. You have a heart condition of your own – do you really not know that? When I came knocking at your door, it was not to find out how a man rides a bicycle with one leg. I came to find out what happens when a man of sixty engages his heart unsuitably. And, if you don't mind my saying so, you have been a sorry let-down thus far.'

He shrugs. 'I was not put on this earth to entertain you. If you want entertainment' – he waves a hand at the runners, the cyclists, the good folk taking their dogs for a walk – 'you have a wide range to explore. Why waste your time on someone who exasperates you with his obtuseness and keeps letting you down? Give me up as a bad job. Visit yourself on some other candidate.'

She turns and bestows on him a smile that lacks, as far as he can see, any malice. 'I may be capricious, Paul,' she says, 'but not as capricious as that. Capricious: goat-like, leaping from one rock to another. I am too old for leaping. You are my rock. I will stay with you, for the time being. As I told you – remember? – love is a fixation.'

He shrugs again. Love is a fixation. One might equally well call love a bolt of lightning that strikes where it wills. If he is an ignorant baby when it comes to the maladies of love, he does not see that the Costello woman is any better. But he is not going to argue with her. He is tired of arguing.

He is also thirsty. A cup of tea would go down very well. They could cross the bridge to the tea-room on the other bank. They could go back to the flat with its noise and disorder. Or they could forget about tea and go on dawdling here by the riverside, letting the afternoon pass, watching the waterfowl disport themselves. Which?

'Tell me about your marriage,' says Elizabeth Costello. 'You hardly ever mention your wife.'

'I think not,' he says. 'It would not be proper. My wife would not thank me for offering her up as a minor character in one of your literary efforts. But if it is stories you want, I will tell you a story from the period of my marriage that does not involve my wife. You can use it to illustrate my character, or not, as you wish.'

'All right. Shoot.'

'It comes from the time I was still running the studio in Unley. I had two assistants, and one of them happened to fall in love with me. To be accurate, it was not love but adoration. She had no designs on me. That was why she could be so open about it. A perfectly intelligent girl. Pretty too. A fresh-faced, pretty, twenty-year-old girl in a solid, sturdy body, the body of a rugby player. Nothing she could do about it. No diet was going to save her, transfigure her into a sylph.

'I was teaching an evening course at the time, at what used to be the polytechnic. Principles of photography. Three evenings a week this girl came to my class. Sat in the back row and gazed at me. Took no notes.

' "Don't you think this is becoming excessive, Ellen?" I said to her. "It's my only chance," she replied. No blushes. She never blushed. "Your only chance for what?" "To be alone with you." That was how she defined being alone with me: being free to sit in class and watch and listen.

'I had a rule: never get involved with employees. But in this one case I had a lapse. I broke the rule. I left a note for her: a time, a place, nothing else. She came, and I took her to bed.

'You probably expect me to say it was a humiliating experience, for her and therefore for me. But it wasn't humiliating at all. I would go so far as to call it joyous. And I learned a lesson from it: that love need not be reciprocated as long as there is enough of it in the room. This girl had enough love for two. You are the writer, the heart expert, but did you know that? If you love deeply enough, it is not necessary to be loved back.'

The Costello woman is silent.

'She thanked me. She lay in my arms crying and gasping "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" "It's all right," I said. "No need for anyone to thank anyone."

'The next day there was a note on my desk: "Whenever you have need of me…" But I did not call on her again, did not try to repeat the experience. Once was enough, to absorb that lesson.

'She worked for me for another two years, keeping a correct distance because that was what I seemed to want. No tears, no reproaches. Then she disappeared. Not a word, just stopped coming to work. I spoke to her colleague, my other assistant, but she was in the dark. I telephoned her mother. Didn't I know, the mother said? Ellen had taken a new job and moved to Brisbane as a rep for a pharmaceuticals company. Hadn't she given notice? No, I said, this was the first I heard of it. Oh, said the mother, she told us she had spoken to you and you were quite cut up.'

'And?'

'That's all. End of story. I was quite cut up: aside from the lesson in love, that was the part that interested me most. Because I wasn't cut up, not at all. Did the girl really think I would be cut up because she had left my employ? Or was the story about her boss being cut up just something she told her mother so that she would not seem too abject?'

'Are you asking my opinion? I don't know the answer, Paul. The claim that you, her boss, were cut up may be the part of the story that you find interesting, but it is not what interests me. What interests me is the Thank you, thank you! Is Thank you, thank you! what you plan to say to Marijana if and when she yields herself to you? Why didn't you say Thank you, thank you! to the girl I procured for you, the one you singled out for your attentions because she would not be able to witness you in your sadly reduced state?'

'I did not single her out. You were the one who brought her up.'

'Nonsense. I merely took my cue from you. You singled her out in the hospital lift. You had dreams about her. Why did you not thank her, I repeat? Was it because you paid her, and if you pay you don't need to say thank you? Your rugby player had enough love for two, you say. Do you really think love can be measured? Do you think love comes by volume, like beer? That as long as you bring a case of it, the other party is permitted to come empty-handed – empty-handed, empty-hearted? Thank you, Marijana (Marijana with the j this time), for letting me love you. Thank you for letting me love your children. Thank you for letting me give you my money. Are you really such a dummy?'

He stiffens. 'You asked me for a story, I gave you a story. I am sorry you don't like it. You say you want to hear stories, I offer you stories, and I get back nothing except ridicule and scorn. What kind of exchange is that?'

'What kind of love?, you might have added. I didn't say I didn't like your story. I found it interesting, and well told too, the story of you and your rugby player. Even the interpretation you give is interesting in its own right. But the question that nags me is: Why does he pick on this story to tell me, this above all others?'

'Because it is true.'

'Of course it is true. But what does it matter if it is true? Surely it is not up to me to play God, separating the sheep from the goats, dismissing the false stories, preserving the true. If I have a model, it is not God, it is the Abbe of Cîteaux, the notorious one, the Frenchman, the one who said to the soldiers in his pastoral care, Slay them all – God will know who are His.

'No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.'

She pauses, cocks an eyebrow at him. Is it his turn? He has nothing more to say. If truth and lies are the same, then speech and silence may as well be the same too.

'Do you notice, Paul,' she resumes, 'how conversations between you and me keep falling into the same pattern? For a while all goes swimmingly. Then I say something you don't want to hear, and at once you clam up or storm off or ask me to leave. Can't we get beyond such histrionics? We don't have much time left, either of us.'

'Don't we.'

'No. Under the gaze of heaven, in the cold eye of God, we don't.'

'Is that the truth. Go on.'

'Do you think I find this existence any less hard than you? Do you think I want to sleep outdoors, under a bush in the park, among the winos, and do my ablutions in the River Torrens? You are not blind. You can see how I am declining.'

He gives her a hard stare. 'You are making up stories. You are a prosperous professional woman, you are as comfortably off as I am, there is no need for you to sleep under bushes.'

'That may be so, Paul. I may be exaggerating a little, but it is an apt story, apt to my condition. As I try to impress on you, our days are numbered, mine and yours, yet here I am, killing time, being killed by time, waiting – waiting for you.'

He shakes his head helplessly. 'I don't know what you want,' he says.

'Push!' she says.