Tirra Lirra by the River (15 page)

‘I shall eat the pawpaw with added pleasure,’ I say with a smile.

I continue to smile after he goes, extending the amused
indulgence of old age to that foolish young woman and that boy. I speculate on what would have happened if I had met him again when we were both adults—say, on the visit I made before sailing for London. It could easily have happened. I imagine myself sitting beside the creek with my nephew, listening to the she-oaks and watching the yabbie rising to the bait suspended in the muddy water. I look up suddenly, and see him standing there. But of course, his face is now the face of my shipboard lover.

Later that day, it occurs to me to wonder what they would have made of Arch at number six. And I find I am glad, very glad, that I did not recall him in time to expose him. I believe there were times when I very nearly did so, because I remember that when we talked of jobs we had had, work we had done when young, I never once mentioned having worked in a newsagent’s and stationer’s shop. And I remember too that this avoidance, and my impulse to change the subject, used always slightly to puzzle me. I knew it was not snobbery—my snobberies were never of that sort—and even as I diverted the flow of the conversation, I mentally charted those little snags of perplexity, so that ‘one day’ I could return on my tracks to examine and resolve them.

But I never did so, and Arch stayed on the dark side, and now I can be glad that he was never overlaid by the discussion, speculation, and humour that will always bring uncertainty to my view of Colin Porteous.

I feel well when I wake the next morning—better than I have felt since that April day when Fred climbed the steps to tell us about his burgundy. Last night Lyn Wilmot pulled my arm roughly as she helped me out of bed, and was angry when I laughed. I could not explain that my amusement was caused by
being made to suffer for help I neither needed nor wanted, so I said nothing, and she—perhaps ashamed—was gentler when she ‘helped’ me back to bed.

It is time I ended the farcical situation by announcing that if I am not allowed to get up today, I shall do so on my own responsibility, but as I get out of bed and put on my robe and slippers, I confess to a regret, for there is no doubt that surreptitious disobedience gives me a slight but distinct pleasure—a legacy, perhaps, from my marriage.

In the bathroom mirror I look with equanimity at an old woman with a dewlapped face and hands like bunches of knotted sticks. I lean calmly to the cool water. Well, I am what I am. The tenderness and indulgence stirred by the recollection of Arch still lingers in me. I forgive myself everything.

After I have washed I go to the kitchen and inspect the china. Small dead moths lie in their own powder at the bottom of Grace’s best cups. They are part of a tea service, not at all bad, that occupies an isolated cupboard alone. I look forward to washing it and bringing it into everyday use. This is not the time to keep anything ‘for best’.

I find some over-ripe strawberries and eat them at the kitchen sink so that juice will not run down my chin. And now a quaking comes over me, and an exhaustion and faintness that would make me feel rather desperate, if I let it. On the way back to bed, to prove in the face of it that I am still in my happy exploratory mood, I make a detour and throw open the door of my old bedroom.

I wish I hadn’t. There amidst broken chairs, cartons piled high with books, a washstand with a cracked marble top, dilapidated suitcases and dress baskets, stands my old bed—narrow, long-legged, with a fringed quilt flung over the lumpy mattress and hanging nearly to the floor. It is comical enough, resembling a medieval horse in a school play, but the fact that
it is not dismantled disturbs me. Common sense tells me that Grace must have kept it here in case she wanted to put some poor soul up in it, perhaps one of the overflow of Tom Chiddy’s country cousins, but I still cannot get rid of my first impression on opening the door: that it has been standing there all this time, waiting for me, and that by coming into its presence I have walked into the trap I sensed (or imagined) two years ago, when Peter Chiddy, sitting in one of my little yellow chairs at number six, told me that Grace had left the house to him, but had stipulated that it must not be sold in my lifetime in case I should want to occupy it. The proposal had aroused me to a quick but elusive resentment, an echo of my old resistance to Grace’s domineering ways, and to her censure of my determination to leave home. ‘She’s still trying!’ was my interior cry. I refused without hesitation, rising out of the second yellow chair to make my point more definite.

‘Sell it, Peter dear, sell it.’

Peter also rose. He put both hands on my arms. ‘Don’t make up your mind yet. Think, Aunt Nora. You pay rent here, I suppose?’

‘Of course.’

