‘Shall we give them Jeux?’ He laughed, and seated himself beside her on the unyielding stool. ‘Yes, Jeux d’enfants,’ he decided, ‘is what I think they ought to get.’ You too, his voice seemed to be implying.
So they started out on this prim walk with the governesses, along the Prokymea, or in other cases, round Rushcutters Bay. The bow into which a sash was gathered bobbing against the waterline. Of splintering blue or submerged stocks. And not without its menace of lantana, through which Curly Golson blundered in search of something he could put his hand on. The future scarcely anyone had found. Not Joanie, her freckle-encrusted cleavage bursting with unwritten love letters. The exiled Greek extinguished by his crown, or its substitute the peasant hat, the aura of which he was still wearing, and not the least, the little-boyhood from which he had never disentangled himself.
So they played, they all played, whether actively or not, the Jeux, the games Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu’s warped piano keys released. Curly’s fingers all thumbs and a blood-blister as he made some attempt at groping after the elusive music. Joanie clasping the amethyst in its several wrappings: of tissue paper, beaded silk, and flesh. More frenetically the two Vatatzes, shoulders bumping as they spun tops, or galloped towards a climax neither they nor Miss Wansborough-Walmsley, Fräulien Felser, or Mademoiselle Le Grand, of dappled necks and crimson nostrils, might ever achieve, rocking and rocking on their stationary rockers.
‘Eudoxia,’ Angelos Vatatzes shouted, ‘your bass is too pedestrian,’ and stopped.
Herself seemingly desolated, Eudoxia continued for a few bars in the bass which had offended her husband.
When at last Madame Vatatzes halted, brutal in turn in her abruptness, the governess in black might have brought her ruler down on Doxy’s knuckles, the sharp edge on cold morning.
It left the Golsons somewhat confused. For Curly it was simply a case of too much bloody music. Joanie on the other hand bled for her love.
Again they were all sitting at attention, while Teakle, the other side of the wall, somewhere under the olive-tree, was clearing his throat. Mrs Golson heard the subsequent gob hurtle and settle, or so she thought. She saw the amethyst lying at Madame Vatatzes’ large feet. Were the hackled toes rejecting her?
They sat until, disregarding all indignities, Eudoxia launched without her husband into deeper seas of music, thrashing out to escape from the weed of human relationships, and he, perhaps recognising the attempt, joined in with a wild disdain.
The Vatatzes were playing, like many marriages, together and apart, but where their Jeux d’enfants had been performed with an angular malice, now the musicians swirled in romantic carnation-tinted circles. Were they perhaps revolving in the waltzes Mrs Golson had heard on that other occasion when she returned to confirm her love? She was sure finally that these were the same waltzes, and breathed so deep she choked on the musty dust rising from bowls of stale pot-pourri and rented carpet, stifled by the moted air where all the poetry of which she had been cheated trembled and expired. Unavoidably, she started coughing behind a knuckle of the hand not engaged with the amethyst.
Mrs Golson was racked by her cough; and not a lozenge in her bag. If only she could have sucked the uncut amethyst, a pebble in her desert of despair, as her wretched cough humped her against recurring themes: her youthful caper with Eadie Twyborn when they crashed that supper dance at the Australia, the circular motion of Daddy’s chapped, tremulous hand stroking her cheek, Curly cavorting at the net, all bravura in white flannels, all male, and yes, the smell of a man, which had shocked when first introduced by Doxy Vatatzes, but which now rose naturally enough out of memory and the swell of music.
Whoever the Vatatzes were wooing it was not each other. As their tempo grew more reckless, the piece they were playing was falling apart. She had become the leader in spite of every indication of his musical displeasure. In his narrowed shoulders, shuddering elbows, Mrs Golson sensed a moral disapproval, worse still, a physical crisis. She was reminded of the seizure which had carried off Daddy, and Daddy’s only unkind words: If what they tell me is true, Joanie … and what strangers tell is usually true … dancing at the Australia with a woman … in a corked-on moustache … then I’ve failed to … After which, poor Daddy turned blue. It was one of the many incidents she had never been able to forgive herself.
And this horrid old Greek, what did he know? He had grown so brittle he promised to break on the piano-stool. Would he accuse her from the carpet as Daddy had from amongst the feather pillows which more than likely caused his asthma and cardiac seizure? Joanie could not have borne to be accused again: two murders were too much in the lifetime of an innocent woman whose only vice was a need for tenderness, romantic sunsets, and emotional conceits of a feminine nature.
All of which she had been receiving from the music until the Greek started turning against her.
He sprang up finally. ‘I must leave you,’ he gasped at his guests.
He looked so livid, Mrs Golson cried out in what she hoped was a compassionate tone, ‘Oh dear — there’s nothing wrong? You’re not ill, are you?’
Good reliable Curly had risen to support the old fellow if necessary (she had always congratulated herself when Curly, a warden at St James’s, carried out the fainted ladies and sat them on the porch during the summer services). Now, in their friends’ salon, she could have patted his broad back.
But Monsieur Vatatzes assured them he was not in need of assistance or sympathy. ‘I am called by nature,’ he explained, and walked rather stiffly out of the room.
Madame Vatatzes continued for a short while at the piano as the romantic composition for four hands trailed off into a series of solo improvisations.
Without turning her straight, and for Mrs Golson, still splendid, carnation back, she informed her visitors, ‘Angelos is the victim of his bladder. He’s practically worn a track, poor darling, tramping to the bathroom in the night.’
She sounded a final treble note and closed the lid of the upright piano.
Curly was preparing to sympathise, but Joanie made sure to quash that. ‘I’m so sorry to have put you to all this inconvenience — and upset your husband by coming here.’ Much as it pained her to twist the knife, she experienced a sensation of exquisite pleasure from the pain she might have inflicted on the unattainable Madame Vatatzes.
An expression of pain did in fact drift across the sublime face, but from no unkindness on her friend’s part, Mrs Golson soon realised; Monsieur Vatatzes was shouting from somewhere deeper in the house, ‘Doxy, where are you? Do your visitors mean to spend the night?’
Madame Vatatzes detached herself in a desperately ungainly movement, floundering in her robe, almost but not quite tripping on the hem, as she thumped across the floor on bare feet, making towards her importunate husband.
The Golsons were stranded in a situation each hoped the other might handle.
While from farther out this distinguished boor continued shouting. ‘But what possessed you?’
Whatever had was drowned in the gushing of a cistern, the flushing of a lavatory bowl.
‘And not to tell me!’ Monsieur Vatatzes stormed.
Never would his wife’s more murmurous explanations reach the ears of their attentive guests. It was most aggravating.
‘You have no consideration—poteh poteh—for the feelings of others.’
‘Pott-ay pott-ay!’ Curly sniggered.
‘All this intrigue behind my back! Will you leave me for …’ the voice was breaking on a high note as it searched for a word sufficiently abrasive ‘… for these Australians of yours?’