Mavis had invited her friend Audrey to dinner. Pleasant-faced and long-limbed, she wore her greying hair in a thick plait that reached half way down her back. Not only had Audrey designed and sewn her purplish-brown jacket herself, Mavis explained, but she had also dyed, spun and woven the wool, all with her own sweet hands. Wollongong’s one-woman cottage industry! In honour of Eleanor and Ruth’s awkward vegetarianism, Audrey had made a spicy chickpea and pumpkin casserole. She was tending to go meatless herself; only the other day she’d bought Recipes for a Small Planet. Since her husband had left her for a librarian, she could cook whatever she liked, and that didn’t include lamb chops. She had also stuck A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle on her bumper, although she felt she should apologise for the infelicitous use of ‘like’ as a conjunction.
“We should get her Eve was had,” said Ruth.
“Or Sisterhood is powerful – it crushes women,” said Eleanor. Those were graffiti they walked past on the way to the university.
Mavis had placed a black bowl of pink camellias on the green linen tablecloth. She had set out the best glasses and cutlery and the treasured family dinner service. Such womanly efforts extended even to her own appearance: she had put on some lipstick and was dressed in a fine camel pullover and chocolate velvet pants, colours that brought out the ginger in her hair. Eleanor had to concede that her mother didn’t look too bad. If only she’d grow out that butch haircut … Wine had softened her face, lent a girlishness to her gestures. Wine? Mavis wasn’t a drinker, but there she was, sipping and bantering and giggling at Ruth’s crisp wit.
The conversation turned horticultural. Ruth was explaining how she had pruned olive trees and grape vines in her kibbutz year. Gardening was safe terrain, unless it led to the phosphorus-cyclethat-was-no-longer-a-cycle and how the world’s agricultural lands would inevitably turn to desert. Eleanor tried to follow her friend through the sunny olive groves, but the half-light of memory that pooled in the recesses of the house had seeped even into this bright, chatter-filled room.
The old dining table had come from her grandparents’ dairy farm, a place Eleanor knew only in imagination. Grief had killed her grandfather, grief that his only son did not return from the war. The farm was sold in 1949, and the bank claimed its hefty share. By then Mavis was nursing in Sydney, and her older sister had married the cane farmer from up north. The grandmother – always busy and productive, always two steps ahead of anything anyone could ask of her – had come to live with Mavis and Eleanor after Jonas left. It was she who had sewn the dining-room curtains and embroidered the sinuous pattern of foliage on the border panels. Beautiful but unnecessary, in Mavis’s view; beautiful and therefore necessary, in her daughter’s. For countless evenings of Eleanor’s childhood, while Mavis worked her shift at the hospital, the grandmother had watched over the girl in this manless house. If there were no homework to be supervised and facts to be memorised – the products of Birmingham and Leeds, the rivers of New South Wales – she would tell stories about the old days on the farm or even recite some Wordsworth and Tennyson.
Having refused to part with the family’s old upright, her grandmother had paid for Eleanor’s piano lessons out of her pension. She died one night while the house slept, several weeks after Eleanor’s sixteenth birthday. Grace was never spoken again at the dining table, although for a time Eleanor repeated it silently to herself until she began to suspect that it only sharpened her grief.
Some months later Mavis announced that her daughter had had enough piano lessons – she could play, couldn’t she? They needed the money for maths tutoring so Eleanor would have the best chance of getting into medicine. The piano teacher made entreaties on her student’s behalf, but that only steeled the mother in her resolve. For a week Eleanor slammed doors and cursed and wept in her room but uttered no threats of retribution, for she had recently learned in French that la vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid. Her revenge would be a cold dish indeed. Instead of failing to qualify for medicine, she worked hard all through sixth form, especially at maths, to ensure that her marks were sufficiently high.
When it came time to go up to Sydney to register at the university, she enrolled instead, with a bilious rush of satisfaction, in an arts degree. That night over dinner Eleanor trumpeted her defection to the humanities. Instead of raging in defeat, however, Mavis merely commented that it was Eleanor’s choice, although some would say an impractical one, and that in the end people should do what truly interested them, just as she herself was now studying horticulture.
After the piano lessons had ceased, and before she found herself a Saturday morning and Thursday night job in the foundation garments section of a department store, Eleanor set about dispensing with her virginity. Mavis had gone visiting gardens for the after-noon, and Eleanor had invited a boy to come over with some music. She felt no deep longing for him, but he was guileless and stoical in the face of the school barbarians when they taunted him about his “dickhead music”. He sang bass in his school choir – Eleanor’s school was new and had no choir – and also owned a fine collection of records that he never lent or allowed anyone else to handle but would record onto cassette tapes for the few he judged worthy. That day he brought the late string quartets of Beethoven, which, despite all her avid listening to the radio, Eleanor had never heard.
“This is my favourite, the Opus 132. He wrote it after recovering from a serious illness. Now, close your eyes. You have to listen with your soul, if you see what I mean.”
Oh, she saw, though music, it seemed to her, was just as much in the body – an oscillation of cells, a pulsing of blood, a rhythmic stirring in the muscles.
She closed her eyes and felt him sit on the end of her bed. The opening phrase, slow and ethereal in its ascent, reached her as if from another world. ‘Soul’ was as convenient a word as any, she supposed, and hers kept company with the quartet through the abrupt shifts of mood, tender offerings, assertions, altercations, thickets of polyphony. It was subdued into introspection by the hymn-like melody in the third movement before falling into step, twice, with the sudden dance of joy. But towards the end, dazzled by contrast, her susceptible soul almost lost its bearings, and then her mind chipped in. Music could arouse in her an intensity of emotion that the rest of life had so far denied her. Those feelings were hers: intrinsic, not borrowed. So why shouldn’t she live it too, that exquisite depth of feeling? While music consoled her for her circumstances, it also fed her desire to escape to a life of passion and European refinement – doing exactly what, she wasn’t quite sure – far from her intractable mother and all the dreary people who had no inkling of who Eleanor Weston truly was.
The closing major chord hung in the air, triumphant. Until that spring afternoon, nothing so mysterious and soulful as the Opus 132 quartet had ever come her way. It made what she was about to do seem pretty tame.
The boy said softly, “If we’re nuked tomorrow, at least we had Beethoven today. The finale’s a bit of a tease, isn’t it?”
She smiled at him, hazy with shared sanctuary. He had allowed her into his inner world, and she was grateful. Before he could leap up to put on another tape, she slid towards him and took his face in her hands. He looked so like a startled rabbit that she almost laughed, almost lost her nerve, but then she began to kiss him until he kissed her resolutely back. She thought what she always thought about kissing, which was that having someone’s tongue poking around in her mouth was a risky imposition. What if she caught glandular fever and failed fifth form?
When he reached for her hand and placed it timidly on his groin, she was relieved to be getting on with it. Without a word she stood up and from the underwear drawer of her dressing-table took out the condoms. (Mavis had put them there, without comment, a month after her daughter’s sixteenth birthday. It was not the act of a broad-minded parent, Eleanor had explained to her dumbstruck schoolfriends, but an infringement.) The boy’s eyes widened in apprehension when she handed him a condom in its foil packet; no doubt his imagination had always skipped the awkward bits. To rally him she unbuttoned his shirt and submitted to another schoolboy kiss. Then she liberated his penis and stroked it