The Death of Noah Glass Read online

  ‘It’s okay. I’ll get it.’ Martin was already righting the bottle and gathering the cloth in careful bunches. ‘Go to bed, Tommaso. I’ll clean it up.’

  Tommaso didn’t object. He leaned against the doorway, saluted goodnight, and left. Martin lifted the cloth towards the kitchen sink. He turned the taps and, using Maria’s dishwashing soap, scrubbed at the mess. He was fussy, impatient, his conduct determined by his inability to deal with so gruelling a story. Martin made the stain a little paler, but it wouldn’t disappear. For ten minutes he rubbed the linen between his hands without much visible effect. At last he left it there, soaking, like the guilty sign of a botched crime.

  18

  HAD MARTIN ASKED HER, Evie would have conceded she enjoyed thinking about her new job. Connecting sound and image, the consideration of time in cinema, imagining—did she dare it?—a blind man’s world, all linked in unexpected ways to her past philosophical studies. Noah had told her once that Piero della Francesca spent his last months, or even years—so little was known of his life—completely blind.

  Her father had been very moved by this detail. He’d mentioned it in the context of a casual remark about age, and she knew at once that he wanted to say more. He began listing dates, this or that scholar. Who believed Piero was blind, who did not. Before or after the publication of his mathematical treatise. Evie made an affectionate joke about how Noah’s mode of parenting was the lecture, and he had clammed up. Her own method of communication, he responded crisply, was the lecture. Resorting to abstraction when she might have been more simple and direct. Talking of ideas when she might have expressed emotions.

  ‘We’re alike in this,’ he conceded. It was a flippant remark, but to the point.

  Embarrassed, both had backed off, not wanting further to hurt the other’s feelings, or to say something that would remain as a corroding insult.

  Still, she remembered it, and knew that he was right. And she should have understood that her father was afraid of ageing and of blindness. She should have offered comfort.

  Evie was beginning to feel less like an intruder in his apartment. It was her duty to bundle up Noah’s life and to dispose of his possessions, but she had removed very little. Those things she assumed would be easiest, like his hairbrush and his shaving gear, still lingered in the bathroom, pushed to the back of a cupboard. These were intimate objects of daily use and, though easily disposable, retained his fingerprints and bodily traces. Other things, the furniture, even the paintings, she might quickly sell. Martin would inherit the golden icon of the Madonna and Child, she, the dubiously identified saint. They made the decision in one of their shapeless and desolate encounters around the funeral, when each was both more and less themselves. She would keep Noah’s two monographs but his books she would give to a university. It was a scholar’s library, eccentrically specific and only professionally useful. All this word-and-image paraphernalia of mind. She thought in a slogan and almost dispassionately: the disappeared mind of Noah Glass.

  When Evie opened her email, she found a message from Martin, asking her if she remembered their father lecturing them—that was the term he used, lecturing—on the meaning of the word ‘dilapidation’. It was somewhere outside Rome, on the Appian Way. She remembered the sunlight and the confrontation and smart-alec Martin’s humiliation. He’d thrust his fists into the pockets of his shorts and walked off in a sulky huff. She’d been competitive and smug, and grabbed her father’s hand as though it was a trophy. She also remembered how excited she’d been to learn that words could work in this way, could have objects inside them, and archaeological histories. That day they ate pistachio gelati, rode on wonky bicycles and visited the catacombs. It was an unusual childhood, made more so by Noah’s pedagogy.

  Evie emailed back that yes, certainly, she remembered that day. Pistachio, bicycles, dilapidation. And did he also remember the little phoenix with a halo in the catacombs that Noah had pointed out to them? Did he remember the tall poplars and the lizard they saw? And the fat woman at the pensione who pinched hard at their cheeks?

  She closed her email and set out to walk to Benjamin’s. Walking stimulated her mind; it was the balance she loved, the motion of the world before and behind and on either side, the sanity of each deliberate step. She trialled a new route, and listed, trivially and for her own pleasure, the names of seashells of the South Pacific. It was a list made years ago, in thrall to her passion for swimming. She was a woman in a floral dress, straightening her shoulders, breasting the wind, already at cowries and already at E. Egg cowrie, eglantine cowrie, eroded cowrie, eye cowrie. There was no point to her skill: it existed only as a token of order. Yet in this it had a beauty, it had marvellous elegance and rightness. Her lists took the rhythm of her walking: she was a mobile poem.

