Slow Man Read online

  She pauses and inspects his face, as if to measure the effect she is having.

  ‘Do you know what I asked myself when I heard those words for the first time, Mr Rayment? I asked myself, Why do I need this man? Why not let him be, coasting along peacefully on his bicycle, oblivious of Wayne Bright or Blight, let us call him Blight, roaring up from behind to blight his life and land him first in hospital and then back in this flat with its inconvenient stairs? Who is Paul Rayment to me?’

  Who is this madwoman I have let into my home? How am I going to rid myself of her?

  ‘And what is the answer to your question?’ he replies cautiously. ‘Who am I to you?’

  ‘You came to me,’ she says. ‘In certain respects I am not in command of what comes to me. You came, along with the pallor and the stoop and the crutches and the flat that you hold on to so doggedly and the photograph collection and all the rest. Also along with Miroslav Jokić the Croatian refugee – yes, that is his name, Miroslav, his friends call him Mel – and your inchoate attachment to his wife.’

  ‘It is not inchoate.’

  ‘Yes it is. To whom you blurt out your feelings, instead of keeping them to yourself, though you have no idea and you know you have no idea what the consequences will be. Reflect, Paul. Do you seriously mean to seduce your employee into abandoning her family and coming to live with you? Do you think you will bring her happiness? Her children will be angered and confused; they will stop speaking to her; she will lie in your bed all day, sobbing and inconsolable. How will you enjoy that? Or do you have other plans? Do you plan for Mel to walk into the surf and disappear, leaving his wife and children to you?

  ‘I return to my first question. Who are you, Paul Rayment, and what is so special about your amorous inclinations? Do you think you are the only man who in the autumn of his years, the late autumn, I may say, thinks he has found what he has never known heretofore, true love? Two a penny, Mr Rayment, stories like that are two a penny. You will have to make a stronger case for yourself.’

  Elizabeth Costello: it is coming back to him who she is. He tried once to read a book by her, a novel, but gave up on it, it did not hold his attention. Now and then he has come across articles by her in the press, about ecology or animal rights, which he passes over because the subjects do not interest him. Once upon a time (he is dredging his memory now) she was notorious for something or other, but that seems to have gone away, or perhaps it was just another media storm. Grey-haired; grey-faced too, with, as she says, a bad heart. Breathing fast. And here she is preaching to him, telling him how to run his life!

  ‘What case would you prefer me to make?’ he says. ‘What story would make me worthy of your attention?’

  ‘How must I know? Think of something.’

  Idiot woman! He ought to throw her out.

  ‘Push!’ she urges.

  Push? Push what? Push! is what you say to a woman in labour.

  ‘Push the mortal envelope,’ she says. ‘Magill Road, the very portal to the abode of the dead: how did you feel as you tumbled through the air? Did the whole of your life flash before you? How did it seem to you in retrospect, the life you were about to depart?’

  Is that true? Did he nearly die? Surely there is a distinction between being at risk of dying and being on the brink of death. Is this woman privy to something that he is not? Soaring through the air that day, he thought – what? That he had not felt so free since he was a boy, when he would leap without fear out of trees, once even off a rooftop. And then the gasp when he hit the road, the breath going out of him in a whoosh. Could a mere gasp be interpreted as a last thought, a last word?

  ‘I felt sad,’ he says. ‘My life seemed frivolous. What a waste, I thought.’

  ‘Sad. He flies through the air with the greatest of ease, this daring young man on his flying trapeze, and he feels sad. His life seems frivolous, in retrospect. What else?’

  What else? Nothing else. What is the woman fishing for?

  But the woman seems to have lost interest in her question. ‘I’m sorry, all of a sudden I’m not feeling well,’ she says, mumbling, straining to get to her feet. And indeed she is distinctly white about the gills.

  ‘Would you like to lie down? There’s a bed in my study. Can I make you a cup of tea?’

  She flutters a hand. ‘It’s just dizziness, from the heat, from climbing the stairs, from who knows what. Yes, thank you, I’ll lie down for a moment.’ She makes a gesture to push the cushions off the sofa.

