Springtime

  Also by Michelle de Kretser

  The Rose Grower

  The Hamilton Case

  The Lost Dog

  Questions of Travel

  Published by Catapult

  catapult.co

  Copyright © 2014 by Michelle de Kretser

  All rights reserved

  First published in Australia and the UK by Allen & Unwin

  Illustrations by Oliver Winward

  ISBN: 978-1-936787-44-9

  Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by

  Publishers Group West, a division of Perseus Book Group

  Phone: 800-788-3123

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015951164

  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Sara White

  THAT SPRING, FRANCES walked along the river every morning with her dog, Rod. One of the things that had been said in Melbourne when she announced that she was moving to Sydney was, You’ll miss the parks. Other things included: There are no good bookshops there. And, What will you do for food?

  Rod and Frances would cross the Wardell Road bridge and veer off onto the path that took them past the river through sports fields and parks. There were joggers and cyclists, and a girl skipping near the public barbecues. Faces grew familiar. A woman with weights attached to her wrists would say good morning, as did the Greek tailor who kept a poster of the hammer and sickle in his shop in Dulwich Hill. Frances kept an eye out for other dogs. If she saw one approaching, she swerved off the path because of Rod.

  She would have said that she was heading east, but sometimes found the sun skulking behind her left shoulder. Her sense of direction, molded to Melbourne’s grid, functioned by the straight line and the square. In Sydney the streets ran everywhere like something spilled. The river curved, and the sun dodged about. On a stretch of the path where there were no trees, the sun bounced off the water to punch under the brim of Frances’s hat. It was a relief to arrive at the apartment block that could be seen on the escarpment, rising behind trees. Charlie’s colleague Joseph lived there. He had a long terrace for the view and a tucked-away second balcony no larger than an armchair: shady all through summer, in winter it floated in light. Every day, whatever the weather, Joseph sat there for ten minutes, wind-bathing without his shirt.

  His apartment block, sixties brown brick with a sand-colored trim, signaled the start of Frances’s favorite section of the walk. It was shaded by she oaks, and she could look into the gardens that ran down to the path. She was still getting used to the explosive Sydney spring. It produced hip-high azaleas with blooms as big as fists. Like the shifty sun, these distortions of scale disturbed. Frances stared into a green-centered white flower, thinking, I’m not young anymore. How had that happened? She was twenty-eight.

  For as long as she could remember, the weekend supplements of newspapers had informed her that her generation was narcissistic, spoiled, hyperconscious of brands. It was like reading about a different species. She was a solitary, studious girl, whose life had taken place in books; at least four years of it had passed in the eighteenth century. Her young parents had always treated her, their only child, as if she were more or less grown up. Her mother was French. Frances was taken to restaurants at an early age, expected to sit quietly and eat her food in a mannerly way while adults talked over her head. As a teenager, she devised a game in which she identified the sentence this or that person was least likely to utter. Her mother’s was: I’m not interested in what you think, tell me what you feel.

  The previous year, at a party to which Frances almost didn’t go, she had met Charlie. His mother, too, was French. Charlie and Frances discovered that as children they had both called a fart a prout. Frances told her friends that Charlie had been unlucky in his women. After his parents divorced, his mother, a drunk, had gone home to live in a tower block in Nice. When her son visited her, she stole from his wallet and made him massage her feet. Now she was dead. That meant Charlie was free of her, Frances believed.

  THE HOUSES BESIDE the path faced away from the river. Back gardens, lying open to the eye, hinted at private lives. At that hour of the morning, curtains were shut and decks deserted, but the aura of revelation remained. Flowers yawned, bronze-leaved cannas, lilies striped cream and red. Nasturtiums swarmed over palings. A heavy-headed datura flaunted pale orange trumpets that darkened at the rim. In September a tall, spreading tree was hung with clustered pink. A man taking a photo of it with his phone said the tree was a Queensland hardwood. Frances would have liked to photograph it too, but she didn’t linger here, not even when passing the ramshackle house with a flight of stone steps that reminded her of holidays in provincial France.

