The Death of Noah Glass Read online

  ‘You’ve never seen her cranky,’ Angela warned. ‘Another child entirely.’

  They sipped a dry white wine and fell into their old, easy exchanges.

  ‘Because of the deafness people think that she doesn’t cry or scream,’ she added. ‘Just hang around a while, you’ll see.’

  It was an invitation. They had been good friends, and confidantes. They had swapped tales and intimacies as sisters did. Implicitly, Angela was asking her to stay in Sydney. Evie’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I can’t bear it, Ange. The thought of him dying alone.’

  She was ineloquent in her grief and felt banal in her misery. Angela leaned across the table and took her hand.

  ‘Some old biddy at the flats told me she found him. Fully dressed, face downwards. It creeped me out.’

  Angela squeezed her fingers. There was a moment of silence. ‘What about Martin?’ she asked.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘How’s he taking it?’

  ‘I don’t know, really. At the restaurant a couple of nights back he was a terrible mess. Guzzled the booze, swore at me and collapsed in a heap, sobbing. I practically had to drag him home. Then at the funeral—you saw it—he seemed to cope fine. It hasn’t sunk in, I guess.’

  ‘Always one, our Martin, for delayed reactions,’ Angela said.

  Evie noticed the ‘our’ as though they had equal claim. Ange was the ex but she was his sister, who had known him forever. She felt a possessive sense of competition, but was wisely quiet, and realised she was edgy, now that Nina was not there to calm and distract them. Evie told Angela of the trip to the police station. The Italian connection. The detective. The Palermo accusation.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Angela said.

  ‘That’s what I said.’ Evie paused, took a sip. ‘Martin wants us to go to Sicily together.’

  Now it was Angela’s turn to look taken aback. She might have been recalling a holiday together, a time when they were happy.

  ‘No way,’ said Evie, as if to reassure her, and Angela didn’t ask why.

  When her niece woke, they went for a walk together along the foreshore, Nina riding for a time on Evie’s back. It was a good weight to bear. Evie felt the child’s fingers clasp at her neck, and the way her skinny legs hooked loosely at her hips, the fitting bracket of another body. She clasped her hands behind her, under Nina’s buttocks, and jiggled her lovingly, and just for the fun of it. And they were friends again, the three of them, though it had been months since her last visit, and she’d worried that Nina would not remember the ease of their affection.

  A squall lifted from the water, changing the weather in seconds. The sky lowered and darkened. Fine spray whisked about them, and soon the force of the wind pushed them back inside. Nina looked grave, then began to laugh. Excited and flustered, she made soft drumming noises. Angela ushered them in. She paused to correct her hair in the mirror near the front door and to her reflection said crossly, ‘Another day ruined.’ Her many bangles jingled. Evie recalled she’d said this often when she and Martin were together, always expressed emphatically, as though irrefutable. Ruined and ruinous days; how little one knows of others’ relationships. She’d silently taken Martin’s side, though she couldn’t imagine him blameless.

  From their second-floor window they saw trees thrash about and the water surge. Waves had sprung from nowhere to break across the low harbour wall, pushing foamy scum across the grass and discolouring the paths. Evie was kneeling at Nina’s height, watching the sky shift, when they saw below them a boy blown sideways from his bicycle. A man ran to him and set the bicycle upright. The boy wheeled it away, and affected a limp. Nina was transfixed by this mini-drama of accident and kindness, and by the windblown boy who should have been, like her, cautiously indoors.

  The scene had a shivery, aquatic quality, and might have been, Evie thought, a kind of visitation. She was irrational in her grief, just as Martin’s sadness seemed more unbearable than her own. She recalled falling from her bicycle when she was a child, and Martin rushing to aid her, his face blue-tinged and alarmed, his mouth agape with fear. She’d not thought of this incident for many years. Now, through the glass, she could see her brother inspecting her grazed knee, dabbing it with his shirt, pulling her hair back from her eyes. He helped her stand as if she were a soldier, dragging her arm over his shoulder, and she limped dramatically, to show how he’d rescued her. He’d offered a daft, reassuring smile.

