Gracious Living (11 page)

On Christmas morning the tutu was duly there, but the dream and the dress had spoiled. Once or twice Kate donned the costume to give a self-conscious performance for the family; but often in private, when the others were out, she would try on the ballerina’s dress, sit on the bed stroking the tulle, the satin bodice, her own bare shoulders, not looking and not even thinking, because she knew she would never be a ballerina.

The following Christmas when Mrs Marley asked what each of them wanted, Kate, determined never again to expose herself as she had done a year earlier, said she wanted clothes, any clothes, whatever her mother thought she needed. That year Graham received a farm set, and the girls were each given a pair of Speedos. Kate hated hers, none of her friends wore such things and she did not like to be different. For the first time in her life she refused her mother – Robyn did it all the time but this was Kate’s first time. And how she regretted it. When it was all over Kate felt mean and ungrateful and even worse than she had twelve months earlier over the tutu.

She was relieved when it was time to begin boarding-school, and the fact of her full scholarship softened her failure in other areas. Faith had finished school the previous year, Robyn had refused to leave home and instead attended the local high school, so Kate started at the new school unknown, very bright, and the
rest she could make up as she went along. Life improved once she went away, as did coming home. Her parents seemed pleased with her high marks, they asked little of her and gave her no more than she was accustomed. Life was undoubtedly less shabby, although, with the waiting, with the longing for love, still very difficult.

Occasionally in the rough terrain on her side of life Kate would chance upon a rock, and how she would welcome it. Vivienne Sweet was one such rock. Vivienne was a day girl and not truly a Protestant. The Jewish mother was the problem; her father was, religiously speaking, quite acceptable to the school, although in all other respects he was a fallen man. Donald Sweet was an artist, a mediocre artist of little imagination and less discipline. As far as he was concerned, the artist was the conscience of society, so, while moral pronouncements were essential, completed canvases were not. He passed his life going from dinner table to dinner table, drinking too much but that was expected of him, talking too much but that was why he was invited, and working too little but that was, he explained, the way of the Muse. The most extraordinary thing about Donald Sweet was his ability to make such a success of being himself.

That a wife and child were superfluous to Donald Sweet’s ambitions was small surprise. Judith, his Jewish wife, ceased to be a bother when she died, and when, soon after, the ten-year-old Vivienne was trundled off to her Jewish grandparents, Lottie and Martin Rosten, he found his artist’s burden considerably lighter. Of course he kept his joy to himself; to all intents and purposes the child had been reluctantly relinquished. A Bohemian lifestyle was a poor influence on a child, he explained to the Rostens, and although he loved his daughter he knew she would be better off with them. In the first six months he telephoned weekly and visited on alternate weekends. In the second six months the phone calls ceased – ‘They only upset the child,’ he said – and the visits numbered three or four. During the second year he visited twice, the third year just once – ‘Exhibitions, speaking engagements, lectures, such a year!’ he sighed with an aesthetic wave of an arm. In the fourth year contact was restricted
to a birthday card, which although very Bohemian, was very belated. Bohemia by this time consisted not only of the dinners but a regular companion who, while only a little older than Donald, was more than a little richer. Love was an inessential commodity for Donald, as is so often the case with shallow people, and Donald, whose lifestyle was expensive, certainly too expensive to contribute to Vivienne’s maintenance, was nicely satisfied.

So was Vivienne. Even as a ten-year-old she was discerning, although even the dullest child can distinguish between indifference and love. And how Nana and Papa Rosten loved! Judith had been their joy, her choice of husband their pain, and her child Vivienne became the target of their unashamedly abundant love. The school, however, was far less loving: absent dead parents were entirely acceptable, but there was something almost sinister about an absent alive one. And of course there was ‘the Jewish problem’. But Vivienne was bright and pleasant enough, and, due to the sins of her parents, almost an orphan – and how unchristian it would have been to ignore that!

So, the school accepted Vivienne Sweet to its claustral bosom and selected her with her double-edged scar for a life of service. She was elected social service captain, in which capacity she organised the fund-raising for a flock of charities – the Blind Institute, the Spastic Society, World Vision, and a half a dozen missions spread across South-east Asia. The school awarded her
Pilgrim’s Progress
for academic excellence at the end of first form and, at the end of second form,
Ruth the Rebel
, a novel about a Jewish convert to Christianity. When in third form Vivienne topped the class in scripture the school was justifiably pleased.

