Reading Madame Bovary Read online

  Diana knocked on the door.

  No-one came.

  She knocked again, and after a minute the door opened a foot or so and the grey head of a woman in her early sixties appeared and said abruptly: ‘You’re early. I’ve got someone with me. Wait on the veranda.’ And the door was closed again.

  After ten minutes a middle-aged man, dressed like a businessman, opened the door, nodded to us and headed down the pathway towards the gate. Diana looked at me knowingly. ‘Probably came to ask about his shares,’ she said. With a wave of her hand Mrs. Cluny beckoned us in. She was a short, fat woman who seemed to float about in a cloud of flesh. In her movements there was a certain refinement, delicacy even, though she was blunt in her speech and drab in her dress. In her mouth was a cigarette that gave off a strong, acrid smell.

  We followed her into a kind of musty parlour at the front where she indicated a fraying couch opposite her own armchair. On the small wooden coffee table between us was a chipped saucer full of ash and cigarette butts, and next to that a packet of Woodbines.

  So this is a psychic, I thought. Where is the velvet turban with the crescent moon? The fringed shawl? The Turkish slippers?

  Mrs. Cluny asked for a personal object and Diana unbuckled her watch and handed it over. The woman closed her eyes, adjusted her wide bottom in the chair and began to rub the leather band of the watch between her thumb and forefinger, up and down, up and down, mesmerically, as if it were Aladdin’s lamp.

  ‘If I see anything dark, do you want to know?’ she asked.

  ‘Dark?’

  ‘Yeah, dark. Like death.’ This was followed by a long drag on the cigarette.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Make up your mind.’

  ‘Um … yes. Yes, okay. But I’ve come about something in particular.’ I looked at Diana and realised how nervous she was. This was serious. ‘Can I ask questions?’

  Mrs. Cluny nodded.

  ‘I keep having this dream, a recurring dream about a baby.’ And she gave Mrs. Cluny a semi-coherent account of what seemed to me a cluster of mundane events made significant only by the appearance of a baby surrounded by a white light.

  For a long time Mrs. Cluny said nothing, just kept rubbing the watchband, up and down, up and down. Then she said, still with her eyes closed, still fingering the fine strap of leather: ‘You’re not dreaming about babies, you’re dreaming about your spirit self.’

  ‘What’s that? You mean, like the soul?’

  ‘Whatever you like to call it.’

  Oh, no, I thought, oh, no, I shouldn’t have come. Not this.

  Next she’ll be talking about past lives.

  There was a silence and then she added, ‘You’ll see it one day.’

  ‘You mean in the dream?’

  ‘No, you’ll see the baby.’

  What baby? There was no real baby.

  ‘You’ll see that baby again, just before you die.’

  Diana was speechless. And then she surprised me. ‘When am I going to die?’ she asked.

  Mrs. Cluny closed her eyes, and went on fingering the watchband. ‘I don’t see your death at all clear.’ She paused. ‘That’s the way it is. Sometimes I see it clear with people, sometimes I don’t. You’ve got a kind of cloud coming toward you. It could be your death, but it could be something else. In any case,’ she added, ‘it won’t be for a while yet.’

  Then she sat, very composed, with her hands on her lap. She put Diana’s watch down on the table beside her, a signal that the interview was over. She would ‘see’ no more that day.

  Diana fumbled in her purse until she located her cheque book.

  ‘I only take cash,’ said Mrs. Cluny.

  On the drive home Diana was uncharacteristically quiet and a little unnerved.

  ‘She didn’t really tell you anything much,’ I ventured.

  ‘Hmmmm,’ she said, biting her lip and staring ahead at the white line. Every now and then her eyes would flutter in an odd way. ‘I should have asked her what she meant by a while,’ she said. She was in a funk.

  Back in the city we went to The Malaya for a bowl of blinding hot laksa and then on to a Bette Midler movie to restore our morale. By the time we got back to Diana’s place she had snapped out of it.

  Despite her weakness for the consumerised supernatural (tarot festivals, crystal workshops, astrology on the net) and what Frank derides as a certain credulousness, Diana can be very funny. She, too, is absorbed in lists, though not of the kind that plague me. Hers are a diverting game of mapping the world through trivia, and often over coffee we compile them together or, rather, she goes off on a riff and I throw in the odd contribution. Here is the latest one, recalled from memory. Knowing me, I’ve probably forgotten the best bits: I’ll have to check with her later.