  On this stretch of the path, hemmed in by fences and water, the difficulty was Rod. A hefty, muscled bruiser from the RSPCA, he was frightened of other dogs. Toy poodles were particularly unnerving. Coming upon a pair of them one morning, Rod tried to make a dash for the brown sludge under the mangroves. Surprised and heartened, the poodles seized the day. Telling Charlie about it, Frances said, “Wouldn’t you be frightened if tiny, angry people rushed at you shouting?” But at the time, with Rod wrenching Frances’s arm and the she-oak needles slippery underfoot, no one was amused. The poodles’ owner marched them on, saying, “Come along, boys, not everyone’s friendly.” Rod hung his head, screwed his paws into the ground, and wouldn’t budge. In the end, Frances had to pick him up and stagger past the malevolent spot recently occupied by poodle. Frances did Body Pump at the gym, but Rod weighed sixty-six pounds. In the shower, she saw red welts across her stomach where he had clawed her in fear.

  The poodles had never returned. But sometimes there would be a dog in a garden—like the white bull terrier alert behind a fence. Rod’s tail drooped, and his ears. Picking up her pace, Frances saw a woman in the shadowy depths of the garden. She wore a wide hat and a trailing pink dress; a white hand emerged from her sleeve. There came upon Frances a sensation that sometimes overtook her when she was looking at a painting: space was foreshortened, time stilled.

  For the rest of that week, Frances kept an eye out for the bull terrier. A white stripe: danger, the surf that marks a hidden reef. But where had she seen him? Not at the French house, not at the one with the spreading tree. Had there been oleanders near the fence or a clump of banana palms? She remembered dense plantings, green gloom. The fence wasn’t solid—Frances and the bull terrier had inspected each other through it—but plenty of gardens ended in railings or mesh.

  Frances had pretty much forgotten the bull terrier when she saw him again. He was sniffing around a tree, but lifted his head as she passed. A few days later, Rod began to whimper—the bull terrier was at his fence. Some distance behind him, the woman in the old-fashioned dress stood beside a flowering shrub. She was a sidelong glimpse through sunglasses and a coarse veil of latticework, there and gone again at once.

  These partial visions, half-encounters, were repeated at intervals over weeks. One day, striding past the woman and her dog, Frances realized that whenever she saw those two she was the only person on the path. The morning swayed, as duplicitous as déjà vu. When a cyclist appeared around a bend, Frances considered hailing him—but what would she say? “Can you see a woman in that garden?” She heard him answer, “There’s no one there.”

  FRANCES AND CHARLIE had left Melbourne so that Frances could take up a research fellowship at a university in Sydney. She was writing a book about objects in eighteenth-century French portraits. When she wasn’t at the library, she worked at home, in the sunroom. Afternoons there were so dazzling that Frances had to pull down the blinds and turn on the light. The spines of her books had already dimmed. By the end of October, she needed a fan—how would she work there in summer? The spare bedroom was reserved for Luke, who had spent three days in Sydney in September and would be returning for a week after Christmas. Charlie had left his marriage eight months after meeting Frances, and then he had left Melbourne and his young son to be with her for the rest of his life. Having more or less forgotten that she had willed these things, Frances felt their weight. Sitting at her laptop, she drew her shoulder blades together and typed: The medieval flowers, the rose and lily of the Virgin and the Annunciation, have given way to exotics: fritillaries from Persia, dahlias from Mexico. The vase is a container that draws on great distances. The boundaries of space and time that frame human life are neutralized. All the while, she was thinking of something that had happened when Luke came to stay. She had woken one night and found him standing by her side of the bed. When she opened her eyes, Luke asked, “Are you dead?”

  The phone rang. Frances hadn’t wanted a landline. She had argued about it with Charlie, teasing and serious, saying, “You’re so twentieth century!” At last Charlie said he needed a landline so that his father could call. “He won’t ring a mobile.” His father had never called. When Frances answered the phone, there was a brief silence, and then a computer-generated female voice said, “Goodbye.” This happened once a week or so at unpredictable times.

