The Last Sky Page 3

  I bend down above him and kiss his lips lightly. He seizes my arms and draws me close to him. I can taste the faint saltiness of his skin. On his lips is the taste of the sea.

  But now, years later in a strange country, he is regarding me with a look of faint impatience.

  ‘It’s quite lovely don’t you think? The idea of Russia being a sound that his people brought with them.’

  ‘I think,’ he says, shaking his head, ‘that you’ve become hopelessly sentimental.’

  I don’t know how we’ve fallen into this pattern. I inflate and instead of indulging me as he used to, he produces the pin. I stare at him. He has been my husband for six years and I can’t think of a single thing to say to him.

  I came to Hong Kong in the thirty-second year of my life to accompany my husband and to write a book on the life and work of Nicolas Poussin. It was supposed to be a quiet and productive time for me. A sabbatical from preparing lectures and marking papers and all the demands of my professional life. Without the endless committees and appointments and theses to supervise I would be free to work uninterrupted on Poussin. The extended study that was supposed to follow my doctoral work on French seventeenth-century painting.

  These are the things I told the university when I arranged for a hasty leave of absence to come here.

  But the truth of it is that I am uncertain, even now, about what made me fall upon this path and choose it as my vocation. I had discovered Poussin while I was studying at the University of New England. After school most young people drifted down to Sydney, to the sandstone university or to the cafes and bars by the quay, but I stayed on in the north. I loved the landscape, the cleanness of its lines, its bareness. And my mother was alone on the farm. My brothers disappeared into the city a long time ago.

  On Friday afternoons I would drive out of Armidale to the farm, arriving in the darkness. Sometimes the bottom dam would still hold the reflection of a tiny streak of light. My mother and I would sit and eat dinner across from each other, our reflections pale smears in the dark mirrors of the windows, the fire cracking and shifting behind us.

  She would tell me things about the farm: the rabbits’ tunnels she had found in the dam wall, the drainage channels she was going to dig beside the track, the rats’ nest she had cleared out from behind the fuel stove. Then she would ask about my studies, nodding severely as I spoke. She was a country woman, precise and laconic; it was hard for her to understand the endless sprawl of words wasted on essays and papers about painting and poems.

  Once I overheard Joseph talking to someone about my childhood. ‘The mother brought them up pretty hard I suspect,’ he said. I don’t know if he was right.

  After dinner we would sit in the armchairs by the fire. My mother would always have some sewing or knitting in her hands, her needles eating up yards of sturdy wool, the dogs asleep at her feet. I would bring out the books I had brought down from university, tucking my feet up under my knees and balancing a cup of tea on the arm of the chair. We could sit for hours in silence like that, the only sounds the reedy notes of the frogs or the spatter of rain against the roof. Sometimes we would hear shots and their echoes bounding across the cold ridges.

  It was by the fire in my mother’s house that I saw for the first time Poussin’s Cephalus and Aurora. The painting shows Cephalus rejecting Aurora, goddess of Dawn. I had read the story in Ovid, but in Poussin’s painting an angel holds up a portrait of Cephalus’s wife, Procris. It is the portrait that lures him away from Aurora. Poussin knew that a memento, a sign of absence, can make a lost person present and so reinforce memory, strengthen love. Years later, when he was in exile in Italy, he sent his own portrait back to France.

  There was no portrait of my father in that house. Only my eldest brother could remember him as someone real, someone who had lived among us. For the rest of us he was a ghost, a name that caused our mother’s lips to tighten. Once I asked her about him and she simply raised her palm into the air and walked away from the table. It was as if he had in some way consumed and exhausted her. I don’t know what she was like before the great fracture in her life that was his leaving, if she still had the same sense of withholding. Sometimes I think she is like Marthe, the woman in the bath in so many of Bonnard’s paintings who is always turning slightly away. She was an efficient mother and she spent hours sewing our clothes, chopping wood to heat our baths and cooking for us, but there was always an insistence on her right to her own self and her own thoughts. A refusal to subsume herself in us.

