Joan Makes History (18 page)

There were times when I remembered myself as a skinny girl, declaring to the chooks at dawn that I would not end up like my bedraggled mother, or any of those other wornout women I saw around me. Even the chooks had been scrawny, their feathers dirty and hopeless, their silly eyes lacklustre, their scratchings at the beaten earth feeble. The rooster had preened and primped, having only his cockadoodling to worry about, not the laying and hidden lurking of eggs on his mind. I had no wish to be that silly puffed-up rooster strutting his idiocy on a pile of smelly cabbage leaves, but I had sworn as I flung wheat at those sad chooks that I would keep myself lithe, young, elastic of flesh and
mind, always sufficient to myself, and not bowed down with a squalling brood or a dour husband.

Ah, I had sworn and grown hot with the conviction that I was special, but now I lay under a tree, trying to pretend I was comfortable enough in spite of a bit of tree root sticking into my spine, because I was too tired to move. Here I was—not lithe, not elastic, and not myself any longer, but hostess to tiny demanding Lucy, and the prisoner of my love for her. And for Ken, too, as dour and sour-sweated a man as any man could be, with the few words coming out from between his lips as if they cost the earth, but I was held prisoner by my love for him, too, for the way his eyes spoke to mine when we woke together on our blanket, and he was tender as he pushed back the hair at my temple and stroked my cheek, in those few minutes we were allowed before another endless day of sun and jolting and flies began.

It was our last day on the road when we met Fred, although we did not know then that our time in the wilderness was nearly over. I lay in the blessed cool and dimness of dusk, under a tree, flat on my back with Lucy asleep and dribbling into my stomach, watching the blue smoke of Ken's little fire drift through the trees and lie like water under the branches. I watched Ken and wondered if I would manage another day of this distress, but knew I had no choice, and whispered aloud to myself, so that Lucy shuffled and snuffled:
It will not go on forever.
I saw Ken straighten up from the fire, the billy in his hand, and stare towards me, so I wondered if I had not been whispering at all but shouting at the top of my tired lungs. But now Ken was putting the billy down again and turning with both hands empty, staring, I could
see now, not at me, but past me down the bit of track where we had come.

Anyone could see even at this distance that Fred was no hungry swaggie with the soles out of his shoes. Something in the cut of his swag and the way his hat sat on his head, something a bit stooped, was it, about the shoulders, as if he crouched over books more than he swung at ironbark with an axe, and something a bit finicky about the way he put his feet down, made me watch as Ken was doing and forget the tiredness in the curiosity of watching him.

We stared at Fred, and he slowed and stared at us too, in a bright pleased way that was not the usual way folk on the track greeted each other. He slowed and finally stood watching, as if memorising every detail of the way I lay under the tree with Lucy, and the way Ken was still half-bent over the fire, and the way the smoke was drifting along the ground. He smiled a smile full of confident white teeth, a bit of a city smile, I thought, for bush folk do not do too much smiling, especially not at strangers, and not at the end of a long day on the track.

He stared, and called out at last:
You make a picture, the three of you there, good enough to hang in a frame, the three of you on the wallaby track.

Again I came to know dawns, wakened by tiny tyrannical cries when grubby light washed into the sky, or when blazes of scarlet and gold made everything look like a gaudy unconvincing painting. I would sit in the old brown armchair, feeling tiny Madge nibble away busily at a nipple, her eyes closed with concentration, her lips tucked tight around my flesh. I would sit there, slack in the chair, watching the light strengthen on the white walls of the room and turn from pink to white, and see outside how the sky shifted from pearly shades of grey and luminous no-colour to the palest, cleanest of blues. The dawn dance the sky performed every morning was its moment of greatest glory, but who was there to applaud? A few weary mothers dizzy with longing for sleep, and a few trudging early workers at shifts in various laborious trades, the lucky ones still warm from the egg and bacon made for them by some loving soul at home, but most plodding along living on the hope of some better tomorrow, with the flat taste of futility in their mouths. And, I supposed, a few of that other dawn variety of person: the silent-footed shadowy swift kind, with a few small tools in a cloth bag and a skilful way with a window in its frame, and light fingers with trinkets of value.

