The Death of Noah Glass Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  BY THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF A GUIDE TO BERLIN AND FIVE BELLS

  The art historian Noah Glass, having just returned from a trip to Sicily, is discovered floating face down in the swimming pool at his Sydney apartment block. His adult children, Martin and Evie, must come to terms with the shock of their father’s death. But a sculpture has gone missing from a museum in Palermo, and Noah is a suspect. The police are investigating.

  None of it makes any sense. Martin sets off to Palermo in search of answers, while Evie moves into Noah’s apartment, waiting to learn where her life might take her. Retracing their father’s steps in their own way, neither of his children can see the path ahead.

  Gail Jones’s mesmerising new novel tells a story of parents and children, and explores the overlapping patterns our lives create. The Death of Noah Glass is about love and art, grief and happiness, and the mystery of time.

  CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Part Two

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Part Three

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Part Four

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  Part Five

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Schwerer werden. Leichter sein.

  (Grow more heavy. Be more light.)

  PAUL CELAN

  1

  IN THE CORAL light of a summer dawn, Martin Glass recalled a tale. Two brothers in their late seventies attended the funeral of their father, aged forty-two. The father had disappeared as a young man skiing across country, and in an unseasonable thaw, years later, his frozen body had been exposed. The bright sun shone upon him, ice melted and slid away, and he became a gruesome, implausible and shiny surprise. The trekker who discovered him felt both lucky and appalled. The body might have been a slow-motion swimmer lifting through the surface of the water: first his nose met the air, then his leathery cheeks, and then his damp face, with eyes closed, was revealed to the sky of Chamonix.

  Martin imagined the two brothers identifying their father, looking baffled at a version of themselves when young. The corpse was part figurine, with the skin hardened and made inhuman by its preservation, like those bog-men, he supposed, who have the appearance of wood. The father’s clothes would have been old-fashioned and possibly familiar. Perhaps his sons saw again a particular scarf, red and cosy, or recognised a belt, or a woollen hat, or gloves they remembered, stretched long ago over the flexing star of his fingers. Perhaps they stared at these details in order not to dwell on the face. Perhaps one of them thought mummy in a fleeting irreverent second, struck with the impertinence that might come with accident or death. They would have been silent, observed by strangers, formally bereft, looking down at their dead, impossible father. Both must have felt the collapse of time. One brother, the younger, died three weeks after the funeral. The older followed a few months later.

  Though he’d not thought of it for years, Martin was awoken by this story. Three faces alike, sorry timing, mortal coil. The vex of an accident, its meaninglessness. It afforded the interest of a chance occurrence seeming supernatural. Each man anticipates looking at the face of his old father, possibly standing by the deathbed, possibly assessing his own mortality in the presence of the patriarch: this inversion in sequence compelled and fascinated him. As he lay half-dozing on his back, Martin saw himself as the iceman, confronting the white wall of an untimely death.

  Wednesday. This was the day of the funeral. Today he must retrieve the suit he was married in and prepare himself. He must be cautious of his own precarious feelings, he must be manly, and upright, and not lose control, or weep. Martin kicked his legs free of the sheets. He turned from the window and struggled hungover from his bed. His body, always slim, felt abnormally heavy. He rubbed his face with both hands, then his stiff neck, then ruffled his receding and thin grey hair. He felt his skull and wondered with idle alarm about diminishment of memory. Only forty-three, he suspected that his brain was already fretted with holes. Almost every day he found evidence of incipient dementia or a biochemical dysfunction that had no name. Objects receded from definition. People became generalised. Book titles were often difficult to recall. It seemed a dopey belittlement. He was growing smaller in the world, and now, with his father gone, there was a dread, or humiliation, entering the texture of things, like the feeling of walking into a dark room, fumbling for a switch and finding the electricity gone.

  In the bathroom, shaving, he barely recognised himself. He was tempted to say his own name aloud. Outside, in the world, he was oddly more credible, an artist who appeared in the newspapers, feted by collectors with a shrewd eye on the markets, linked to the burnished figures of the mysteriously rich. He tilted the mask of his face towards the mirror at a cubist angle. This, apparently, was what it meant to be parentless. One changed appearance, something was peeled away. Shaving cream spattered as he flicked his razor. Martin wiped it to a bleary swirl with the back of his forearm, turned on the tap, and watched the foam of his shaving mess circle and disappear. It would be a day sullied, he knew it, a day full of objects and substances turning into emotions and symbols.

  When he heard the phone he started, as if it sounded his nervousness. He considered refusing the command, but realised it was Evie, checking up on him.

  ‘So how’s it going?’ he asked.

  ‘Did I wake you? Have you remembered?’

  ‘No. Yes. Of course I remembered.’

  ‘You found the suit?’

  ‘Not yet, but I know it’s here somewhere. Fuck, Evie…’

  Martin paused. He must not swear at his sister or sound exasperated. She’d seen him drunk the night before, wallowing in self-pity. She’d seen him stumble on the pavement and whine like a bullied boy, as though the death of their father, Noah, was a personal affront. He felt the grip of a juvenile shame.

