Tirra Lirra by the River (2 page)

Here I am, and here I will stay. Anything else is too much trouble.

All the same, I admit flatly at last that if I had remembered the house better I would have found some other solution, but the passage of time so blurred and modified it that for these last ten or fifteen years it has been only a sort of squarish blob on my memory. It wasn’t until I was on the plane from London that I really saw it again. I had reached that point of sleeplessness, my eyeballs burning behind dry lids, when, without warning, I saw it imprinted on the darkness—no blob now, but
it
, the real house, a heavy wooden box stuck twelve feet in the air on posts. In my confusion and misery I longed painfully for my friends at number six, Hilda and Fred and Liza and poor Belle. I enfolded my right hand about the scratch on my wrist, and as I blinked to lubricate my eyeballs I became incredulously aware of myself sitting in that enormous hollow metal projectile, hemmed in by a host of propped or lolling bodies, listening to those gloomy engines and moving on and on and on through the dark sky.

A suitcase thuds to the floor behind me.

‘That’s one of them up.’

I turn round. ‘Thank you.’

He comes into the room, knocks with a knuckle on the wall. ‘Grace,’ he says, ‘Grace, now, always reckoned this room was practically the same as when you were girls.’

‘Yes’.

‘Well, this won’t get the rest of them up, will it?’ And off he goes again.

At my nephew’s house in Sydney, they told me that when Grace took over the house from our mother, she had had many renovations done, but had never ‘got round’ to the living room. ‘All the better,’ said my nephew’s wife. ‘You’ll be able to do it yourself.’ But really, I can’t think of a thing that would help this room. It is a room of such a hopeless character that as I look about me I begin to feel a sort of satisfaction. When my worst expectations are met, I frequently find alleviation in detaching myself from the action, as it were, the better to appreciate the addition of one more right, inevitable accent to the pattern of doom, or comedy, or whatever you like to call it. But even as I look about me, and nod, and smile, and say ‘Precisely!’ I am conscious of a deepening mystification. Because where, in heaven’s name, in this room, could have been the source of the exaltation I felt last night on the train?

In Sydney my nephew and his wife often talked of the house, but they talked of so much else, and took me about so much, and I was forced to exclaim and comment so much, that I managed to stave off all concentrated thought of it. I was happy to let it become a blob again. But in the train last night I forced myself to dwell on it, and it was then that my thoughts found a focus in this room, and I was touched by exaltation.

Exaltation? Well, bliss. An obscure sensation, it touched me lightly, the ghost, perhaps, of some former bliss. There is certainly nothing in this room to account for it, so it must have been something outside it, but visible from it.

I hear the thud of another suitcase. He comes in and puts his hands on his hips.

‘That’s number two.’

‘Thank you. So kind.’

‘Only a few odds and ends now.’

‘That’s good. Do you know, I hardly dare to part those curtains.’

‘What? Why not?’

He is startled. I have half-shut my eyes and am waggling a finger at eyebrow level. I remind myself again that such little joking habits, fostered in the intimacy of number six, do not travel well. In Sydney my nephew’s wife and children, and occasionally even my dear nephew himself, would sometimes give me the same look that this man is giving me now. Smiling, but slightly askance, slightly embarrassed. I am beginning to see our little coterie at number six through other eyes. We would often say to each other, describing incidents that had happened ‘outside’, ‘Oh, he thought me
quite mad
.’ It was our happy assumption that everyone in the outside world thought us
quite mad
. But now I am finding that when one is really outside, and alone, it is less of a burden (and much more private) to be thought
quite ordinary
. Besides, I am too tired at present to insist upon my madness. So I lower my hand, and speak in a sensible and reassuring voice.

‘Oh, the view, you know. I’m sure it was rather nice from this room. And I’m so afraid it will have changed.’

‘The view? Well, there’s the cabbage-tree palm … the road … But you saw all that,’ he says, ‘as we came in.’

‘But not from up here.’ I go towards the window. ‘I’m sure it was better from up here.’

I am short, he is tall. He comes quickly behind me and pulls the curtains apart. I raise the blind and look through the glass at the leaves of the palm tree. My gaze travels down its trunk, as tall and straight as the electricity poles in the street, and moves over the parched grass. There is drought here—I heard about it in the man’s car—and the grass is rather a subtle and gentle colour, a greenish-blond. But that is not what I am looking for.
I look at the dusty shrubs along the fence, I watch two cars pass, then I look up, for a change, at the perfectly plain, sky-blue sky.

