The Winds of Heaven (32 page)

On Fan’s funeral day the clouds were small and white and fluffy, children’s clouds: kittens and ducklings and little lambs on a bright blue kindergarten freize. The townspeople stood in small clusters, whispering to each other; neighbours and shopkeepers, younger people who might once have been at school with Fan; Fred Niland from the station, a teacher called Miss Langland who’d come all the way from Parkes. Old Mr Chiltern from the hardware store was crying into a big checked hanky; beside him Evie Castairs and Maggie Carmody were crying too.

‘And she a
mother
!’ a woman’s voice exclaimed harshly, suddenly, and then another, softer voice said, ‘Hush!’

There wasn’t a sign of the young man who might have been Gary, no sign of the vanished Uncle Len. Even Aunty Rene had been absent, far away with Trevor in Tucson, Arizona, dancing on a competition stage. ‘“Too far to come,” that’s what she said,’ an angry Caroline told Clementine. ‘Couldn’t be bothered, more like!’ She’d stamped her foot, but gently, so as not to alarm the small fair-haired baby she was holding in her arms, and a puff of bright red dust rose up round her shoe. ‘Oh, I hate her! Mum! Bloody old dancing
fool
!’

‘Ah, come on, love.’ Her husband put an arm around her shoulders.

Caro’s anger was the kind Clementine had instantly recognised, an anger with oneself. ‘I’d give anything,’ Caro
had begun, and then fallen silent, her unfinished sentence drifting away on the air of the bright winter day.

The baby she was holding was Fan’s daughter. ‘We left Cash with the neighbours,’ Frank explained. ‘We reckoned this might be too much for him, seeing he’s old enough to understand what’s going on – ’ he gestured round the little cemetery, the scrubby grass, the dry, lopsided stones, the small heaps of deep red earth beside the hole where Fan’s casket had been lowered into the ground.

‘
And it was so-o dark, Clemmie, like you were right down buried in the ground
…’

Frank chucked a big finger under the baby’s chin and she grinned up at him. ‘But we thought we’d bring the little one along for her mum.’ He took her small hand and held it out to Clementine. ‘This is Madeleine,’ he said.

Madeleine.

Clementine felt the ground falling away beneath her feet. She could hear Fan’s voice, her actual laughing fourteen-year-old voice: ‘
Okay, tell you what: when I have my first little girl I’ll call her Madeleine for you
.’

Clementine looked up at the small frisking clouds, the kittens and ducklings and baby lambs and fought back angry tears. ‘Why didn’t you
tell
me?’ she cried out silently. ‘Why didn’t you write and say, “I’ve had a little girl and I’ve given her your favourite name like I promised. Madeleine!”’

Why hadn’t she? Because if Fan had done that, then Clementine would have written back because she’d have known what to write about, and she’d have come up to see Fan and the baby in the holidays, and –

And then perhaps none of this would have happened. There’d have been no vanishing, no death, and she and Fan
might this very morning be walking round the lake with Madeleine and little Cash, the fluffy clouds frolicking above them, the small winds of heaven riffling through their hair. Distantly, she heard Caroline saying, ‘It was good of you to come.’

She spun round in anguish. ‘But I didn’t!’

‘What?’

‘I didn’t come! Not when I should have, anyway! I didn’t even write to her when you sent me that letter. I didn’t – ’ Clementine burst into noisy tears and Frank took the baby so that Caro could put her arms around her cousin. ‘Shhh,’ Caro whispered. ‘Shhh.’

‘It’s not your fault, love,’ said Frank. ‘Even if you’d written a letter she mightn’t have got round to opening it. Fan sort of – left things lying.’

‘She would have opened it,’ said Clementine. She was sure of it. And she couldn’t help remembering the girl she thought she’d seen on that rainy afternoon a few weeks ago, the girl at the end of the corridor in the Old Arts building, in the faded blue-grey dress with the hem coming down. Fan had still been alive then, so it couldn’t have been her ghost. But what if she’d learned to send her spirit wandering when she was asleep, like she’d told Clementine the old black man used to do – sent it roaming down the red land to Sydney, searching for her
gindaymaidhaany
?

‘Was that you?’ Clementine whispered, gazing up at the great blue arch of sky. ‘Was that you, Fan? Francesca?’ The beautiful name, suddenly remembered, so long forgotten, settled in Clementine’s heart like a sweet white dove. Francesca.

‘Grief is the worst thing, I think.’ Sarah might have been tracing the silent passage of her companion’s thoughts as she and Clementine make their way slowly along the path towards the car park.

‘Yes,’ agrees Clementine. ‘Oh, yes.’

In a fourth year English exam, a whole two years after her cousin’s death, Clementine had opened the poetry paper and unexpectedly begun to cry. It had been the question on Henry Vaughan that had undone her, the poem for analysis printed out on the page. It was the eighth stanza:

If a star were confin’d into a Tomb
Her captive flames must needs burn there;
But when the hand that lockt her up, gives room,
She’l shine through all the sphere.

