The Acolyte by Thea Astley

Author:Thea Astley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Limited
Published: 2021-11-10T11:27:32+00:00

VI

It’s all a mess, a highly organized garbage-tip of human relationships and pardon the stinking journalese of that. The only rock-firm untroubled monolith is Holberg who, since Slum’s death, has more or less withdrawn into the shiny glass study where a belt of shelves bears stocks of his emotional needs: barbaric lumps of rock, pottery forms, sophisticated enamel bowls, figurines. He is nearing the end of this third symphony and when he is not working he moves round and round the room, picking up, feeling, his hands like antennae, replacing, moving on, picking up. I’m used to it. I wonder how an outsider would react. With pity? I feel the pity. But I wonder how an outsider would react to me also. Mostly he is working, bent questioningly over manuscript onto which he is transcribing the tiny continent we have made on this edge of the rainforest. There are days when dictating directly to me he barely leaves the piano except for one of his endless cigarettes, grunting when Hilda interrupts for food, so that I have taken to bringing in a small jug and making coffee for us unasked while we work. It is as if I had taken solemn vows. I play the scherzo for him as far as we’ve gone and am conscious of hearing Jamie and Ilse and Slum, in accelerando domesticities and argument. It’s all there. He grins while I play and interrupts constantly with alterations, transpositions, modifications of chords and then a whole set of minor variations crematorium-geared to changes in the old status quo. The sadness, the gut-disturbing sadness of those blues harmonies that without apology to Sadie he inserts during passages of almost classic exposition! I grow wary and find Hilda and me, Hilda and me and the muted quality of our love-making trapped in sunless places across the hill.

The icing is licked a little thin.

Holberg sees us only as shadow minions pussy-footing round the vast halls of his domain. There’s a dark-haired cellist, now, a long mournful swamp creature who appears regularly at week-ends to liaise (it is her word) between Holberg and some student group she is representing in her practical fan-club fashion. It is mid-week. I am nodding in the small hours with my finger still marking the unread page. The master’s bedroom is next door, the door ajar. It is their voices, I swear, that wake me to three o’clock dark and I am no longer one huge eye but ear flapping at the threshold of revelation.

They must have been arguing for some time because Hilda is now sobbing in little triplets, scale of D.

“By why,” she is persisting with the idiocy of females, “why all these women?”

Unscrupulously I pressed my blazing head back to the wall and listened.

“All what women?”

She began naming them.

There was only silence to listen to.

She named them again.

“You really want an answer?”

“It might help me.”

“Me,” he said. “Me! But it won’t satisfy you, will it? Nothing satisfies your sex but the inside turned out, the glistening bowels of me and the small white pip of a soul.

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