Raisins and Almonds pf-9 Read online

  It was one thirty by the kitchen clock. Phryne stoked the slow-combustion stove with chunks of red gum, lowered the lids and waited for a while until the firebox began to roar. Then she found a saucepan and heated some milk and water, half and half for a dog. She poured it into a saucer and watched the little dog wriggle and lap, reflecting how strange it was to be sitting in her own house at such an hour on such an errand. The rest of the house was asleep. Dot was asleep in her tower, and the girls in their bedroom under the jazz-coloured comforters. Phryne could hear Mr Butler snoring in the Butler's suite, beyond the pantry. It was strange to be awake, Phryne thought, when everyone else was so firmly in the land of nod.

  Ember walked into the kitchen and sat down at Phryne's feet, tail curled around black paws, looking inscrutable as was his wont. The clock ticked. The electric light banished the darkness but made the garden outside Phryne's house as black as a pit, and she felt suddenly uncomfortable, as though someone was watching her. She pulled the creamy silk close at the front, swore and stood up, taking the poker. Action, she reflected, was always better than unease.

  She unlocked the back door with its huge key and stood in the doorway, scanning her own domain. One tree, tall. One shed, whitewashed. Three garden beds, grey in the darkness. One small patch of lawn. Nothing else, no sound but the wind and no movement but the trees bowing under the wind. She stared out into the night, poker raised, for some time before she closed and locked the door again and returned to the puppy.

  It had clambered back into the grocer's box, and was washing itself inefficiently with a small pink tongue like a scrap of ham. Ember, watching it with close attention, cleared the box lid with one complicated leap which took him into a reclining position with the puppy snuggled up to his side. He dipped his gaze and licked the top of its ragged black and white head, then began to wash its milky face.

  'Ember, it's a dog, canis, you know, not felis,' Phryne informed him. Ember appeared unenlightened by this news. The kitchen began to warm. Phryne, fascinated, made herself some Dutch cocoa from the tin with the lady in a white cap on the front and sat sipping it, her bare feet on the hearth stone, the uncurtained windows as black as black glass, and listened to Ember's rising purr.

  She put herself back to bed half an hour later, and the night seemed to have quieted so that she fell easily asleep.

  All of which went close to explaining why, when Phryne woke suddenly to voices at her own front door, she was annoyed.

  'Eight of the clock on a Sunday morning, what an hour!' she exclaimed, as Dot tentatively enquired if Miss Fisher wanted to see the apologetic young man now downstairs with a bunch of hyacinths (white) in his hand?

  'Oh, all right, Dot dear, but I'm not getting up yet. Tell Mr Abrahams that if he cares to breakfast with me I will be delighted to see him in a quarter of an hour's time. Open the window, Dot dear, and bring me coffee, I want to see the spoon standing up in it.'

  Phryne extracted herself from a tangle of green sheets and quilt, went into her own bathroom, made certain contraceptive preparations and washed her face. That was as far as she was intending to go in the way of hygiene, and her cream negligee which supplemented the remarkable appeal of her cream nightdress should be decent enough for a chat with a nice young man before Phryne went back to sleep. The insertion of her diaphragm was almost second nature now, with a young man in the offing. She stood at the window, looking out, until the rising wind chilled her and she wrestled the casement shut.

  There were green leaves on the sill, recently broken, but whether they had been snapped off the parent stem by a climber or a possum or the weather, who could tell?

  Simon Abrahams, who was escorted up the stairs to Miss Fisher's boudoir by a very respectable maid carrying a covered tray, stopped at the door and stared in a way which would have caused his mother to clip his ears. The room was lush, and the bed in which Miss Fisher reposed was hung about with cobweb-fine black gauze embroidered with ivy leaves and grapes. He looked aside and saw his own faun's face in a mirror wreathed with garlands. The bedchamber was opulent, unrestrained and entirely shameless he was glad to say, and he walked forward, his feet sinking into a velvety carpet like moss.

  'Simon dear, do come in,' said the vision in the big bed. She was draped in milky Chinese silk and looked both sleepy and cross. He thought her very beautiful and dangerous, and sat down carefully on the edge of her bed and took her hand reverently between both of his own, raising it to his lips to kiss.

