had of holding her hands together, the right hand circling the left thumb. She liked the fine wrinkles around her blue eyes, the wideness of her mouth, the wind-tangled curly honey hair.
They ate prawns from newspaper and drank wine: Leah, one glass; Rosa, the rest of the bottle.
And it was under the influence of this single glass that Leah, on their third picnic, began to unburden herself of secrets.
'No,' Rosa said, when Leah had made her first confession. 'You are not dull or stupid. 'You are young. Of course you know nothing. You are a baby. Don't smile. You have strong feelings and don't know how to argue in their defence. You will spend the rest of your life finding justifications for your strong feelings. I watched you, the day you came to my house – the way you sat, so meekly. Your hands were – so -in your lap, your head bowed, very meek. And inside, I knew, you were boiling with all sorts of things you would like to say. You were not meek at all. So, tell me, what is it you really want to do with your life?'
Leah's hands were sticky with prawns, her head light with wine. She tore a piece of bread from the loaf and threw it to the jostling crowd of orange-legged seagulls.
'I would like,' she said, watching the seagulls fight but not seeing them, 'to do one really fine thing.'
'I knew you were a dangerous girl,' said Rosa, laughing. And then, seeing how shy and embarrassed the girl was, added, more tenderly: 'What thing?'
'I don't know,' the girl said.
'Only one?'
'It would be enough, wouldn't it?'
'I don't know.' Rosa poured herself more wine and lay on her back. She held the glass in one hand and shaded her eyes with the other. 'When I was young, I was just like you. Very moral. Very serious. But my character was flawed. The real reason I left the Party was nothing to do with what they did to Trotsky (Trostsky was not a saint himself). The real reason was because I couldn't spend my life in dark rooms when the sky is like this. I could not believe there would be a revolution here. I blamed the gold, working men with gold in their mouths, but, really, it was the sky. Look at it. It has no history. But is this why you study medicine? To do one fine thing?'
Leah sat cross-legged, her hands folded in the nest of her pleated skirt. She blushed, but although she wished to bow her head, did not. 'Do I seem silly?'
'Not at all. But why a doctor? Why not a baker?'
The girl smiled.
'But why not? Have you never smelt bread?' Rosa shut her eyes and her nostrils flared as she smelt imaginary loaves. 'You wish to be of use. I was the same. I joined the Party. Of course I was often travelling, on the road, but I did whatever work I could. My husband thought I was mad, but I did dull and menial things for the Party and I felt that being a dancer was of no worth. But a danceris of worth and a baker… candlestick makers too.'
Rosa sat up slowly and rubbed her eyes. 'I will tell you why, really, I left the Party. It was because they could not take a dancer seriously. They could not imagine I was a serious person. I was not dowdy enough for them. Do you believe me?'
'Yes, Rosa,' said solemn Leah.
'It is a lie,' said Rosa, looking out across the harbour where a liner was coming around the point from the Quay, coloured streamers still dangling from its sides. 'I am so used to saying it, I believe it.' When she turned her gaze was so fierce that Leah averted her eyes and began to fiddle with the loaf of bread. 'The bastards expelled me.'
Leah blushed.
'Because', Rosa said, 'they are puritans and hypocrites, because I had an affair with a married comrade. We used to come on picnics, like this, and tell secrets to each other. But they did not expel him. He was a man. They expelled me. It's quite true. He was very senior too. That is why I can't forgive them.' She drank her wine, thirstily, emptying the tumbler and refilling it. 'So now, darling, you have my secret. You are shocked?'
'No,' said Leah, who was shocked. 'Not at all,' she said, as if she heard about such things every day. 'I was thinking about your son, Joseph, in Moscow.'
'What else is there for him to do?' said Rosa hotly, rubbing her eyes. 'How could he be anything else but a Marxist? Better a Marxist than some wishy-washy social democrat.' And to emphasize the point she threw a prawn head at a scavenging seagull.
'Oh, Rosa!'
'Yes, I know Izzie is your friend, but he is my son.' This time it was the wine cork she threw.
'He is very kind,' said Leah, 'and that is what is important.'
Rosa's face then underwent one of those transformations that would always delight Leah – it sloughed off its tired miserable lines and became drum-tight with a splendid smile.
'And that is what's important? Kindness?'
'Yes.'
'Yes,' said Rosa, shaking out her hair. 'Kindness and dancing. Can we agree on that?'
Leah could not say yes but smiled instead.
'I will teach you to dance,' said Rosa with a shyness that Leah did not understand. 'Then you will understand what I am talking about.' But it would be another week before Leah realized how important the dancing lessons might be to Rosa and now she only smiled, relieved that Rosa's mood had passed.
But even then, as they contented themselves with the progress of a tugboat pushing its way back to Pyrmont, a man came up to them and asked them for money. His eyes were downcast and he had cardboard tied to the bottom of his shoes. He was a young man too, no more than thirty. Rosa gave him the money and he went away.
They watched him trudge around the path beside the seawall.
'I am suddenly struck,' Rosa said, her smile quite collapsed, 'by how evil we are.' She looked down at the empty prawn shells, the broken heads, the long thin feelers and something -perhaps it was only the flies crawling on them – made her shudder.
16
Secrets sheltered within secrets, boxes within boxes, and in the heart of this secret world, in the ultimate box, sweet as sandalwood, Leah Goldstein danced, felt her heart pump, her glands secrete, savoured the sweet ache of unused muscles and knew herself – beneath the eye of her stern-faced but contented teacher – to grow beautiful.
In this final box, the stories had no moral. They were dancing stories set in country halls, flapping tents. Here Rosalind danced for miners. There Leonard bent his iron bar and swallowed fire to wild applause, while the man he had become drove his trucks through the Sydney streets unaware that, in his own house, his wife was romancing about their difficult past, turning those country halls into theatres as glittering as the fortune they had never found.
It was months before they were sprung and by then it was too late. The women, both of them, were addicted. So when Lenny found them -having arrived at the house in the middle of the day, his heart set on nothing more complicated than cheese and pickles – there was nothing he could do to stop it. He opened the door of the spare room as Leah Goldstein – moving to the rhythms of Lou Rodana's Orchestra – dropped a coloured scarf to reveal her small leotard-clad breasts.
There was a silence then. The gramophone clicked noisily. Lenny fumbled for a cigarette in his blue overalls, but even while he discarded wet matches, one by one, his eyes took in the scene -the electric radiator glowing in the corner, the wind-up gramophone in the empty fireplace, the girl's shapely legs, the sweat on her upper lip, the old scrapbooks spread across the little table beneath the cobweb-covered windows and – last of all – his wife's pleading eyes as she stood and smiled.
'Show me', he said to his wife, 'where you keep dry matches.'
'You know where,' she said, not wishing to be alone with him.
'Show me,' he said.