  ‘Still ten-thirty?’

  ‘Yes, that should give us time.’

  Martin waited for Evie to resume the conversation. There was a pause that he could not decipher.

  ‘You okay, Martin?’

  She’d seen him red-eyed and pathetic. He’d gazed not at a father-artefact, preserved to outlast him, but at an outstretched stranger, already tomb grey. It was not true what they said, that the dead appear to be sleeping. Their father was stony and gone. His mouth hung slightly open. Martin would never tell Evie about the official identification, how he’d been disgusted by the force of his own revulsion, that there was a foul odour in the air and a mortal sting. Someone professionally impassive, standing by, had known not to speak or touch his shoulder. Someone else, a stiff clerk, asked him to sign a form. And now Evie was phoning, to check if he’d found his suit. He hated the way his younger sister called him to account, made him feel that his misery was undisciplined and trite.

  ‘No worries. See you soon.’

  He hung up. She would guess, no doubt, that h
e was ashamed of his behaviour, of having made a scene at the restaurant. She was the practical one. She had taken his face in her hands and kissed his moist forehead and said, ‘We’ll get through this, Martin, we will, we will.’ She’d hailed the taxi and held his hand and dragged him snivelling into the house, and propped him against the wall with her own body as she reached to flick on the lights. She’d guided him with difficulty to his unmade bed, lowered him to rucked sheets, arranged him, chided softly—Jesus, Martin—pulled off his stinking shoes and foetid socks. He’d made a weak joke about cowboys dying with their boots on and wanted her gone. Their roles should have been reversed. He should have been the strong one.

  In the kitchen Martin half-tripped on his daughter’s Barbie dollhouse, left behind after her weekend access visit. It was three levels of tiny kitsch, in which everything was coloured fuchsia and open to view—wee tables and chairs, a four-poster bed ringed by a shred of looped gauze, a stove with a minuscule chicken roasting in the oven. He’d won the argument with Angela, who was offended by what she considered its domestic malevolence. Like a pedant Martin lectured her on mass-cultural knowledge, on how charming things in miniature really were, on how children in play are instinctively radical. When she said no, he bought it anyway, wishing to secure Nina’s love with a plastic token. He liked to watch her small hands exploring the rooms, pushing furniture here and there, redecorating with her index finger alone. She had the scowl children achieve when they are concentrating with pleasure.

  Just as he’d never known Angela, he would never truly know Nina. Women were alien, communicating in arcane languages, exulting in something delectable he couldn’t see the point of, or outwitting him with an observation he didn’t quite understand. Mars and Venus—wasn’t that it? A formula that possessed the crude vigour of a cliché and made everything intractable comic. Once, enraged and casting about for a novel insult, Angela had called him Martian. It was meant to hurt. But by then both were too docile in their marriage to revert to wit, and they had walked off in opposite directions, defeated, frowning.

  Martin bent his face to the level of the tiny house, and then lowered his whole body. He stayed like that, curled on the floor, looking into the Barbie rooms as one might seek a saint’s face in the galleried spaces of a quattrocento painting. There was a chessboard floor, and he thought of those early works that situated figures in geometry—Piero’s Flagellation—those visions beyond walls in which the eye calculates significance by lines of conjunction and perspective. Martin could have slept again there, acquiescing in his own unhappiness, as children fall asleep in the company of toys. But at length he rose. He needed an aspirin and strong coffee and to greet his sister with resolution.

  In his grief he was thinking: I’ve had my vision for the morning and it was a crap toy doll’s house. He was missing his daughter. He was missing his father. Self-deprecation was his default against difficult emotions.

  The crematorium chapel resembled a bunker, with the anomalous addition of stained-glass windows. It was a dull building, unsuited for any function but disposal. Already, before the service, the community of mourners was dispirited and the summer heat added sweaty discomfort to an ill-timed event. For Martin and Evie, exposed by their status as his children, weak with fatigue, ravaged by memories, each convinced of the incapacity of the other to cope, the service was a trial.

  At the funeral they sat so close they might have been lovers, just met. Evie rested her whole body to his, and he to hers, as if their two bodies would make up for the one suddenly gone. Bereavement was like exhaustion; they could barely stay vertical.

  There were twenty or so people there, Angela among them, though she kept her distance, hiding behind sunglasses. Most of the others were friends of their father’s, those who also moved in the comfortable world of art-historical scholarship—snobs, Martin thought. His insecurity prevailed. There were one or two younger scholars, and an attractive young woman in those heavy-framed glasses that were now all the rage; and two men about his age beside her, competing for her attention. She had black hair and dark eyes and might have been Italian. Martin wondered who she was, and if they might meet here and whisper tenderly before the wreathed coffin of his father. The air of grief would make him appear mournfully seductive.

  He was in control in this way, even sexually and artistically speculating, until the minister began the eulogy. Hearing the name of his father made him anxious again. Martin felt a wasteland spread open inside him; every word seemed to bring him to the verge of tears. Evie was distant and silently weeping. Her shoulders sloped away, arousing his pity. What he feared above all was his own lack of dignity. He might blubber or call out. He might make a spectacle of himself, as he had in the restaurant. He sat clenched, imagining a series of desperate blunders: falling in the chapel aisle, uncontrollable sobbing, opening his mouth to speak and finding the bubble of nothing to say.

