The White Body of Evening by A L McCann Page A

peace. She died of pneumonia in Port Adelaide, waiting for the
Gothland
to sail to Bremen.
    As twilight fell Anna knew she couldn’t bear to be alone with these thoughts and gratefully accepted Sarah’s invitation as they watched Robert escort their sons towards their encounter with history. But now it was as if the passing of midnight had broken the spell. The century had turned and she finally felt able to leave the party and go home.
    When she tucked Ondine into bed she knew she wasn’t looking forward to Robert’s return. Since Albert’s suicide attempt – she still called it that – and his subsequent breakdown, which saw him convalescing and then unemployed for almost three years after the birth of Ondine, Robert had helped her no end. He was always there to take a hand in the raising of the children and the running of the household affairs. He did this with such chivalry and commitment to his brother’s family that soon his mere presence, as surely as anything, reminded Anna of the desperate nature of her situation. She would almost have preferred to have been left alone with her enfeebled husband and their two small children, rather than encounter Robert’s good intentions at every turn. He made her feel as if she were living in some protracted state of hopeless dependence. He tried to sympathise with her and to help Albert along, but he had no idea what it was really like. Her husband had worn her out, living off her like a parasitic strangler vine, turning her into a shell of herself. She knew that, in a way, she had given up.
    While Albert was unemployed he occupied himself with incessant writing. At first he wrote letters to newspapers complaining about larrikins on Clarendon Street, prostitutes around Albert Park, and the sorry state of the Hanna Street drain, “the river of the dead”, which had become a dumping ground for animal carcasses. Not one of these diatribes was ever published, but the act of writing seemed to mollify his anxiety and distract him from what the doctors had described as “nervous exhaustion and enervation”. Then he started going to the library in pursuit of other projects about which he remained secretive. She almost never saw him during the day. In the grip of his graphomania, Albert was more complex than she had first thought, and it was this complexity on which she focused when she sacrificed herself in the hope of appeasing his obscure and sometimes violent inclinations. She was almost used to it. She’d learnt how to tame her fear and forget her shame, how to numb herself and act out her part.
    And then, one day, there he was, standing in the living room wearing a train conductor’s uniform.
    Anna felt her chest tighten. The children’s wooden train set was spread out at his feet. Paul pushed the red and blue carriages along the tracks, choo-chooing as they went.
    “I got a job,” Albert said, morosely. But then a grin crept over his face. He grabbed her as if she should have been happy, mocking her with the irony of his celebration.
    Something in her gave out, and though she was aware that she didn’t betray herself, she felt as if she were about to dissolve in the acid of her anguish.
    “Dad’s a conductor,” he puffed out to the children.
    Anna looked at the train set, the children and then at her husband’s uniform. She put her hand to her mouth, stifling a shudder as Albert’s hands ran down her spine. The man who hid himself away in the library all day and virtually raped her at night now revealed himself as a grotesque and regressing man-child. She was living in a nightmare.
    That night, when he hauled her carelessly towards him, it was all she could think about. She forced herself to quieten her revulsion, becoming a pliant, but dead thing as he crushed her into the sagging mattress.
    Why on earth should she feel guilty at having run to Winton? As her husband tore away at her like an animal, she knew there was nothing left to accuse her.
    Paul was only