  'Green leaves, lady?' he said in his lightly accented voice, noticing them on her pillow.

  Tor spring,' she replied, and he presented his hyacinths. Phryne leaned forward and drank in the scent and he had a dizzying feeling that he was actually going to fall down her cleavage.

  The maid uncovered the tray, taking the flowers and placing them in a vase of exactly the right dimensions. She poured Phryne a cup of coffee from the copper pot, opened the napkin to reveal freshly made bread rolls, and left. Miss Fisher buttered a roll lavishly and poured coffee for her fellow breakfaster. Then she seemed to be struck by a thought.

  'Simon, I'm sorry—can you eat with me?'

  'Yes, of course,' he said, 'unless you were responsible for dosing my co-religionist with rat poison,' he added, taking a roll and breaking it. 'In fact, even if you were I would presume that you haven't a reason for killing me, eh?'

  'Aren't you supposed to only eat kosher food?'

  'You've been researching us,' he said slowly. 'Yes, my mother keeps a kosher house. No, I see no reason why your coffee, your cherry jam and your bread should not be perfectly all right. I can't eat dairy food at the same time as meat, that's all, and I'm destined never to taste moules mariniere or bacon, but that's no great loss. And we keep the Sabbath, so we don't do anything but rest on Saturday, which is something of an impediment in a world which doesn't do anything on Sunday ... including get up early, I had forgotten. But my father taught me never to be negligent to beautiful ladies, so I came as soon as I decently could to apologize for not returning your call yesterday.'

  He gave her a lopsided smile which was very hard to resist and Phryne's mood was already improving under the onslaught of real coffee, hyacinths and charm.

  'I had a disturbed night, with all that wind, and the puppy which the girls have wished on me started howling. I shall go back to sleep presently, but for the moment I am pleased to see you,' said Phryne, sipping the black caffeine-rich brew and surveying the young man.

  He was very decorative. His hair was curly, and she wondered idly what it might feel like under her hand. His bright brown eyes were as alert as a fox's; indeed there was something foxy about him, except that he had the unshakeable confidence of being his mother's favourite or only child. His close-shaven jaw was slightly shadowed, his tie pin was a little too emphatic, his suit a little too formal for so early in the morning, and his buttonhole of a pink rose quite outrageous according to the canons of public-school taste. Phryne was very pleased with her acquisition.

  'Delighted,' he murmured, looking into her eyes. She bit into a crust and the young man dragged his gaze away and caught sight of her bedtime reading. He shuffled quickly through the books.

  'Ah, yes. Mr Goldman.'

  'Have you read it?' asked Phryne, spreading cherry jam on her roll.

  'es, certainly. "The Jewish problem is not a Jewish problem, but a gentile problem, and only the gentiles can solve it." The trouble with being a Jew—apart from being Chosen and presumably God knew what he was doing when he Chose us—is that we have no home. There really is no place where the Jews have not lived for years and felt safe which has not turned against them. We exist everywhere on sufferance—here, for example.'

  'Here?' Phryne sat up a little. 'There have been no pogroms here.'

  'No, but immigration is restricted. If there was an emergency somewhere—Russia, for example—and the Jews had to flee, as they fled in 1492 from Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, where would they go? Our own assimilationists wou
ld keep the Russians out, saying that there was no room in this country for the sweepings of the Soviet ghettos as they said about the immigrants fleeing the Czarist May laws in 1881. The Jews who have been here for a couple of generations—and Australia has only been settled for a few generations, you know—would keep the others away because they are afraid of turning even this laconic place against us. They are afraid of there being too many Jews attracting too much attention and envy. We have not forgotten Ikey Mo in the Bulletin in the nineties, you know'

  'The Bulletin in the nineties hated everyone,' objected Phryne. 'Along with Ikey Mo there was Johnnie Chinaman and Jacky-Jacky the aborigine and Paddy the drunken Irishman and they weren't keen on women, either, looking on my own sex, as I understand, as the root of all evil. But what's the solution? If your own people want to restrict immigration, what is to be done?'

  'A homeland,' said Simon, and his face shone with a pure light of dedication.

