Tirra Lirra by the River (11 page)

‘Where to?’

I didn’t really have a firm intention of going anywhere, but I said London because it was the first place I thought of. And to myself I said that I could go, too, if I pleased. Nobody could stop me. I jumped to my feet and laughed. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s where I’m going. London.’

And that’s how I came to go to London, not because I particularly wanted to, but as an affirmation of the wonderful discovery that
nobody could stop me
.

‘Nora,’ said Ida, ‘that eight hundred won’t last for ever. And if you truly don’t want to remarry, what will you do when it’s gone? You’re too old for shop jobs. They won’t pay senior wages to inexperienced women. And when it comes right down to the honest truth, you’re still only an amateur dressmaker. You still can’t
cut
.’

I laughed. ‘You and your cutting! I’ll be back in a year, and I’ll still have some money. Time enough to think about it then.’

When I went to book my passage I discovered that somebody
could
stop me. Colin. We were not yet divorced, and my ‘husband’ must give signed permission for me to go. He gave it, of course. What better evidence of desertion than a wife who went tripping, traipsing, gallivanting overseas?

While Ida was making my travelling clothes I went north to see my mother and Grace. It was an uncomfortable visit. Some families have an almost uncanny power of forcing an alienated member to behave according to its opinion of him or her, and as soon as I divined, in their reserved greetings, their questions, and their set reproachful mouths, the discussions they had had about me, I began to act in a manner to confirm them in their opinion. In Ida’s rooms I could bow my head and tell my woes, but at my mother’s table all I could do was to sit upright and make smart cracks about marriage and divorce. She and Grace would have been ready to console me for being broken and rejected, but could not forgive me for my apparent gaiety, for wearing the first trousers they had ever seen ‘in the street’, or for painting my toenails pink. Reckless. Cynical. Frivolous. Those were the words they used about me. And rebuttal seemed so hopeless, and the thicket of misunderstanding between us so old and dense and dusty, that it was less exhausting simply to be as reckless, cynical, and frivolous as they said I was.

‘The way you talk,’ said Grace one day, ‘you would think we were all no better than animals, each grabbing what we want and never thinking of the other fellow.’

‘But isn’t that exactly what we do do?’

‘It might be exactly what you do.’

‘Now, girls,’ said my mother.

‘And it might be what we all do naturally,’ continued Grace, ‘but we ought to rise above our natures.’

‘And how does one do that, Grace?’

‘Girls, girls.’

‘You pray for a state of grace.’

‘What, grace, Grace?’

‘Nora, stop that. You might at least have some respect for the beliefs of others. Mother’s and mine.’

‘Yes, Nora. It’s too bad to have you blaspheming in the house.’

‘Oh, come on, Grace. What about this state of grace?’

‘It is quite possible,’ said poor Grace, with a desperate blush, ‘for a state of grace to exist wherein the lion lays down with the lamb.’

Ah, yes, I thought, each turned away from the other in the dark, each gritting his teeth. I did not say it aloud because it hinted at humiliations I was too proud to reveal. All I said was, ‘In my opinion, lions should lie down with lions and lambs with lambs. It’s asking too much of both otherwise, especially the lion.’

‘Girls, if you knew how my head ached.’

Everything was oppressively the same except at night. Grace’s husband came home then, and played dominoes with my mother, while Grace cooked, and I read aloud to my nephew Peter. Peter, then seven years old, became my favourite member of the family in two seconds by jumping into the big firewood box under the house and shouting, ‘Lost in the wood!’ After he came home from school I would go with him to the creek to catch yabbies, and as I sat there with my slacks rolled up and my bare feet in the mud, while the sun beat down and the she-oaks soughed, and I exchanged with Peter an occasional low remark, and the yabbie in the silent water drifted upwards to the suspended bait, I would experience the deep poignancy of a recapitulation of childhood sensations that one believes will be one’s last.

Peter’s memories of those occasions are very different. ‘Are you still striking blows for mercy?’ the grown man asked me when he came to London after the war.

‘I have never struck a blow for mercy in my life.’

‘Yes, you have. Don’t you remember saying, “Let’s strike a blow for mercy”, and throwing all those yabbies back?’

