Joan Makes History (16 page)

Henry in person, unlocked from the headrest and the gaze of the lens, stood by the table where people paid.
Well, Joanie,
he said in an odd sort of voice, glancing at me quickly and then away as if I dazzled like the sun.
I received your letter, as you can see.
He shot me a ghostly small smile that was unsure of its welcome.
And here I am.
He bit off anything more: all the things he might have asked, such as how long I had been here, did I like it, and was I the paramour of Albert? I saw him frame all these questions to himself and bite them all off, and I recognised him in that moment as intimately as I recognised myself mirrored unexpectedly in shop windows: I knew his every frailty and every strength.

This moment silenced me: I, garrulous Joan, always ready with a quick bit of an answer, could find not a single word to put
my tongue to, except one.
Henry,
I said, and the word unlocked something that rolled over me like the breaking of waters.

I did my best to loathe you,
Duncan said above the clatter of the train.
I filled my heart with images of you and poured hatred over them.
Outside the window, the sun dazzled from small bodies of water, paddocks passed laboriously, sheep ran away in a fluster with their silly fallen-down-stockings of legs, cows stared and chewed, and a band of sunlight took turns to lie across Duncan's lap and then mine.

I felt my fingers to be still greasy and dark from such a number of plates, knives, forks, and felt my feet still puffy from such a lot of standing, keeping a watchful eye on the table near the door from which a couple of lads had once made a quick exit without paying. And how strange and naked I felt with my legs bare under a skirt! How odd it felt to be without my shoes with the laces, and the socks with clocks on them!

Who was the impostor? The man Jack whose husk I had left behind, or this shorn-looking woman watching the sunlight sliding from her lap to that of the man opposite? I had abandoned Jack in a suitcase outside the Salvation Army: Jack had folded himself up among the jackets and ties and the socks with clocks on them, and it was Joan who had locked the door of the room for the last time and slid the key under Mrs Elliot's door. I sat
fingering the cloth of my new skirt: I was Joan now, and Joan was no more an impostor than Jack had been. Under all skirts and socks with clocks I was everyone who had ever breathed, sat, made errors of judgment: and there was Duncan, who was also no impostor, but every good man who had ever forgiven a fool.

I tried, Joanie, and succeeded for a while,
Duncan said. The band of sun lay between us while I pictured Duncan smiling, gesturing, caressing some other woman's shoulder, waxing carnal late at night after a drop or two taken. Such things were no doubt true, but it did not seem necessary to linger on such truths: I felt there were things more important than the truths of the recent history of Duncan and myself.
But hating is hard work, I found.
Duncan had grown a few grey hairs among the sandy ones, and had acquired a line on either side of his mouth, and one between his eyebrows, that had not been there before, but the freckles on his lips and his pebble-coloured eyes were still the same.
But Duncan, where are we going?
I asked, for I had boarded the train in a blur, seeing nothing but Duncan's tweed back in the crowd, carrying the case with the few things I wanted from Jack's life.
Ah, Joanie, you must let me surprise you,
Duncan said now, and winked, although he did not smile: I had not seen him smile yet.
I promise you a surprise,
he said,
and I think you will find it worth the wait.

I could not quite gauge this new Duncan, for the old one had been so full of soft looks, and had liked to be in contact with my flesh whenever possible (so that, for example, in the old days had we sat facing each other like this, he would have made sure his shoe was up alongside mine, or our knees rubbing each other through cloth): so this Duncan, who did not smile (although
he did not frown, either), and who did not touch me (though he did not seem to be avoiding me either), was strange to me, although the way he called me
Joanie
(the only person who had ever called me
Joanie
) was something I found reassuring.

I will be patient, then, Duncan,
I said, and moved my leg in such a way that my knee was about to come in contact with his, but at that instant he leaned forward to the window so that his knee was again separated from mine by a hand's-breadth of air.
We are off, Joanie, off we go,
he said, and I heard the excitement in his voice, and could not guess whether or not he had avoided my touch.