  As she approached Benjamin’s house, she faltered. No further, she thought. Wild now, unalphabetical. She was conscious of her body.

  Evie could hear Rocky again, bounding up the hallway towards the front door. When Benjamin opened it, Rocky once again wove around her, his tail thumping against her legs with the throbbing enthusiasm of a dog in want of a walk. He ducked beyond into the small front garden, sniffing, all-alive, his head shovelling at the overlong grass, and Benjamin called him back. Evie could offer, perhaps, to walk the dog; she saw in his muscular ripple the thrill of an old-fashioned romp.

  The house seemed quieter, somehow. Benjamin greeted her and indicated that he again expected to shake hands, and Evie did so. This formality surprised her. Benjamin turned and led the way down the corridor into the over-bright sitting room, his dog now reconciled to staying at home and springing ahead. This time she noticed certain details of his life: the sensitive portrait of a boy in oils that was surely him as a child, the little bust on a side table that might be of Garibaldi, or indeed one of any number of bewhiskered nineteenth-century men. There was an expensive sound system, and a collection of glass paperweights on the desk, next to the computer. There were paintings by various Australian artists whose work she recognised. Above the computer—yes, unmistakable—was a picture by Martin Glass, one of his early drawings in a series called Nature Opened. She owned a drawing from the same series, of leaves of grass.

  ‘So, what did you think?’ he asked, feeling behind him for the armchair.

  ‘It’s trash, but I suppose it’s interesting trash.’ She was hoping to provoke him.

  ‘I’ve only seen two Hitchcocks, Vertigo and Spellbound, so I thought this might be an easy place to start. I have a vague idea what to expect, but it will be a good test, I think.’

  ‘Of me or of you?’

  Benjamin smiled. ‘We will have an intermission,’ he said. ‘And a glass of wine. We should finish by six.’

  Before the movie began, Evie described the main character, Marnie, played by Tippi Hedren. She is pert and meticulous, with hair the colour of champagne, swept back in a neat bun, slightly beehived, exposing an unusually high forehead. She has flawless skin and a doll-like uniformity of features. She wears rose-pink lipstick. Her posture suggests strenuous repression: she holds herself firmly, clutches her handbag as if it were a lifeline, is prissy, classy and exudes a tone of chilly boredom. All her clothing comes to the neck, all her sleeves are long. There is a hint of perpetual sneer, especially towards men.

  Sean Connery, Benjamin knew. He must remember Connery, Evie said, as he was in Goldfinger, made the same year, in 1964. The same macho mannerisms, tilting his head as he measures up a woman, a determined and pugnacious setting of the lower lip, a square way of standing that suggests barely withheld violence. He plays Mark, a widower and the wealthy owner of a Philadelphia publishing house. An ever so slightly hip element is introduced with Mark’s former sister-in-law, who wears tight sweaters and riding pants and is clearly in love with him. The soundtrack, Evie advised, is heavy and intrusive, and these are the main points at which she would describe the special effects and wordless action on screen. Might she pause if she needed and lower the sou
nd a little?

  Benjamin handed Evie the remote. Rocky settled his head on his master’s feet and dozed.

  The opening shot focuses on a canary yellow handbag, being held by a dark-haired woman, who is walking away from the camera. As she recedes into the shot, she is revealed to be walking along a train platform; in her other hand she holds a suitcase. The shot plays again soon after as the same receding woman walks up the corridor of a hotel, preceded by a bellboy, who carries shopping bags and a new suitcase. Alfred Hitchcock himself, his profile blobby, pendulous, steps into the hotel corridor, glances at the camera and disappears. There is a scene of identity changing that involves Marnie washing her black hair and emerging instantly as a blonde, the first time her face is shown.

