Below the Styx

A Novel

By Michael Meehan

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2010 Michael Meehan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74175-780-4
CHAPTER 1

'YOU ARE,' SHE SAID, 'A LOUSE.' IT WAS THE WORD THAT HURT. IT WAS the word, indeed, that set the infernal thing — the blunt object in question — into its fatal motion. Her opinion, I was long aware of. I had lived with it long enough. She knew that the word would hurt because I once told her it would. As the arguments grow old, we grasp about for refreshment, for new ways of twisting the knife. Without great effect. It's the old insults, the old jibes, lurking deep in their furrow, that really bite. The deep griefs of a long, sometimes intimate relationship. Intimacy! Therein lies the trap. You do admit, in fonder moments, the gaps, the lacks, the secret hurts. The mood then shifts, and all you've done is stockpile ammunition.

It was only after I came across her rummaging in my black plastic bags that she first used the word. Martin Frobisher, as louse. The word 'louse', you see, has associations. It was an expression of my father. A louse was a person without principle. A human parasite. Always a louse, singular. Never the plural. Once you started talking about lice, it all got too close to the real thing. One 'flaming louse' after another, and a whole train of 'lousy rips', passed through my childhood; immoralists all of the darkest hue, but more usually parking inspectors, council employees, tax gatherers, hangmen and other forms of public service pestilence.

I struck her. Or at least the object struck her, with me, unfortunately, and as I have already explained in great detail to Clive Partington, attached to the other end of it. For this, I am in prison. This is the core of my story. The reason, in fact, for writing. The story of two sisters, my wife Coralie and Madeleine, the wife of Rollo. The story of my life.

The object was an epergne. What is an epergne? I hear you ask. If you had asked my father-in-law, Ernie, in happier days, he would have taken you aside, tears of gratitude welling in his eyes, and lectured you at fond and foolish length on the history of the epergne, its classical origins, its imperial antecedents, the growth of the native industry, the place of epergne design in the evolution of Australian decorative arts, the gradual use of native insignia, the sorry decline in the art of the epergne in the century of the common man. The epergne is, in short, a large, unwieldy object designed to suspend delicacies — usually fruit — above the table. Equipped with a column (Doric, Ionian, Corinthian), it has a modest footprint, as I believe the computer people say, making table space available for other forms of clutter.

Old Ernie collects them. No more, I suspect.

I struck her. My hand reached for the nearest blunt object, and closed around the pylon. I did not raise the epergne above my head and bring it down mightily on hers. The long swing began at waist level, and became two-handed as I leaned into the weight of the thing. The motion of the epergne began to describe an arc that did indeed curve upwards, and which was less the motion of an arm — now two arms — than the movement of a whole body, turning with and perhaps even dragged along by, now that the momentum was taking over, the weight of the object in question.

My defence, Your Honour. Was it me who swung the epergne, or the epergne, once set in motion, that swung me? What if the intention to mangle and maim which had existed at the outset of the swing had waned long before the object achieved its target? Can mens rea still be said to exist? I insist that the jury should have the opportunity to test the weight of Exhibit A, preferably in a long swinging motion that runs from right to left, beginning roughly at waist level and running upwards to connect with the temple of a female of approximately average height.

* * *

IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU, at least, have all the facts. For these, you have to go back. Stories are like that. You need the long trajectory, the full swing so to speak, if the whole truth is to be told. The accounts in the newspapers have all been far too short. They begin with the blow, and end in cautious speculation about trial dates. They deal in rumour and confusion, and generally play upon the most naïve of stereotypes. Accounts of the trial will also be short, full of gaps, topped and tailed to the point where the real truth will remain just about anyone's bet, with the journalists drawing on all the daemonic arts of suppression and embargo to set rich disinformations in train. The whole miserable saga will be a-dancing in the imaginations of daily readers through spicy denials and refusals to comment, with shadowy hints and deeper suspicions flowing like delicious treacle in and around the well-heeled participants, the expensive locations, the indulgent lifestyles, the fatal blow itself.

Ordinary is better! Ordinary is safer!

I'll find a beginning for you. A chance meeting at breakfast, in a small Left Bank hotel in the rue St-André-des-Arts. A Dan-Air package tour, with a bus trip down to Dover, a quick sardine-packed hop over to the airfield at Beauvais and a further bus trip the rest of the way down to Paris. My appearance at breakfast was opportune. There was an awkwardness with la patronne about whether or not the breakfast was included. I came quickly to the rescue, all petits malentendus sorted out in no time, and all parties, even the cranky patronne, left smiling.

