The Life to Come. Michelle De Kretser

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СКАЧАТЬ away from each other in Swiss Cottage with new partners and stepchildren. Ash acquired a half sister. Christmas, by tradition a grave festivity at which the three Fernandos had opened expensive gifts and peacefully dismantled a goose, developed into a riotous affair with reindeer antlers and aunts. A preposterous ceremony known as Kris Kringle played its part in Ash’s decision to apply for the lectureship in Sydney that he saw advertised on a sleety November day.

      Women—but not only women—were drawn to Ash, to his politeness and his eyes. His eyes suggested, obscurely, that he had suffered. In Sydney, an emeritus professor offered him the use, rent-free and for as long as he liked, of a pied-à-terre in Newtown. It consisted of a big, high-ceilinged room on the top floor of a subdivided Victorian mansion. A bathroom opened off the hall, and a short stair led to a room at the top of a tower. It contained a hard chair, and a table that served as a desk. On clear days, the view reached to a distant, glinty line that was Botany Bay. It was the long stair down to the street that had defeated the professor’s knee. For most of his life, he had been a radical with a kingly beard. Now, having retired to the Hunter Valley, he was writing a monumental work that examined everything by which he had lived and judged it a sham. His wife had stopped speaking to him. Introduced to Ash, he saw a foreigner newly arrived in Australia: that meant someone who needed help. He lied, “My heart,” hitting himself on the chest to explain about the stairs. He wouldn’t confess to arthritis, which made an old man of him. That night, resting between savage paragraphs, the professor began to cry. He was remembering what Ash had said: “In every way that matters your heart is entirely sound.”

      Everyone Ash knew in Sydney lived in houses in which rooms opened off a long passage. These corridors were unfailingly dark and cold—why didn’t Australians heat their houses? There would be, at best, a dodgy, unflued gas heater in a living room. Sydney remained for Ash a city of cold bedrooms, cold bathrooms. Oh, but how he loved it! For a long time after leaving Sri Lanka, he had remembered leafy lanes held in a sea-blue rind. He went back when he was twenty-four. Colombo was full of soldiers and dust. Ash went away again quickly and didn’t return. In Sydney he recovered lost mornings of steamy gray warmth. The city was regulated and hygienic—occidental—yet voluptuously receptive to chaos and filth. It knew the elemental, antique drama of the sea. Whether or not Ash could see it, the sea was there with its deaths and its ships. Whenever a storm stirred the Pacific, every hill in Sydney was an asphalted wave. The city smelled briny and fumy. It was a smell that made Ash feel something like homesick but without sadness. In those first weeks, when he was at his most porous, past and present fused. The understanding cries of crows—Ah! Ohh! Aahh!—rang out from his childhood. A botched arpeggio overheard on a humid afternoon revived the Czerny exercises played by nine-year-old Ash. He recognized things he couldn’t name: trees that ruined concrete with their toes, reckless floral perfumes. Even the fruit bats rotting on power lines were dreamy visitants from the past.

      Sydney was a summer city as London was a winter one. Its dusty golden light set a nimbus around bodies moving unhindered in floaty clothes. When dark jackets and heavy scarves appeared in the streets, the city looked hangdog and shifty. That yolky light was one of the things Ash had missed without knowing it. His e-mails to friends around the world said, “I spent too many years in places where the light was blue.”

      Cassie was oaty porridge: pale, reassuring, wholesome. Ash thrilled to her satisfying breasts, her orderly teeth. Her eyes, widely spaced, gave her the remote look of someone listening to distant music. She wore empire-waisted velvet dresses, with sleeves gathered at the wrist, which had belonged to her mother. Cassie was taller than her mother, and the jewel-colored dresses barely skimmed her knees. Evoking a vanished age, they intensified her faraway air. Her reading glasses had large frames that made her look like a girl playing at being a grandmother; when she took them off, there were a few seconds when she seemed dopey and pitiless. All her effects were like that, uncalculated, incidental, and her artlessness was part of her power. Sometimes she turned up in jeans topped with a vintage blouse, pin-tucked and demure, in a lilac-y sort of blue. Tiny fabric loops fastened two nacre buttons at the back. At the sight of Cassie’s shoulder blades, faintly shining through the blouse, Ash wanted nothing more than to undo those buttons.