  And so it went on. Evie described the gambits of exposure and concealment, inserting description where there was only music, trying not to reveal her understanding of plot. Every time Marnie sees something scarlet-coloured—blood, ink, the spots on a jockey’s uniform—the camera focuses on her face, and the screen turns bloody with a dread, expressionist glow.

  ‘Blood red,’ said Evie. ‘Marnie is afraid of blood red. Her look is one of anxiety and terror, mouth slightly open, her eyes wide, her head flinching away.’ She resisted commenting: bleeding obvious! Such a clunky device.

  When the movie was over, Benjamin and Evie drank a chilled white wine and ate green olives. They had forgotten their intermission, being both caught up in the action. Benjamin enjoyed her narration and thought the movie better than Evie had suggested. He liked the twist at the end and the voices of the actors. He liked the intrusive soundtrack and was fascinated by the contradictions in the characters: Marnie both brazen and timid, Mark a sexual predator and capable of fond concern.

  There was no obligation to stay and talk, but Evie was pleased to do so. A languid comfort descended, the dreamy aftermath of their movie absorption. Benjamin was feeling expansive and relaxed. He talked of his childhood love of James Bond and how he’d made drawings of Bond’s gadgets. The word ‘revolver’ entranced him and he’d imagined owning one. Curious, he said, how lucidly he remembered the opening sequences, the silhouette of Bond half-kneeling to shoot through a camera aperture at the audience, the veil of blood dripping down, the morphing shapes of naked women, all inevitably doomed. This was the high point, he said, of a befuddled adolescence. Not his expensive cello lessons, or his first place in physics, but diligent fandom of James Bond movies.

  Benjamin became pensive. Possibly he regretted this admission of boyhood tastes, or was caught up in his own unspooling nostalgia. Possibly he had cultivated habits of self-enclosure. His eyes drifted and, for a second or two, closed, then opened. He heaved himself forward to place his hands on the coffee table.

  Evie watched the careful way in which Benjamin poured the wine, testing with his fingertips the rim of the glass, listening for the point at which he should stop pouring. Blindness, she thought, must be a world of cautious precision, all movements, even tiny ones, being so consequential. It must be pure space, pure prudence and pure attention. She saw his unseeing eyes slide away from her. There was a moment in their conversation when Evie felt an inclination to touch his arm, but didn’t dare. His blindness made her feel shy, just as his manner inspired social diffidence. Yet Rocky, alert to their connection, seemed to notice her impulse. He cocked an ear, lifted an eyebrow, and gazed at her, his tail lifting a little, then falling with a gentle thump. Evie reached down and patted him, and he in turn licked her hand. It was a furtive complicity.

  When she left, it was almost eight and dark. She decided against the bus, preferring to walk through the humid summertime suburbs. The terraces shone like mica, black and silver, their windows casting ideograms of light onto small gardens and courtyards. She heard the faint screeches of fruit bats high in the trees, and domestic sounds—a television, a child calling, the clatter of dinner dishes. There was a soft quality to the air, and an earthy scent. There was a mysterious bottle-glass shine she already associated with Sydney nights. All was peaceful, still. Caught in the spell of her own steady walking, she thought: later, it will rain. But for now Evie relished the heavy night air. For now she walked as if this were her city, not Martin’s, and she could take pleasure here, as she knew he did.

  She wondered about the memory of ‘dilapidation’, etched deep inside him. From somewhere she retrieved an image of the stoning of a saint: it was a fresco entitled The Lapidation of St Stephen, it was in Prato, years ago; and there was Noah, dear Noah, pointing to direct their vision. Even then she was appalled by how much torture appeared in religious art. St Lucy’s eyes on on a golden plate, St Agatha’s breasts.

  Memory and consistent stride made her inward and serious. Martin’s stony wound, persisting from that day on the Appian Way, was in part to his pride, and to the harmony of their little family. She remembered his flushed face, turning away, how he scratched an obscenity in the dirt with a stick, then erased it quickly when Noah stepped near. She didn’t tell her father. Though triumphant, she felt protective and knew ‘dilapidation’ was a gift that Martin had offered. But she also remembered their father’s hand, extending upwards, and his merciful teaching.

