Charades by Janette Turner Hospital Page B

back?” He has a sudden queasy fantasy of a green twister sucking her into mathematical blips, and then darkness. Loss swamps him and he half stumbles across the room and draws her against himself, tongue and hands convulsive, geographies interlocking. “Ahh, thank God, you’re so …” His mouth closes hungrily over hers. Not an abstract flavour, not a hint of the dry burn of mathematics or theory, which are, no question about it, acquired tastes. Matter , he thinks with enormous relief. Sweet vulgar heavy Newtonian mass. Substance.
    â€œWhat’s wrong? What’s the matter?”
    â€œOh nothing,” he says, relaxing a little, but holding her so that her lips are against the crook of his neck, her cheek on his shoulder. “I just had a silly … a fleeting nightmare.” He strokes her hair. “It’s nothing.” The irony of this strikes him and he laughs. “Or rather, it’s not nothing. Luckily. It’s
matter.”
    â€œAh,” she says. “Matter. One of our most persistent illusions, so you told me. Koenig …?”
    â€œMmm?”
    â€œThese … these nights  … We’re just, you know it’s only …”
    â€œYes, yes.” He doesn’t want to know what it is.
    â€œEventually I’ll have to go home. I’m just stalling, you know, staving off the … The truth is, I can’t bear to think I’ve checked out the last clue and not found him. Nicholas, I mean. My father. That’s why in Toronto I was afraid —”
    â€œAfraid in Toronto.” He laughs a little, letting her glide out of his arms and hunch up in his chair again. Images come to him: of swept curbs and decorum, of tea and buttered shortbread, of clean subways, safe streets, tacit curfews.
    â€œAunt Kay … Katherine … lives outside of Toronto. Sort of nowhere, really, in the middle of woods and on a lake. But she
was in Toronto when she saw Nicholas again. Or thought
she saw.”
    â€œSaw your father?”
    â€œWell, thought she saw …” He watches an uneasy laugh pulse up like alpha rays. “With Aunt Kay it’s difficult to … Now I know what it’s like, for her and Mum.” Getting queasy at certain names. Picking a path through memories that might blow up in the face. “I used to watch how Mum …”
    She used to watch, she watched, she was watching,
    past tense imperfect,
    she was watching the curvature of time.
    It’s now, Charade, and then; it’s only now and then; sing a song of Einstein, a perfect circle full of time. She watches, she does watch, she is watching …
    Charade watches everything: the way Siddie, her older brother, stiffens at certain bird calls, the ones that come McGillivray- throated, rising from the lips of the publican’s daughter; the way spittle hangs in bright stalactites on the slack chin of Em, sweet Em, the vacant third-born, her younger sister; the way Michael Donovan rubs one bare foot against the other, flylike, when he comes for his dad. But most of all, she studies her mother. What fascinates her is this: there are three strings which can pull her mother’s easy body to sudden tautness.
    They are making scones together, Charade and Bea, scones that will swell thickly and stickily into the little pinched stomachs of the Bea-lings, that happy-go-lucky multi-fathered Ryan tribe. Bea makes the plain and solid kind of scone: flour and lard, a few raisins, a pinch of soda, a half-cup of milk. Flour dusts her arms, her hair, and hangs above her, shot through with the morning sun. Em, threading buttons to keep the littlest ones amused, laughs with excitement to see the way gold rides through the room on white scone-smoke.
    Charade plumps dough into a square for cutting and says carefully: “Are these as good as the scones Aunt Kay’s grandma used to make?”
    And