  Two wreaths of mauve roses, with sprays of baby’s breath and leaves that might have been plastic, sat high on the coffin. Death-buoys, he thought grimly, pleased with his own morbid wit. But he held it together; he sat fixed as a corpse.

  For old times’ sake Evie had chosen a Scottish hymn:

  Abide with me; fast falls the eventide.

  The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.

  The faint consolation was only of memory. Martin recalled standing in church between his parents as a seven-year-old; it would have been the year their mother died. She was wearing a white cotton dress, or possibly linen, something with a dry, papery rustle. She was holding a hymnbook down to his height, so they could share the words. Her thumb keeping the book open. The musty scent of the pages. The twin pillars of his parents aligned beside him. All around, droning voices created an aura of contentment.

  Martin couldn’t remember Evie there, but she would have been almost four and old enough to join them. She must have been present, surely, standing at his side, singing ‘Abide with Me’ in an infant mumble.

  From the tedium of so many Sunday services, he had recovered the solace of this one, small moment. He would have brushed at the fabric of his mother’s dress. There would have been a mother’s or father’s hand come to rest on his head, or a low formal whisper to make him lean closer.

  For the dreadful interlude during which the coffin slid behind the gold curtains, Evie had chosen Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. How their father had loved it. His taste had been mostly conservative and predictable, yet the music seemed to swell in the hot hall as if in a cathedral, the organ continuo rising up, the strings vibrating with their pulse-like effect. Something—was it the tempo?—encompassed and held them all, like a rhythm inside the body. Albinoni had never before sounded so sensual. Others heard it too; Martin saw it in their faces, this throbbing appeal of an easy sadness, this pressurised emotion.

  Together Evie and Martin watched their father slide away. The mauve roses wobbled, the hall light might have flickered, or dimmed, as the melody repeated, and repeated, in an accumulating sob. And since this was the logic now, and since he’d remained bravely calm to the end of the service, Martin embraced his sister and avoided looking at her wet, distressed face.

  They stood in the windy chute near the door and shook the hands of departing mourners. They heard their father praised. They saw the courteous manners of genuine sadness. Some mourners introduced themselves, most simply filed past. Martin was gratified to see that the attractive woman had been crying. She shook hands weakly, and didn’t make eye contact. A former university colleague of his father’s was there, murmuring platitudes, his turtle throat quivering. Martin had to suppress an impulse to yawn. An old student announced himself. Strangers passed by. A distant relative, a woman in her nineties and more rumour than real, blew her nose and called their father ‘a lovely boy’.

  Martin’s attention wandered.

  ‘Lovely,’ he repeated. ‘Yes, my father was a lovely boy.’

  What a ridiculous thing to say. Someone in a smelly suit escorted
the old lady away, down the steps and over the crunchy gravel.

  There would be no wake at the house, no small talk, warm brandy or soggy ham sandwiches. There would be no laborious reminiscence or false sociability. When the group dispersed, when the minister had climbed into his prehistoric Datsun and cheerfully waved goodbye, Martin and Evie phoned a taxi, went speedily to the pub, and together commenced the business of serious drinking. Now, they were companionable. Now the task was done and they felt like truants.

  Searching for topics of conversation, Martin considered, at one stage, mentioning the Barbie house, and how it had reminded him of the Italian painting. But this would have sounded pretentious. In a private scandal of inattention, he’d been thinking of it all morning, even during the funeral service. There was a possibility there, perhaps a video installation, or a painting that used fuchsia and chequerboard and acute angles of perspective. Instead he rambled on, itemising the trivial offences of the service, displaying his control, ordering another round of drinks.

  Evie was mostly silent. Another alien woman. Since she’d moved to Melbourne, they had become strangers to each other. He knew that she worked in a bookshop. Lived in a flat somewhere. It pained Martin how little he knew of his sister’s life, and in a pledge to himself he resolved to find out what she was planning, if she had a partner, if she needed any help, or money. He’d noticed with a pang her cheap and unflattering clothes and the first threads of grey in her dark wavy hair.

  And it was Evie, this time, who was the alcoholic wreck. She was gulping and stumbling. Wine trickled down her chin. Her averted face showed the miserable struggle of the day. When they returned to his house, Martin laid her down on the couch, arranged her legs, and shuffled to the kitchen to make coffee. Noah had once announced, ‘This family drinks too much,’ his tone a mixture of severity, charm and rebuke. They’d felt helpless and irresponsible, celebrating a shared weakness.

  They’d missed lunch, but Martin realised he was not hungry. It was late afternoon, too early for dinner or sleeping. Outside, the sun was the acrylic gold of crematorium curtains, and the city hummed with irrepressible life. He forgave cement and high-rise and the deadening rivers of traffic, for barking dogs, shimmering trees, and the roar and heave of busy streets. He loved it all, the jumble and jubilation of inner-west Sydney. Everyone said it: life goes on.