Disquiet Read online

  JULIA LEIGH

  disquiet

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  Published by Penguin Group (Australia)

  250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Group (NZ)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2008

  Text copyright © Julia Leigh 2008

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  penguin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74228-189-6

  Avec ma main brÛlée, j’écris sur la nature du feu.

  With my burnt hand I write about the nature of fire. Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina, after Gustav Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, 6 July 1852.

  They stood before the great gateway, all around an empty and open countryside, ugly countryside, flat mudploughed fields. On that morning the sky was balm, a pale and whitish blue. The woman was dressed in a tweed pencil skirt, a grey silk blouse and her dark hair was pulled back into a loose chignon, the way her mother once used to wear it. Her right arm was broken and she’d rested it in a silk-scarf sling which co-ordinated unobtrusively with her blouse. By her feet, a suitcase. The children – the boy was nine, the girl was six and carrying her favourite doll – were saddled with backpacks and they each guarded a small suitcase of their own. The woman stepped forward and went right up to the gate – iron-spiked, imposing – looking for the lock. Instead she found the surveillance system, a palmpad, and she rested her palm on this electronic pad for a long moment until she was defeated. Unfazed, she returned to collect her suitcase and, without a backward glance at the children, turned off the driveway onto the grassy verge.

  After a while they decided to follow. First the boy, then the girl. They lumbered in single file alongside the stone wall that bordered the vast estate until the woman reached a spot which looked familiar; she had recognised an ancient oak over the bristling glass-topped wall. A sweet-smelling vine covered this section of the wall and, hooking the handle of her suitcase awkwardly over her cast, she trailed her left hand through the greenery, seeking out the stone behind it. Until she found – the door. She tore at the vine and when the children joined her they watched this motherly performance with the same impassive look on their faces that they usually had when they watched TV. But the boy soon came to help and eventually they uncovered the small wooden entrance. She still had her key and – holding the slender precious thing in her left-hand mitt, the ‘sinister hand’ – she fitted it to the lock. At first she turned it in the wrong direction but then, click, they heard the tumbler fall. The door didn’t open, would not open: she tried, it stayed shut. She pressed her full bodyweight against it, leant into it with her shoulder, but it refused to budge. She stood there for a long while with her forehead resting against the door, as if by dint of will it somehow, if only, would melt away and allow them to pass.

  The boy had a go. He planted himself on the ground and kicked at the door. He kicked and kicked, first a hard low kick and then a one-two kung-fu kick. He took a few steps back and, like a high-jumper, standing on the balls of his feet, gathering concentration, he readied for a run-up: he launched himself against the door. At the point of impact there came a dull thud. He did this again; he made himself brutal. And again. Over and over, uncomplaining. He picked himself up, wincing, and walked back to his starting position, lifted his heels, ran at the door. But the door was oak and he was boy; his shirt was torn and bloodied. He snuck a glance at the woman and with a slow blink she encouraged him to continue. In the end he forced an opening.

  The woman was first through the breach, snagging and ripping her stockings. The boy helped his sister across and then, piece by piece, passed the luggage over. He took a quick look around to make sure no-one had been watching and closed the door behind him.

  Once inside they dragged their suitcases through lawn that grew thick and soft. In the distance a squad of four men, gardeners in uniform, were scooping leaves out of a stone-sculpted fountain. As the trio drew close one of these gardeners, a longtimer, struggled to his feet and waved in greeting. The woman returned his wave but did not deviate from her course. They followed the long line of yews clipped into fantastic shapes, into top hats and ice-cream cones and barbells. Another gardener, riding on a mower, swerved to give them berth. They avoided the rose garden and instead cut into the pebbled allée which was lined with elms whose twigs had not yet sprouted their leaves, so that it was apparent a tree actually grew, that a twig had worked its way out of a branch, that an elm did not arrive in the world elm-shaped. The girl declined to leave the lawn, would not put a foot onto the allée, until her brother opened her suitcase and from it removed the tiny exoskeleton of a pram. She settled her doll into the pram and, reassured, proceeded on, managing to push the pram and pull her suitcase at one and the same time.

  The stone stairs leading to the château were wide and shallow and worn like soap. The woman took hold of the doorknocker – it was a large bronze ring running through the nose of a great bronze bull – and weighed it in her hand. Knocked. They waited patiently, and their kind of patience was born more from exhaustion, from abandoning any expectation of easy gratification, than from gracious goodwill. She reached out to ruffle the boy’s hair, to give them both some courage. Knock-knock. An old woman answered. She was wearing her perennial uniform, a black dress and white apron, and her hair, grey now, was curled in a tidy bun. They stared at one another without speaking and between them passed an understanding of the unsung miracle of the door – one moment a person wasn’t there, and the next moment… there. Peering inside, the children spied the entrance hall; it was austere and immense, the wood-panelled walls were painted palest dove-grey. High ceilings lent it the authority of a church or a courthouse although this authority was undermined by brightly coloured helium balloons weighted down in vases and tied along the banisters of the grand central staircase.

  ‘Hello Ida,’ said the woman calmly. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Hello Olivia.’

