He said as much to Nelly. Who argued, ‘But you can see a painting, touch it. Fiction’s the spooky thing. The thing that’s not there.’
She stirred in her ugly vinyl armchair as she spoke. The movement caused her shirt to ride up; there was the glimmer of a bare hip. It was an intensely erotic apparition. Tom looked away. He thought there was nothing more present, more material, than her flesh; and nothing he found more disturbing.
When he told Nelly that he was thinking of writing about her work, she looked doubtful. ‘Yeah, right, that’s good, I guess.’
Next thing there was Posner, lying in wait for Tom at the Preserve. ‘Dear boy, this is tremendously exciting. The serious attention Nelly’s attracted so far has been rather outweighed by sensationalist dross. The hour is ripe, ripe, for a scholar.’ He brought out his version of a smile; cautiously, like a man exercising an alligator. ‘Oh, I know you’re not an art historian. But as I’ve been saying to Nelly, one must think over and through mere categories. The specialist is a contemptible modern creation. I consider the fact that you come to us from literature a veritable atout. Art and text: an illustrious association.’ A shirtfront loomed vast as a snowfield. ‘If I could help,’ said Posner, ‘I would be honoured. Resources, contacts, suggestions… We could start with dinner.’
Tom murmured that the project was in its infancy.
Nelly said, ‘You’re scaring him off, Carson.’
‘But it’s quite the other way around. I’m entirely awed.’ Then he was pressing something into Tom’s hand, the bloodless fingers surprisingly warm. ‘My card. Whenever you’re ready,’ crooned Posner.
‘Tell me a story,’ Nelly would say.
It was oddly disquieting. The childishness of it: Tell me a story. It rang through their encounters like a refrain. Tom was unable to resist it, of course. Soon he was going to meet Nelly stocked with stories like charms.
He told her about April Fonceca, who sang in the last row of the choir and was a living example. When April was a little girl, she had lit a candle and placed her dolls around it. Afterwards, she said she was only playing birthday parties. Afterwards, who could tell exactly how it happened? But there was a golden flame and there was a celluloid doll, and then the doll was the flame. And there was April, reaching to save her pretty doll, and the flame reaching for April. April wore high necks and long sleeves, but there was nothing to be done about her face, and that was what came of playing with matches. Whenever Tom looked at her, he saw the girl and her doll flowering into light, a big candle and a small one. He didn’t want to look at April, said Tom, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
He told Nelly about a widowed Englishwoman his parents had known. She kept a little dog called Chess: tight white body, black ears. ‘The Civil Service terrier,’ said Arthur. One day Chess was bitten by a snake and died. Soon afterwards, the elderly Indian couple who lived next door to the widow acquired a dun-coated mongrel and promptly named him Chess. This greatly amused Sebastian de Souza: ‘The fools! A brown mutt called Chess!’ Passing their compound, he would call out,‘Here, Magpie! Here, Domino!’ Or,‘I say, Prasad, how’s Zebra today?’
He was a grown man, said Tom, before it occurred to him that the Prasads might have intended the name as a form of homage; a mark of respect, even affection. The old people had been gentle and ineffectual. Tom could recall a steady procession of beggars to their door.
He spoke to Nelly of marvels. Of arriving in Australia and finding clean water piped into every kitchen, every drinking fountain. He had drunk glass after glass of it: an everyday miracle on tap.
On a moonless night, Tom ventured a gothic little tale. It was a true story, said Tom, and he had heard it from his father. It was Arthur’s earliest memory, and this was how it went:
What Arthur remembered was a red thing. It jumped up and fell back. Sometimes it vanished but tiny red eyes still watched him. It had a name and that was fi re.
Arthur had scarlet fever, which was red fever, and his head hurt. His arms and chest were on fire. In his mother’s ivory-handled mirror he saw that his cheeks had turned red. But his tongue was white: coated with sugar or snow.
Snow dropped past the window. Arthur’s throat burned. The next time he saw himself in the mirror his tongue was a strawberry. The red thing was growing inside him. It spread in his bed, and his sheets were on fire. The only cool thing in the world was his mother’s white hand. She smoothed his hair. She fi lled a red rubber bag with ice and placed it on his forehead. She read him a story about Snow White and Rose Red.
His older sister sent him a picture on folded white paper. She had drawn a wreath of sharp green leaves and berries like beads of blood. ‘It’s Christmas,’ said Arthur’s mother. She draped a snowy pillowcase over the foot of his bed and left him in the dark. The red thing leaped about.
In the night it turned into a man. It was a red man and Arthur knew him and he didn’t know him and he was coming closer.
Tell me a story. It led Tom to reflect on the book he was writing. Near the end of his long life, Henry James had written a story with a happy ending; having until then, in exemplary modern fashion, avoided the redemptive case.‘The Jolly Corner’ told of Spencer Brydon, who returned to New York after a long absence abroad. He was welcomed by Alice Staverton, an old friend who had loved him steadfastly over the years.
Not long after his return, Brydon began to suspect that a family property he had inherited was haunted. He took to prowling the house after dark and, after a harrowing pursuit one night, came face to face with the apparition. As Brydon had intuited, it was none other than his alter ego, the rich businessman he might have become if he hadn’t left New York. The terrible figure advanced on and overpowered the hero; who when he finally came to his senses found Alice cradling his head in her lap. She had come to the house because she sensed Brydon was in danger. She spoke gently to the bewildered man of the need to accept the path his life had taken; and they embraced as the story ended.
Tom had devoted several pages of his book to this text. He had concentrated on horror, on the awful qualities that pervaded the story. He had traced the presence of doubles in James’s fiction, had analysed the mythic, cultural and psychoanalytic import of the doppelgänger; and remained unsatisfi ed with his efforts. The tale continued to elude him, as the ghost eluded Brydon. It was a complex, masterly work, far removed from simple childhood tales. But Tom suddenly saw that the fairy-story, a humble, enduring form, might provide him with a fresh thread to follow in unravelling its significance. For Brydon, like the protagonist in a fairy-tale, had bravely stared down peril, securing selfhood and winning union with a beloved other.
It was an insight Tom pursued with happy results. In this way, Nelly entered a chapter of his book: an enabling, untragic muse.
Saturday afternoon passed in hopefulness and despair, and bouts of icy rain. Images of the dog continued to present themselves to Tom. He remembered him sitting up very straight at the top of the hill above Nelly’s house only a week earlier: calmly attentive to his wide surroundings, rich in world.
With wind stirring the trees into a formless boiling, Tom made his way back up the track towards the house. Felix Atwood’s attachment to authenticity notwithstanding, his architect had clad the old building in galvanised iron. Seen at a certain angle, its corrugations shadowed violet, the house could, in fact, pass for the shed it impersonated. It was iconic, in its way; at once more and less than it appeared, a persuasive fi ction.
Nelly had told Tom that Atwood had acquired the house in her name. After negotiations with the tax office, her solicitors succeeded in saving it. Whereupon Nelly put the property on the market. But no one wanted it. Its lack of mod cons had no charm in rural eyes and it was too far from the city for a convenient weekender. And it was in any case dismaying.