Shall I tell you how they looked? An extraordinary thing it was, to come clattering down the rickety staircase in this tiny budget hotel and to hear the metallic ring of the Australian accent, unmistakable even in its mangled private school variant, scraping around the salon and clawing its way up the stairwell. Here were two sunny, golden-haired young women, greeting the gusty Parisian autumn with bare shoulders and the last trace of Australian tans, poring over maps, dragging them through the confiture and sending the breakfast apparatus flying as they furled and refolded and pumped and flattened, the two of them laughing and haggling their way through the day's prospective sightseeing.

I had seen them on the bus the night before, as we made our way down from the airport at Beauvais, though they hadn't seen me. They were asleep, fallen against one another. Jetlag, perhaps, or the legacy of some shrieking Earl's Court send-off.

One of them was, of course, my future wife, Coralie, who was to topple, in the moments to follow. Hopelessly in love? I wouldn't quite risk that. Hopelessly into a tangle of curiosity and intense amusement, I would say, of a kind that didn't quite manage to sort itself out before we tied the knot.

The other was her older sister, Madeleine.

I will describe them to you. Each of them, distinctly. Coralie and Madeleine. In the earliest stages of our relationship, I would not have tried to do so. I would have described them as 'the sisters'. The Australian sisters. A generic entity of taut and slender muscularity with blue eyes, blonde hair and slightly reddish face, flushed with excitement and enthusiasm for just about everything we saw as we walked the streets, the 'French bread', the 'French cheese', the 'French windows', the 'French poodles' and even, it seemed to me, the ubiquitous French dogshit that we wove our way around in our first negotiations with the city.

A generic entity they were, too, in the way they went about their touring — the frenetic exchange of banalities with anyone who would listen, the indiscriminate approval for anything that was vaguely old, for everything that was on record as ever having been admired by anyone else. The two of them swapped clothing, ideas, cameras, sunglasses, tanning oil, lipstick, maps and clichés, as they cheerfully and noisily tweedledummed and tweedledeed their way through all the prescribed tourist sites. Having 'done' Spain and Italy, they were now, God preserve it, 'doing' France.

Generic they were, until about three days after that momentous breakfast, that opportune descent, when they began to separate themselves into two quite distinct entities. Coralie started to distinguish herself by the sheer relentlessness with which she organised our days to ensure maximum 'coverage', with the drawing of lines across maps, the close consultation of timetables and opening hours, the economies in both francs and foot leather that could be achieved through the proper arrangement of our visitings and viewings. Each girl's resources for awe and amazement, her capacity for admiration of all that was Fantastic and Wonderful, was carefully sequenced to ensure that the tempo of stimulation would be sustained throughout the day, and that every evening would go on to be just as Amazing and Fabulous as the day that it concluded.

Madeleine though, I gradually came to see, was actually quite interested in the historical detail. Through the froth and babble about all that was ever yet more Fabulous I did detect a real interest in exact details of the period and reign in which the side chapel was created, the precise phase in which the great work was painted, the actual order in which the oeuvres were published. We caught her more than once surreptitiously nosing through the more detailed sections of the Michelin guide, or tarrying to catch the tail end of what was being foisted on those who took the Guided Tour. Such dawdling, I also noticed, more than once put Coralie's careful sequencings at risk.

It all came to me in gentle stages. Those extravagant compliments and vacant superlatives actually contained coded messages, on the one side, about the near onset of boredom and of it now being time to move on. From the other, they hinted at a failure in appreciation, with each compliment and expostulation suggesting the need to tarry further.

The arm-in-arm progress through the galleries and grandes maisons, the Louvre, the Jeu de Paume, the Cernuschi and the Nissim de Camondo, just occasionally — I did begin to see it, even at the time — took on the character of hooling and shoving on the one hand, and dragging and slowing on the other; the interlinked arms actually said far more about divergence than kinship. And while nothing was lost of the shared accents, attitudes, clothing, makeup, cameras and clichés, there started to emerge not only two distinct personalities, but two personalities locked into deep and determined competition, with much of what had at first seemed engagingly generic arising less from deep kinship than from a knee-jerk determination, on the part of each, to hold, match and top the other.

It was, it always seemed to me, one of nature's more desperate forms of loving. I have lived with it now for almost twenty-five years. Coralie, and Madeleine.

* * *

I HAVE JUST THREE VISITORS. There is Petra, my research assistant. Petra is the daughter of a former colleague of Rollo. She is writing a doctoral thesis at the university — I am not sure which university — on the Victorian government's plans for resisting invasion by the Russians in the second half of the nineteenth century. The forts, the gun emplacements, the embryonic navy, the local militias. Obscure? One would have to concede that the plans appear to have been successful. I recall no such invasion.

