From the edge of her chair, Cassie said, “But what if she was right?” The jacaranda across the quad was in flower. A group of tourists could be seen through the window, photographing one another in front of the tree, giggling and adopting rock-star poses. Cassie, too, found a kind of freedom in the luminous purple blur. She said, “I mean, life in developing countries might have been as awful after independence as before—just differently awful.” What was in her mind was something Ash had told her: that Sri Lanka, in the 1970s, was given over to national socialism. “Small ‘n,’ small ‘s,’” said Ash. “But not too far a stretch.”
Leanne said, “I expect you to interrogate the colonialist point of view, Cassie, not take it over.” She began to go through Cassie’s bibliography, finding fault. But her face had returned to its normal dimensions, for it was gratifying to have identified an ethical slippage. The previous summer, when Leanne still seemed to have time for Cassie, she had confided that she intended to take up rowing—she even invited Cassie to join her. Nothing came of the invitation, but Cassie noticed that something had sharpened her supervisor’s cheekbones. Leanne’s hair, freshly hennaed, chimed with her statement lipstick—any one of these things by itself could have made Cassie feel small and inept. Her supervisor’s old, kind voice asked, “Is everything all right? It’s easy to get caught up in things that carry you out of your depth.” Cassie took this to mean that she was being informed she wasn’t cut out for academic life. Leanne was staring across the desk very intently, and Cassie looked away with a slight frown. Leanne sighed. “You’re still very young,” she observed. It was the worst thing she could have said.
Cassie came away with a list of reference works about post-
colonialism. In the corridor, the Lawson specialist was just coming out of his room. He asked Cassie what she was working on. When she told him, he said, “Hazzard’s no good. Sentimental, women’s magazine fiction. You’re wasting your time.” Cassie’s bright face among all the closed, dark doors was a reminder of the last graduate student he had attracted, several years ago, a porcelain virago who attacked “the symbolic masculinity of the bush ethos” with cold brilliance. What the Lawson specialist really couldn’t forgive was that in order to refute her arguments he had been obliged to dip into, and occasionally even read, Luce Irigaray.
Cassie went on her way, round-shouldered as if she were protecting her chest. In the quad, she sat on a wall and looked up into the jacaranda. She saw that the short upper lip of each blossom was bent back to display an opaque white tongue. Light striking there was deflected outward, creating the tree’s radiant effect. The jacaranda was itself, but so vibrantly itself that it seemed charged with hidden meaning—it could have been a sentence composed by Hazzard. Cassie took out her notebook and wrote:
The Problem with Shirley Hazzard
1. She is a woman.
2. She is a great artist.
3. She is fearless.
4. She has stayed away instead of coming home to be punished for 1–3.
When she reported her conversation with Leanne to Ash, he replied that he wasn’t surprised. “Every Friday afternoon, Leanne shuts herself into her office and reads Who. Cover to cover, every week without fail. She’s a perfect example of a type in the humanities, caught between theory and trash. Of course Shirley Hazzard’s beyond her.” Hazzard was the one Australian novelist Ash had read (under the impression that she was American).
“How do you know what Leanne reads?” asked Cassie, thrilled.
“A library meeting got shifted to Friday lunchtime at short notice. Leanne sent apologies. I bumped into her later on, and she confessed why she hadn’t turned up.” Ash went on, “The problem with Leanne is that she’s invented a story about Asians and wants to stick us in it.”
Cassie was about to tell him that Leanne had objected to Hazzard’s depiction of a North African country, not an Asian one. Then it struck her that it was the first time she had heard Ash refer to Asians as “us.”
He said, “You mustn’t repeat what I’ve told you, obviously.”
She wondered which disclosure had alarmed him.
It was summer, a season that lasted from the beginning of Novem-ber to the end of March. Light fell in yellow sheets. The true Sydney weather set in, damp and hot. Cassie’s velvet dresses had given way to denim miniskirts and limp floral shifts. She told Ash, “Summer Hill’s a size-twelve suburb. All the women there have two kids, and the secondhand shops are full of the clothes they can’t fit into anymore. That’s where I come in.” The shifts, and the sleeveless cotton tops that showed her bra straps, were easier to remove than the lilac blouse but made her seem ordinary. Ash spent November marking essays in his tower. A student quoted Marx: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” It was an observation that had long exercised Ash. It was self-evidently true. But did it matter?
Pollution veiled the city in brownish gauze and obscured Ash’s view of Botany Bay. But if he craned his neck he could see a jacaranda flowering in a park. By the middle of the month the tree was exactly poised between fullness and decay. Ash saw a pillar that ran between a carpet and a cloud, both the color of Cassie’s blouse. There were jacarandas in his street as well; Ash’s shoes slipped on petals after a storm. One day he saw a wondrous thing: a car made out of flowers. Drawing closer, he realized that fallen blooms had covered an old Holden set on blocks under a tree. Ash had received an interesting e-mail that morning. At the conference in Canberra, he had met an Iranian-Canadian anthropologist. She had skin like an apricot. Now she had wangled him an invitation to a symposium in the States. Ash was thinking about that.
Cassie was thinking about Christmas. She was sure there would be invitations for Ash: to Yukkendrearie and the Hunter Valley and an assortment of celebrations in Sydney. Cassie hoped that he would go north with her to her parents. Pippa, to whom she confided this wish, said, “Parents and Christmas—sounds like the full catastrophe.” Pippa’s aura was invariably the muddy green that signified professional resentment and low self-esteem. She had met Ash at last, at a harbor bar one evening. Ash and Cassie got there first, and Ash ordered champagne: the real deal, French. Pippa arrived alone, perfume-first. Her hair, newly styled, was combed over her forehead. “It’s a pixie cut,” said Pippa, touching it in answer to Cassie’s compliment. Ash kissed her on both cheeks. Cassie knew that Pippa would remember this display of middle-class pretension; an evil teacher in her first novel had been in the habit of campaigning for animal rights and kissing everyone she met. The Moët, too, would be a black mark.
Pippa said, “Matt says hi and he’s so sorry. He got his dates mixed up—he has a school concert on tonight.” For Ash’s benefit, she explained that Matt was a music teacher. Pippa was wearing dangly earrings, and an intensely pink dress with straps that crossed at the back. Whenever Pippa got dolled up, Cassie was reminded of weddings in their country town: the frocks, hairstyles, and makeup that aspired to the social pages of provincial newspapers and whispered of tightly banked-down fear.
Ash informed Pippa that he intended to buy her novel and read it over Christmas. “Oh, please don’t feel you have to,” said Pippa. “You’ll probably hate it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, you know. It’s a small book about a family. No one could call it a masterpiece.”
Ash was flummoxed by this, Cassie could tell. He had spent the best part of a year in Australia but still couldn’t read the signs that shouted, Reassure me, please! He said, “Tell me what I should read to really get a handle on Australian fiction.”
“Patrick White,” Cassie heard. “Christina Stead.” At the next table, backpackers were shouting with laughter and drinking beer. Cassie turned her head to look at the view. The view, like champagne, amplified every emotion that was offered to it. When Cassie turned back to the others, she saw that Pippa looked