  ‘The ferry will be too rough,’ Angela advised. ‘Wait a little longer.’

  By the time Evie returned to Elizabeth Bay, still a little queasy from the bouncing ferry, she regretted inviting Martin for dinner. She needed the time alone. She would have liked to wander by herself around Noah’s rooms, to sit in his armchair and peer into his secrets. The annoying woman was in the garden, scooping leaves from the swimming pool and extracting them with finicky care from her broad plastic net. Evie nodded as she passed. When she entered the flat, closing the world behind her, she felt once again the chill of her father’s absence. It was not just the death, she told herself; it was the questions, the Italians, the police. It was the wider mystery of things gone missing so that a private matter might be exposed, so that she and Martin could be called upon to attest to their father’s worth, when he was still inside them and not yet resting in peace.

  Evie found a bottle of gin in a side cabinet and poured herself a shot. She sat in ochre half-light sipping and looking around her, and then she rose and began to inspect more closely, rifling through papers, lifting objects and pulling open drawers. There were the two icons she knew to be semi-precious antiquities—a Madonna and Child, their earnest faces set together in a field of flaky gold leaf, and a dour saint, possibly Jerome, since he was Noah’s favourite. Both had crazed lacquered surfaces and a supernatural glow. Each head bore a halo, picked out in starry dots. A map print of early Venice, foxed and water-stained, prestigiously faint, hung above the icons. On the desk stood a faded photograph of her parents in the seventies. It was not one Evie had ever seen before, and it was this artless relic that gave her pause. Noah had lanky hair and a gormless smile; her mother, Katherine, looked attractive in the manner of that time, kohl at her eyes, hippie hair parted in the middle, a tame, placid and faraway expression.

  Evie stared into her mother’s face, seeking her own. Her memories were only of the astonishment of not finding her there, of searching the rooms of their cold house, of crouching in corners waiting, of listening to her own breathing, the barest rhythm, in case stillness might summon her mother back. She could not recall crying, though certainly Martin did. Only this waiting, this watching, this disbelieving search.

  They left the house soon after, moving to London for a few years, then later back to Australia. Her mother drifted into a state of complete erasure. Evie’s memories were of shaded domestic spaces and inadequate heating, of the dank gloom of the bedroom she shared with Martin, of the small electric heater they leaned towards, eating toast and flicking the crumbs to sizzle on the element. Once, they scorched the corner of a blanket just for the stink of wool burning, and for the brazen amusement of something soft and accessible destroyed. Noah was upset. They could have burnt down the house, he said; they were naughty, both of them, he was afraid he would return from work and find them burnt to a crisp. He removed the electric heater from their bedroom and their punishment was the cold. Burnt to a crisp became a joke between them: Martin used it as a warning, to be cheeky, and to entertain her; she as funny wordplay, riffing on crisps.

  She’d always considered her forgetting of her mother a deficiency of her own character, as if she’d not paid attention, or cared, even as she witnessed her brother weep. But she’d been old enough to know something drastic had happened and that there could be no return or restoration. She’d looked at her tear-stained brother, already exhibiting shame at his lack of self-control, and felt a helpless concern. He’d wept so piteously she had no choice but to practise self-containment. She’d
touched his cheek and he’d withdrawn. Even then, she felt older.

  This was when Evie began forming her lists. She discovered later that Noah had thought her a child savant, but for her it was a simple, reassuring skill: to commit to memory indiscriminate details from life or from books, to order things according to dates, or acrostics, or the first letters of objects. She started with the names of sweets, of streets, of comic-book characters, but, having no sense of boundary, moved quickly to adult topics. Later, at school in Adelaide, she had the novelty value of being an English girl without a mother, but she was also set apart by her mad and vigorous talent. A provincial whiz-kid, arrogant, with glittering eyes. When she was eleven, her teacher told Noah she was a disruption in the class because she liked to talk to herself, sometimes chanting her lists aloud. As other girls played skippy or hopscotch, she would be perfecting twelve unusual flowers starting with S, or looking in the library for kings’ names that repeated through history, or types of igneous rock that she could place in alphabetical order. There was no logic to her selections, just a will to know everything, and have it under her control.