      There were fragile, potent, slightly witchy things on Cassie’s windowsill: a bird’s skull, lavender sea urchin cases, a view of the Prater painted on glass. There was also a photo of her parents: solid, dark strangers. They proved what Ash had known all along: Cassie was a changeling, magical. That was the kind of foolishness she called up in Ash. He would have been embarrassed for any friend who indulged in it.

      Cassie had the Sydney imperviousness to cold. Her velvet dresses—emerald, sapphire, topaz—were unlined. When an icy gale blew from the west, she slipped a weightless coat over her dress, or a lambs’ wool cardigan. She seemed to own neither scarf nor gloves. Her concession to winter was socks inside her boots. Previously, Ash had thought of Australians—if he thought of them at all—as no-nonsense, practical people: Canadians with tans. Now he realized that he had overlooked what history had required of them: they were visionaries, adept at denial. Australians had seen pastures where there was red dust, geraniums where there were trees as old as time, no one where there were five hundred nations—they dealt with winter as a tank deals with a blade of grass.

      In bed, arching beneath Ash, Cassie bit the side of his palm. There was salt in her, he decided. That made him think of his mother: her salty Scottish eyes. His mother had e-mailed Ash on the day he left: “Australians are hardworking and very successful. They are suspicious of their success and resent it. They are winners who prefer to see themselves as victims. Their national hero, Ned Kelly, was a violent criminal—they take this as proof of their egalitarianism. They worship money, of course. Anyway, enjoy yourself.”

      Cassie always wore two rings, a garnet and a square-cut emerald in old-fashioned claw settings, which had belonged to her grandmother. Her friend Pippa had told her, casually, “You’ll be murdered for those one day.” People often remarked that Pippa and Cassie were like sisters. That was quite true in the sense that each girl kept track of, rejected, and coveted whatever belonged to the other.

      In the winter break, not long after Ash met Cassie, a colleague invited him to his family’s sheep station in western New South Wales. “It’s the real Australia out there,” said Lachlan, as if Sydney were a collective hallucination. The real Australia was called Yukkendrearie, or so Lachlan said—it wasn’t so very different from the name on the map. Ash and Lachlan crossed mountains blue with menace. A distant viaduct had the look of all out-of-place objects, sinister and forlorn. Then the mountains were behind them, and there were the carpet rucks of threadbare hills. All this was disappointingly familiar: sheep, hills making waves.

      Ash asked, “Will we see real Australians?” It was a joke, but not wholly. He was keen to encounter the outlandish, to be enlarged or overwhelmed.

      “Bound to. Strong, silent types. Famous for self-reliance and endurance. Hardworking and practical. Stoic.”

      “So the real Australian is a Victorian Englishman?”

      “All archetypes are fossils.”

      Ash didn’t say, Shame to have a borrowed one, though.

      Lachlan sent a text message whenever they stopped to stretch their legs. His partner of eleven years had recently left him and wasn’t returning his calls. Zipping up his jeans beside an empty highway, Ash saw a row of canaries in a windbreak. But it was only an arrangement of light.

      In the afternoon, the scenery drained away. What was left was flatness and sky. There was no end to either, and a peculiar light. All that space might have been restful but scraped Ash’s nerves instead. Like reality TV, it was both harrowing and dull. How did Sydneysiders trim their children’s fingernails or buy stuff from the Apple store or sign up for Fun Runs with this enormity breathing down their necks? Ash wondered what word might apply to what they were moving through: certainly not СКАЧАТЬ