These dawns, like those others in the creaking wicker chair
in the desert, brought tears to my eyes, but this time not the stinging tears of rage and ennui. What were these tears? It seemed to me as the days passed that I was weeping for everyone: I wept for the mothers of sick infants, bending low over them in their feverish cots, willing health back to their limp bodies: I wept for women who did not have the luxury of a chair, and a breast full of good warm milk, but had to squat—I had seen the pictures—on a bit of parched dusty earth, with their few rags fluttering in the desert wind, gaunt with anguish as their skinny babies, too weak to cry their hunger, sucked hopelessly, wearily, at an empty breast. I wept for the fathers watching their wives and children subside into heaps of bony limbs and rags, never to rise again: I wept for the misery and injustice of it all, and wept my thanks that Madge lay, fat-limbed, content, snuffling and gulping into a breast running over with what she needed.

I wept for myself, too, of course: wept with relief that, fool though I had been, and hard of heart, callous and obdurate as a stone, I had still been forgiven by Duncan and by life, which was now filling its cup to the brim for me. Here I was, totally necessary to tiny Madge, whose life was at this moment nothing, if it was not a milky breast, and then a shoulder to burp on: and I was necessary to Duncan too, in a small way, although Duncan would never again allow any person to become too necessary to him.

I too had become a person of needs, had given over my life and happiness into the hands of others in a way that would have made me shudder, or laugh in scorn in my ruthless younger days. Tiny Madge was necessary to me now, so much so that, parted from her for an hour, I felt my being stretched out to her, joined as if by an elastic thread that tugged and tweaked, making me
distracted, like someone with toothache or a tight shoe, until I was with her again. Then there was Duncan: I knew now, as never before, how necessary he was to me, and made myself groan at night sometimes, imagining the bed without his warmth beside me, and the bleakness of dawn in a house without him.

I sat in that armchair with the bulging springs, with long pale stains where Madge had burped too enthusiastically, and wept for the past and the present, and for the future as well. I sat with Madge's sweet warmth and weight in the crook of my arm and her feet bumping out her bliss against my leg, her fingers grasping at my breast, fingering the flesh as if to learn it by heart. I sat and saw our futures together, our futures which from this moment, where we were flesh of one flesh, would be a gradual process of separation.

I was resplendent, comparatively, in the black charmeuse with the purple embroidered lisse jabot. To tell you the truth, I fancied myself at least as fine as any of these other women, although it had been a great disappointment not to be able to wear the peacock-blue mousseline-de-soie that did such a lot for me: but everyone was looking sallow in black for our dear departed Sovereign, so we were all in the same boat, and I was sure I was grand enough for the occasion, and for my position. After all, I, Joan, was the wife of the Mayor of Castleton, a mother of six, and grandmother of three, and none of that was to be sneezed at.

True, George and I had not arrived in our own carriage for the occasion of the Opening of Parliament, but in the hackney from Foyle's. I supposed too, that some of these peau-de-soies and crêpe-de-chines in the throng had cost more than my charmeuse, and some of them had no doubt been constructed in Paris or London by supercilious women who snapped their fingers and made minions run with pins. In spite of that, I swelled with pride within my purple embroidered lisse jabot, knowing that I was as good as any of those other pigeon busts. I had no doubt that some of theirs, like mine, were cunningly padded with
horsehair and pongee to make up for what Nature had seen fit to be niggardly about.

The Exhibition Building was resplendent, too, with bunting and flags snapping and heaving against a breeze, and the trees of the grounds bowing and curtseying to each other as the fine gentlefolk were doing, milling on the paths. Behind the barricades, people in cloth caps pointed and stared and fat women in calico aprons held babies up to see history being made. There was a family of black folk there too, clustered together and watching without any kind of expression at all: but no one liked to give too much thought to them and what they might be thinking.

Carriage after carriage drew up and everyone craned to see who it was, and if it was someone whom everyone knew, such as Lord and Lady Tennyson, or dear Nellie Melba herself (what a cheer went up when she stepped out, and a hush fell as if we half-expected her to open her mouth then and there and let her voice soar out), a pleased bright murmur went through both crowds, the silk one and the calico one, for everyone likes to recognise the famous.

At the start of the day, I had congratulated myself for being a member of this nation, and I felt that it was truly the way they said it was, that this was a land of equality and justice for all, an example to the bad old lands with histories too long ever to be put right. It must be so, for here were George and I, folk from humble origins, up here rubbing shoulders with the highest in the land.

After all, I had grown up in a hut with a dirt floor and had shared a pair of boots with my sister, so we could never go into town at the same time: I had worn smocks made of flour bags and had filled up with plenty of damper and dripping in my
time. And when George and I had married, and he had started up the business, we had had to count every penny. I had made the sheets of the cheapest unbleached calico, and made them last by turning sides to middle, and had spent my evenings darning George's socks and turning his collars, and patching the children's clothes and running string along the inside of hems for when they needed letting down: I had grated up carrot to make cakes stick together when eggs had been scarce, and knew how to make scrag end into a good meal. And now, when we had arrived by such hard work and thrift at a position of comfort, here I was, creaking in the best whalebone, sweating discreetly in my charmeuse, up here with the grandest.