She had read those lines many times, but never before had the connection to her cousin revealed itself, as it did that December afternoon in the middle of the English Honours exam. Oh, that was like Fan! It was! Perhaps it was the heat of the summer day pouring through the high windows of the exam room, or the sound of the wind roaring outside, or the smell of red inland dust in the air, but Clementine couldn’t stop crying; she’d had to be helped from the examination room to sit outside in a chair in the corridor, an invigilator beside her, until she’d got herself together and could go inside again.

‘Fan would have shone, she would have, if only – ’ she’d sobbed out in the corridor. ‘If only she’d
stayed
!’

‘Do you want to go to the sick room?’ the invigilator had asked.

‘No, no, I’m all right.’ Clementine had rubbed at her
eyes. ‘I’m better now.’ And she’d marched back into the exam room, sat down at her desk and answered the question on Henry Vaughan. She was living life for both of them now, and it had to be good, it had to be ‘brushed with light’, as old Henry Vaughan would have said.

Then there was the time, at a party in a terrace house on Glebe Road, where she’d gone with David Lowell, when Clementine had turned pale and quiet as Johnny Cash’s rich deep voice flooded out into the room –

‘Oh!’ she’d gasped, because he was singing about a girl from a far country, a girl with long hair that curled and fell all down her dress. Like Fan’s hair used to do, once upon a time.

How Fan would have loved that song, and how bitter it had seemed to Clementine that Fan had never got to hear it.

Never, never, ever.

David Lowell had taken her to that party. It was the first time they’d gone out together. He’d seen the shock bloom on her face when she’d heard that song.

‘What’s the matter?’ he’d asked her. And she’d told him about Fan and he’d put his arms around her and whispered, ‘Your poor cousin.’

‘And you keep on thinking,’ Sarah goes on, ‘you keep thinking, if only one little thing had been different.’

Oh,
yes
! Clementine has puzzled over this so many times: if she’d written that letter to Fan, would it have made a difference? Or had it been too late, even then? Would Fan have left it lying unopened on the kitchen table, or never even taken it from the post box, already too far along on her last mistaken journey to the blue hills?

Would it have been different if Fan had grown up in the city, instead of far away at Lake Conapaira?

Or if she’d had a different family?

If she’d married someone else instead of Gary?

If things had gone better at school?

If the old black man hadn’t gone away?

There were so many ‘ifs’ – ‘ifs’ beyond number, countless as the stars that peered in through the window of Fan’s old bedroom, or the grains of red earth that made up the land. The closest Clementine can come to any reason is something Fan said herself, on that last evening by the lake: ‘Sometimes I feel like I didn’t get through into the world properly, like other people, that I left a little bit behind – ’

Clementine had protested, thinking Fan was putting herself down, but perhaps she’d been right after all. Perhaps there was a little piece missing, something hard and thoughtless and self-serving, which most people needed to survive and which Fan didn’t possess, or bother to call out and use. The only thing that would have saved Fan for sure was this: quite simply, if she’d been a different kind of person.

If she’d been a different kind of person, then Fan would have lived. If she’d been more cautious, less defiant, less sure that happiness would come to her, less eager for life, then she’d probably still be here.

But then she wouldn’t have been Fan. There’d have been no Fan ever on this earth, no sweet Fan, Francesca,
Yirigaa
, the morning star.

‘Ah, it can be a difficult old place, this life,’ grumbles Sarah, and as she says this Clementine has a sudden unaccountable image of the Brothers’ house across the road
from her childhood home, and remembers how she used to sit up on her bed and lean her elbows on the sill and gaze across at the lighted windows, long into the night. She remembers how she dreamed that the Brothers were seated round a table busily sewing their big net and how Fan was dancing in the centre of it, close to the weak place they hadn’t finished yet.

‘You missed her,’ Clementine silently accuses the industrious Brothers. ‘You let her fall through.’

It’s strange how some dreams stay with you all your life, so that when you’re old they seem as real as the actual people and places that you’ve known. Clementine can still see, quite plainly, the soft red dancing shoes Fan had been wearing as she danced up and down, happiness shining out of every little bit of her.

‘What beautiful shoes!’ Caro had exclaimed on the day after the funeral, as Clementine was packing to catch the train back home.

They were green shoes, like the ones in the dream Fan had told her about that morning when they’d hung the clothes out together: green leather shoes with a slim strap across the instep and a small square heel. A few months after she’d come back from that last visit to Lake Conapaira Clementine had seen them in the window of a shoe-shop on Broadway. ‘I should have written and told her,’ she thinks now, almost fifty years later, as she and Sarah make their way through the last stand of dusty eucalypts. And then, suddenly: ‘
That’s
what I could have said in that letter I didn’t know how to write. I could have told her about the shoes!’

They turn into the car park. Only two cars remain there now: Sarah’s blue Datsun and a battered green Toyota with a thick band of red dust along its sides. As they approach, the Toyota’s driver’s door swings open and a young girl leaps out, a tall girl, with hair in two thick braids the colour of wild honey. She rushes forward and stops abruptly just in front of them, lifting the braids in both hands, twisting them into a crown on top of her head. Then she lets them fall, tossing them back over her shoulders. ‘You’re late, Aunty Clementine!’ she cries. ‘You’re late, but I forgive you. Seeing as it’s so hot, and you’re so ancient!’