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THE ONLY TIME she had been to Europe, it was in a dream,
in a lie, in a dreamed lie, when even her daydreaming had
fallen behind. Was it in 1978 or 1980? In any case, several
years after she had eventually rejected Jacques’ offer to stay with her
forever in Sydney (and his consent to breed four children). Certainly at
the time he had left Sylvie and was living with Jill. She pretended she
was writing to him on her return from the old continent, very evasive
about which places she had visited, except Florence. She told him how
beautiful it was, the whole town an art gallery. She knew that he had
never been there. And it was Florence she had seen in the dream, when
she had dozed off, a lonely, sunny and windy spring afternoon on Bilgola
Beach. Jacques had appeared to her as a young painted saint, music by
Debussy, poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His pale, lean, soft-skinned
body. But tall, hard and hairy at the same time, not a Sebastian. Fred
was skinny too, but more muscular.
“It’s funny,” Carol said to Sally, the English teacher, as they
were discussing their students’ communication problems at a subject
masters’ meeting, “it’s funny how, when we grow older, words seem to
become less important... We think under the surface, as it were.” Sally
did not answer immediately, stopping to think or reserving her opinion.
She was a tiny, pale-faced woman with very large brown eyes, two or
three years her junior. She was always very soft-spoken and secure, but
looked as if she had been a bewildered furry animal in an earlier life.
“When I did my ‘grand tour’,” added Carol after a while, “I tried so
hard to speak perfect French and Italian; each word, each intonation
was almost a matter of life and death... at least a matter of honour. I
also remember...” No, this she could not divulge, one of those strictly
private memories: when she sat for her last oral exam with Jacques, at
the Manning House cafeteria. It was early November, but a very hot day.
All the electric fans were purring. Sylvie had been back since August. It
was maybe six weeks after disaster day. Jacques had told her: « Aucune
faute, c’est un excellent examen, quatre-vingt-cinq sur cent. » Her best
mark ever in French, and her best performance: scholastic perfection
instead of their perfect life together. Why had she tried so hard to prove
that her failure as a woman was deliberate? It was the first fault, the
first defeat of her reason, of which the trip to Florence was only a logical
sequel. Then Sally rejoined something about being linguistically in phase
with one’s environment, but Carol was not listening, she could hear the
white whispers of the forest where they had never walked. She could
smell the last breath of the pallid, tall skinny gum trees when death was
blowing from the sea in the form of established nostalgia.
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