Lovesong Read online

  ALEX MILLER

  Lovesong

  Dedication

  For Stephanie

  and for our children

  Ross and Kate

  And for Erin

  Epigraph

  I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,

  by the gazelles or the wild does:

  do not stir up or awaken love

  until it is ready!

  THE SONG OF SOLOMON

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Two

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Three

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fiveteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Four

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Five

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Six

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Alex Miller

  International Praise for Alex Miller

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Chapter One

  W hen we first came to live in this area in the seventies there was a drycleaners next door to the bottle shop. The drycleaners was run by a Maltese couple, Andrea and Tumas Galasso. My wife and I got to know them well. A few years ago the Galassos closed up. There was no explanation for why they had closed, no notice on the door regretting the inconvenience to customers, nothing to reassure us that the business was to open again soon. The premises that had been the drycleaners for all those years remained abandoned for a very long time, junk mail and unpaid bills piling up inside the front door.

  I live with my daughter. She’s thirty-eight. She came to stay with me when her marriage broke up. It was to be for a week or two, until she sorted herself out. That was five years ago. I was in Venice during this last Australian winter and came home to an empty refrigerator. I don’t know why Clare doesn’t buy food, she is a very successful designer and has plenty of money, so it’s not that. When I ask her why she doesn’t buy food, she says she does. But she doesn’t. Where is it? I took a taxi from the airport and I walked into my house and there was no milk in the refrigerator. I was exhausted from the interminable flight from Venice and I probably said something harsh to her. Clare cries more readily even than her mother used to. I said I was sorry, and so she cried some more. ‘Oh, that’s all right, Dad. I know you didn’t mean it.’ I don’t understand her.

  Even with our enormous modern airliners, Venice is still a world away from Melbourne. You have to adjust. Venice and Melbourne are not on the same planet. No matter how fast our airliners go, or how comfortable and entertaining they become to ride in, Venice will never be any closer to Melbourne than it was at the time of the Doges. It was spring here and everything seemed very dry and barren to me. I’d come home to an empty refrigerator. That’s what I remember. I couldn’t even make myself a cup of tea. So two minutes after I got out of the taxi from the airport I was walking to the shops.

  When I turned the corner by the bottle shop, I hadn’t yet decided whether I was glad to be home or was regretting not staying on in Venice for another month or two. Or for a year or two. Or forever. Why not? I was passing the shop where the drycleaners had once been and was asking myself gloomily why I’d bothered to come home, when the delicious smell of pastry fresh from the oven hit me. For twenty years we’d walked past the Galassos’ on our way to the shops and there was the smell of dry-cleaning chemicals. I stopped and stood looking in through the open door of the shop. It was new. I suppose I was smiling. It was such a lovely surprise. The woman behind the counter caught my eye and smiled back at me, as if it made her happy to see a stranger standing out in the street admiring her lovely shop. It was Saturday morning; the shop was full of customers and she was busy, so it was the briefest of acknowledgments that passed between us. But all the same her smile gave my spirits a lift and I went on along the street feeling glad I’d come home and hadn’t stayed in Venice for the rest of my life.

  Venice brings out the melancholy in me, inducing the overriding conviction that effort is pointless. Doesn’t it do that to everybody? I walk around in that timeless city feeling like the untouchable Victor Maskell. Which I don’t actually mind all that much. I’ve always enjoyed indulging my gloom. Don’t ask me why. It’s probably my father’s side of the family that does it, the dour Scottish influence, so I’ve been told. I’ve never visited Scotland. As I searched the aisles of the supermarket that dry spring morning, my gloom had vanished and I felt as if I’d been welcomed home by the smile of the beautiful and rather exotic-looking woman in the new pastry shop. While I was trying to remember which aisle things were in at the supermarket I was thinking about the woman’s lovely smile and I probably had a look of secretive pleasure on my face, as if I knew something no one else knew; the kind of look that infuriates me when I see it on someone else’s face.

  Sweet pastries were not part of our regular diet, but on my way back from the supermarket I went into the pastry shop. I had to wait quite some time to be served. I didn’t mind waiting. As well as the woman behind the counter there was a man in his late forties and a little girl of no more than five or six years of age. The man and the girl were bringing trays of pastries in from the kitchen at the back of the shop, the man encouraging the girl and pausing every now and then to serve a customer. The mood among the customers was unusually good-humoured. There was none of the regular Saturday morning impatience, no one trying to get served before their turn. Nothing like that. As I stood there enjoying the pastry smells and the friendliness of the place, I felt as if I’d stepped into a generous little haven of old-fashioned goodwill. This, I decided, was due to the family that was running the shop, something to do with the sane modesty of their contentment, but more than anything it was due to the manner and style of the woman.

