Free The White Body of Evening by A L McCann

clearly peeved at his demotion in her attentions. Paul showed them the picture, which now had the title written in crude letters underneath it.
    “That’s awful,” said Hamish.
    “I think it’s beautiful,” said Ondine.
    “No it’s not, it’s ugly.” He might have added that Ondine herself was beautiful, that her mother was beautiful, that each of them was the embodiment of a beauty more radiant than any of the princesses or sprites in the stories that Anna had read to them.
    Albert watched the children debate the merits of the picture and then strolled into the kitchen where his wife stood up, kissed him on the cheek and poured him a cup of tea.
    “Did Paul behave himself?”Anna asked.
    “He worked most of the day and sat quietly in the depot office in Ballarat. Good as gold, so to speak.”
    The ease with which they both slipped into the rhythm of the evening sometimes astounded Anna. She would have preferred it if Albert had looked at her like a quivering madman, but he didn’t. His usual manner had nothing really exceptional about it, the demeaning uniform aside, and the casual observer would not have sensed that there was all that much out of the ordinary.
    “Hungry?” Anna asked as Sarah finished her tea and made to leave.
    “Yes,”Albert said.
    “I’ve got some chops, fresh.”
    “That sounds good.”
    The surface of things had its own comforts, and sometimes they could both feel at ease in it, as long as neither of them dwelt too long on the deception.
    “Can Hamish stay for tea too?” Paul asked from the living room, catching the mention of food.
    “He’s got to come home to his own dinner,” Sarah said before Anna could consent, as she inevitably did in these situations.
    “These children are really inseparable,” Sarah said under her breath.
    “You can say that again,” said Albert.
    Anna liked Hamish and the way in which he interacted with her own children. The boy had taken to German and once, when she read them a Heine poem about the Lorelei, he asked her whether Australia had a Lorelei of its own, which she took to be a revealing question, indicating the boy’s intelligence. While other children played cricket in Draper Street, Hamish was content to read or be read to, and his presence turned what might have been the loneliness of a mother and her children into something like the feeling of company. That, years ago now, he had looked into her eyes, seen her so cruelly exposed and then concealed the fact of such intimacy within him, never mentioning or even hinting at what he had witnessed, also filled her with warmth at the thought of his loyalty. Paul, Ondine and Hamish had grown up together, and though Hamish was older, the bonds between them seemed quite unbreakable.
    Albert, on the other hand, was not so trusting. He thought a boy of twelve, nearly thirteen, was too old to be playing dominoes with a girl of seven. He could see that Hamish was infatuated with Ondine and it troubled him.
    One evening Albert had come home to find Hamish nervously looking at an old issue of the
Bulletin,
fixing upon a provocative illustration by Norman Lindsay depicting “The Poet and the Muse”. The former was a forlorn, world-weary man, leaning bent and broken over a writing desk. The latter was a winged maiden, her rounded breasts drawn with precise detail, leaning over the poet sympathetically, as if to guide him. Hamish quickly closed the magazine when Albert appeared at the door, but not before he could guess what the boy had found so engrossing.
    Later, according to Sarah, the boy had asked his parents what a muse was.
    “What did you say?”Anna asked.
    “Well, I don’t really know. Like an inspiration, wouldn’t you say? That’s what Jack said to him anyway.”
    Albert promptly produced the very issue of the
Bulletin
that contained the sketch, which he showed the women, and read the accompanying poem about the sacred secret of infinity burning in the beauty of the rose, and the soul