  The narcissist’s bedside table versus the non-narcissist’s bedside table

  THE NON-NARCISSIST:

  – K-Y jelly

  – toilet lanolin

  – tissues

  – anti-histamine tablets

  – Body Shop moisturiser

  – reading glasses

  – detective novel or the Women’s Weekly

  – contraceptive pills

  – small asymmetrical plaster vase made by offspring in Grade Two art class

  – twenty-dollar alarm clock with tinny beep

  – bedside lamp: cheap Taiwanese knock-off of a Milanese design

  THE NARCISSIST:

  – pink ceramic oil burner with ylang-ylang aromatic oil

  – vibrator in purple velvet case with silver draw-string

  – Almond and patchouli massage oil

  – The I Ching or Liz Greene’s Astrology for Lovers, Stephen Coulter’s The Empathic Friend (and Where to Find Them) or Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart

  – Magazines: Marie Claire, Vanity Fair and, if of a certain age, Vogue

  – Estée Lauder night cream and eye gel

  – buff stick for nails

  – black silk eye mask for when partner is inconsiderately reading

  – mobile phone for late-night calls when depressed

  – bedside lamp: (under forty) cheap Taiwanese knock-off of a Milanese design or (over forty) Laura Ashley with pale-blue flowers on the base and a pleated shade in satin cream

  The beautiful object

  There is a joy in money, and we are all too refined to speak of it directly. We say, ‘What fine linen, what a lovely bowl, what nice shoes.’ I’m not materialistic, we tell ourselves, it’s just that I love beauty.

  Yesterday, I took an extended lunchtime and went to David Jones. I go there often. Frank says it’s my temple.

  Leaving aside all the deep and meaningful contributions of my career path (more of that later), my job means that I can walk into David Jones and buy two pairs of shoes at the one time. Not that I do this very often – in fact I’ve done it twice in the last ten years. The point is: if I want to, I can. Something my mother could never do, or her mother before her. And if my shoes are good, I feel powerful, so that no matter how badly things go in other spheres, there is some part of me – the shoe part – that can’t be humiliated.

  Shopping can turn into mania. Some people buy on impulse. Not me. I am a member of the school of exhaustive research. Come the new season I cannot buy one pair of shoes until I look at every pair of shoes in the city. I must survey the field. I must not make a mistake. It’s my professional training. I have a reputation at work for being thorough. I am.

  I can’t understand Frank. When he goes shopping he buys the first thing he sees that he likes and goes home. Don’t tell me it’s a male trait because my sister is the same.

  I have to conduct a complete reconnoitre, a thorough evaluation of available resources. I cannot go home at night haunted by the nagging thought that something better might have been just around the corner.

  Yesterday I went to buy a lipstick. I tried one colour on my bottom lip, one on the top, choosing from the testers.
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  ‘I’ll just leave these on and see how they look outside in the natural light,’ I said to the sales assistant, a girl with short, spiky blonde hair and heavy blue eyeshadow, expertly applied. ‘The colours are so misleading under these lights.’ She murmured her discreet assent.

  ‘Do they really last?’ I asked, with the knowing scepticism of the practised, indeed, jaded buyer.

  ‘They’re a drier formula,’ she intoned, with all the solemn aplomb of a research scientist explaining the latest breakthrough in genetic engineering, and then she streaked, first, an orange-pink frosted and then a scarlet slash on the back of her hand, just above the thumb – which is where they always do it. Where I do it. Where all women do it. Why there? Is there a lipstick-testing gene in all females? One Perfect Coral, Mister Melon, Rio Mango, Sherry Pepper, and a new range with names like Lust, Vanity, Ambition. Before I know it, I’ve spent ninety dollars on two lipsticks.

  I pay with one of my credit cards.

  Our credit cards are precious. They sustain morale. Every time I hear someone on the radio droning on about the perils of credit, I turn it off. Once I found a credit card in the gutter on Glebe Point Road. When its owner came to pick it up she brought me a cutting of African violet, taken from her own garden and earthed in a small decorative pot to express her relief and gratitude. Her son had broken his arm that day but she had taken the time to show her appreciation.

