The Children's Bach by Helen Garner Page B

a cello – was on so loudly that she wouldn’t have known if an army had marched in the back door. The passage was cool; a telephone sat on the lino. He stopped at the door through which the music poured. She was lying on her back on the floor with her eyes shut, her knees bent and her arms spread out. One foot kept the beat and her torso and her head rolled from side to side. Her face flickered and blurred like that of someone making love: a laugh relaxed into a smile, then into a vagueness as her head turned; she took a gasp of air and let it out, and all the while she rolled in time to the music, small rolls this way and that, as if she were floating on water and being lightly bobbed by a current.
    He turned and walked quickly back to the kitchen, and sat on a chair and waited. The piano was open but he did not touch it straight away. He was holding his breath with embarrassment and curiosity.
    She heard him out in the kitchen when the music stopped. She heard him go to the piano and plink with two fingers a tune whose name she did not know but which she had surely heard from the radio in Vicki’s room. ‘Tsk,’ she said. ‘He would play that kind of stuff.’ She stepped into the passage, thinking herself safe and superior; but he struck one quiet chord, a wide blue one, a chord from the kind of music she knew nothing about and was too tight to play; she stood still, listening, and he left a silence, and then he resolved it.
    How fresh and pretty he looked, sitting at her piano in his clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the top button fastened! She said, ‘You look gorgeous!’
    He laughed and looked down. ‘What was that you were listening to?’
    â€˜Haydn. It’s in C major. Isn’t that supposed to be the optimistic key? I could never understand why I always felt so cheerful after I’d heard that concerto, till I thought what key it was in.’ She blushed: what an idiotic generalisation. Surely musicians were beyond such crassness. Nerves cause chatter. Least said soonest mended.
    â€˜Let’s go somewhere?’ he said.
    â€˜Where?’
    â€˜Just out. Look at things.’
    â€˜Wait till I get my bag.’
    She stood in the middle of the bedroom and looked at the rows of books. She read novels fast, lying for hours on her side holding the book open on the other pillow; they blurred into one another and were gone. Great passions are ridiculous, she thought, although it is terribly cathartic to have felt. She imagined that Philip had indulged in sexual perversions with strangers. Every man she met was inferior to Dexter, but only, perhaps, because she had chosen that this should be the case.
    He would have liked to move around her house and examine all its icons, or to hang over the front windowsill with her and make remarks about the dress and gait of passing pedestrians; but he wanted also to get her outside and on to his own turf, into public places where no-one was host and no-one guest, where everything had a price, where he could get what he wanted, pay for it, and keep moving in long, effortless, curving afternoons unsnagged by obligation or haste: the idea of destination meant almost as little to him as it did to Billy.
    â€˜I’m supposed to be on my way to work,’ he said.
    â€˜I thought you only worked at night.’
    â€˜Something came up.’
    â€˜Are you worried about getting there on time?’
    â€˜No. I’m just worried about being comfortable.’
    â€˜Did you say “comfortable”?’ said Athena.
    â€˜Yes, I did. But I didn’t mean it.’
    That was his way of talking. When she pressed him he was not there. Like most women she possessed, for good or ill, a limitless faculty for adjustment. She felt him give; she let herself melt, drift, take the measure of his new position, and harden again into an appropriate configuration. There was something to be got here, if only she