  ‘Let me help you.’ He gets up and, leaning on a crutch, takes her arm. The halt leading the halt, he thinks. Her skin is noticeably clammy.

  The bed in the study is in fact quite comfortable. He does what he can to clear the clutter off it; she slips off her shoes and stretches out. Through her stockings he notes blue-veined, rather wasted calves.

  ‘Pay no attention to me,’ she says, an arm over her eyes. ‘Isn’t that what we say, we unwelcome guests? Carry on as though I were not here.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to rest,’ he replies. ‘When you are feeling better I’ll phone for a taxi.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ she says, ‘it’s not like that, I’m afraid. I’ll be with you a while yet.’

  ‘I think not.’

  ‘Oh yes, Mr Rayment, I’m afraid so. For the foreseeable future I am to accompany you.’ She raises the arm that has been shielding her eyes, and he sees she is smiling faintly. ‘Bear up,’ she says. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’

  Half an hour later he looks in again. She is asleep. Her lower denture bulges out, a faint rasp like the stirring of gravel comes from the back of her throat. It does not sound healthy to him.

  He tries to return to the book he is reading, but he cannot concentrate. Moodily he stares out of the window.

  There is a cough. She is standing in the doorway in her stockinged feet. ‘Do you have aspirin?’ she says.

  ‘In the bathroom, in the cabinet, you will find paracetamol. It is all I have.’

  ‘No good pulling faces at me, Mr Rayment,’ she says. ‘I did not ask for this any more than you did.’

  ‘Ask for what?’ He cannot keep the irritation from his voice.

  ‘I did not ask for you. I did not ask to spend a perfectly good afternoon in this gloomy flat of yours.’

  ‘Then go! Leave the flat, if it so offends you. I still have not the faintest idea why you came. What do you want with me?’

  ‘You came to me. You –’

  ‘I came to you? You came to me!’

  ‘Shush, don’t shout, the neighbours will think you are beating me.’ She slumps into a chair. ‘I’m sorry. I am intruding, I know. You came to me, that is all I can say. You occurred to me – a man with a bad leg and no future and an unsuitable passion. That was where it started. Where we go from there I have no idea. Have you any proposal?’

  He is silent.

  ‘You may not see the point of it, Mr Rayment, the pursuit of intuitions, but this is what I do. This is how I have built my life: by following up intuitions, including those I cannot at first make sense of. Above all those I cannot at first make sense of.’

  Following up intuitions: what does that mean, in the concrete? How can she have intuitions about a complete stranger, someone she has never laid eyes on?

  ‘You got my name out of the telephone directory,’ he says. ‘You are just chancing your arm. You have no conception of who I really am.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Would that it were as simple as that,’ she says, so softly that he barely catches the words.

  The sun is going down. They fall silent and, like an old married couple declaring truce, sit for a while giving ear to the birds screeching their vespers in the trees.

  ‘You mentioned the Jokićs,’ he says at last. ‘What do you know about them?’

  ‘Marijana Jokić, who looks after you, is an educated woman.
Hasn’t she told you? She spent two years at the Art Institute in Dubrovnik and came away with a diploma in restoration. Her husband worked at the Institute too. That was where they met. He was a technician, specialising in antique technology. He reassembled, for instance, a mechanical duck that had lain in parts in the basement of the Institute for two hundred years, rusting. Now it quacks like a regular duck, it waddles, it lays eggs. It is one of the pièces de résistance of their collection. But alas, his are skills for which there is no call in Australia. No mechanical ducks here. Hence the job in the car plant.

  ‘What else can I tell you that you might find useful? Marijana was born in Zadar, she is a city girl, she would not know one end of a donkey from the other. And she is chaste. In all her years of marriage she has never been unfaithful. Never fallen into temptation.’

  ‘I am not tempting her.’

  ‘I understand. As you said, you want merely to pour out your love upon her. You want to give. But being loved comes at a price, unless we are utterly without conscience. Marijana will not pay that price. She has been in this situation before, with patients who fall for her, who cannot help themselves, so they say. She finds it tiresome. Now I will have to find another job: that is what she thinks to herself. Do I make myself clear?’