  When my turn came to be served I asked her for half a dozen sesame biscuits. I watched her select the biscuits with the crocodile tongs. Separately and without hurry, she placed each biscuit in the paper bag in her other hand, her grave manner implying that this simple act of serving me deserved all her care. She was in her early forties, perhaps forty-three or -four. She was dark and very beautiful, North African probably. But what impressed me even more than her physical beauty was her self-possession. I was reminded of the refined courtesy once regularly encountered among the Spanish, particularly among the Madrileños, a reserved respect that speaks of a belief in the dignity of humanity; a quality rarely encountered in Madrid these days, and then only among the elderly. It was this woman’s fine sense of courtesy to which the customers in her shop were responding. When she handed me the bag of sesame biscuits I thanked her and she smiled. Before she turned away I saw a sadness in the depths of her d
ark brown eyes, a hint of some ancient buried sorrow there. And on my way home I began to wonder about her story.

  When I was telling Clare about the pastry shop later I said something like, ‘There’s a kind of innocence about those people, don’t you think?’ Clare was sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper and eating a third sesame biscuit, taking a little bite from the biscuit and looking at it, then dipping it into her coffee. She had been into the pastry shop several times while I was away, she told me, but had seen nothing especially interesting about it or the people who were running it. ‘He’s a schoolteacher,’ she said, as if this meant they couldn’t possibly be interesting, and went on reading her paper. I added some thought or other about the possibility of a simple love story between them, this Aussie bloke and his exotic bride. Clare didn’t look up from her paper, but said with that quiet conviction of hers, ‘Love’s never simple. You know that, Dad.’ She was right of course. I did know it. Only too well. So did she.

  A week or so later I saw the man from the pastry shop in the library. He was with his little girl. Over the following weeks I saw him at the library several times. He was sometimes alone, sitting at one of the tables hunched over a book. There were usually children running around dropping things and making a noise, and I was impressed by the way nothing seemed to distract him from his reading. He read the way young people read, lost to the world around him. Surely, I said to myself—defending my opinion against Clare’s cynicism—surely there is a kind of innocence in the way this man reads? I tried to get a look at the books he was reading but could never quite make out a title. I greeted him on a couple of occasions. But he just gave me a very cool nod. I thought he hadn’t recognised me. He had big hands, the veins prominent. Beautiful hands they were, the hands of a capable man. He seemed more like an artisan than a teacher to me; not a workman but a craftsman of some kind. Perhaps a woodworker. A musical-instrument maker would not have surprised me. I could imagine the harpsichord his hands might lovingly fashion for his beautiful wife.

  When he closed his book and got up, he was tall and a little stooped. I watched him going out of the library, his books under his arm, his gaze on the ground ahead of him, and I wondered what had brought him together with his darkly exotic wife.

  One warm Sunday afternoon in October, when the weather was more like summer than spring, I met him at our open-air public baths. For several lengths of the pool I’d been aware of another swimmer keeping pace with me in the next lane, doing the crawl as I was, arms lifting and driving down as my arms lifted in turn and drove down into the water. I completed my twenty lengths and stood up at the shallow end. I was resting my back against the edge of the pool and taking my goggles off when the man who’d been swimming in the lane beside me also stood up. I saw at once it was the man from the pastry shop. I wasn’t going to say anything, as he’d seemed quite determined not to recognise me. So I was surprised when he said g’day and asked me if I was a regular swimmer. I said I was hoping to become one. I was glad he was being friendly but I did wonder what had changed his mind about me.

  That’s how John Patterner and I met. Side-by-side swimmers. After our swim he invited me to have a coffee with him in the pool café. While we drank our coffee we watched his daughter having her swimming lesson with two of her friends from her prep class. She kept calling out to him, ‘Watch me, Daddy!’ and he kept calling back, ‘I am watching you, darling.’ I said, ‘She’s very beautiful.’ His eyes shone with his pride and love and I remembered how Clare and I had been when she was that age, how infinitely close we had been in those days, how filled with emotion and love and delicacy our friendship had been. And I saw all this again in John Patterner and his daughter. Her name, he told me, was Houria. When he introduced her she looked at me gravely, and I saw she had her mother’s eyes. I don’t remember what John and I talked about that day, but I do remember that the coffee, in its cardboard cups, had somehow managed to become flavoured with the taste of the pool water. Two weeks later I saw him at the library on his own and suggested we have a coffee at the Paradiso. He seemed pleased to see me.

  After that we met for coffee every week or two at the Paradiso. Slowly at first, hesitantly, little by little, he began to tell me their story. The story of himself and his wife, Sabiha, the beautiful woman from Tunisia whom he had married in Paris when he was a young man and she was little more than a girl. And the beautiful and terrible story of their little daughter Houria. They lived now in the two or three rooms above the pastry shop. There couldn’t have been a lot of space for them up there. Their family kitchen was the kitchen on the ground floor behind the shop where Sabiha made her delicious pastries. You could see the kitchen from the street. When I walked past late at night, taking Clare’s kelpie, Stubby, for a last walk for the day, the light in the pastry shop kitchen was usually on.