  It wasn’t until many years later that I wondered if perhaps it was this unyielding self-containment that had driven my father away.

  During those university years, and later when I moved west for my doctoral studies, I was desperately trying to force my way into the world of ideas, to forge the kind of mind that could contemplate the abstract. I travelled to France to study for a semester, I wrote assiduously researched papers, I won a scholarship to the University of Western Australia to study under an expert in early French painting. But my mind kept veering back to the specific, the peripheral, the places where art meets life. I would try to contemplate the spatial planes in Poussin’s self-portraits and find myself instead thinking about the particular hesitance in his gaze or wondering what his relationship was to the woman with the crown in the background.

  In Hong Kong I sit with my boxes full of notes, staring at all the archival material I’ve photocopied, the reproductions of the paintings, the journal articles. I once read that any biography is a siege laid by one personality against another. I don’t know if this is what I’m trying to do with Poussin. I am a person who is supposed to be able to spin a clear line out of the tangle of the past, to sift the facts from the extraneous material. All I know is that I cannot think as I should be able to if I was a true resident in the world of ideas. All I know is what I cannot do.

  ‘Nicolas Poussin,’ Joseph says from the doorway, drawing out the vowels in the French way. ‘How is the illustrious Monsieur Poussin?’

  ‘Fine. Inscrutable.’

  Joseph is rolling a cigarette. He runs his tongue neatly along the edge of the paper. ‘Now you’re in China maybe you should look at some of the Chinese artists. Find someone obscure and interesting and write a monograph.’

  I surprise myself. ‘Actually I’ve found some other research I want to do. I want to find out about the Jews who came to China during the war. There were thousands of them, you know.’

  Joseph leans back in his chair. He is watching me, waiting for me to say more, but there is nothing more to be said. I don’t know any more than Ken Tiger has told me. ‘The wandering Jews,’ he says slowly. ‘They sure got around.’

  ‘You say it like it was a choice. The wandering wasn’t voluntary, it was exile.’

  ‘It was pretty voluntary for your father. Don’t think there was much persecution to escape from in Armidale, New England.’

  I stare at him across the table. He has a strange, pursed smile. I notice how much older he looks, how his clothes seem looser on him. He is peeling an apple and he lowers his eyes.

  Back in Australia there was a world around us. There were friends, a house, a garden to work in on the weekends, the markets in the old boat shed where we bought our groceries. We had offices, students, good wine over dinners with colleagues. But here there are no well-worn paths around us. This is hardly a life and now we are forced back on ourselves.

  I sit in silence and watch my husband eating an apple.

  It’s not hard to find information on the Kadoories. There are pages and pages in the library on their philanthropic works, cancer hospitals they built, local schools they founded. There are company reports, newspaper clippings, biographies. Here is Lord Kadoorie opening the Shanghai Paper Hunt Club, here are his wife and daughters feeding refugees during the war, smiling out across soup kitchens. It’s like reading a fairytale.

  Iraqi Jews, they came from Baghdad, made their fortunes under the protection of the British in India, moved
from Bombay to Shanghai where they amassed more wealth, and then finally settled in Hong Kong after the communists took over. There’s a long line of handsome sons, sent to school in England and groomed to run the family businesses.

  Ada Lang is harder to find. She’s not in any of the pictures; no sign of her presence in any of the stiff manila photographs of family groupings. Finally, under the Kadoorie entry in a kind of historical Who’s Who of Hong Kong, I find this:

  Kadoorie, Ada (nee Lang). Born Russia, 1921. Emigrated to Shanghai 1942. Married to Sir Victor Kadoorie (1903–). Arrived in Hong Kong 1946.

  There’s only one paragraph in Victor Kadoorie’s biography about his first wife. All it says is that she was a Russian émigré who came to Shanghai during World War II and that she died shortly after the couple arrived in Hong Kong. His second wife was English and bore him five children. There’s a picture of them, lined up on the curving steps of a white house. Victor is dark and handsome, the English wife pale and plump, a straw hat casting a circle of shade over her face.