  'Where?' asked Phryne, putting the tray on her bedside table.

  'Palestine ...'

  He looked so beautiful, his long lashes lowered over the bright eyes, that Phryne reached out and caressed the curly hair and the smooth cheek. Simon Abrahams nestled into the touch and kissed her palm, and Phryne gasped. Her hand dropped to the broadcloth lap, and Simon made the same noise. She undid his tie, shucked his coat, took the studs from his sleeves. 'Come and lie down with me,' she whispered.

  He took the rose from his coat and shed the petals over Phryne. They slid down her shiny black hair and were scattered over her pillow and her breast.

  From then on, it was simple. She lay and watched him undress, shedding broadcloth and linen, young enough to pull impatiently at the shirt where the buttons would not release their grip. The slim body emerged like a flower from a calyx: long legs, slim hands and feet, a wiry body used to some hard labour. He was entirely naked when he slid down alongside Phryne in her silken bed, and the cream nightdress was already cast aside.

  Cool morning light made an icon, strangely religious, of the young man with the Middle Eastern face. Phryne felt him shiver as their bodies touched at a thousand points, and she ran both hands down his smooth back, her fingers curling over the muscular buttocks and sliding inward to cup the denuded genitalia in a gratifying state of excitement.

  Jews, Phryne had been told, did not enjoy sex as much as gentiles because of circumcision. As she sank into a bath of sensuality, she was pleased to have this statement proved as idiotic as she had first thought it.

  His fingers trapped her nipples and she gasped aloud, closing her eyes as the clever hands moved down her body and caressed in a circular, fiery motion, so delicate and so skilled that she did not immediately feel the change as the fingers were withdrawn and both bodies closed, joined, with a snap like a tensile steel spring.

  Simon Abrahams' knowledge of women had been almost entirely theoretical. He had been sorely tempted by the light ladies who walked St Kilda Road and by the flaunting damsels of the Eastern Market, who haunted the street-level shops when all the rest of the city was respectably dark, looking for a friend to take home with them before the market shut at nine o'clock. He was conscious of his duty to marry a suitable young woman and have children in due course, and meant to do so. But he had never expected to be seduced by a woman so beautiful, so strong, so sure of her own desires. She was as pale as bone china and as strong as he was; he felt lithe muscle under the smooth skin as she slid from under him and they rolled, so that he was lying flat on his back and the woman was riding him, her breasts in his hands, her mouth on his. She moved like a dancer, like a mating animal, like something out of a hermit's fever-dream. She lay under him with her legs wrapped round his waist. Surprise had delayed his climax; now it overwhelmed him. Her red mouth smothered his cry and matched it. He embraced Phryne as she collapsed onto his chest and panted for breath.

  He felt tears trickle down his cheeks and tasted salt on his mouth. He was crying.

  Phryne untangled their limbs and lay down beside him, and he put his head on her breast. She felt him sob and said gently, 'Simon?'

  'Oh, Phryne, oh, beautiful lady,' he whispered. 'I never ... I never thought that the love of woman would be so ... so ...'

  'Overwhelming?' She was still breathless, and her body burned under his hands. Her voice, however, was light and almost careless.

  'Well, gentle lady, you wanted me,' he said, hurt. 'Was that all you desired, Phryne?'

  'No, I desire a great deal more than that,' she returned. 'I am not intending to cast you from my door now that you have given me your all, Simon dear, don't be melodramatic. You're very beautiful,' she kissed him once. 'And you're very skilled,' she kissed him twice. 'And as you see,' she kissed him a third time, 'you have more to offer me.'

  Simon Abrahams found that, as usual, Miss Fisher was correct.

  Phryne woke at noon and surveyed the room lazily Dot had been in and removed the tray, contriving as she always did to ignore any extra tenants in Phryne's bed. The sun was shining in that half-hearted watery unreliable way which marked the season as spring and the city as Melbourne. The wind appeared to have died down. The noises of the house came to her as she turned her head and picked rose petals from her surroundings. Something with a very high-pitched howl was making its wants felt: the telephone bell announcing that the outside world was still there and desirous of establishing contact with Miss Phryne Fisher. She heard Mr Butler's even tread as he went to answer it and Dot yelling something to the girls, who appeared to be in the kitchen. All normal, even comfortable sounds, after the strange night and the delightful, if fraught, morning.