George and I were not altogether comfortable among such fine clothes and genteel speech, such display and waste, but I knew we would not disgrace ourselves today, for we had learned, laboriously, what these grand folk had been born to and could do without giving it a thought.

We had not taken in etiquette with our mother's milk, and there were still small issues on which I had to keep my eyes open and see how others did it, and I still had to make discreet enquiries of folk I trusted, and had a small collection of books hidden away on the subject of manners in the best society. And for this day in particular I had prepared with the greatest care, because there would never again be a day like this one, and what if I should be presented to Nellie Melba or Lady Tennyson, and need to know how to address her? Should she be
Ma'am,
or
My Lady,
or
Your Ladyship,
or what should she be? The book was tantalising on this subject:
A knight's wife, is, of course, Lady Blank,
it told me smugly,
and is never addressed by her equals as Your Ladyship.
Not being an equal, that did not help me much, but I thought
I would be safe with
Ma'am:
or would that make me sound like a servant girl? And what if I was (or
were,
as I tried to remember to say), confronted with the problem of an introduction:
Mrs X, may I present Mr Y?
And what of the controversy surrounding the curtsey, which some said was quite out of fashion, while others were adamant that it was still quite the thing, or
de rigueur,
as I had read but never dared to say? Even the handshake was a matter of anxiety: I had taken to heart the importance of avoiding the
flabby palm,
the
crushing grasp
and the
clinging clasp,
until I felt as stiff about it all as a plank.

I had practised eating asparagus with the fingers, had studied lists of who—or was it whom?—should precede who through doorways, and had become deft in fan-manipulation: I had rehearsed in the cheval glass various expressions and movements, and the kind of elegantly long-winded ways of saying it was a fine day that were essential in good society. Preparedness had always been my forte: I had always carried a supply of safety pins and sal volatile in my reticule as a mark of my preparedness, and I was sure I had thought of everything for this day. I had even rehearsed the controversial curtsey, in case I should come face to face, somehow, with the Duke and Duchess themselves: I knew I would feel it
de rigueur
to curtsey then, whatever the fashionable said, and I had made little Alice squeal with the fun of seeing Gran practise, spreading my skirts in a deep teetering curtsey.

I had consulted with George on my only doubt: the propriety of taking opera glasses along. Would that be a mark of the proper enthusiasm, or would it be merely vulgar? The books were strangely silent on this matter, and George had submerged into a great deal of silent frowning thought, during which he fingered his watch chain in the way I knew so well, and loved for knowing
that it meant serious thought and self-doubt: at last he said in his most mayoral tones, somewhat adenoidal in their seriousness:
Yes, that would seem an appropriate thing, Joanie, although in moderation.

I had prepared so hard that I found myself purblind and half deaf on arrival at the building glittering and twinkling in the sun: so much finery and so many important men and their swaybacked wives! Everywhere I looked in the throng, I saw faces I knew from the illustrated papers, and I succumbed to a kind of daze in which the only solid thing was George's arm, keeping me upright and dignified.

I tried, though, to collect myself and take note, because Alice, that newest and best-loved of all our grandchildren, had demanded that I tell her every detail: to tell her
everything, Gran, every single thing, promise.
And it was no hardship to peer and crane at details of fichus and collarettes, for I had always been inclined to be a bit of a stickybeak, and this was a stickybeak's treat, peering at everyone around us, slow-moving women cautious with their parasols in the crush, and their menfolk looking cross with the gravity of it all.

I stared and suddenly found myself exclaiming to George:
Why, there is Lady McNab,
and a woman next to us turned to stare at me. I was fool enough to feel proud of knowing Lady McNab, and it passed through my ignoble mind to say something that would make the woman know that not only did I recognise Lady McNab, but that I had dined in her company in Castleton, on the occasion of the laying of the foundation stone of the Castleton and District Hospital. George and I had enjoyed a haunch of good meat, and French wine in crystal glasses, and had laughed with everyone else at her husband's laborious tales of Surrey hunts, and at hers of the droll banter at Amblehurst,
and I had even sympathised with the way you could not get good help, these days, and the way servants were beyond words grand and troublesome. George and I had sat and smiled, and been seduced by it all, although uneasy.