There is my esteemed brother-in-law, Rollo, who arrives, always, in Cloth of Mourning. Discreet, judicious Rollo, who is known for 'sticking by' people, at least up to the point where the law declares them to be a blighter.

And there is my lawyer, Clive Partington.

He's a former associate of Rollo. He recently quit the ranks of Rollo's firm, Sawney Bean & Co, because, Rollo once darkly confided to me, he wanted to Help Mankind. Clive's promising legal career was thus cut off in its prime. Clive was a victim of the deepest of legal professional hazards, as when pharmacists start taking their own drugs, or accountants start fiddling their books, or sweet-sellers start licking the merchandise. Clive had suffered a mid-life attack of Justice. He'd decided that the firm of Sawney, Bean & Co attracted the wrong kind of clients. Faceless racks of interchangeable corporate suits, always looking for ways to sail just that little bit closer to the wind. Clients wanting to be helped, indeed, but only in the sorry business of keel-hauling or scuttling each other. Or, in finding themselves becalmed and sinking, to be towed away from the consequences of their own excess.

In a few moments, Clive will arrive. His shirt will be white, almost luminous in the dim light. He will arrive looking crisp and clean, the whiff of soap by now at war with the musty and acidic odour of a long day of intense and sedentary work.

As my lawyer, Clive may come to my cell. It is gratifyingly modern. I am incarcerated by electronics — the door, the lights, the temperature, the levels of oxygen. My cell is small and clean, and has nothing in it with which I can harm myself. Other than myself. I have a bed, and a shelf for books, and an ensuite — an in-suite, rather — with a basin and a shining steel toilet bowl, which is my only companion through the long nights of solitary meditation.

'Refresh my memory,' Clive will say. 'Refresh my memory.'

I will then supply poor fumbling Clive with all the memory he will ever need, all he needs in order to stand up and speak with conviction and authority for all that I am not. For my version of the whole story. I will sit and talk, and Clive will take his notes and wonder yet again how it could be that such a person had gotten himself into such a fix. How it was, as he would delicately and strategically put it, that she managed carelessly to stray within the range of a sweeping epergne. And why it was that I was not chasing bail.

Clive will survey me yet again with his practised trial director's eye, and size me up for the stand. He will examine yet again those fabled Frobisher 'boyish good looks', just starting to look like idiocy and retardation, the fine blond hair now starting to run thin and silvered, the teeth starting to jostle one another for position, the spots, the wrinkles, the patches of dry skin, the grey creeping upwards from the temples, the nostrils and ears starting to sprout. None of it grave, none of it against nature and, certainly, none of it making me look less improbable, less inappropriate in the dock and witness box, nor less likely to be seen at all points to be telling the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth.

I had met Clive once before, in the dim and distant world that lay beyond the remand centre, at one of Rollo's parties. Clive was the very model of well-fed legal decency, but already showing signs of foundering between the Rock of social conscience and the Hard Place of mortgage, school fees, club memberships, beach houses. I recall feeling the most exquisite and protracted boredom — Decency's abiding companion — while subjected to long and windy tales of the young Sarah's horse's bottomless appetite and the state of the gutters at Balnarring, with the other party guests soon shuffling their way to the far end of the room and no sign of help in sight.

Clive, who has nobly agreed to 'act' for me, who has no doubt more than once sat through Rollo's uncertain account of this whole miserable story — a version which would contain remarkably little real information (never have I so deeply valued Rollo's steady and reassuring inability to see his own nose in front of his face), but just the mystifying details of its rather gory end, the ugly void and puzzlement to follow.

Rollo, you must understand, was and always will be the very epitome of decency, solidity and balance, and just about every other quality — both Coralie and Madeleine were at one on this point, as on no other — that I have always so manifestly lacked. I could not, in the circumstances, use Rollo. Sawney, Bean & Co (known to the summer clerks as 'Beanies') had long given up their criminal practice anyway, and had passed on to a higher cleave of miscreant. But I do want someone like him. I confess it. I do want a real lawyer, or, at the very least, someone who looks like a real lawyer. I want the suit, the buttoned-up cuffs, the discreet tie with its escutcheoned hints of clubbability, the well-modulated voice, the gentlemanly attention, the lingering whiff of soap and assiduous early-morning scrubbing. I want the moderation, the balance, the patience. The insensitivity to human nuance. Even, at times, the genuine concern for Justice.

I want, in short, to be represented, and by someone who can be relied upon to dress.

(Continues...)Excerpted from Below the Styx by Michael Meehan. Copyright © 2010 Michael Meehan. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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