  There had been a string of cold nights, but the day was windy and hot. Walking down the passage, Frances passed through pools of cool air deliciously interspersed with warm gusts. In her study, she touched her faded books. She had amassed a good deal of information about jewels, furniture, dogs. For instance, she knew that whippets remained popular from the Middle Ages until the mid-nineteenth century. The only books Charlie read w
ere large paperbacks with covers that showed backlit, hunted men, but when Frances told him about her research, he had seen the point of it at once: “What people don’t pay attention tochanges the story.” After the party where they met, Charlie gave her a lift home, and she told him about the necessity of decentering the human subject. He had parked beside a garden where three staked camellias stood as whitely upright as martyrs. It was very cold inside the car. Soon their breath shrouded the windows and the camellias disappeared. A phone rang. They paid no attention to it. However, several days later, days on which Charlie called her every afternoon, Frances said, “You could come round now. But afterwards, will you feel awful?”

  “You’ll never know.” He said, “I can promise you that.”

  FRANCES’S PREOCCUPATIONS—Luke’s next visit, her work—kept her from thinking about the woman in the old-fashioned dress. Walking beside the river pushed ideas around her mind like chairs. Sentences arrived ready-made: Our perception, in short, is directed to the irreducible materiality of the world. When she remembered the woman in the garden, the scene might have been a tapestry, something that existed at an angle to life. But sometimes, passing under the she oaks, Frances found herself anticipating a figure in pink. She still couldn’t pinpoint where the woman lived, so the sight of her always brought a small shock. The season was no aid to location, proliferating flowers where there had last been green drapery, or stripping away petals while buds worked loose in a neighboring yard. For weeks, Frances placed the woman’s house next door to a hand-lettered sign, fastened to a gate, that advertised UGG boots. But one morning, the sign was nowhere near when she saw a familiar shape at a fence. The woman was there too, under overhanging branches, as silent and white as her dog. Their house merged with the sun in Frances’s mind: it was something else that shifted about and wasn’t always where she looked.

  FRANCES HAD A CHOICE of three bus routes to get to the university. Charlie caught a train to the city, where he worked in I.T. Sydney came to them as a series of visions held in rectangular glass. They were serious Melbourne people. They wore stylish dark coats, and Sydney could seem like an elaborate joke. T-shirts in winter! A suburb called Greystanes! On wet days, gumbooted stumps showed under the striped and sturdy domes of vast umbrellas, while subtropical rain pounded Frances’s and Charlie’s black foldaways into collapse. And the streetscape was so weirdly old-fashioned. Where were the hip, rusting-steel façades, Melbourne’s conjuring of post-industrial decay? The decrepitude in their western suburb was real: boarded-up shops, cracked pavements, shabby terrace houses sagging behind stupendous trees. The neighborhood had known great days before the construction of the Harbour Bridge bore the respectable away to the north shore. Traces of grandeur remained: the sandstone gateposts that had guarded a mansion survived before a block of orange flats. Even Frances and Charlie’s duplex had a rising sun on the front gable to mark the dawn of the new, twentieth century, and casements edged with squares of colored glass. This glass was engraved with flowers and tendrils. Vanished children pressed their faces to the colored panes to see shrubs, cars, passers by printed with pink or blue flowers. Frances tried it for herself. She saw nothing—the glass was opaque. But later that day, she did come across some rusty steel. It was a model rocket in a playground: a relic of the Space Age, a ghost from a future that hadn’t arrived.

  Discovering Sydney was a way of exchanging information about each other. Charlie pointed out a bulbul in their neighbors’ pomegranate tree. He googled “Sydney birds," puzzling over a song that rose maddeningly in pitch on warm evenings. Frances called him a bird nerd. What she was really saying was, Who are you? She told him about the scrawled plea she had spotted on a wall that morning: I am human and I need love. They sat on the back steps drinking beer. Sunsets performed for them. Weather arrived from unexpected angles—in Melbourne, it was only necessary to look west. Charlie gathered up Frances’s hair and balanced the knot on his palm. At night they slept entwined like wet sheets.