  He is silent.

  ‘You are in the grip of something, aren’t you?’ she says. ‘Some quality in her draws you. As I conceive it, that quality is her burstingness, the burstingness of fruit at its ripest. Let me suggest to you why Marijana leaves that impression, on you and on other men too. She is bursting because she is loved, loved as much as one can expect to be in this world. You will not want to hear the details, so I will not supply them. But the reason why the children too make such an impression on you, the boy and the little girl, is that they have grown up drenched in love. They are at home in the world. It is, to them, a good place.’

  ‘And yet . . .’

  ‘Yes, and yet the boy has the mark of death on him. We both see it. Too handsome. Too luminous.’

  ‘One wants to cry.’

  They are growing lugubrious, the two of them, lugubrious and drowsy. He rouses himself. ‘There is the last of Marijana’s cannelloni in the freezer, with ricotta and spinach,’ he says. ‘Would you like some? After that I do not know what your plans are. If you want to stay the night, you are welcome, but that must be the end of it, in the morning you will have to leave.’

  Slowly, decisively, Elizabeth Costello shakes her head. ‘Not possible, I am afraid, Paul. Like it or not, I will be with you a while yet. I will be a model guest, I promise. I won’t hang my undies in your bathroom. I’ll keep out of your way. I barely eat. Most of the time you won’t notice I am here. Just a touch on the shoulder, now and then, left or right, to keep you on the path.’

  ‘And why should I put up with that? What if I refuse?’

  ‘You must put up with it. It is not for you to say.’

  Fourteen

  It is indeed true, Elizabeth Costello is a model guest. Bent over the coffee table in the corner of the living-room that she has annexed as her own, she spends the weekend absorbed in a hefty typescript, which she seems to be annotating. He does not offer her meals, and she does not ask. Now and again, without a word, she disappears from the flat. What she does with herself he can only guess: perhaps wander the streets of North Adelaide, perhaps sit in a café and nibble a croissant and watch the traffic.

  During one of her absences he hunts for the typescript, merely to see what it is, but cannot find it.

  ‘Am I to infer,’ he says to her on the Sunday evening, ‘that you have come knocking on my door in order to study me so that you can use me in a book?’

  She smiles. ‘Would that it were so simple, Mr Rayment.’

  ‘Why is it not simple? It sounds simple enough to me. Are you writing a book and putting me in it? Is that what you are doing? If so, what sort of book is it, and don’t you think you need my consent first?’

  She sighs. ‘If I were going to put you in a book, as you phrase it, I would simply do so. I would change your name and one or two of the circumstances of your life, to get around the law of libel, and that would be that. I would certainly not need to take up residence with you. No, you came to me, as I told you: the man with the bad leg.’

  He is getting tired of being told he came to this woman. ‘Wouldn’t you find it easier to use someone who came to you more willingly?’ he remarks as dryly as he can. ‘Give up on me. I am not an amenable subject, as you will discover before long. Walk away. I won’t detain you. You will find it a relief to be rid of me. And vice versa.’

  ‘And your unsuitable passion? Where would I find another such?’

  ‘My passion, as you call it, is none of your business, Mrs Costello.’

  She gives a wintry smile, shakes her head. ‘It is not for you to tell me my business,’ she replies softly.

  His hand tightens on his crutch. If it were a proper, old-fashioned crutch of ash or jarrah, with some weight to it, instead of aluminium, he would bring it down on the old hag’s skull, again and again, as often as might be necessary, till she lay dead at his feet and her blood soaked the carpet, let them do with him afterwards what they will.

  The telephone rings. ‘Mr Rayment? This is Marijana. How are you? Sorry I missed my days. I was crook. I come tomorrow, OK?’

  So that is to be the fiction between them: she was crook. ‘Yes, of course it is OK, Marijana. I hope you are feeling better. I will see you as usual tomorrow.’

  ‘Marijana will be back on the job tomorrow,’ he informs his guest as matter-of-factly as he can. Time for you to bugger off: he hopes she gets the message.

