Forty-Seventeen Read online

‘Please. Surely a social drink isn’t too much to ask?’

  That was a subterfuge. He didn’t want only a social drink. He couldn’t have settled just for that. She was a fire in his mind.

  She added, ‘Maybe sometime in the future.’ And then said, ‘You turned away from me once.’

  ‘When? How?’

  ‘I wanted to have your baby.’

  Huge fissures were opening in this conversation.

  ‘Have a baby? Back then? But you were only seventeen. You were a kid.’

  ‘So what?’

  Exactly. Yes. So what.

  ‘You’re being operatic,’ he told her, ‘you’re the one who’s into fantasy now – motherhood-romance shit.’

  ‘Yes, maybe. But I still think it would have been the right thing to do. A “venturesome thing” to do.’

  His word.

  He was taken aback. That was the phrase. He couldn’t find a response for this revelation any more than he could for the first. He was getting no clean response back from his sensibility. He’d placed no importance at all on the long-forgotten conversation about having a baby. He was taken aback. He was at sea.

  ‘Well, I hope you really are OK,’ he heard himself say, ‘and I hope we do meet up in the future. The near soon future. Anything you ever need – you just have to ask. You know that.’

  Except, he expected her to say, for a baby.

  She laughed. ‘Your voice has changed again – you sound almost brotherly. But I must go now.’

  Brotherly, he was not.

  ‘Take care of yourself.’

  ‘I do. I know how to – very well. Goodbye.’

  He wanted to hold onto the call but he was conversationally at sea.

  ‘Goodbye then.’

  ‘Yes, goodbye. And you take care too.’

  ‘Yes – but unlike you I don’t think I know how to do that yet, properly.’

  ‘Oh you take care of yourself quite well enough I seem to remember. And you’re a big boy now – you are an older man. Now.’

  The call ended. He was very much at sea.

  Over a drink in the bar he argued with himself that he hadn’t in any way ‘inducted’ her, although the idea of doing so had an erotic charge for him. Maybe it could be argued that it was inherent in the flow and nature of all contemporary male and female dynamics – something like that. Surely it was obvious that she had a predisposition. He certainly admitted to whore-fantasy shit. There was all that about his great-grandmother – herself, well, a whore. But that had been a game with Belle. But as he brooded, this was followed by stray concern about her health, her life moves. But most of all he was caught in the turbulence coming from the inadequacy of his personal code in response to what she had told him, the carnal discomfort and paradox that she was no longer available to him yet was available to random others. But the responses of his mind were not complete, late returns, he knew, would come.

  Edith was obviously fidgeting with curiosity and from the queer possessiveness towards him which she had allowed to take shape in her mind. She did however wait as long as she could at breakfast before asking him how his telephone call had gone.

  ‘Did you make contact then – with your own true love?’

  ‘She is not my “true love”,’ he said, in a shielded voice, thinking that she could have so easily become his ‘own true love’ and maybe yet so become – she had always been so frighteningly full of potential for him.

  ‘Well whatever,’ Edith said.

  ‘She’s involved with a man in London. A Parisian.’

  ‘It’s honourable enough to lose out to a Parisian,’ she said, with the pointless relief of her voice commingled with the pointlessness of her remark. ‘It sounded very much like a middle-age crisis love affair to me.’

  What the hell would she know about it?

  ‘I don’t see myself as “middle-aged” – I don’t think that description has any meaning and certainly doesn’t carry a fixed program of behaviour.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to offend.’

  ‘I wanted to do a pilgrimage to the Spanish Civil War sites with her. And to visit anarchist places. I wanted to fit it in after we finish up here, we’d planned it for some time.’

  She ate her cheese and cold cuts, wary of speaking.

  He pushed his breakfast platter across to her. ‘You have that. I’ll just have coffee.’

  ‘Thank you. But I couldn’t eat it.’

  She would.

  She then said, ‘I’d love to see Spain again. I was there many years ago, I hate to admit it – before, just before, the Civil War. Yes, I’d like to see Spain again. I knew Ascaso, one of the brilliant minds on the anarchist side. I knew him … well.’

  This lured him out of his brooding, into bright surprise. He realised, of course, that it was feasible. But for him Edith had not had a personal history, let alone an existence before he was born. His knowledge of her had been from their day-to-day travelling, their IAEA itinerary. Back in Australia, he realised, he had seen her as a biographical note – ‘leading environmentalist’.

  Ascaso was a name from a poem for him, and from his reading in anarchist history.

  ‘Did you know Durruti?’

  ‘No. I would have liked to have, but no.’

  She began to eat his breakfast, now aware that she had impressed him.

  ‘I’ve abandoned the Spanish plans,’ he said, realising that he had to say it to void her suggestion that maybe she should go with him. ‘Anyhow it was sentimental anarchism, a hangover from another part of my life.’ In a different tone so as to close the matter entirely, he said, ‘I should try to sit in on the consultative committee to stop some of the silliness that will come out.’

  She changed her tone too. ‘You’re hard on the others. Remember giving “public concern” a voice is part of our brief.’

  They knew each other’s views and relapsed into silence. He would talk to her at another time about Spain and the anarchists. He feared that now it would painfully enliven his numbed heart.

