The Newspaper of Claremont Street (8 page)

She found him in bed in pain, she thought, with his familiar illness. Quickly she filled the kettle to ease him with the steam.

‘No No! You fool! I don't need you to boil a kettle,' he was impatient with her. ‘I'm on the mend. I'm hungry. I haven't eaten for days. What have you brought me?' He sat up in bed gathering the quilt around him.

Weekly noticed at once that the room was shabby, not at all like the previous apartments where he had all the fashionable luxuries and where his clients could feel at ease and have confidence in him because of his wealth.

His pale fingers tore the white cloth from the little veal and ham pies she had taken from the pantry. ‘These are cold!' he pushed them away in disgust.

‘I didn't have the chance to heat 'em,' she whispered, ‘I 'aven't got the afternoon orf, only an hour. I 'ave to be back to the Nursery by half three!' Not listening to her, and without grace or gratitude, he pulled the other things out of her basket. She had spent her hard-earned wages recklessly, on the way to him, on white rolls and pâté and a soft creamy cheese.

‘Peaches, that's better,' he bit into the fragrant, expensive flesh and quickly finished the fruit. ‘Only two?'

‘Them's expensive,' she apologised, watching him.

‘This wine's no good, no good at all,' he held up the ornamental bottle she had chosen for him. ‘Remember, it's champagne I need when I'm ill; this bubbling pearl, or whatever it is, is just soapsuds as far as I'm concerned.'

Victor drank some of the wine and Weekly was pleased to see some colour come into his fragile face.

‘Ugh! Soapsuds!' He made a face at the wine.

‘Yo'll be better soon,' she wanted to comfort him.

‘I'll have to be,' he said, ‘I'm just waiting for my passport and I'm off to South Africa. But it's not your business to know where I'm going or why. And it's nobody's business either to know. I'm lying up here till I feel stronger and then I'm off, as soon as my papers are through.'

He looked about him with a distaste which included Weekly. She looked away from him, hurt.

‘This place is disgusting,' he said, ‘I'll be gone before the rent's due. Have you brought what else I asked for?'

Reluctantly she laid what remained of her small wealth on the bed.

‘Is this all? This can't be all?' She thought he was angry enough to shake her. Quickly his nimble fingers, accustomed, tossed through the money counting it.

‘On no account give Victor money,' their mother had said to Weekly more than once.

As she lay in bed, sleepless, she remembered how on the way back to the Big House that afternoon she kept wishing she had said something more to comfort Victor. She wished she had kissed him like she sometimes, in those days, kissed his faded childhood photograph. Their mother had often explained to her that Victor could not help being disagreeable. He was like he was because of how their world was. The world was cruel and ugly, she had said, and people like Victor could see this, they knew what people were like and knew what they were like themselves but did not know how to say what they knew and saw.

Weekly groaned aloud with the bitter pain of memory. That afternoon was the last time she ever saw Victor. Every time she thought about it all the years later, and she did think often, she wished she could have the afternoon again and somehow do things differently and somehow
unsay some of the things she had said. She was about halfway home when a smartly dressed man had stopped beside her.

‘Miss Morris?' he had said there in the street. Weekly groaned aloud, Nastasya stirred.

‘What is it Veekly? You have pain?' she asked sleepily in the dark.

‘No, I'm orl right, get orf to sleep!'

What was the use thinking like this, there was nothing she could do now. She waited a while till she was sure Nastasya was fast asleep again and put on her light. Weekly reached for her old school reading book. There were a few poems in the back part. There was part of one she liked, she didn't know who had written it. She read the verse aloud, softly for herself, catching her breath, reading carefully as if she were back at school reading in the classroom.

That was what her money was. And, as she began to sink into her cradle, fragrant with thought of the silver figures adding and growing, the total changing as if on a little gilt-edged board, like a plaything on the side of the cradle, she thought, and the thought comforted her. Of all the land she had seen, the valley was the most beautiful, and it was what she wanted. She would go as soon as possible and buy the valley.

Sometimes lately, the Newspaper of Claremont Street came home from her work by way of an old lane which was behind the houses, a neglected path reminding of times gone by. Tall grass grew there and enormous old oleanders. They were like big coloured skirts embroidered with pink and white flowers and threaded with the blue-cupped bindweed. In places the lane had disappeared because of new buildings and car parks, but it was possible to have quite a tranquil walk, especially towards the back of the bottom end of the street where less alteration had taken place. It was when she walked through the lane that Weekly remembered the sky and looked at it. Mostly she forgot about it and, when she thought of looking up
between the massed oleanders, taking care not to trip over bits of wood and rubble in the grass and not go headlong over an old pushchair or a dustbin, she saw with reverence and renewed pleasure the greatness of the sky.