  Impressed by his little sister’s eccentric behaviour, Martin now and then asked her to perform for his friends. She obliged with the names of cars—since boys liked this kind of thing—or a list of nautical knots. They thought her commendably crazy. Yet she understood that the world was full of patterns and connections. The globe itself was wreathed by ornate organisation, just as it was by networks of roads and cities, by flight paths and shipping channels. When she lay, a motherless child, staring at the ceiling above her bed, it was a relief to think of the world with so much movement going on, somewhere and everywhere. Her mind caught at words flowing by that would establish these connections, and though she knew the remoteness of her method she was still reassured. Rational systems—alphabets, webs, logical associations—these offered the simplicity of something solved and evidently indubitable.

  Evie stared at her mother’s face and felt the old urge for alphabetical order. Everything submitted to alphabetical order. Her compulsion, she reasoned, was harmless enough. The photograph was a lamp in the dusk; it glimmered and flared out at her. How humble this understanding, that she had never mourned her mother. She’d been a self-enclosed and peculiar child, ardently attached to her father and brother, and without a cluster of girlfriends or the rituals they carried with them. She liked boys more than girls, she liked adult books more than schoolbooks. She was expelled from school at sixteen, and went to university late, at twenty-two. No woman’s advice had been sought and she’d grown up withdrawn, and inward. This mother, this unfamiliar woman from the past, would have found her a stranger.

  So Evie stood before the photograph of her parents and knew a double bereavement. She had entered her father’s rooms, and found there an image of her mother. All her ordering and alphabetical confidence fell away. She moved to the window. She could see the edge of the swimming pool, extending its shining trapezium into the leafy courtyard. Ripples, ordered as lists, were swept by a breeze over its surface. Not wishing to envisage her father, she thought of Nina swimming there, diving deep and surfacing, lifting her wet child-limbs, triangular, into the fading silver light. It took an effort to imagine, and not to imagine, but what does one do, she asked herself, faced with his liquid grave, confronted at each leaving and returning with the container of his death?

  When Martin arrived, she’d not even begun to think of dinner, nor, she confessed, had she remembered to buy food. He found her hanging around, staring at nothing in particular. She felt she’d travelled a long distance and was in the confused lag of another time. He hugged her and left to buy a Thai takeaway. When he returned, he rattled around in the kitchen, set the table and spoke very little. They ate together from the greasy plastic cartons in silence, companionable in all that remained unsaid.

  Evie understood and appreciated his effort of control. Martin didn’t ask about Angela and Nina, he didn’t ask what she’d found in the flat, he didn’t ask her again to come with him on an Italian journey. All that he’d been meaning to say to her over dinner was wisely stored away and he ate, in any case, as if already preoccupied. It was his first return to his father’s home since Noah’s death. Perhaps he too had been driven to a more solitary remembering; perhaps he too had baulked at the swimming pool and known he must repress his imaginings.

  When Martin stepped out into the porchlight, sounding a soft goodbye, Evie was pleased not to have been alone, but also pleased to see him leave. She watched him walk around the edge of the pool, bend to pick up a bloom of frangipani, then stride down the bright driveway, and disappear into the night.

  8

  NOAH GLASS ARRIVED in London determined to refashion a self. His old one was tainted. He had been at university in Perth, for four long years, and conceived there an ambition to become someone else, to fill his head with old-world imagery and the wisdom of other generations. He was not a scholar, or brilliant, but desperation made him conscientious. He was a snob, and wanted his snobbery endorsed. He found his lonely life intolerable, Australia more or less barbaric, and no amount of fantasies of exile made the situation better. He imagined England the magnificent exemplar of all cultural aspiration, and under this gorgeous miscalculation aimed his life there. He boarded the Marconi and waited the entire sea journey, gazing from the porthole, reading in his stuffy cabin, for the coming revelations.