  ‘If you change your mind about Spain – I would gladly come along to keep you company. But don’t expect me to help with the driving. I dare say it’s not that much different from back home but I do recall many donkeys and flocks of sheep.’

  She was asking to go with him.

  ‘No. Thank you, Edith. I’ve given up on the Spanish adventure.’

  ‘You poor boy, you make it sound so tragic.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he said, irritated, glad to be irritated with her. ‘It is not tragic at all. It’s just something that’s passed through my life. Abandoned plans. Acceptable losses. Nothing tragic.’

  Disposal

  He explained to Edith that he wanted to work it so that he spoke last at the plenary session of one of the Commissions related to the IAEA.

  ‘I don’t want the Russian to speak last.’

  Edith found the idea offended her sense of the natural order of things.

  ‘You have to accept these things as they occur,’ she said.

  She moved the flowers on the breakfast table and straightened her setting, staring into the flowers as if she were looking into the foliage of her seventy years of life and now fearing that everything in her life might have been ordered, not by the natural scheme of things, but by ‘schemers’ like him.

  Maybe his life, the moves and plays of his life, were being induced by others.

  ‘I don’t like schemers,’ she said, ‘and you have already involved me in some sort of trickery with that girl.’

  He hunted his mind for a reason which might swing her.

  ‘Let’s do it for Australia,’ he sang, ‘let’s do it because we’re mates.’

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ she said matter-of-factly, wishfully.

  Although he and Edith were far apart in political sentiment and personality, and age, they had been oddly bonded. They did represent Australia in an official way and were travelling on official passports, married in a file by a public servant
. She clung to him socially because she was not a good mixer. And she’d fallen into a dependency on him because he was on secondment, temporarily, to the IAEA, while she was a public member of the mission. This meant she ‘left things to him’ as a dependent wife might and this sponsored extraneous echoes of matrimony.

  ‘I just don’t like schemers,’ she said, ‘never have done.’

  ‘Oh come on, Edith – treat it as a game – a scam.’

  ‘I can’t really treat the problem of nuclear waste as some sort of game,’ she said solemnly, ‘I’m sorry.’ And then she added, ‘I don’t know what a scam is.’

  ‘Who got you a better room here at the hotel?’ He reached across and placed his hand on hers, which surprised him and surprised her. She looked down at his hand – he hoped it didn’t look as manipulative as it felt, under her glance.

  He took his hand away.

  ‘Who got you out of the meeting with the guy from the Netherlands whom you detest?’

  The thirty-year difference in their ages made the touch an unnatural advance and recalled for him – and he guessed for her – the ambiguous visit to her room he’d made one drunken night. Oh God.

  ‘I did chase that girl’s telephone number all across the world for you, which, in all likelihood, you should not have had. No, I don’t like schemers.’

  The breakfast food disappeared as Edith wolfed it down. He gestured to the waiter and in his faltering German ordered another round of breakfast for her.

  ‘You can’t bribe me with food and you shouldn’t encourage me to eat,’ she said, as if to an over-indulgent lover. ‘You know I eat too much.’

  She liked to play, verbally, with this marrying.

  ‘Maybe Dr Kum’a Ndumbe would do it,’ he pondered aloud. The Cameroon Commissioner and he had something of a common view of things, got along well. He didn’t quite know why.

  This seemed to get at Edith, maybe she felt now excluded by this suggestion and would rather be implicated than excluded.

  ‘What is your plan then,’ she asked, in a right-to-know voice, ‘hypothetically speaking?’

  ‘It’s simple,’ he said, ‘there are seven reports to be given – I’m in number five position. The Soviet guy Ulyanov has got last place – he demanded it, for godsake, at the Secretariat meeting. Well, I’m going to take it away from him – and that’s where you come in.’

  ‘If I do come in. If I choose to play politics.’

  ‘All you have to do is deliver a message to the chairperson during the fourth report. This message will call me from the dais and while I’m gone Ulyanov will be forced to speak in position six. I’ll come back and give my report in the last position. Get it?’

  She stared at him as if suspecting that something remained unsaid. ‘But really, why?’

  ‘The last speaker gets the last say.’

  ‘Why’s that so important?’

  ‘It just is. You get the last say.’

  ‘It’s a form of cheating.’

  ‘Do you think they don’t cheat? What about Ulyanov’s famous news release on Wednesday? It’s just gamesmanship, Edith.’

  ‘Really you’re just little boys.’ Then her face indicated she would do it. ‘You’re corrupting me,’ she said, with a coyness.

  He thought she was tantalised by the intrigue as she had been when she’d found the girl’s telephone number for him. He thought she even enjoyed the possibility of corruption at her age – as though it testified that she had life left to corrupt, innocence to lose.

  ‘And we’re assuming that I agree with the things you’ll say when you get this much-treasured last position.’

  He wasn’t sure about giving her a veto.

  ‘I think I should have the right to see what you intend to say – which I assume is not strictly FA policy,’ she said.

  ‘Even you, Edith, agree that being well-meaning isn’t enough in negotiated positions.’

  She looked confused and as if she might bolt.