  ‘May I introduce the children?’

  Each child gave a limp wave. Ida noted the boy’s bloodied shoulder, his torn shirt and trousers, but held her tongue. She bent down and twinkled her fingers in greeting, ushered them inside.

  Grandmother crowned the staircase. She was impeccably dressed in a matching bouclé jacket and skirt, a faultless string of pearls. A sceptral silver-topped walking-stick rested by her side. Though small and frail, the impression she gave was one of dignified resignation.

  ‘Hello Mother.’

  ‘Hello Olivia.’

  The woman climbed the marble stairs, and when she reached her mother she took her soft scaly hand and kissed it. A formal gesture, not one of reconciliation. And her mother, in turn, made an assessment – the straggled hair, the torn stockings, the broken arm. Tactful, she determined not to pass comment.

  ‘I needed to come home,’ said the woman. There was a long silence. ‘Well, meet the children.’

  She waved them up the stairs.

  �
��This is Andrew, we call him Andy. Andy, this is your grandmother. Grand-mére. Grandmother.’

  He said hello; she smiled.

  ‘And this is Lucy. Lucyloo.’

  ‘Hello Lucyloo,’ said Grandmother.

  The girl was too shy to reply.

  ‘Will you be staying long?’

  A pause. ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘So, the day of days,’ said Grandmother. She tapped one of the balloons with the end of her walking-stick. ‘Your brother will be home soon. They are pregnant, you know. In the hospital. We expect them any minute. Everything here is ready, just for the first six months or so – when it’s hardest. But, of course, there is plenty of room. Where would you like to sleep, Olivia?’

  ‘Wherever is convenient.’

  ‘Ida will see to it.’ She looked to Ida for confirmation. ‘Well, come now, are you tired? You must be tired. Such a long trip.’ And then she added, ‘Was it a long trip?’

  ‘Very long,’ replied the woman. ‘Wasn’t it, kids?’

  The boy shrugged but the girl bobbed her head up and down without stopping.

  Ida showed them upstairs to their rooms. In the past the children’s room had been used for visiting adult guests, for couples who no longer slept together; it was furnished with two large beds, each with a white satin-quilted bed-head. As soon as Ida had left the girl said, ‘It smells like old people.’ Overcome by an atomic exhaustion – at long last – the woman sank down on an armchair in the corner of the room. The boy bumped on his mattress, gauging its spring. He fiddled with the bedside lamp, twisting the round brass knob beneath a fringed lampshade, but couldn’t work out how to turn it on. He stood on the bed and examined the painting that hung above the bed-head – an eighteenth-century portrait of a black-haired, lunar-skinned woman resting a posy of violets in her lap. Violet, the household knew her as Violet. He ran his fingertips over Violet’s breasts, feeling the surface of the paint, and used his fingernail to worry off a chip of the craquelure. When he succeeded he proudly held up his finger and showed his mother the chip. ‘It’s real.’

  He jumped down and headed to the long narrow windows that overlooked the great expanse of lawn. He tried everything he could to open the windows but failed.

  He twisted himself into the floor-length silk curtains, twisted and twisted, disappeared. It must have been dark in there, so that he could hardly breathe, so that he listened to his heartbeat. After a while the girl – marooned with her doll on her own giant bed – grew frightened.

  ‘Andy!’

  He returned to the world.

  Glancing at the woman, he walked over to his suitcase and unpacked his mobile telephone and its charger. Contraband. He got down on his knees and, following the cord of the bedside lamp, searched for a powerpoint. As she expected, he found that the prongs of the charger were mismatched and no amount of jamming could fit them into the socket. He sat back on his heels and absorbed the measurements of his confines; he looked deep into each corner as though the junction of two walls, the angle, pointed to a way out. The woman let him be: she hauled herself from the armchair and went next door to her room.

  Her room – was never her room. It was another guest room, similarly furnished. She drew the curtains and loosened her hair, freed her arm from its sling. She undressed, dropping all her clothes in a pile on the floor. Crawled onto the bed. Lay belly down, face on the pillow. There was a loop in time; she was already dead. And then she must have sensed the children standing in the doorway for – with great effort, turning her head and opening one eye – she saw reflected in the mirror that, yes, the children had been spying, how long she could not be sure, but they had no doubt seen their mother lying on the bed, the white plain of her back covered in rotten yellowed bruises. ‘Andy?’ she said and the word sounded strangled, faint. ‘You two. Please, go and play outside.’

  Not long after Ida was preparing food in the kitchen, an enormous kitchen with a walk-in fireplace, flagstone floor and a long wooden table as its centrepiece. She was working at the table while the twins, the teenage housemaids who had been with her for almost a year, were chopping vegetables on marble-topped benches ranged against the far wall. The children, dutifully in new clothes, stuck their heads around the corner. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello! Look at you,’ said Ida. ‘Who is wanting a biscuit?’ She only spoke crude English.

  The girl held up her doll and stated flatly, ‘Her name is Pinky. We’re on the run.’

  ‘On the hop,’ the boy corrected his sister.