  Credit cards are our life-blood.

  I work at keeping the African violet alive.

  The zoo

  Let me tell you about work. I call it the zoo.

  I am a project officer in the Human Resources section of a medium-sized company that does (mostly) outsourced work for government agencies. I won’t say who or what: somebody might sue. My director is a young man called Winton, a psychologist by training with an MBA and an infatuation with all things Japanese, especially their approach to corporate management and decision-making. He goes to ikebana classes. I am fond of Winton, and it’s probably because he’s such an unpredictable blend of the fey and the fly. He’s short and stocky with fair curly hair, square practical hands and rimless glasses, and is so improbable a blend of corporate style and winsomeness that it can be disconcerting. He is quietly spoken with a reserve that is neither stiff nor shy but is a kind of charm in itself.

  Today is a hat day in the office and Winton is wearing a smart Tyrolean number with a feather.

  ‘Only Winton,’ I say.

  ‘I’m amazed that it’s not Japanese,’ says Christina, tartly. Christina Montiades is Winton’s chief antagonist. Christina is the office cynic, a big woman with a deep, hearty laugh. Cynic: an autocrat in search of a vision. She is an SCW (Single Career Woman) and a workaholic (she has a life coach). Christina perches on her ergonomic stool typing away at the keyboard with a long, thin pencil set firmly between her teeth. She keeps it there, on the advice of her dentist, to prevent her unconsciously grinding her molars into a paste. This morning Christina is wearing a navy-blue baseball cap with the Southern Cross of the Eureka Flag on the front. She is an ardent advocate for a republic.

  I am wearing Ben’s Sydney Swans beanie, which rather suits me (red is my colour), but by general acclamation the prize goes to Martin who is wearing an understated grey felt effort, a kind of soft turban. Immensely smart.

  ‘I got it on my trip to Tashkent,’ he says. ‘It’s what the Taliban wear. I also bought an embroidered cap but it’s a bit gay.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ says Christina. ‘This is Sydney.’

  ‘You can’t wear a Taliban hat,’ says Winton. ‘It’s in poor taste.’

  ‘Grow up,’ says Martin.

  We are dangerously on the edge of politics which, mostly, we manage to avoid.

  It was Winton’s idea to have a hat day because this week we begin yet another restructure. First off, we have to draft a strategic plan, which will mean redundancies, and Winton thinks we might all get a bit tense.

  Stratagem: a manoeuvre in war; a plan for deceiving an enemy; an instance of clever generalship; in figurative speech, any ploy to gain an advantage; a trick or scheme.

  We are scheduled to meet in the afternoon in the conference room on the twenty-first floor, the one that’s painted grey and has white Venetian blinds. It’s about as sterile as it could be, and perhaps that’s why we get nowhere. Winton has just returned from a special management conference on how to develop a vision statement for the next three years. But first, he says, you have to have a vision before you can have a vision statement.

  ‘What,’ asks Martin, ‘is the difference between a vision and an objective?’

  ‘It’s the difference between a mechanical and an organic, relational model.’

  ‘In plain English, Winton.’

  ‘I’ll have more to say about that at this afternoon’s meeting.’

  Winton has been reading a book on management called Theory Z and he’s at pains to explain it to us. It’s all about how to adapt Japanese management practices – with special reference to teamwork – to Western management hierarchies. He has scanned pages into his workstation and emailed them to every member of the office. The gist of these is that ‘hierarchies’ and ‘bureaucracies’ are out and ‘clans’ are in, viz: ‘The Theory Behind the Theory Z Organisation. ‘The difference between a hierarchy – or bureaucracy – and Type Z is that Z organisations have achieved a high state of consistency in their internal culture. They are most aptly described as clans in that they are intimate associations of people engaged in economic activity but tied together through a variety of bonds. Clans are distinct from hierarchies, and from markets, which are the other two fundamental social mechanisms through which transactions between individuals can be governed.’ AND ‘Type Z companies succeed both as human social systems and as economic producers. A Z company seldom undertakes any explicit attempts at team building. Instead, it first creates a culture to foster interpersonal subtlety and intimacy, and these conditions encourage cohesive work groups.’

