In London, she told him, nobody gave her a second glance.
‘Ah, but this isn’t London,’ he said. ‘German women don’t like to dress in such an eye-catching way.’
‘Maybe not in Gellingen,’ she replied. ‘But I bet they do in Berlin.’
‘You’d probably be happier in Berlin,’ he said. Which was her cue to disagree. His love may have made her kinder, but it was yet to make her a liar. Heartlessly, she shrugged.
Sabine opened the front door to reveal a scene that would become familiar over several afternoon teas that week. The four other guests sitting around the tea table were all teachers: the men with neatly trimmed beards and colour-framed glasses, the women fresh-faced and wholesome.’
‘Tee trinken’ was an important ritual here, conducted at a table laid with matching crockery, cloth napkins and two large cakes. Pots of tea and coffee sat on little china stands, each with a small squat candle lit underneath to keep it warm.
Sabine was a gentle mathematics teacher with an uncharacteristically savage haircut. She greeted Caroline with genuine warmth. But a certain proprietary look that she cast at Karl from time to time suggested a greater intimacy than Karl had, as yet, admitted. Caroline’s thoughts drifted as the others compared notes on the timetables they’d been landed with. Sabine and Antje discovered that they both had Friday afternoon off, and started planning a tennis afternoon.
‘Perhaps you would care to join us, Caroline,’ said Antje in her carefully formal English teacher’s English.
Caroline blushed, wrenched back from thoughts of her own life eight years ago in Melbourne. Something about the cakes – but certainly not the table setting – had made her think of the impromptu afternoon tea parties on the floor of Steve and Vicki’s bedroom in the seedy terrace next door to her flat.
How she had loved sitting with her neighbours in a chaos of cake boxes and milk cartons. The teapot was made of battered tin, the cups were chipped and all the teaspoons were bent and burned. But when they had drugs – and she had never been there when they hadn’t – the mood was always festive.
She told herself she didn’t admire them for sneaking around in the middle of the night breaking into chemists’ shops, although she quietly envied them the guts it must have taken to do the break-ins.
She most certainly didn’t covet the customers Vicki picked up on the street and brought back to the small bedroom at the end of the hall. But she respected the black humour with which both of them viewed the world. And she enjoyed the parade of characters that passed through their room, looking for a $30 deal and a place to have it; like Julie, nicknamed “the axe lady” because she was supposed to have armed herself with an axe for a chemist’s shop hold-up once. She used the room by day while Vicki used it by night.
Caroline had also admired their talent for excess. At 32, she’d finally outgrown that emotion, although she hadn’t changed her low opinion of those who had never dreamed of living anything other than an orderly and obedient life. But she cringed at the memory of her 24-year-old self, because that Caroline was as immature as her 16-year-old self with its confused yearnings for Byron and opium dens and its disregard for prefects and other supporters of the status quo.
The contents of the bookshelf she had left behind in her Sydney flat spelt out her fascination with excess, the worn books on Byron lined up with Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the works of the opium-eaters Coleridge and De Quincy, the addict poet Baudelaire and his opiate-inspired colleague Gerard de Nerval. On the bottom shelf, the sexy Restoration Comedies were squashed in with a few set texts from her German courses. The three years she had spent studying drama were a blur of noble generals and virtuous heroines. The only characters that had ever appealed to her were Wedekind’s demonic and sexually voracious Lulu and Brecht’s rebellious, promiscuous Baal. So she kept Pandora’s Box and Brecht’s Collected Plays and threw all the Schiller and Goethe in the bin.
Literature had given Caroline extra evidence for a world view that she had developed at 16. Her reading merely helped order it around two mutually antagonistic poles: Goethe’s icy cold, ethical North and light-hearted warm and aesthetic South; Apollonian strivings for order and restraint and the Dionysian drive towards orgiastic abandonment. For her, sitting up reading in her narrow bed, it all seemed very simple. The bourgeois was opposed to the artistic; the law-abiding to the criminal. She had already pounced upon a book called Opium and the Romantic Imagination, hoping to find within it some sort of endorsement of the creative powers of opium. All she needed was to read Jean Genet, with his visions of the artistic and criminal outsider, and she was ready to meet Steve and Vicki and to fall under their spell.
Fortunately for her sake, none of the junkies she met at Steve and Vicki’s were artistic. In fact the majority were more like Julie, whose hard grey eyes took her measure and clearly found her wanting.
Caroline squirmed just thinking about it. How out of place she must have looked with her fashionably eccentric clothes and her “nice girl” job, teaching ex-prisoners English. Not to mention her clean complexion, unspoilt by the pimples and spots that all the junkies seemed to have. She could comfort herself with only one detail. At least they hadn’t known all the nonsense she’d been thinking.
Years later, when Caroline was visiting from Sydney, she discovered that the house had been replaced by an ice-cream parlour. She also found out that Steve had died, Julie was in jail and Vicki had straightened out, gone back to school and then to uni.
That evening, when Karl asked what Caroline had thought of the afternoon, she didn’t say she found his friends boring. But she was rude enough to say that the afternoon tea had made her nostalgic for people like Steve and Vicki.
She didn’t attempt to explain that she had left university determined to collect as many experiences as possible; good and bad. A mixture of caution and cowardice had kept her from allowing Steve or Vicki to stick one of their well-used syringes into her arm, although she had eagerly swallowed the many pills they offered her. It wasn’t until she became a journalist that she realised there was a safe vicarious alternative to trying every possible experience yourself.
After three days in Gellingen she still hadn’t written a word in her diary, although she had managed to get some time alone.
Karl had two school meetings on successive mornings, so Caroline decided to visit the local pool. It was, as he had told her proudly, Olympic-size, outdoor, set in parkland and heated. She walked there and back, breathing deeply as she strolled along a tree-lined path that hugged the river and trying not to make comparisons with the way she got her exercise in London: the walk through polluted air across crowded Waterloo Bridge and along the Strand to Covent Garden; the overcrowded dressing room; the exercise class in an overcrowded gym; the rush for the queue for showers; and the dash to a crowded Tube back to the office.
At the swimming pool itself, spacious, state-of-the-art and spotless, she thought of the smell of mould that pervaded the local baths in Holloway, only 25 metres long so you had reached the other end before you had a chance to think.
In the long, empty lanes of the Gellingen Freibad there was too much opportunity to think. Too many ideas floated into her brain, unsought, as she swam up and down, watching the black lane-lines slip past below and repeating to herself, mantra-like, the number of laps she’d swum.
Mostly she thought of Karl and how much more appealing he seemed now. Was it only that he was more confident on his own home ground? She was still at a loss to explain the speed with which he claimed to have fallen in love with her. But she had started to accept it, even to respect his honesty.
Before, she had taken his premature talk of love and relationships as a sign of weakness or desperation. Now that she had had a chance to see how he lived, it was clear that he had not turned to her out of loneliness. There were women queuing up to visit him. And there’d be no shortage of tea and sympathy for him when she went back to London.
But what