‘There’ll be none there. And rates and maintenance are to be taken care of. Dad left mother well off, you know. So you see, Aunt Nora, with the pension, and the bit you have …’

‘Peter, sell it. If you need my permission, you have it.’

‘I can’t, even then. Not in your lifetime.’

‘Then rent it, my dear, rent it.’

‘No. You may change your mind. I think you will.’

But I smiled, and shut my eyes, and shook my head slowly from side to side.

‘Never! I assure you! Never!’

I open the top left-hand drawer in my old dressing table, where I once kept stockings and scarves, and find it stacked
with albums. As I take out the top one a big photograph falls to the floor. I know before I pick it up and turn it over that I shall see my father’s face.

Once, standing at Colin Porteous’s side, I had examined it with greedy bewildered curiosity. I examine it in the same way now, holding it close to my eyes and re-setting my spectacles on my nose. But the more pleadingly I stare, the more expressionless, the more impersonal, that young fair face becomes.

With the photograph still in my hand, I am shutting behind me the door of that disturbing room, when I hear footsteps on the front stairs. Taken by surprise, I forget my resolve to ‘end the farcial situation’, and go as fast as my weakness allows me, with an absurd schoolgirl sense of being ‘almost caught’, into my bedroom and back into bed.

‘You
are
early this morning.’

‘Yes,’ says Doctor Rainbow. He is looking at me searchingly. Was my voice breathless? Have I strawberry juice on my chin? I am still holding the photograph of my father. I put it under the magazines on the lower shelf of my bedside table.

‘You look very well,’ he says. ‘I think we may let you up today.’

To reply that I have already been up would be to make a fool of the man. I have no alternative but to express delight. He examines me. He remarks that my temperature continues to be normal. He picks up my wrist and looks at the healed scratch.

‘Very good. I’ll call at the Custs’ as I pass and ask Betty to come and get you up.’

‘Betty is
good
,’ I say. ‘She makes me wish I had never used the word for anything else, but had kept it just for her.’

‘Yes, she’s very good. Don’t walk around, will you? Stay in a chair.’

‘But I may go to the bathroom alone?’

‘Well, as long as you go straight there and back.’

‘This is a red letter day for me,’ I cannot help saying.

As he is going he drops a parcel on my bed. ‘Betty asked me to let you see this. No hurry to give it back.’

I open it as soon as he goes. I was once persuaded to make an embroidery for a charity raffle. It was won by Dorothy Rainbow, and there it is—a swag of jacaranda leaves with the head and breast of a big magpie thrusting through. It supports my suspicion that the orange tree was a fluke, for although the conception is good, it is muddled in execution. I suspect it was something I actually saw, and tried, with mistaken fidelity, to reproduce.

‘Not nearly so good as the other,’ I tell Betty when she comes.

‘Well! Why sound so pleased about it? Doesn’t she sound pleased about it, Jack?’

Jack picks up the embroidery. ‘Looks pretty good to me. What’s wrong with it?’

‘It proves the other was a fluke.’

‘Or that this one is,’ says Betty, ‘if it’s as bad as you say.’

She takes the embroidery from Jack and looks at it attentively. ‘You must be terribly fussy, Nora,’ she says in a disappointed voice. ‘It’s always been my favourite. You would think that maggie was real.’

The criteria of even the most trivial art are not those of virtue. How often must one remind oneself of this, and hold one’s carping tongue? I take the embroidery and say, ‘It’s very dusty, isn’t it? Nobody has cared for it. Wouldn’t you think one of Dorothy’s daughters would have taken it? Doctor Rainbow isn’t married, is he?’

‘No,’ says Jack, ‘nor likely to be.’

‘Breakfast first, Nora,’ says Betty. ‘Then we’ll get you up.’

But Jack continues. ‘Not after seeing his mother like that.’

‘Oh,
Jack
!’ says Betty.

Jack shows alarm. He points at me, but looks at Betty. ‘Doesn’t she … Doesn’t Nora …?’

‘I did
tell
you, Jack.’

‘Betty,’ I say, ‘I am not so easily distressed as you appear to think. I guessed it was suicide. It was suicide, I take it?’

Betty sighs. ‘Yes, it was.’

‘He saw her with her head in the gas oven.’