  Something else. Something else returned with ‘dilapidation’. It was Martin, with the same expression, in the heroin clinic. He’d succumbed in his early twenties, and again two years ago. She’d seen him dazed and disconnected, propped against a bank of pillows, Noah nearby and unmistakably distraught. The tang of diamorphine and cleaning ammonia and the light bleak and institutional. The tone of surly irritation. Martin’s wrecked face.

  And their joint history piling on top of them, heavy, like stones.

  19

  IN THE FIRST years in Adelaide they were a tight unit of three, the grandparents hovering, always available for a school-holiday jaunt to the windy beaches of Victor Harbor, or the comforting ritual of a Sunday roast. Norman stood as he carved a dauntingly huge leg of lamb. Margaret passed the mint sauce in a jug fashioned to resemble lettuce leaves and crossly told the children to take their elbows off the table. They commenced the meal by saying grace. The children were obstinately non-compliant but Noah joined in. They made small talk in lowered voices. They commented on the predictable or unpredictable weather. They ate in unison and complimented Margaret on her cooking. It was a semblance of what others called family life. But it was damaged, they all knew. It was incomplete.

  There were the usual childhood complaints: measles, flu. After an outbreak of chickenpox, and ensuing panic at the school, Noah was reminded of his anxieties at the leprosarium, and he began dreaming of Maggie again, seeing at night her lipless smile and her open red mouth. His blatant fear, persevering, seemed ignominious. After his father’s funeral in Perth, the dreams included Maggie’s brother, whose lost name Noah still some day hoped to recall. In his dreams, this man was always driving a jeep, disappearing into a bulging cloud of grainy red dust. It was a scene possibly lifted from a movie somewhere. A black man appearing in the shape of a black man. A man remote, enigmatic, signifying something forgotten. This figure was a void in himself he could not name or even contemplate.

  In Adelaide, Noah developed his ideas on Piero della Francesca and time. Piero was known for his mathematical mania in the development of perspective, his scrupulous lines, his fanatically specific axes and disappearing points, the calculation of which confirmed his faith. Most scholars wrote on Piero and space. So many compass lines and ruled verifications. So much that met golden means and mystical thirds and the artist’s own conviction of the theological dimension of numbers and angles. But gazing at the familiar reproductions, Noah thought that the images might be more about the mystery of time. In The Baptism of Christ, Jesus is at the centre, radiant, hallowed, consecrated for eternity by a single drop of water, but behind him, looking awkward—indeed, it must be the most awkward figure in quattrocento art—is a man pulling his shirt on or off over his head. It’s the amusing moment children instinctively li
ke, when the head is encased, and elbows are jutting out, and the bare back is bent. He could be any man. He could be Christ himself, just after or before the baptism, so that the audacity of the painting would exist in imagining a man exceeding time. The insight realigned Noah’s otherwise unconventional thinking; it made him wonder whether little flaws or inconsistencies might offer a second theology.

  Likewise, he thought, with the famous Flagellation of Christ. Art scholars went on and on about the classicism and the over-defined architecture—but this could mean that the event was happening in present-day Sansepolcro, that a man’s suffering for others is always contemporary. In this painting, Christ is in the far background, a manikin of torture, and in the foreground, separated in their own space, are portraits of two local men who were both known to be grieving their adult sons. This too seemed to make sense as a meditation on time. Might the death of a son issue in a temporal fold of some kind, so that the human and divine were radically continuous? Did God grieve? Was that a preposterous question? Did heaven tip upside down, like a body tumbled face-forward into a grave?

  When he delivered his first academic paper on the topic, others at the conference listened with polite disdain. Ahistorical. Decontextualised. Noah was disappointed. But gradually his ideas began to seem less far-fetched, and scholars here and there wanted to support him. It was easy to argue that the famous panels on The Legend of the True Cross declared the loops of time—repetition, surely, must be a kind of temporal mystery—but every Piero painting, Noah believed, worked on a variation of this principle.

  It was a small idea, not even original. But something in his contemplation of images had led him here, to see his own children in the figure of the man wriggling in or out of the shirt, to see his religious beliefs expressed in the way one body might look next to another body. And to see Christ as the body that was always in and out of time.