‘There’s considerable humour in the situation,’ Nana Rosten said, ‘a Jewish atheist yes, but a convert to Christianity never. Not my little girl.’ Vivienne had just arrived home with news of the scripture prize; Nana Rosten was slicing fresh crusty bread and coating it with honey. ‘Here you are,’ she said handing Vivienne a piece.

Mrs Rosten spread butter thickly on several of her water biscuits and began to nibble. Vivienne loved to watch her grandmother eat, so daintily, so slowly, the pudgy little finger propped high
in the air. She finished her biscuit and took another and she and Vivienne began to talk.

Vivienne, unknown to the school, was being raised for something other than a life of service. By the time Adrian Dadswell opened Eden Park early in 1988, Vivienne Sweet, a PhD in linguistics and a reader at university, had published her fourth book. And while in 1959 she did not know the details of her future, she did know she would go to university, she would study the humanities and she would not become a missionary. She also knew that Kate Marley was a fellow traveller. Vivienne was correct in the first three but only partly so in the fourth, but this was not clear when, at the age of twelve, she and Kate first became friends.

‘Sometimes I think I’m an alien from an another planet,’ Vivienne said as she and Kate sat together after school watching the inter-house basketball. ‘Sometimes I think there’s been a terrible mistake and I’ve been sent to the wrong place. I find all this,’ she waved her hand at the game, ‘so pointless, and so boring. Baseball too, and geography – ’

‘And what about scripture?’ Kate, usually so private with her opinions, couldn’t help herself.

‘I’m an atheist.’

Kate sat and stared and Vivienne, interpreting her silence as lack of understanding, tried again, ‘I don’t believe in God.’

Kate had had her doubts too, but fear of God’s bloody vengeance – pestilence, storms, perhaps a disfiguring scar – had made her ignore them. But when the clouds were silent, and the locusts stayed in the north of the state, and Vivienne’s olive cheeks remained pristine, Kate decided that her doubts were well-founded – either that or his attention was elsewhere.

‘It usually is,’ Vivienne said. ‘Despite all this omnipotence business it’s obvious he can’t attend to everything. And if it’s a choice of ignoring a well-fed, well-clothed Jewish atheist or neglecting the starving children in India, I rather think, given for argument’s sake he exists at all, that the blasphemous girl would miss out.’

‘So apparently do the starving children, or else they wouldn’t be starving,’ Kate said.

A shout went up from the boarders as their team threw a goal. ‘I’m sick of this,’ Vivienne said standing up. ‘Are you coming?’

‘Where?’

‘Anywhere.’ Vivienne noticed Kate’s face, she looked distinctly squeamish. ‘Just hold that expression and we can pretend you’re ill.’

It was the truth. Kate felt awful. For students still at school on Tuesdays at four o’clock the options were clear: play basketball, watch basketball, practise the piano, attend debating club, do homework. All else was forbidden. Kate’s stomach was churning and her throat was tight. She pulled her arms into her stomach to try and settle it.

‘That’s great,’ Vivienne said, ‘now leave the rest to me.’

Miss Mitchell required little convincing, she was involved in the match and did not want to be disturbed.

‘Take her to Sister,’ she said without shifting her eyes from the play.

Once away from the basketball courts, Vivienne stopped, threw an arm across Kate’s shoulders and chuckled. ‘Didn’t we do that well?’ She started hopping around on the asphalt, head down, skirting the cracks. From a distance it might have been mistaken for hopscotch, but close up? never. Suddenly she stopped.

‘I’ve got it! Let’s go to the boarding-house. I’ve never been inside,’ – which was as it should be, the boarding-house being out of bounds to day girls. ‘Come on Kate, be a sport. We can always pretend you needed help in your weakened state.’