  IN DECEMBER, JOSEPH invited Frances and Charlie to dinner. He led them onto the terrace, where two faces displayed sunglasses like identity-protecting black bars. They belonged to Lola and Tim—a stray plane, flying low, muffled introductions. Over the roar, Lola cried, “Heyyy, Chaz!” They worked together, Frances learned. Why had Charlie never mentioned her? Lola lowered her voice and began to discuss something that had happened at work. Still talking to Charlie, she reached across the table and drank from Tim’s glass.

  An Englishwoman called Vanessa arrived, and the writer George Meshaw. When Frances was at Bryn Mawr, her father had sent her one of his novels because it had won a prize. She tried to remember whether she had finished it. George Meshaw was wearing one of those T-shirts with buttons favored by middle-aged men—he looked as if he had been dressed by his mother.

  All day a southerly had blown, but the evening was humid and still. The glass-topped table was strewn with gardenias. George fingered them, turning their petals brown. His eyes followed each dish as it was brought to the table. They were thin eyes and surprisingly inky. Eating, he grew animated, appreciative. Frances knew no writers but was acquainted with a few artists. When they weren’t depressed they were drunk. George Meshaw neglected to pass the bread. He neither looked nor sounded foreign, but nevertheless brought the possibility to mind.

  Tim—muscles, aftershave—dealt out cards: Tim Prescott, Creator. He organized product launches, he explained, “all the way from concept to creative communication outcomes.” On Frances’s right, Joseph was telling Vanessa about growing up in the Soviet Union. His father, a biochemist, had spent eleven years as an exile in Kazakhstan, during which time he was known only as Object Number Six. Before that, when Joseph was a small boy, there had been holidays in a yellow wooden dacha on a hill above the Moscow River. All day long, the children in the colony played beside the river, along the opushka, the edge of the forest. There was a cemetery with crosses, said Joseph, and Communist stars. When Joseph wanted to get up from the table, he placed his palms flat above his knees and pushed. Why would a man who wanted to stand exert downward pressure on his thighs?

  Frances had reminded Joseph that she didn’t eat meat. Joseph texted back: No problem. He served a platter of oysters and announced marinated duck breasts to follow. Rising to fire the barbecue, he told Frances, “Don’t worry, there is plenty of extra salad for you.” Joseph believed that if you didn’t eat meat you weren’t hungry. He was fifteen years older than Charlie, which made him thirty years older than Frances—older than her parents. Once he had told her, “I am one who will leave nothing behind. But you will be remembered.” Frances knew he was talking about her face and that he was wrong; she would be valued for what she had to tell the world about everything it had overlooked in eighteenth-century French paintings. Joseph invited Frances and Charlie to the opera, to the sea baths at Coogee, to picnics in blossomy parks where hidden steps led to the harbor. On a winter afternoon, he put them into his small silver car and drove them on a freeway, across the western plains, to a street where suburban villas had been transformed into Indian restaurants; the three of them sat on a terrace that had once been a garden eating spicy, delicious food. When they first met, Joseph had asked Frances if she loved the beach. When she hesitated, remembering the cold southern ocean off Melbourne, he said, smiling, “You will love the beach.” His face, habitually humorous and alert, was the painter Vernet’s face in the portrait by Vigée Le Brun.

  The duck breasts arrived, and a plate of colored leaves for Frances. “I used to be fussy about food,” remarked Vanessa. She had that penetrating, well-bred voice that, no matter what it says, enters the Australian ear like glass. “But I was in Sri Lanka two Christmases ago. The tsunami? When I saw what people went through, I made up my mind to always eat whatever was on my plate.”

  Charlie avoided Frances’s eye, just as he had avoided it when the main course was revealed. His dislike of confrontation had been a great aid to Frances in her victory, but now his incompetence as a dragonslayer was a disappointment. Naturally, she had attributed the end of his marriage to the force of love.