  ‘I just don’t want Australia to come out of this as dupes in some ridiculous manifesto,’ he said.

  ‘All right then, as long as I get to read what you’re going to say first.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He gave her hand a squeeze, spontaneously this time. ‘Terrific – as co-conspirator, Edith, your timing will be everything.’

  ‘Don’t care for the expression “co-conspirator”.’

  ‘Adventuress then – you are a bit of an adventuress, Edith.’

  She made a small pleased mouth. Under the earnest eminent environmentalist there really was an adventuress. ‘And remember,’ she said, ‘I’m just indulging you. I only hope that it’s all harmless.’

  On the night of the plenary he rehearsed her.

  ‘I’ll feel very silly,’ she said, ‘if I begin to giggle.’

  He saw the seventy-year-old Edith on the platform with a piece of paper in her hand, giggling in front of the Commission people. He wondered about the image she had of herself – was it unsynchronised with her age? Could she still at times see herself as a giggling schoolgirl?

  ‘You’re a good actress, Edith, when you faked that call to Australia for the telephone number you were perfect.’

  ‘Don’t recall it – I still feel bad about all that.’

  By talking about it that way he was not recalling it. By keeping it up in the conversational air like a kite he could avoid it. The telephone call had been an emotional devastation, objectively, although the expected emotional concussion had not arrived. What was disturbing him about it was that the concussion had not reached him, had not authentically reached him, that it was still out there waiting to hit him.

  Or did he really like the idea that the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl he’d met and loved was now in London doing a little amateur whoring? No. Why did he say ‘A little amateur whoring’? She’d said she was whoring. The girl was now a whore.

  Well, I’m no longer your archetypal young girl. I’m no schoolgirl any longer. I’m grown up and worse … I’m older than I should be …

  Have you been through some sort of tribulation?

  You could say that.

  Stop being mysterious.

  As they say, a girl has to eat … you inducted me … you taught me how to pleasure older men. You let me down. I wanted to have your baby.

  Rubbish.

  He supposed he felt he should have an emotionally devastating concussion from all this and was more worried that he seemed deficient than he was worried about her. He’d reacted lubriciously to the conversation – that also worried him. Or he worried that he should be worried about it and wasn’t. His personal code had no response ready for him. He was uncomfortably skewered by it but could not react. Skewered.

  On the last night he sat through the political posturings of the other Commission members and despaired of diplomacy at this level. He either found this sort of international posturing ‘subtly critical’ for world affairs or ‘frighteningly futile’. He was finding it, tonight, frighteningly futile.

  He saw that, as planned, Edith was absent from the horseshoe of Commissioners and auditors as he sat apart with seven other rapporteurs. All those in the conference room wore headphones for simultaneous translation which gave them the appearance of each being lost in a private Walkman world.

  It was approaching the time when Edith should appear and come forward with the note. Number four – Lenrie Peters of Gambia – was rising to speak.

  He saw her appear fleetingly at the side door of the conference room, look around and disappear back into the anteroom. She then appeared again. He gave her a disguised nod. She shook her head and made a desperate movement of her mouth to say that she couldn’t go through with it.

  Damn her.

  She was probably entranced by this demon dance around the issue of radioactive waste, fearful of disrupting the incantations.

  He silently cursed her.

  She must have sensed the fury of these curses because he saw her look at the floor fo
r a second or two and then stride in and come in at the side of the rapporteurs.

  She passed him without a glance and handed the faked note to the chairperson. She then turned in a calculated way, controlled in her pacing like a fashion model and, again without glancing at him, left the dais.

  The chairperson read the name on the note and passed it along to him. He made as to read it – it said ‘You and your boyish games!’ – frowned histrionically, looked at his watch, took off his headphones, and leaned across to the chairperson. She took off her headphones.

  ‘I’m needed off-stage for a moment – I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ he whispered urgently under the booming voice of the Gambian rapporteur.

  The chairperson looked perplexed. ‘But you are next to report,’ she hissed.

  ‘Go on without me – I’ll be back as soon as I can – I’ll be back before it’s over. Go on with Ulyanov.’

  ‘I don’t like changing the order of things …’ she looked at her watch as if it might give her advice.

  ‘Don’t worry – I’ll be back.’

  He left, chortling to himself, conscious of the questioning gaze of Ulyanov and the others.

  He found Edith standing with a bored security officer chatting in limited English.

  ‘Well done, Edith – well done – did you receive my curses?’

  ‘Yes, I did indeed, but I was rather good, I thought.’

  ‘You were.’

  From where they stood, Edith could see the dais and she reported that Ulyanov had risen to speak, disconcerted, unwilling.

  They listened to him begin his report, waited a few minutes, and then he returned to the conference room.

  When Ulyanov finished, the unsmiling chairperson beckoned him to make the final report.

  Afterwards, at the drinks and the irradiated shrimp – sanitised by gamma rays – which Edith wouldn’t touch, the chairperson came across to him and said, ‘I cannot understand. Why should you be called from proceedings at such a time?’

  Edith, who was standing near him nervously sipping her wine, turned away.

  He shrugged and said, ‘Affairs of state.’

  ‘At such a time?’ she persisted.