And so the tone of the relationship was established. It seized Kate, seized all of her except that tough, percussive, protective part that never let her forget she was a scholarship girl whose harmonious stay at the school was dependent on a partnership of high marks and exemplary behaviour. And not only her stay at school but her very future – which was not in Stirling, no matter how clipped her name or witty her manner, and no matter how long and patiently she waited for her mother’s love. She knew her sole ticket of leave was her intellect. Some girls were forced to marry in order to leave an uncongenial family, but Kate would study. So when Vivienne, her hand on the glass knob of the
boarding-house staff sitting room asked, ‘What’s in here? Let’s have a look,’ a career as a nurse in some tropical backwater careened through Kate’s mind.

‘Come on,’ she said taking Vivienne’s arm, ‘I’ve something better to show you.’

They walked quickly along the wood panelled corridors, past the dining room set for dinner, past the senior girls’ common room, out of the boarding-house and into the cloisters. The clatter of shoes on stone was welcome comfort.

‘Where are we going?’ Vivienne asked.

‘To the music room, where I practise the piano. If someone sees us we can say I was feeling better and you’re thinking of taking up the piano.’

‘I already play the oboe.’

‘Real musicians always have more than one instrument.’ Kate didn’t know if this were true, what she did know was the piano room was safe. And she did have something there with which to impress her new friend.

Once in the cubicle, with the heavy door closed and the muted air weighing on their ears, Kate selected one of several copies of the Methodist Hymn Book and opened it at hymn 469; she placed the book on the piano.

‘That’s the one I’m playing in assembly on Thursday,’ Kate said, ‘ “That Mystic Word of Thine” – it’s my favorite, although I like Blake’s “Jerusalem” too, and “Be Thou My Vision”. In fact, I suppose I like most of them.’ She paused, unsure whether to ask her question, then she was talking and the decision was made. ‘Do you like hymns? Being, well, you know, not really Protestant; can you still enjoy the music?’

‘Of course I can! I am half Protestant after all, and all the music is first and foremost about God, who was, as I’m sure you know, a Jewish God before he became a Christian one. As for Jesus, he was Jewish.’

Kate knew the flaws in this argument, the scripture teacher had been adamant that it was the Jews who had killed Jesus, but having no desire to cross her new friend, Kate simply nodded and remained silent.

‘Well, what have you got to show me?’

Kate knelt down in front of the shelves of music. She stretched behind the stacks of old Speech Night programmes and pulled out a sheaf of papers. The sheets were covered in a child’s handwriting, Kate’s presumably.

‘They’re sonnets,’ Kate explained. ‘Love sonnets by Shakespeare.’

For the next hour the girls sat on the piano stool playing the occasional melody and reading the verses. Now and then they giggled at some of the old-fashioned expressions, but most of the time they were solemn and admiring. And with each mention of words such as ‘breast’ and ‘kiss’ and ‘skin’ Vivienne became more firmly convinced that Kate was right to keep the verses secret.

‘Do you ever imagine saying the poems to someone?’ Vivienne asked suddenly.

And Kate lied: no, never. For Vivienne was still very much a stranger and secrets were the only protection she knew. Besides, some of the people to whom she recited weren’t even real: Ruth from the Bible was one, and Sydney Carton, and Beth from
Little Women
.

‘But Beth was such a sop!’

The girls were sitting on Vivienne’s bed. It was mid-term break and Vivienne had invited Kate to stay with her and the Rostens. Kate rarely went home during term, and although she was a child who enjoyed solitude, even she found the boarding-house a barren place with only herself, the overseas students and four girls from interstate to fill it on the weekends home, each of them scuttling about the cloisters pretending they were not really there. The other girls had excuses, Kate only the shame of not being wanted.

‘I thought Beth was a pain, and so prissy with all her kindness and love that all she was good for was dying. Now Jo was another matter, she had backbone.’

Kate merely shrugged: she’d prefer love to backbone any day.

‘Did you remember the sonnets?’

Kate dug deep into her school bag. The sheaf of papers was very much the worse for wear, wrinkled and torn and smelling of stale fruit.

‘There’s a rotten apple in the bottom of my bag,’ Kate confessed, ‘left over from the inter-school swimming carnival.’

‘But that was more than a month ago!’

‘I know, but it’s impossible to get rid of it at school without being seen. When Janie Beaton was caught throwing food away she was given five hundred lines and lost a free Saturday.’