Her father always looked at the sky and talked about it,

Weekly could quote this without really knowing what it meant. Her father always noticed the air, the freshness of it and the fine soft caress of the morning on his face. For days on end Weekly forgot about the air. In the lane she thought of it and the loveliness of it reminded her of the strength and beauty of her money. It was now a considerable sum but, as she walked, she tried to get over the shock she had had this afternoon. She tried to look at the clouds. There were so many kinds of clouds, her father had known them all. She tried to remember them now. Cumulus and cirrus, then there was nimbus, the rain-bearing cloud, but the mackerel sky was the one she pictured best and, for a moment, she could remember the sky ribbed all over as if with the firm white flesh, tinged delicately with pink, of a fish. Once her mother cooked a
mackerel and her father was sick all night and the cat died.

Cumulus, cirrus, nimbus and mackerel, even if she talked to herself saying over the names of the clouds she found she was unable to see them. The sky suddenly seemed overcast by her own thoughts. She began to hurry through the lane. There was nothing to remind her of her money. She scarcely saw the oleanders and did not notice when she stubbed her foot on a piece of old railway sleeper, thrown carelessly across the path. She walked fast leaning forward, her skirts swirling in the coming dusk.

‘Hi Newspaper!' the boys called her from the corner when she came into Claremont Street. ‘What's happening in the world? What's the news?' but she ignored them and went across into the shop and sank onto the broken chair, propping herself on the counter.

‘What about a lottery ticket?' Val called across the shop but Weekly could not be bothered to pick up the little coloured book of flimsy pages, one of which might be a number on which she could save a dollar, by not buying it.

‘Go on Weekly, buy a ticket, big prizes!' Cheryl came and leaned her plump bosom on the sheets of newspaper they used for wrapping beans and lettuces. ‘What's the news?' she asked. Weekly pulled herself together. She sucked in her cheeks and narrowed her eyes and looked around the shop to see how many people were there; no use to tell news to nothing except the floorboards, dark
with kerosene and littered just now with rhubarb leaves and the rotten bits pulled off vegetables.

‘You buyin' a cool drink?' Weekly looked up and down a well-dressed woman who was close to the counter.

‘No.'

‘Well what yo' taken two drinking straws for then?'

It was disconcerting for customers to have their small robberies noticed. After a pause Weekly said, ‘Pore Mr Kingston.' She shook her head and addressed the shop. ‘I did the whole of 'is puzzle terday. Mr Kingston, I said, let Aunty do yer crorssword,' she paused again to suck in her cheeks. ‘There was not one word he could fill in 'imself. I doubt he'll leave his bed again,' she said.

Silence fell among the groceries and the women and their last-minute shopping. The silence remained unbroken, for Weekly had stopped talking; her own thoughts were too much for her and they took over and prevented her from going on with her gossip. Her mind was occupied with thinking of the valley. She seemed to see the wooded slope and the bright meadow, small as if on a postcard; it was so vivid she forget what she was talking about. For the first time her thoughts of the valley were sad and troubled.

All her savings, her gilded cone-shaped mountain of money, her cradle of comfortable silver, were not enough, not enough for even part of the meadow. The
valley was quite beyond her reach, the land was far too valuable and far too expensive. She was trying, as during her walk through the lane, to get over the terrible disappointment she had just had. And of course, since she had never spoken about it to anyone she could not talk of it now.

She had taken an hour off to keep an appointment with Mr Rusk the land agent. She sat in his brown office and a beam of afternoon sun lay across his leather-topped desk, showing up the dust, but Weekly scarcely noticed it.

‘If you're prepared to go out, say fifty miles,' Mr Rusk said gently, ‘at a little place called White Gum Crossing, near there, there's a nice five acres with a tin shack for tools. Some of it's what they call river flats, flooded in winter, you could grow pears there. And it would be within your price range,' Mr Rusk spoke seriously to the old woman even though he was not sure whether she was all right in the head. ‘Think it over,' he advised. He always regarded a customer as a buyer until the customer did not buy.

As she sat in the shop Weekly tried to forget her valley. She began in her mind to scatter the new land with pear blossom. It was not easy but she was used, all her life, to making an effort, and now, with great effort, she disciplined her thoughts. She would go out there as soon as she could.

‘Goodnight all!' she left the shop abruptly without telling any news at all.

It was some weeks before Weekly was able to go, on a Sunday, to look at the five acres. The days were hot now and the country was brown and dried up and, though cattle grazed, it was hard to see what they could possibly find to eat in the bald paddocks. She had to leave much later in the day than she wanted to because there was Nastasya in her wood-block mood and everything had to be done for her: pulling on her wrinkled stockings, fastening her shoes and her dress, combing her hair and even holding a cup to her lips to make her drink some tea. When Nastasya was like this Weekly came near to despair. How could she ever do any of the things she wanted to do?

The car required little attention since it had been so thoroughly overhauled, but Weekly always spent a few minutes going over the engine with a duster. She made an odd sight every day when she opened the bonnet of the old car. In her mended clothes, the darns and stitching like embroidery in strange places, she awkwardly leaned into the engine, peering and polishing before setting off with a crash of gears and her foot kept too long and too hard down on the clutch.