I went to see Mrs Partridge, who showed me her collection of masks from New Guinea and gave me Olive’s address in London. I wanted to visit Dorothy Rainbow, but was deterred by Grace’s protest that it would be stupid, and that I hardly knew her, and that she had no time these days for chatter. But one day, from a tram, I saw her coming out of a shop, carrying a basket. Age had changed but not destroyed her beauty. Her extreme thinness made apparent the elegance of her structure, and blue shadows had appeared on her temples. But her hair had been cut and compressed into a corrugated cap, and in place of the long flowing dresses in which she had moved with such grace, she wore a tight wool skirt and a tight knitted jumper. The result was an uneasy blend of the exotic and the commonplace, and her body, as if confused by these conflicting edicts, moved nervously and abruptly.

‘Dorothy looks much better without that great mass of hair,’ said my mother comfortably.

I no longer felt those surges of strength, nor the intimation of that presence at my side. I had promised to stay for two weeks, and to cut my visit short would have offended my mother and Grace even more than my presence did. So, with the help of my nephew, I endured it, and, with the help of their righteousness, so did they, but I am sure they were as relieved as I when the time came for me to go.

On the soles of my shoes I slithered across the verandah, ran down the steps. And there was the yellow taxi in the street …

Having gone to so much trouble to deceive them about my feelings, I should not have been made so bitter by my success. On the long train journey back to Sydney, torpid and exhausted, I kept hearing those three words—reckless, cynical, frivolous.
Reckless I was, and cynical and frivolous I sometimes felt, but even at the very top of that bent, even as I was walking up the gangplank of the ship, with a tiny hat clamped to one side of my silly head, I was weighted by a sub-stratum of sadness. I knew that like fruit affected by hard drought, I was likely to be rotten before ripe. Sometimes I believed it was already too late, but at others I was seized by a desperate optimism that expressed itself in spates of chatter and laughter and hectic activity.

Ida Mayo and the watercolourist came to the ship, and Colin sent a bunch of roses with a card on which he had written
‘No hard feelings.’
‘They’re like bloody pink cabbages,’ I said, and threw them overboard. Ida and the watercolourist looked shocked.

Those roses, as I see them now, rocking on the thick green water of the dockside, do pose a question. Although I still believe that Colin sent them to demonstrate his nobility to Pearl, and although at the time I could feel, almost as if I were there, the exudation of his self-satisfaction as he wrote ‘no hard feelings’, other reasons do occur. I consider regret, even shock at the realization of how we had wasted each other. And because I can still ask the question, I must ask another. Have I given an accurate account of Colin Porteous, or have I merely provided another substitute? At number six our speculation on the roses always ended in laughter.

‘Well, it was certainly very
cryptic
of Colin.’

Perhaps the real man has been so overscored by laughter that he will never be retrieved. As a rule, when we can’t find even one good quality in a person, we are prejudiced, and by that rule I must admit my prejudice. Pearl may have been able to mine seams in him disregarded by me, or may have been practical enough to disregard the ones I mined. She certainly would have had a better chance of happiness with him than I had. According to Una Porteous, she had money of her own.
And she was pretty, too, in her outsize way—not fat, but with a large frontal area and a strikingly large face. Liza had a dinner service, with outsize plates, that she used to call her Pearl china. ‘Now at last Col will be able to have children,’ said Una Porteous. But I am fairly certain he didn’t, because, when I left the ship at Southampton, I was pregnant.

He was a middle-aged, squat-bodied American, of considerable honesty and charm. He began by making me laugh, and laughter weakened me easily to love. Hilda, out of her varied experience, used to say that of all aphrodisiacs, laughter is the one most unjustly ignored, and I, out of my limited experience, my very limited experience, used always to agree.

He was an engineer who had been engaged in bridge building in Australia, and awaiting him in England were his wife and two eldest children. With five children already, he was delighted by my barrenness. I didn’t have a cabin to myself, and he did, so it was in his cabin that we made love. But it was usually on deck that we talked, walking slowly in our engrossment, and sometimes, in disagreement or perplexity, drifting of one accord to the ship’s rail to rest on our folded forearms and resume our detailed, halting exploration of one another. Neither of us had ever known anyone resembling the other, and this exploration so thoroughly engrossed us that when we sat in one of the great public rooms of the ship, it occasionally happened that we realized only by the silence spreading around us that we had forgotten to go down to lunch. By this time I had read a great deal about love affairs, but again my knowledge had been theoretical, and it came as a surprise to me that the reality far surpassed the theory.