  I can’t help wondering how this squares with what a young mining executive told me at a dinner recently, that anyone in the same job for more than four years is a loser who’s going nowhere. ‘If he’s any good,’ he said (note the ‘he’), ‘he’ll be bored after four years or headhunted by someone else.’ Winton has been in this job for five years. I should tell him he is in danger of becoming a loser.

  Winton wants us to begin our vision statement by coming up with a definition of our work ethic (a clan ethic, presumably).

  ‘I’ve read your material, Winton,’ says Christina, ‘and it strikes me as just another form of groupism. I know these models, full of love and kindness but with a thin line operating between consensus and coercion.’

  ‘The most efficient working bodies are like clans. Look at the Google corp.’

  ‘You mean packs of nerds who go jogging together in their knee-length running shorts.’

  ‘There’s a place for everyone,’ he says, ‘and if not, you retrain them. This is how the Japanese do it: they always find a niche for you. You work for the company all your life, give them total loyalty, and they find a place for you.’

  ‘But they own you. It’s all about creating the corporate personality. You become an automaton.’

  ‘Yes, Christina, but don’t you see, it works for them, it works.’ He looks pointedly over the rim of his Armani glasses.

  Later, Christina will take me aside (her strong grip on my arm) and say that Winton just loves the group thing, the bonding thing.

  ‘It’s stronger in some men than the sex drive,’ she says.

  The afternoon drags on and we wallow in abstractions. Sitting to my right is Lisa, picking at the rim of her styrofoam cup, flicking the crumbs onto the floor and making, in her fastidious way, a mess. Lisa is an administrative assistant, all of twenty-six, with two degrees and a mop of curly black hair. She is tall and thin and neurasthenic. She smiles and laughs too much, in a kind of brittle, high-stru
ng way. She is the youngest and possibly the cleverest person in the office. Except perhaps for Kelvin, our programmer. Kelvin is into minor forms of self-mutilation. During meetings he has been known to trim the cuticles of his nails with a razor blade.

  After three hours of squabbling and getting nowhere, we rise from our chairs and head back to our stations.

  ‘That went well,’ says Winton dryly as we go down together in the lift. He sighs. I hate it when Winton sighs. I want to console him.

  ‘It’s that room. Next time we should meet somewhere nice, outside the building. Bring a fresh perspective to it, try and enjoy ourselves.’ We need to get out of the office, I say, to somewhere our heads can clear and we can – just maybe – get out of old patterns of thinking and knee-jerk responses to traditional antagonists. We should go somewhere to have our sense of possibility enhanced, our sense of wonder replenished.

  ‘Where?’

  I tell him I hear there’s a great conference centre at the zoo (the real one), with a glassed-in meeting room that looks out onto a pool in a rain-forest setting.

  ‘Book it,’ he says. ‘It’s a great idea.’

  ‘Does this make me a Z person?’

  Winton smiles, wanly.

  Domesticity

  Are all pleasures corrupted by domesticity, except the pleasure(s) of domesticity itself?

  The moment I leave work it’s like some kind of whirlwind. The office is a space capsule, sealed in, airless, quiet; you’re unreachable, no-one from the family can get at you emotionally; there is only work that can be done, and I do it. My work has a manageable limited-ness to it, unlike the family, whose demands go on and on and on and you could have ninety hours a day and it still wouldn’t be enough.

  I get off the train, walk to the butcher on the corner who stays open late, buy some chops for tea because that’ll mean a quick meal, jog to the little fruit-and-veg man (it’s late and Frank has to eat early tonight to get to his martial arts class), buy some French beans (it’s the only green thing Ben will eat) and some melon (a quick dessert). Then I remember I’ve forgotten the anti-itch cream for their mosquito bites from the weekend camping and I’ve got to double-back to the chemist behind the train line; I get there and he has just closed and I swear and some schoolboys look up from under their boaters and smirk and I’m doing my high-heel jog back across to the station and down those interminable steps painted with slogans – ‘Drugs Kill’ – and a fat busker echoing in the tunnel, ‘Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door’, and this is the fourth time today that I’ve been through this filthy tunnel.