The eager propitiation in Jack’s voice makes it seem, oddly, as if by this disclosure he means to make amends for his first indiscretion. Betty gives him one of those looks that are such a comfort to the unmarried. ‘Betty,’ I say, almost laughing, ‘suicide doesn’t shock me.’

But by her frown, and her refusal to look at Jack, I see that she is still annoyed with him. ‘What would you like for breakfast, Nora?’

After breakfast, while Jack is bringing a long chair from some other part of the house, I draw her fire by telling her I have already been up. And she frowns again, and now won’t look at me. But I will distract her from both Jack and myself.

‘And I went into my old bedroom, and found this.’ I take the photograph of my father from between the magazines. ‘Imagine! I was six when my father died. And all I remember of him is this photograph.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Absolutely all. The photograph has swallowed the man.’

‘But Grace said your grief when he died was quite excessive.’

‘Grace thought everything about me was quite excessive.’

‘Perhaps your grief swallowed the man.’

‘Then it swallowed itself as well. I remember no grief.’

Jack comes back with the chair. ‘Jack,’ says Betty, all crossness forgotten, ‘look, this is Nora’s father.’

After they go, I sit in the chair, with a rug over my knees, and examine the embroidery. My chair is by the window, and as I handle the embroidery particles of dust detach themselves from it and hang in the sunlight. Unsuccessful though it is, I
am offended by this dust. I begin to form an uncomplimentary image of Dorothy’s daughters—heedless women, carrying cartons of groceries to their cars, sunburnt, bossy, busy, half-naked, not caring at all that their mother’s things should be left to the care of a busy bachelor. I know now how Dorothy killed herself, but should still like to know why, and am sorry that the suspended conflict between the Custs prevented me from asking. It is strange that whenever I hear of a suicide I feel compelled to ask ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ although I know from my own experience that the cause can be hard to define, and that the means tend to be those nearest to hand—in Dorothy Rainbow’s case, a gas oven, and in mine, sleeping pills, because they were always there, in the drawer of my bedside table. As for the reason, I can say that in my body and spirit a spark seemed to have been extinguished, but I must still ask what put out that spark, and if I leap to explain that the weakness resulting from six bronchial winters, and the approach of the menopause, left me morbidly defenceless against the postwar revelations of the German camps, it is because I am ashamed to admit that in the same breath as that vast horror, I can speak of the loss of my looks. Whether that loss alone would have reduced my world to greyness I cannot say, but I do distinctly recollect that on those rare days when my spirit triumphed over my face, and I looked well again, the horrors of the camps pressed lighter upon me.

‘I am the type that collapses overnight,’ I used to reply to those compliments on my youthful appearance. And so it turned out. Overnight, it seemed to me, the homage of glances was withdrawn, and I became an invisible woman. The comeliness of my face had depended on moulding rather than sculpture, and the deterioration of the outer casing quickly revealed the weakness of the frame. Becoming pendant, on the lower rim of this frame, was the scalloping jawline foretold ten years before by Colin Porteous, but time’s chief offence was against
my eyes. They had been wide and shallowly set, with clean-cut lids, the Australian eye adapted early to light, and I asked myself what heavy ancestral hand had set itself across my forehead, and pressed down until my brows descended on my eyelids, and two folds of flesh over the outer corners gave me the small blue triangular eyes, with the two little flax-tufted lumps of brow, that I saw so often in England.

Family accusations of selfishness and frivolity, so deeply embedded, so true, added guilt to my depression, as did the fading echo of that wartime injunction on alarm and despondency. I fought hard against the encroaching greyness. I spoke with enthusiasm of my return to Sydney, I booked my passage, bought luggage and shoes, and gathered information with apparent eagerness from Australians I met.

I was warned of the housing shortage in Sydney. ‘You have a flat here,’ I was told. ‘You’ll find it hard to get anything there.’

But I would not be deterred. If it was hard, so much the better, the less time I would have to think.

I was making a suit, for the last time, for a regular customer, a company secretary. ‘How well you look,’ I said. ‘Have you been away?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘to have my face lifted. It wasn’t a matter of vanity. I’m a professional woman. I regard my face as part of my equipment. So why not keep it in the best possible condition?’

Hilda and I met for the first time in the washroom of the hospital. She was drying her hands, I was washing mine, and in the mirror we each examined the other’s bandaged face through eyes surrounded by bruised and swollen flesh.