  ‘That’s all right. I’ll keep out of her way.’ And when he glares at her angrily: ‘Are you worried she will think I am one of your lady friends from the old days?’ She gives him a smile that is nothing less than merry. ‘Don’t take everything so seriously, Paul.’

  Why Marijana has decided to come back emerges as soon as she steps through the front door. Before even taking off her coat – it is raining, a warm steamy rain that carries a tang of eucalyptus – she slaps down on the table a glossy brochure. On the cover, mock-Gothic buildings against acres of greensward; in a panel, a well-scrubbed boy in shirtsleeves and tie at a computer keyboard, with an equally well-scrubbed chum peering over his shoulder. Wellington College: Five Decades of Excellence. He has never heard of Wellington College.

  ‘Drago say he will go here,’ says Marijana. ‘Look like good school, don’t you think?’

  He pages through the brochure. ‘Sister institution to Wellington College in Pembrokeshire,’ he reads aloud. ‘Preparing young men for the challenges of a new century . . . Careers in business, science and technology, the armed forces. Where is this place? How did you find out about it?’

  ‘In Canberra. In Canberra he find new friends. His friends in Adelaide no good, just pull him down.’ She pronounces Adelaide in the Italian way, rhyming with spider. From Dubrovnik, just a stone’s throw from Venice.

  ‘And where did you hear about Wellington College?’

  ‘Drago know all about it. Is food school for Defence Force Academy.’

  ‘Feeder school.’

  ‘Feeder school. They get, you know, preference.’

  He returns to the brochure. Application form. Schedule of fees. He knew that boarding school fees were high; nevertheless, in black and white the figures give him a jolt.

  ‘How many years would he be there?’

  ‘If he start January, two years. In two years he can get year twelve, then he can get bursary. Is just fee for two years he need.’

  ‘And Drago is enthusiastic about the school? He has agreed to go?’

  ‘Very enthusiastic. He want to go.’

  ‘It’s normal, you know, for the parents to take a look at a school first before committing themselves. Make a tour of
the premises, speak to the headmaster, get a feel of the place. Are you sure you and your husband and Drago don’t want to pay a visit to Wellington College first?’

  Marijana takes off the raincoat – it is made of some clear plastic material, purely functional – and drapes it over a chair. Her skin is warm, ruddy. No trace of the tension of their last encounter. ‘Wellington College,’ she says. ‘You think Wellington College wants that Mr and Mrs Jokić from Munno Para come visit, see if maybe Wellington College is OK for their boy?’

  Her tone is good-natured enough. If anyone is embarrassed, it is he.

  ‘In Croatia, you know, Mr Rayment, my husband was famous man, sort of. You don’t believe me? In all newspapers photographs of him. Miroslav Jokić and mechanical duck. On television’ – with two fingers she makes walking motions in the air – ‘pictures of mechanical duck. Only man who can make mechanical duck walk, make noise like how you say kwaak, eat’ – she pats her bosom – ‘other things too. Old, old duck. Come from Sweden. Come to Dubrovnik 1680, from Sweden. Nobody know how to fix it. Then Miroslav Jokić fix it perfect. One week, two week he is famous man in Croatia. But here’ – she casts her eyes up to the heavens – ‘who cares? In Australia nobody hear of mechanical duck. Don’t know what is it. Miroslav Jokić, nobody hear of him. Just auto worker. Is nothing, auto worker.’

  ‘I am not sure I agree,’ he says. ‘An auto worker is not nothing. Nobody is nothing. Anyhow, whether you visit them or not, whether you are from Munno Para or Timbuctoo, my guess is that Wellington College will be only too glad to take your money. Go ahead and apply. I’ll pay. I’ll give you a cheque right now for the application fee.’

  So there it is. As easy as that. He is committed. He has become a godfather. A godfather: one who leads a child to God. Does he have it in him to lead Drago to God?

  ‘Is good,’ says Marijana. ‘I tell Drago. You make him very happy.’ A pause. ‘And you? Leg is OK? No pain? You do your exercises?’