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objects, passion and rationality. Joël was not an enthusiastic practitioner
of introspection, rather cautious before risking a foot in the abyss. But,
at times, he could not help delving into other people’s mental processes,
and, at times, these other people included himself. A future specialist in
genetics who liked to question heredity, he also returned to his father’s
confusing puzzle because he found, in reveries between equations and
the physical effort of sports, or in the hesitations of his commitment to
Muriel, some features that were now blatantly illustrated by his father’s
lonely and disorderly home in Sydney.
“A stranger to the apartment”, these words hardly applied to
him. He was almost born in the back room with a blue carpet, brought
back to sloping grass and Hills hoist views through white Holland blinds
from the Royal Prince Alfred maternity hospital when he was five days
old. But he had obviously not the slightest recollection of his first two
years, when he had lived in that room before his parents’ final separation
or, later, when John and Sylvie left him to Jacques and Jill’s care on a
few weekends. On his return from Europe and North America last year,
without Jill, Jacques had rejected all the opportunities he was offered
to purchase property on the North Shore where prices had taken the
plunge, to eventually “settle”, he said, in his old dwelling, when it came
up for sale after the owners bought the big one storey house on the other
side of the street.
Was he going to appear at all tonight? You could never know,
with him. He hated to cook for himself and had dinner out several times
a week, whether alone or with one of his female students or younger colleagues
whom he took back to the flat for a night or a week. Sometimes
there was no trace of him from Friday afternoon to Monday morning.
Even in the heart of winter, he would drive to Nowra, Picton or Lake
Macquarie with his latest escort, staying overnight in crumbling country
hotels as if he expected to rejoin his old self, ten or twenty years younger,
heartily breakfasting on charcoal-like lamb chops with his greatest love.
Sylvie would say, not very nicely : “He only needs an MGB convertible
and a corduroy cap on his head to look and behave like a perfect eccentric
wreck.” Joël found these odd habits rather endearing. John Silverman,
his stepfather, gave him constant affection and security, he could afford
to lavish some of it on Jacques without depleting his reserves. He would
have liked to see Jacques happier, really in love with someone. It was
queer, at seventeen, to play protector to his forty-six year old father. But
there was more to it. A kind of ill-defined complicity which went beyond
affinities. Now he had come to invite him to Muriel’s birthday party
at the Robinsons tomorrow, not because it was something a son should
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