  The imprecision of his imagining became a source of distress. When Noah arrived in London in January 1971, hoping to find work before he went up to Cambridge in September, he found the monotone streets oppressive, the chubby blokes in the pubs boorish, the dingy bedsit that he rented a temptation to despair. The cold spiralled inside him like a virus unwinding, and his woollen coat, for which he’d laboriously saved, was both unfashionable and inefficient. Noah walked around the National Gallery, taking meticulous notes, registering line by line his self-improvement, missing almost nothing, but then had to traipse the long, inartistic road back to his room, shivering all the way. There was rubbish in the streets and a low, murky sky. Londoners walked with their heads bent, as if in a city of penitents. And though the newspapers were all about swinging Carnaby Street and the Beatles and scandalous music and fashion, the place seemed to him essentially bleak. How could they live like this, in this ash-coloured city? Sometimes he entertained the idea of heading home to Australia, but it would have been a humiliation and an admission of failure.

  Eventually, predictably, he found a job at a pub in Earl’s Court, serving tepid beer in sloshing jugs to other expats, all united in their loud disdain of the Poms. In the overheated, slightly nauseating atmosphere of the pub, in which all men’s faces looked the same, swollen like toads and glowing with an alcoholic blur, Noah felt he was somehow camouflaged and safe. Spivs in kipper ties and over-the-top accents whacked him on the back with an assumption of team spirit. He practised endurance. He was stubborn, apart. And though Noah hated the work, this was also a hole he might hide in, while he saved up money for the new Noah Glass. He learned that living in cheerless London-in-winter was not his crowning achievement. It was a time linked inextricably to the sound of a shilling falling through the metal guts of the gas meter in Soho. The chink chink epitomised his sadness and his dislocation. In the future certain coin sounds, heard in unconnected circumstances, would recall the terrible pang of those early weeks.

  Noah feared he was becoming a kind of buffoon, a man locked outside his own fervent ambitions. But a few months after his arrival, and in the leafy promise of spring, he found his vocation in the National Gallery. He saw at last a painting whose singular majesty moved him, and was reminded why art history was worth pursuing. Piero della Francesca. The Nativity. 1470s. He’d had his fill of block-faced holy babies and drowsy Madonnas, of lurid martyrdoms and rapturous ascensions, by the time he paused before it. There was a ruined old wall that stood in for a stable, five ordinary-looking angels singing their praise, and a kneeling Madonn
a, very lovely, very simple, who had her baby set down before her, lying on her blue robe. Baby Jesus had no crown or sausage limbs, no divine particularity or glorious election, but was reaching just as babies do, human and set apart. There was a magpie sitting high on the roof of the stable, there was Tuscany in the background, there was the artist’s home town, Sansepolcro, visible in the distance. For all its cramming of faces and animals, while Joseph sat, apparently bored, with his foot on his knee, like an ordinary bloke looking for a thorn, to Noah this picture seemed to possess a rare distinction. Images local and from afar enigmatically coincided. The mundane and the divine, he told himself, in seamless coalition. Afterwards, saner with his decision, he realised that it was the singing magpie he loved most of all, and the touch of the commonplace, and the thin baby set apart on a field of blue, reaching.

  Noah went outside to take a breather. In the chilly drizzle of Trafalgar Square, it occurred to him that he might go to Italy, that if he were to take up his scholarship at Cambridge in September, he might one day travel to Sansepolcro. With this artist, he could find things to say and matters to investigate. He felt pragmatic, reasonable, but also drawn to something from his boyhood that lingered at the fringes of his consciousness. He could not have articulated his sudden choice. It was less scholarly than romantic, less considered than a whim. He smelled wet wool and exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke intermingled, the streets were coated in the sky-shine of recent puddles, he was cold and alone and a foreigner in London, but he also felt an astounding relief. It was almost joy, a joy such as he rarely felt again looking at a painting in a gallery. When he met Katherine a year later, and described this moment to her, he wondered whether it had actually been so, whether he could have been so sure and so open, even for one afternoon.