She is looking better than when we saw her last,
I could not resist saying now to George, and he nodded without saying anything, for he had not enjoyed that day or that dinner, and had been made uncomfortable by Lord and Lady. George had too much natural honour to have thought of impressing the stranger in front of us with our intimacy with English aristocracy.

It was no great surprise to see Lady McNab here: she was higher gentry than we, after all. The surprise was that Lady McNab had seen us too, had caught my eye and was making her way towards us to speak. I was somewhat astonished: in such a crush it would have been easy for her to bow slightly and move on, and after all at that fine dinner the Mayor and his wife had been only minor guests, people of no real account: but I was pleased and flattered and proud, for this must truly be a day when
all hearts were joined, regardless of rank, to the same great goal,
as the papers had said that morning, and
all distinction of degree was forgotten.

Well, Lady McNab advanced on us, huge in gleaming satin that made her look like a gigantic muscatel, and I waited confidently, knowing the right thing to do. I waited with one foot slightly behind the other, preparing to perform my vestigial bob, of which the exact degree of drop was a matter of fine judgment, regulating nicely the exact degree of deference. But even as I was on the point of performing my bob, Lady McNab beamed with all her fine teeth and made a grand gesture with her right hand, a gesture of bestowing, and I had to recognise that she had
made a different decision on the matter of curtseys: she was offering me her hand to shake.

Frankly I panicked. At war within my horsehair and pongee chest were two imperatives: the one, that a hand proffered from aristocracy was never to be refused: the other, that a lady never shakes hands with her gloves on. Now, I am not a woman of pretension, and know I am no lady, and can only excuse myself by saying that in my panic there seemed only one possible thing to do. In the few seconds left to me while Lady McNab's hand was outstretched, I must remove, with all haste and decorum, the glove from my right hand.

It was panic, of course, or I would never have been so mad as to imagine all those tiny mother-of-pearl buttons could possibly be undone in time. It was panic, and I felt the raw blood bursting in my veins, engorging into a blush over my whole body, so the glove seemed to become part of my flesh, never to be removed in time for contact with the palm of Lady McNab. It was panic, and there was no time, and finally what those warring imperatives left me with was a glove only half-removed from the hand, so that it was empty fingers of black suede kid that were shaken by Lady McNab. Lady McNab, that smiling gracious grape, smiled all the more and seemed to linger endlessly over the business of shaking the hand, or the glove, of the lady wife of the Mayor of Castleton. I knew that many a marvellous Melbourne dinner party would rock with laughter, such as would alarm the maids sedate by their sideboards, as she told this story of a jumped-up shopkeeper's wife who thought she was as good as quality.

I was still swollen with the mortification of this when men in livery began to herd us to our allotted places. We all moved with a great silken rustling into the great hall, under the mighty
arches and domes. At least there I could bow my blazing face down into my chest and try, in the change of place, to put behind me that grotesque moment of ill-judged etiquette, although even when we were shown to our places I was still hot and was starting to wish the day was over. We had been allotted a place in one of the high galleries, a long way up, and as far away from the dais as it was possible to be while still being actually in the hall, so that I was glad of my opera glasses: here it was easy to see a quite precise gradation of rank, from the most grand down close to the Prince, to the most humble up here, where the heat gathered in a smell of feet and we were packed in rather tightly together.

For Alice's sake, I stared and strained with the rest to catch sight of the heir apparent to the throne. I could see by glimpses a pale puny sort of man, covered in froggings and braid, with bits of coloured ribbon on his chest, and most of his face covered with hair. He stood in a great shaft of light from a window high up, a small man with a cocked hat that seemed too large for his head, and read his few words full of bombast, while we all strained to hear over the unceasing shuffle of feet on the wooden floors.

I counted the people on the stage and tried to remember the mousseline-de-soies and the ostrich feathers, the arrangements of bows and curls, and the way the Duchess stood leaning ever so slightly on her watered-silk parasol. Down there on the dais, the important people were doing their best to look solemn, and not to sway where they stood at attention: the men had become all chest, the women rigid under their stays, and the white plumes of the helmets of the men in uniform had gone limp in the heat.

The band blared and we shuffled our programmes:
All People
That On Earth Do Dwell,
we sang, the echoes of so many voices blurring the song into a great droning muddle of sound like a melancholy beehive. Then the speeches began, and I did my best to hear what was being said. But up here where the minor folk were situated, there was little to be heard, just a great breathing, the sighing of thousands of people present at history, and from up here the words ebbed and flowed like the sea, sometimes audible, sometimes not, so that it looked as though nothing much more important was happening than a lot of mouths opening and closing, and lips shaping themselves with hot air around grand phrases.