I wished for no kind of conversation: there was no small beer information exchanging kind of dialogue I wished to have. Our separate pasts were foreign languages: no matter what details I had found, to describe my life as Jack, no matter what he had told me of his life as Duncan-by-himself, nothing but the crudest facts could have been conveyed. And what was the point of primitive chunks of fact? What was real about being Jack or being Duncan-by-himself was not the facts, but the feelings, and such kinds of truths could not be spoken of in a rattling train trundling over paddocks full of bandy-legged silly sheep.

So we gazed out at those sheep and at gum trees bending under wind we could not feel and at bedrock exposed in cuttings. Small towns fled past our window: I leaned forward and strained to read the names on their stations, but they were a blur, and in any case my grasp of geography had never been great, and whether we had been heading towards the coast or towards the junction of the western rivers, the names of the towns would not have helped me to know our direction.

And what difference could it make? I assumed we were
returning by some roundabout route or other to that place of dust and dryness, where sunrise had become a chronic affliction to me. This time I was prepared to learn the language of that place: secretively I watched Duncan's profile as he gazed out at Australia passing, and in my mind a picture grew of the Joan I could be if I took the leap of imagination I had been too purblind to take last time. This time, instead of laughing at the lists of cows Father sent me—
Santa Gertrudis, Belted Galloway, Blonde d'Aquitane
—I would learn my own lists, learn the names and needs of the dusty brown mobs Duncan owned. I would learn to get up on the back of a horse, and imagined the exhilaration of leaping fences, and of camping at night with Duncan beside me and the stars blazing just above our heads. I had got the hang of scones with Elsie, and knew what worth I would find in the floury Country Women's Association women, now that I had an inkling of what to look for: I would grow lean, brown, perhaps even a little leathery of complexion; I would at last know how to live the life that had been given to me, having had a go at living one or two others.

In the meantime I was reconciled to waiting and to silence and, after all, Ducan had never been anything but a silent man. Of course my own pride would have been better served (since it was I who had approached Duncan and pleaded for another chance), had Duncan gone down on his knees before me, covered my feet with kisses, become wild-eyed and ardent, but I was more humble now than I had once been, and was prepared to be patient.

Morning wore on, and our band of sliding sun grew shorter and shorter and disappeared at last. We stopped now and again at the larger towns, and it was the third or fourth of these, as
the train slid in and stopped with a sigh, that Duncan stood, stretched, and looked down at me.
I will forage us up a bite to eat, Joanie,
he said.

What do you say?
I watched him stride down the platform towards Refreshments, feeling a little cheered: Duncan was not going to cover my feet with kisses, but I felt somewhat cherished by this foraging. I sat staring at the train across the platform, where I could see an old woman reading a book with a magnifying glass, and was reassured that there would be a new life with Duncan, and that affection would, in time, blossom again.

But there was a humming expectant quality to the silence of our train that began to make me anxious. I felt stifled by the silence: it seemed as though Duncan and I were the only passengers on this entire train, and the old woman the only passenger on the other. The platform was completely empty and I began to peer out of the window, pressing my cheek against its dirty glass, and wished I had looked at my watch as Duncan had left, for now I was having to tell myself that, although it felt that he had been gone an hour, it could not be so.

In the silence a man in a uniform startled me by walking past the window inches from my eye: I heard a distant whistle: I stared at the woman with the magnifying glass and told myself that the train was not moving yet. But it would be moving soon, we had been here forever, and where was Duncan, and what would happen if the train left him behind?

As this thought came to me it was engulfed by another, which filled my mind like a picture of truth: a picture of Duncan not returning to the train before it left the station, but watching as I was carried off: watching not in dismay, not wildly wondering if he could leap on it as it gathered speed, but watching with
glee. I saw it all: Duncan reading my letter, tearing it up, then thinking better of it: getting the bits out of the fireplace to piece together the address at the top, and standing at the window tapping his fingers on the glass, smiling at the thought of his revenge.