‘None of those books ever said,’ I told him, ‘that it was such a marvellous way of getting to know people.’

He looked at me sideways. ‘Think of the people you will get to know, now that you are free.’

‘Oh, I shall.’

He grimaced slightly, but said, ‘Yes, you will.’

In those days the voyage lasted for six weeks. One day in the Mediterranean he remarked that if he had been free he would have liked to marry me. It is an easy thing for a man to say in such circumstances, but because he was not a man who said easy things, but rather who scrupulously avoided them, I believed him, and in retrospect, I still do. All the same, I would have been afraid to marry him. I felt it was precisely the absence of a future together that enabled us to love without cruel possessiveness. The voyage was peaceful, with calm seas and skies, and as day succeeded day, and I continued to keep this friend and lover by my side, and to wake up each morning to the instant realization of his presence in the ship, I grew incredulous of so much luck and happiness, and would not have dared to risk it by extending it further. The definite break on arrival—goodbye and no addresses—was at my insistence, and the argument it caused confirmed me in it.

‘You see?’ I said. ‘Now we are almost quarrelling. The only way to keep these things intact is to give them up.’

‘You are either a mad pessimist,’ he said, ‘or a mad perfectionist. I don’t know which.’

‘I am neither. I am a preservationist.’

He threw back his head and laughed and laughed. I grew angry and walked away. He caught up with me and walked at my side.

‘But what you are preserving?’

‘This.’

‘But if you have your way it will be over. You will be preserving nothing.’

When I continued to insist, and he to oppose me, we had a real quarrel, followed by a reconciliation during which I wept, and he agreed at last to my terms of goodbye and no addresses.

His wife came down to Southampton to meet him. He had not expected her, and his disconcertion on seeing her on the wharf below, his quick glance from her to me, made me say, ‘You see,
this
is what it would be like.’ They were the last words I ever said to him. I moved away and stood at another part of the rail.

I saw them later as we passed through the customs. I passed them without turning my head, but I heard her pleasant southern voice, and his reply, and saw out of the tail of my eye that he had also resisted turning to look at me. Against all logic, I suddenly felt discarded. It was a bleak moment, but my cowardly spirit was consoled by not having put him to any sort of test. And I was consoled as well by gratitude for what he had taught me. I believed that our candour and loving freedom had shown me a happy sexual pattern by which I could live. At last, I thought, I knew how freedom could be reconciled with appeasement.

Six weeks later, certain of pregnancy, I remembered Daff and the abortion car. ‘As easy as puff,’ I remembered her saying. ‘The police are fixed. All you need is about fifty pounds and the doctor’s address.’

I had money, but no address. However, I thought that if it was as easy as puff in provincial Sydney, it would be even easier in metropolitan London. I was amazed, when I asked Olive Partridge about it, to learn that abortion in London was a matter of whispers, danger, and solemn secrecy.

‘They enforce the law here,’ said Olive. ‘If I got you an address we could both go to jail. Why not have it and let it be adopted?’

But immediately we both cried, ‘No!’ And then Olive said, ‘No, of course not. I’m sorry, Nora. Oh, Lord, this is dreadful. You know, I do think you should get in touch with, er, the man.’

But when I told her of my resolution to make a complete
break, and why I had made it, she began to nod her head even before I had finished speaking. I think her approval was rather literary. She probably thought it gave the event a nice shape. But still, she gave it.

‘Let me think,’ she said. We were sitting one at each end of the sofa in her living room. She frowned as she thought and chewed one side of her underlip.

The green wraith evoked by her novels had evaporated as soon as I saw her again. Her face was attractive in its mobility and intelligence, but she wore stodgy clothes and had put on weight round the hips and bottom. When I told her about the green wraith she had been both amused and annoyed. ‘One day,’ she had said, ‘I’ll write a novel about a woman who looks her best sitting behind a desk. Then no one will be surprised when they meet me.’ While she sat and frowned and chewed her underlip, I got up and went to the window and looked down at the trees in Cadogan Square. I was repelled by the stony look of London, its chilly regularity. ‘But oh,’ I kept saying, ‘the trees!’ But though the trees, the soft green cumulus of the English trees, moved me to rapture, it was the rapture of an audience who would soon leave the theatre. In Cadogan Square the trees were enclosed by an iron railing with a locked gate. Behind me Olive said slowly, ‘There is one woman I know.’