  Then there’s a death notice, in a Hong Kong newspaper from 1947: Kadoorie, Ada. 4 March 1947, from complications after an illness.

  Back at the apartment I pull the table up to the window and take out an empty notebook. If I lean forward I can just see the tops of the trees in the public gardens. They look like aspens. Aspens, aspens, someone once said to me, even the sound of the word lulls you into a swoon.

  The sounds of the street reach me through the closed window. The endless sounds of bicycle bells and clattering engines. I open my notebook and begin to write about a death.

  She exists in a kind of watery suspension. Faces float towards her and disintegrate, a woman’s hands draw the shades, layers of words hover above the bed. She is liquid and indefinite, chalk-white and gaunt. Moisture gleams incandescent on her forehead.

  A nurse leans towards her with a damp cloth, whispering, whispering. She is wearing a dark brooch of cut glass at her neck and Ada sees herself multiplied infinitely in its geometric refractions. Prismatic, luminous images of herself float above the bed.

  This is a woman who has seen the world through the effacement of snow, who has watched, from the dark safety of winter trees, the obliteration of her own family, who has reached for a handful of snow, warm and sticky with blood. She has travelled over the vast spaces on the map, and stood on the deck of a ship speeding her to the outermost limits of the world. On the passage to China, Ada had spent hours in her cabin, her arms drawn around herself, thinking of watery deaths and feeling the sea huge and black around her suspended capsule. Despite all her inventions and reinventions she still feels herself a trembling girl, curled in a pocket of space beneath the sea.

  Somewhere is her husband, hovering at the end of the bed, talking to the doctor with his usual authoritative calm. One night she wakes suddenly to see him standing above her, staring down at her. There are deep lines between his black eyebrows. She is burning, luminous, her top lip covered in beads of moisture. From this feverish suspension she reaches out her hand to him, sees it there between them, the fingers white and bony. He looks at her for a moment longer then turns and walks from the room, closing the door behind him.

  In the darkness memories rise up. This is a state of disconnected remembering.

  She remembers a boy called Vasiliy. In the summers he had told her the names of mushrooms. The bonneted baby edulis and the marbled scaber. She remembers, after an afternoon of mushroom hunting, arranging her treasures in concentric circles. She remembers the afternoon sun on the preposterous little gills and fleshy domes. She remembers Vasiliy smiling at her.

  She remembers a train speeding through a black void. When she was small her mother had taken her on a trip to Moscow. They had taken the train. She remembers kneeling on a flat pillow at the breath-misted window of a sleeping car. Suddenly, out of the darkness, a handful of glowing lights that sparkled whitely and then slipped into a pocket of darkness. Later they will reappear as diamonds she wears around her neck but they will never have the same wonder as that first scattered brightness.

  There are other things: the tiny footprints of a bird on new snow; a butterfly net propped against a tree; her mother sitting at a table, leaning on her elbow, her thumb pressed into her cheek close to her mouth, the pressure of it denting her skin.

  She remembers her Chinese lover’s arms: she remembers the way they encircled her perfectly, drawing her into a neat, warm circle. She remembers feeling his heart drum against her cheek. His heart. Its blood-pumping perfection, its containment of other, separate stories.

  The nurse comes and presses a hand to her forehead. Her uniform is stiff and white. Ada turns her head to the wall. White, she remembers, the Chinese colour for death.

  I don’t know where these memories come from. Have they come to haunt me, the scattered recollections of a dying woman? A mad woman?

  When I was small my mother took us to Sydney for a month in an old hotel above a grey beach. The hotel was run by people she knew, two elderly Russian sisters. I remember long hallways and red swirling carpets. I don’t remember the look of the hotel but I can vividly recall being lifted up onto a high table in the kitchen and watching black cherries being dropped into glasses of tea. I remember lying in a cot bed under a window and peeling large flakes of paint from the wall. I can still see the exact blue of the underlayer of paint.