How neat it would be, how entirely fitting! I, Joan, would be swept on to whatever town was next, without a ticket, without any idea where I was, without any life I could return to, having sold up everything: there I would be with nothing, Duncan making a fool of me much more elegantly than I had made a fool of him.

As I pictured all this I knew it to be true and I leaped to my feet determined to avoid the trap while there was still time. At the door of our carriage I glanced up and down the empty platform and across at the other train: there, framed in the window with the woman with the magnifying glass, I saw Duncan.
Ah,
I thought,
you fox, you are returning the way we came, not to be caught!
I sprang across the platform and up into the other carriage, bounced from wall to wall down the corridor and burst into the compartment of the old lady: she looked up from her book and dropped the magnifying glass with the shock of my precipitous arrival: the man with her stared too, and frowned: another man altogether, a man with small blue eyes and a cleft in his chin, a man not in the least like Duncan.

Then he must be hiding there on the station! I leaped off the train, feeling it start to move under me, and tried to run, forgetting the clinging skirt and the awkward flimsy shoes: got to Refreshments and flung the door back so hard it rebounded off a table and sprang closed against me: pushed it again and saw a red-faced man with white whiskers standing like a demonstration of patience,
monumental beside a gleaming tea urn. Duncan was not here: I heard whistles from behind me on the platform: I heard a man's voice yelling words I could not understand: out on the platform the train, our train, was sliding coyly along the platform: I ran towards it, and there, his hat fallen over his eyes, his mouth laughing under it, with paper cups and brown paper bags spilling from his, hands, was Duncan, panting as we both somehow got on to the train.
Joanie, I have never missed a train in my life, there was no danger whatsoever, I assure you,
Duncan panted, and at last, after so many cautious unsmiling days with each other, our skins unwarmed by the touch of another skin, it was there in the swaying doorway that we embraced at last, and laughed together to see the rock cakes tumble out the door.

I was right in thinking Duncan had a surprise for me, but it was not the cruel surprise I had pictured. The surprise was that Duncan did not take me to that place of challenging sunrises, but to a house in the city by the sea where I had had all my beginnings.
This is where I live now,
he said.
I am a man of business now, such as you yourself have been,
and we had a good laugh together over that.

It was not long before a giant began to grow within me, kicking and dancing, chuckling at the way I exclaimed at the feel of feet against me. It was a benign giant, and one I already loved for carrying the face of that man Duncan, my husband again, and now after so long the man I loved. He lay beside me in sleep, a rounded foetus shape himself under the bedclothes, breathing the steady breaths of a sleeper who knows he is being watched with eyes full of love.

What was the moment I loved best? Ah, bear with me while I indulge myself, thinking of the moment I loved best. It was
when he lay beside me, my skin touching and whispering to his, and the birds outside warbling in a watery way about the new morning they were enjoying. He lay knowing I was there, not yet awake, but not still asleep either, and he knew even through his closed eyes that I was watching him in a passion of tenderness that brought the tears prickling to my eyes. What I watched was his mouth, the faint smile at its corners that told me he knew I was watching, and he knew I was smiling too, and he could feel my love coming through my skin to him, so that when at last he opened his eyes he was already smiling.

But I had made a bad sort of bargain, I saw now, too late. I had had love, I had had adoration, I had had a soul who would have gone on his knees before me: I had had the devotion of a good man. Before I had abandoned him, Duncan's eyes had always grown soft with private bliss, staring at me so that I grew uneasy, loud, brutal under his adoring gaze. He had brought me gifts: not a week had passed that his eye had not been caught by some little trinket or some bit of frippery he knew would please me. He had been proud of me, had been proud to be the husband of Joan, the woman to whom he had entirely made over his heart. I had enjoyed all this, but had I seen the worth of his love? Had I known how rare and how fragile such a thing was, and did I worry myself with ways to make sure it did not fade? No! I, Joan, had been a fool, let me not mince words. Duncan had adored me, and I had scorned him so much, regarded him so little, that I had done that cruel thing of making a monkey of him at the Show. I had watched him then and not softened: I had not been able even to imagine what he felt, the panic and despair in the mornings, waking up alone.