At last she arrived at the place. It was more lovely than she had expected and fragrant and quite different from the valley. This difference gave her a surprise. A great many
tall old trees had been left standing, white gums and red gums and jarrah, and the tin shack turned out to be a weatherboard cottage. She was afraid she had come to the wrong place.

‘It must be someone's home,' she thought to herself as she peered timidly through the cottage window and saw that it was full of furniture. Disappointment crept over her and she turned away, stepping on the purple pigface which was growing everywhere. She climbed the broken steps at the back of the cottage and, from the high verandah, she looked down the sunlit slope of the land and across a narrow valley to a hayfield between big trees. It was like the things she had read about, only far more beautiful because of the stillness and fragrance. These are not put into the advertisements. There was such a stillness that Weekly felt more than ever she was trespassing, not only on the land, but into the very depths of the stillness itself.

On the verandah was a homemade sofa, the lumpy mattress was tucked over with a rough woollen blanket. Weekly sat down on it, she felt tired. It was the long drive and the excitement of coming, and then the feeling that it was the wrong place, and that it all belonged to someone else and could not be hers. On the table beside the sofa was a piece of candle stuck on a saucer. In the heat of the afternoon, the candle began slowly to bow to her.

She woke up about an hour later. It was unusual for
her to sleep during the day, she was not used to it. She woke as a little child wakes in a strange place, crying, tears streamed down her thin wrinkled cheeks and she cried aloud for her mother as if she was a little girl again. Her wailing broke the stillness.

‘Now stop that or I'll give yer summat to cry for!' her own voice in the middle of her tears surprised her; her mother would have said it. She supplied the words herself sharply, and the quietness, after all her noise, was all at once filled with birds. Black cockatoos left the treetops in twos and threes and then in their numbers and came swirling in ever-widening circles, screaming and calling in their flight. The shallow ravine of trees and the endless stretches of trees and scrub on either side of the piece of land seemed full of these birds. Their heads were round and determined and black fringes edged their wings and, as they flew round and through the trees, they brought to the place a quality of strangeness, of something unknown, as if they had some other knowledge, something to do with another kind of life.

‘I must be orf home,' Weekly muttered to herself as the screaming subsided. She was not used to such a loneliness and she had never seen in her life such a flock of birds. And she hobbled down the broken steps quickly and started back up the track to where she had left the car.

The light was fading from the northern hills and a
wind came along the valley, only a small wind; it was a soft deep roar among the branches of the trees. Weekly turned back to see the trees swaying, she heard the wind before she felt it.

she said and went on as quickly as she could, though she would have like to stay longer.

‘I got that wrong,' she said to herself in the car. ‘'ow does it go, the wind in the trees reminded me,' she thought to herself. ‘Aw yes!

‘that's it!

Weekly sang aloud in the car.

‘Well I hope He don't talk too loud and break them trees back up there!' and with her mind full of the twenty-ninth psalm she reached the outskirts of the city and drove through a red light, she was so busy thinking.

Mr Rusk said it was the five acres he had meant, he assured her there was no mistake.

‘I've never been there myself,' he explained when she told him about the cottage. She tried to describe to him the silence and the privacy and she told him about the big old trees standing so still with the secrets of their years.

He listened to her with polite kindness.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘there is some standing timber, quite remarkable, as most of the jarrah was taken from that area years ago.'

‘It is the place,' he said. ‘Everything's included in the price, leaves you something over for extras too,' he smiled at the strange old woman who had laid her small wealth before him and asked his advice anxiously and with a trust he had never seen before in all his experience of buying and selling.

So Weekly tried to stop thinking of the valley so much and every Sunday she began to go to the five acres. She walked down the slope and over the fragrant warm earth scattered with leaves and twigs, and peered into the cottage trying to see as much as she could of the inside through the tiny windows. She walked back up the slope, caressed by the light and shade, wondering how long the trees had been there.

Left to herself more than usual and for longer than usual Nastasya had done several crazy things. Once she had dressed herself in some tattered remains of her national costume and had gone out scattering her money on the pavement, trying to give it to people who just stared at her. And then she had taken a taxi to the station and, as she had no money left, she gave the taxi driver Torben's ring. Then, just as Weekly was falling asleep, tired out, Nastasya began to weep and howl.

‘Veekly! My Ring. Torben's Ring from his Mother. I must have it. Please Veekly! Go out and find the taxi and get from him my Ring. Veekly I beg you!' She made so much noise Weekly was afraid the people in the other rooms would hear and be disturbed and annoyed.

‘Oh Hush Narsty do!' she said and, while she got dressed, she grumbled and complained to herself, her complaining voice made a kind of background music to Nastasya's shrill lamenting.

She returned about two hours later, unsuccessful, fearful of how Nastasya would be about her failure to find the ring, only to find Nastasya was fast asleep. Furthermore Nastasya forgot about the ring completely for she never spoke of it again.

Whenever Weekly was on her way home she was worried that Nastasya might have done something really dreadful in her absence.