  From the day we’d had our pool-flavoured coffee together at the baths, I had detected his need to talk. But he was a modest and very private man and it took me some time to convince him that his story interested me. Time and again he said to me, ‘I hope I’m not boring you,’ and laughed. It was a laugh that implied all kinds of reservations and uncertainties. This laugh of his made me anxious. I was afraid he might decide he’d revealed too much and say no more. But I was the perfect listener for him. I told him so. I was the best listener he’d ever had or was ever likely to have.

  My last novel was always going to be my last novel. I’d had enough. ‘That’s it,’ I said to Clare when I finished the last one. ‘No more novels.’ She asked me what I would do. I said, ‘Retire. People retire. They travel and enjoy themselves and sleep in in the mornings.’ She looked at me sceptically and said, ‘And will you play bowls, Dad?’ I’m her father and she’s entitled to these little witticisms. I was so sure that book was my last I had called it The Farewell. I thought this was a pretty direct hint for reviewers and interviewers, who are always on the lookout for metaphor and meaning in what we do. I waited for the first interviewer to ask me, ‘So, is this your last book then?’ I was ready to say, ‘Yes, it is.’ Simple as that, and have done with it. But no one asked. They asked instead, ‘Is it autobiographical?’ I quoted Lucian Freud: Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait. The trouble with this was they took Freud’s radiant little metaphor literally. So I went to Venice to enjoy my solitary gloom for a month or two. When I got home I realised I didn’t know how to do nothing. During my life I had acquired no skills for not working and I soon found that not writing a book was harder than writing one was. How to stop? It was a problem. For a while I concealed my panic by doing things like going to the National Gallery in the middle of the morning during the week. It was pretty demoralising. The place was haunted by do-nothings like myself. I watched them, solitaries all of them. Then I met John Patterner, and suddenly I had something to do. I could listen to him telling me his story. More than anything, I wanted to know by what means sorrow had found its home in the eyes of his beautiful wife. That was what I listened for, to find that out.

  If it was fine we took a table on the footpath under the plane trees outside Café Paradiso. John liked to smoke. ‘I’m having a spell at the moment,’ I told him when he insisted he was keeping me from my work. He sat a while, playing with the unlit cigarette between his fingers, then he straightened and began to tell me about himself, the cigarette unlit in his hand until he finished talking and we’d got up and were walking back to the shop together. Only then did he finally light his cigarette. I suppose he was trying to give them up. He told me he was originally from a farming family somewhere up on the south coast of New South Wales. And Clare had been right, he was a schoolteacher these days, teaching English as a second language to boys and girls at the local secondary college, kids who for the most part came from homes where the language spoken was not English, which is about half the population around here. He spoke of his students with great respect, but I had the feeling he was not content in his job. He loved his wife and his d
aughter, but he also loved to lose himself in a book. I picked him for a passionate reader.

  So, to his story then. I soon began to realise that it was, in its way, a confession. But isn’t that what all stories are? Confessions? Aren’t we compelled to tell our stories by our craving for absolution?

  Chapter Two

  Dom Pakos was in his narrow kitchen at the back of the café serving up his usual midweek offering of overcooked pieces of stringy beef from the abattoirs down the road, mixed with a couple of dozen boiled zucchinis and one or two spices, a dish he dignified with the name sfougato. Dom was a man of short stature with a nose that had been broken so often in his youth it looked as if it might have been trodden on by an elephant. Despite the hard bulk of his torso, Dom, at that time in his fiftieth year, was quick and confident in his movements. He was ladling the sfougato into bowls, the big saucepan set on the gas stove in front of him, the bowls laid out in a line on the marble bench to his right. Dom let go of the big iron ladle, which dropped into the saucepan, splashing the front of his white shirt with gravy, and he gave a short gasp, as if he had suddenly remembered an urgent appointment. And with that he collapsed onto the tiles.

  The café, Chez Dom, was in the narrow street known in those days as rue des Esclaves, opposite Arnoul Fort’s drapery and next door to André and Simone’s stationers. If you turned left outside the café and walked past the stationers to the corner, then crossed the square and walked down the slope on the far side of the square for a hundred metres or so, you crossed the railway line and came to the source of the nose-tingling smell that pervaded the locality in those days: the great abattoirs of Vaugirard. For the locals, the distinctive smell of the slaughterhouse signified work and home. Some days the smell was sharper than others, and there were days when it was scarcely noticeable at all. Like the weather, the smell was always there, day and night, winter and summer. And, as with most things, familiarity had rendered it innocuous to the people who lived in the area. It was newcomers who wrinkled their noses.