The White Body of Evening by A L McCann Page A

before the doctor’s return the children had made a habit of creeping into each other’s rooms after they were supposed to have gone to bed. The size of the house and the rugs running along the hallways made it easy to walk around at night without the slightest fear of detection. They sat up together and read stories or ate the sweet food they had hoarded during the day. It was a marked contrast to their old house, especially when their father was alive. In Brooke Street rickety floorboards shifted with every footfall, and the thin wooden walls carried a ghastly range of effects. Mattresses would squeak, doors slam and muted groans of pain or deep, troubled breathing would sometimes reach the children in the dead of night, putting them in fear of an intruder stalking around the yard. Their old house was a claustrophobic shanty of trapdoors, secret panels and peepholes, presided over by a clownish father in a conductor’s uniform. It was a place to be ashamed of and neither of the children looked back on Brooke Street with any nostalgia whatsoever.
    Nevertheless, they had both cried when their father died. Two policemen had knocked on their door around midday. Paul heard them tell Anna that Albert’s body had been fished out of the river near Yarraville. The children were shaken, but their tears were as much a response to the grotesqueness of the situation as an act of genuine grief. The whole thing seemed so strange, ugly and, in an intangible way, demeaning. Afterwards the shame of their father’s death hung around the Brooke Street house like the unwholesome odour of rising damp. Ondine dreamt repeatedly of the bloated, blue body floating under the water’s glassy surface and both children imagined they could still hear their father’s footsteps outside their door. The house would creak in the night and they’d both start, almost simultaneously, and listen to the troubled silence around them. It was only now, in the comfort of this new home, that they were completely free of this haunting. The sense of relief they both felt as they stretched out together on Paul’s bed the night of their arrival was enough to obviate the unease of living in a stranger’s house. A week later, when the doctor turned out to be so genial and solicitous, their apprehensions were banished altogether.
    Neither of them suspected that their mother would have been capable of betraying their dead father, though this faith was born of idealism and a sense of convention, rather than an understanding of the distance and sometimes the hatred that had existed between their parents. They were both young when Albert had died, and the enchantment of childhood had been strong enough to protect them from the thorns that entangled them. What they remembered as unpleasantness they now attributed to the weird powers of night, the melancholy of childhood, the spectres of the imagination. They could dismiss these easily enough as they grew older, whereas the starker realities of disintegration, breakdown and adultery would have been so much more intractable had they ever managed to displace this half-remembered realm of shadow and light.
    Anna seldom retired before her children. On the rare occasion she did, she retreated to the room that preserved the half-fiction of her celibacy, which she carried on with an almost superstitious insistence, though she knew she was being old-fashioned. It was an austere but comfortable chamber that she in fact only ever used as a place to dress. It opened into a bathroom, which in turn opened into Winton’s own room. The second floor of the house was laid out so that the hallway connecting the children’s rooms was entirely sequestered from the other rooms on the floor, which were accessible along another hallway running off at a right angle, and usually closed off by a locked door. The house had two staircases. One was attached to each hallway so that the top floor was in effect divided into two discrete sets of