Five Bells by Gail Jones

Author:Gail Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2011-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

The coffee arrived. Her flat white, his espresso. James drew his cup forward and looked up. Ellie was examining him.

‘You didn’t marry?’ she asked softly.

Only then, hearing her blunt inquiry, looking into her eyes, seeing the slight moisture there and the intensity of her concern, did James realise there was lingering desire in her voice. Her lips were still slightly parted. She lowered her gaze and tore open a small sachet of white sugar.

‘Well, you know …’ he said vaguely. The noise in the restaurant rose, fell back, resumed its generalised clatter. He was distracted by the din and felt once again numb and dull. He glimpsed the threshold of what might be said, then retreated. ‘So what about this new government?’ He was trying to find another topic.

‘I’m full of hope,’ Ellie announced. ‘I believe, I really do, that the Apology will change everything. It will alter history. And it can’t be bad having a polyglot prime minister.’

‘You think that matters?’

‘Has to. Has to open his horizons.’

James was silent. Ellie was still the optimist; she believed in redemptive futures. He repressed the impulse to lecture her on the necessity for political cynicism. Besides, they had reached that point in the conversation when both were disengaging, when too much remembering had eclipsed what it might be possible to say to each other. James was confused by his own responses to seeing Ellie so unchanged, and so self-possessed. This was her beauty, he reflected, her command of her own life, her staunch independence. Something about her concentrated presence was effortless and assured. And now Ellie was turning her silver rings on her slender fingers; she had the resigned, soft gaze of a passenger on a long-distance flight. He had bored her, he thought. He was an idiot, a fuckwit.

The lunch concluded. Ellie was sending her mobile number to James.

‘Let’s talk again,’ she said. ‘In another context. Give me a call. Any time.’

James’s phone rang. He silenced it. ‘Got it,’ he said. These were magical numbers. The code to find her by.

There was a moment of tense hesitation as Ellie looked into his eyes. What must she be thinking?

Her bright pink lips. Bob Dylan’s ‘I Want You’; its facile declaration.

‘Of course. We’ll talk tomorrow, if that’s OK.’ He looked down at his fingers, entering her name into the mysterious world of telephonic memory. ‘Thanks. For meeting up.’ He felt unworthy of her, a prisoner of his own skulking gloom and tongue-tied desire. A mug-shot of a man.

Ellie stepped forward and embraced him. This time James felt her shape, the sturdy curve of her back, the soft and confident press of her breasts. He made himself let go, made the embrace unsexual. It had been like a bad date, a couple attracted but inert, a conversation that turned from easy news to free-lance unhappiness.

‘Tomorrow,’ she repeated.

James watched her walk away. He thought of the priest holding his hands, saying ‘With God’. He thought of René Magritte’s painting of the lovers, their faces smothered in cloth.

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