  Sprawled asleep across half the bed was a long-limbed young man of surpassing beauty. His eyes were closed, his expression beatific, his arms outspread, his hands out and half-open, half-curled. He could have been a renaissance painting, except for the love bites which marked his olive throat with round red patches, darkening into black. Phryne wondered what had prompted her to bite him so hard, and shivered at the remembrance. If she had been his first lover—and she suspected so—then this was a youth of truly remarkable amatory skill, who needed only a little cultivation to be superb.

  She knew that she could not keep him. He had to go back to his father and his family duty. But while she had him, Phryne meant to enjoy him.

  But she was hungry, and it was lunch time. Also, whatever message he had come to deliver had been lost in the translation, so to speak, and it might have been important. She slipped a considering hand down his face, from brow to nose to lip, and he woke enough to kiss her palm.

  'That's how this all started,' she observed. 'Wake up, my dear Simon, it's lunch time and I'm starving.'

  His bright eyes snapped open and he sat up, startled.

  'Oh, Phryne,' he said. 'Oh, Phryne,' he began again. 'I never asked, you know, I never asked all those things one is supposed to ask. You just ravished me out of all my senses,' he said complacently.

  'And very nice too,' said Phryne, throwing back the sheets and rising. 'Come and have a bath. You didn't need to ask me,' she added, taking his hand and leading him to her bathroom, where the tub was quite big enough for two. Over the roar of the taps, she commented, 'You would have touched my diaphragm, that meant I would not conceive. And anything else can be settled now.' She put both hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes. 'Thank you for your love and your body,' she said very deliberately. 'But I can't keep you, you belong to your family, and you can't have me, I belong to myself. Is that clear?'

  'Yes,' stammered Simon. 'But ... does this mean that you have had your will of me, that you ...'

  'Curb this tendency to melodrama. I do not intend to cast you aside like a soiled glove, either. Dear Simon,' she said, kissing him and helping him into the bath, scattering orchid bath salts with a liberal hand, 'you shall come and lie with me again, if you please, and we shall have a love affair of which your mother will never approve. Now, what did you come here to tell me?'

  Simon Abr
ahams sat in warm water and sponged Phryne's white back while he racked his brains to recall what had brought him to her house so early on a Sunday morning.

  For the life of him, he could not remember.

  Five

  Rubedo is the ascension of the red queen.

  Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Brittanicum 1689

  Phryne pushed back her chair. She had lunched well and her young lover appeared to be coming to terms with his new status. Simon had refused cream soup but accepted lamb chops and pureed vegetables, and was now eating new strawberries with enthusiasm.

  'What do you make of these, Simon?' she asked, laying the dead man's notebook and the strange engravings on the table. He puzzled over the black letters.

  'No, I can't read them. It's Hebrew, but it's some sort of code, or maybe just a jumble of letters. No, that doesn't seem likely, does it? But the parchments—I've seen something like them before.' He turned the picture of the red lion around, mouthing the Latin. 'It's doggy enough, medieval, probably. I have it, Phryne—alchemy.'

  'Alchemy?' asked Phryne, sprinkling castor sugar over her strawberries and applying cream liberally.

  'es. I don't actually know anything more about it, but those drawings apparently depicted chemical operations.

  Mercury entered into it. And salt. I've got a friend who's a real expert on alchemy. His name is Yossi Liebermann. They call him Joe. Been studying it for years—the study of a lifetime, thus Yossi. He says it is connected with Kabala.'

  'Kabala?'

  'Far too complicated for me to explain,' said Simon. 'We can go and talk to him, if you like. He should be home. Oh, and I've remembered what I came to tell you. My father has talked to his people in the Carlton factory, and they knew this dead man, Shimeon Mikhael. He was a mystic, they said. People were a bit afraid of him. He was a Torah student, a good one, they said. He knew a lot. But he was waiting for the Messiah to come, and that's always been a dangerous thing, my father says. He's invited you to dinner tonight, can you come?'