  Ida feigned comprehension with an all-purpose smile, gave them each a biscuit. The girl started hopping in a circle.

  The boy said, ‘We’re passing through. Don’t worry, we’ll be gone soon. Maybe tomorrow. Or the next day.’

  The girl, finishing her hopping circle, announced, ‘I live in Australia.’

  ‘Australia. Far away. Lots of kangaroos.’

  The boy ignored the kangaroo reference and asked, ‘Are you a servant?’

  In the background the twins suppressed a laugh.

  ‘A housekeeper,’ replied Ida. ‘And I am here a very long time. I know this place inside outside and I know everything that happens here. Every. Thing. Everything.’ She fixed him with a stare she used to scare children. ‘The painting. Violet. I know. The curtains. I know.’ She tapped her forehead. ‘Here, my third eye. Just here.’

  She bent down and allowed the children to take turns touching her third eye – just as she had once, many years ago, bent down and allowed their mother the same privilege. In those bygone days the children of the house never doubted Ida’s mysterious powers, her affliction; brother and sister had both gone to inordinate lengths to conceal their wrongdoings, even in empty rooms.

  ‘I’ll always be watching,’ Ida said to the boy, and called to the twins for affirmation. Yes, yes, they nodded in solemn agreement. After the children had gone one of the twins mistakenly slipped an egg yolk onto the bench and, without turning around, Ida clicked her tongue in admonishment.

  A little later the children were playing alone by the lake. The boy was skimming stones across the water while the girl dug a hole in the sand, using the plastic hand of her doll as a spade. Weeping willows were married to their reflections. On the far side of the lake, a rippling dark forest, and rising beyond the forest, the mountain – impervious to roads, to tunnels, never to be upended. The woman had changed into a new dress and freshened her make-up, redone her hair. She didn’t join the children but instead watched them from a stone bench that overlooked the lake. After a while the girl caught sight of her mother and jumped up, started waving. Ran toward her.

  ‘Mummy!’ she grabbed her around the neck. ‘Mummy! Can we swim? Can we?’

  ‘It’s too cold,’ replied the woman. ‘The winter’s still in the water.’

  This scarcely bothered the girl though the boy hung his head and looked like he didn’t believe her.

  ‘Oliiiiviiiia! Oliiiiiviiia!’

  Ida stood in the distance and waved her white apron over her head. ‘Ollliiiiiviiiiiia!’

  They hastened up the path.

  ‘Olivia, come, hurry. Your brother is arriving,’ said Ida.

  The woman took hold of the girl’s hand, Ida took the boy’s. They had not gone far before he snatched the girl’s doll and broke away, started sprinting.

  Inside the house they were obliged to walk through the long parquet hallways at a stately pace: one of the house rules that never must be broken. Grandmother was waiting for them in the entrance hall. They gathered near the door and Ida cupped her hand to her ear. ‘Listen.’ They listened – they breathed, no-one made a sound. The girl pulled her ‘listening face’, a kind of grotesque where she clamped shut her eyes and clenched her jaw in a maniacal grin. This lasted about a minute.

  ‘Can you see?’ she whispered to Ida.

  Yes, she nodded. ‘They’re coming.’

  They heard – a car rasping on the pebbled allée, a car door open and close, footsteps, a
nd – a knock, a knock, a knock. When Grandmother gave the signal, a discreet wave of the hand, Ida opened the door.

  ‘Marcus!’ She threw her arms around him. He was tall and had a permanently lowered head so that he always appeared as sheepish. With pale brown hair and blue-grey eyes he was closer in likeness to his late father than to his mother. His father’s son. Usually he would have been thought of as handsome but here he was – haggard. Unshaven; grey pouches below his eyes. A cloth baby-bag in a teddy bear print was slung over his shoulder.

  ‘And Sophie!’ From the red blotches on her skin it was clear she had been crying. She was in her late thirties and though she was big-boned – solid and wide-hipped – she had somehow made herself very small, almost to the point of disappearing. She was carrying a bundle wrapped in a pale pink blanket close to her chest. On her wrist, the hospital’s plastic ID bracelet.

  ‘Olivia?’ Marcus asked quietly, but without a note of surprise, as if he could no longer be surprised, had lost this luxury.

  ‘Hello Marcus.’ A small gentle smile.

  ‘Hello.’ He seemed unsure of what to do then put an arm around Sophie’s shoulders, shepherded her through the double doors into the salon. The room was sparely furnished with a few Louis XV pieces, the cabriole legs of the chairs ending in little deer feet. Dozens of antler trophies were collected on the walls. Even with this furniture the room felt empty – in the way an empty room can be made emptier by the addition of a single table. Sophie settled herself on the end of a chaise longue, gingerly; after the birth there must have been stitches or perhaps a bruised coccyx. Grandmother sat opposite her, and Ida stood behind Grandmother, as was her place.

  Marcus rested a hand on Sophie’s shoulder. ‘We… I am so sorry to tell you…’ He looked to the children and hesitated, went on. ‘There has been an accident. The cord – as she was born the cord caught around her neck. There was nothing anyone could do. Our beautiful child, our Alice, has died. Did not live.’