  Sometimes my mother would disappear for long hours, leaving us with the old women. She had business in the city, she said, fastening a high button above the collarbone and shaking my clinging hands from her skirt.

  My brothers would disappear into the dunes beyond the hotel and I would be left to amuse myself on the sand in front of the terrace. I wasn’t allowed to go beyond the dry sand, to the place where the shore grew damp and mysterious.

  Every afternoon the ladies would sit on the terrace of the hotel and talk, every afternoon of that whole summer. Friends of theirs would stop by to drink tea and talk. They would tell about their lives in Europe before the war and about the things that had happened to them and to other people. They were marvellous storytellers, and sitting on the sand under the verandah I could imagine I was in a snow-covered country estate in Russia.

  After that summer I began to dream of the feel of seal furs pressed to the lips in a carriage speeding over ice. I dreamed of the warm cloud of a chestnut horse’s breath on a winter morning, the thud of hooves on ice and the heavy weight of bearskin rugs. I saw cockaded footmen and pink silk-flounced skirts, onion domes of faraway cities and the purple dusks of other lands. Half-awake, I inhabited the old ladies’ memories as if they were my own, as if I too had been to such a place.

  But Ada Lang’s memories never floated down to me from a terrace above an Australian sea. She was a woman who died in the colony many years before I came. A mad woman.

  It’s not in any of the papers, but in the colony they still whisper about her madness. Raving mad, they say. A lunatic.

  We had arrived in Hong Kong during the last glory days of the colony. The city was still full of people of every nation. Things would change; in time they would scatter to other cities, other postings, but then Hong Kong was swimming with the whole world. Music floated down from the windows of the Peninsula Hotel and dinners at the Indochine Restaurant lasted into the morning. Chauffeurs lined up on the sidewalk in the pale, rain-washed dawn.

  Sometimes when Joseph is in the city we slip into this ceremonial life. A strange image: my husband moving among the rich, distant and faintly contemptuous.

  The Peak tram line winds around the mountain like a spidery thread. Joseph and I sit opposite each other, our knees bumping together as the carriage lumbers slowly uphill. It is dusk and the air is thick with mosquitoes.

  There are people here who call the Peak Hong Kong’s Mount Olympus. The higher you live on it, the higher you stand in the strange, murky welter of Hong Kong society. Once there was a time when you needed a pass to go there if you were Chinese. I suppos
e they didn’t want the natives getting too close to the gods.

  I sit quietly and watch Joseph. He looks haggard and exhausted. He stares back at me with his worn-out face, unable to smile.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was thinking we should take a trip to Macau.’ I’m trying for cheeriness but it comes out sounding plaintive.

  ‘Why would we want to go to Macau?’

  ‘Why not? It sounds interesting. All those Portuguese buildings.’

  ‘It’s all casinos and drunken businessmen. And anyway, you’ve barely seen anything of Hong Kong. You should go out and explore instead of sitting around reading poetry.’

  ‘I just thought it might be nice to have a holiday together.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he says dubiously.

  Sometimes I think there will always be a maze of unexplored roads between my husband and me. I’ve created a construct for us, the comforting shape of a marriage, and yet he still moves warily within it.

  The Rays’ bungalow is called Rose Cottage. It sits on a bluff halfway up the mountain. From the terrace you can look straight down at a clump of yachts moored in the harbour.

  I met Clarissa Ray the week we arrived in Hong Kong. There was a Thanksgiving party at the American Embassy. I was standing alone at the bar when a woman leaned confidentially towards me. ‘See that man over there propositioning that girl. He’s probably suggesting dinner at the China Club. Or the honeymoon suite at the Hyatt.’

  I looked over to where a heavy man with greying hair and faint patches of sweat on his shirt was standing by a girl in a sequinned dress. ‘Isn’t she a bit young?’

  Clarissa laughed. She had a wide mouth and clear, tanned skin. She looked rich and healthy and her hair flashed brightly as the sun caught it. ‘The younger the better for my husband.’