‘You must be thinking of the flower-beds that used to be there,’ I hear him say.

I shake my head.

‘Gerberas?’ he suggests enticingly. ‘Iceland poppies?’

But no, I am not looking for gerberas or Iceland poppies.

‘There must have been something else there then,’ he says, ‘that stuck in your mind. A tree or something.’

‘Yes,’ I say. There is no need for him to go on. Things are turning out so badly that I am filled again with my perverse contentment.

‘Something that died.’

Naturally! If it were a source of delight it
would
have died! Nodding and smiling, I turn back into the room and look about me in the clearer light. On one of the little leggy tables stands a vase of yellow daisies. The vase is too big for them, and they have slipped down to water level with their poor little faces upraised, like drowning people crying for help. But all the same, someone has taken the trouble to put them there.

I touch the vase. ‘What pretty flowers.’

‘The wife put them there.’

‘How kind. Do thank her.’

‘I will, Mrs Roche. Sorry, Porteous. It’s that I’m so used to hearing you called Nora Roche. Grace, now, Grace was Grace Chiddy because she went on living here after she was married. But you, round here you still go by your maiden name.’

I have shut my eyes out of sheer weariness, and in one of my sudden severances of attention (accompanied as usual by an expansion in the head) I find myself earnestly pondering the derivation of the term ‘maiden name’. ‘The name,’ I want to say to someone, ‘I had when I was a maiden.’ I very nearly whisper the words. I open my eyes in fright. Did I in fact whisper them?

No. The man’s face is unchanged.

All the same, unless I have a warm bath very soon, and lie down, something regrettable is bound to happen. I take off my hat.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘thank you very much.’ And in lieu of his name I add, ‘for everything.’

‘No trouble. No trouble at all. What kind of a job do you reckon they made of the cleaning?’

‘Very good.’

‘It was one of those cleaning teams did it.’ He bends with his hands on his knees and looks at the legs of a chair. ‘Bit of dust there. But generally speaking, they didn’t make too bad a fist of it. Not too bad at all. Peter rang, you know. He rang STD and asked me to get one of those professional teams in. So I did.’

Peter is Peter Chiddy, my nephew in Sydney. I wish I could recall the name of this man, but I am too tired, and too ashamed of my discourtesy in having forgotten it, to ask him to repeat it. I don’t even know why he met me at the railway station. In the meantime I shall just have to assume that all these services were arranged by my nephew. I can’t be bothered reconciling them with his written instructions (lost) to take a taxi to such and such a number in the old street, where I would find this good neighbour (named in the lost instructions) who had the keys, and would let me in.

Now he is saying, ‘Oh, and before I forget, the wife thought, the wife said, would you like to come along tonight, and have a bite to eat with us?’

I manage to smile. ‘So kind, and do thank her. But I’m much too tired.’

‘Fair enough. She thought you might be. So she left a bit of tucker in the kitchen, just in case. And she said she’ll be along in the morning to say hello.’

‘That will be lovely. And now, what I would like most in the world is a big warm bath.’

‘Fair enough. I’ll just get that airlines bag, and those books and things, then I’ll push off.’

‘Thank you, Mr …’ And now I am forced to say, ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Cust.’

‘Cust. Well, thank you, Mr Cust.’

But now he says, ‘You don’t remember me, do you, Mrs Porteous?’

I shake my head.

‘You don’t remember the Custs at all?’ he asks incredulously. ‘The Custs, in the corner house, the big white one, with the poinciana trees?’

And now, remembering, I look fixedly at the wall beyond his head. ‘There were some Custs,’ I say with difficulty, like a medium at a séance, ‘who had the newsagency.’

‘That’s me! That’s us!’ Then he says, ‘Or was.’

Still in my trance, I say, ‘I worked there for a few months.’

‘Right. I was only a little chap then, of course.’

‘You used to practise piano scales in the room above the shop.’

He begins to speak, but such trances must not be interrupted. I raise a hand. ‘Wait. I have just remembered your maiden name. I mean,’ I continue without a blink, ‘your Christian name. Jack.’

‘Yes, Jack.’

And now he has thrust his head forward and is looking at me closely. I hate being looked at closely. My husband used to do it. Suddenly I am furious with this man Jack Cust, furious with him for his cushiony obtuseness and even for his kindness. I shut my eyes tight. His voice sounds very close.

‘Mrs Porteous, you’re done in, aren’t you?’

I can only nod.

‘Look, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Standing gasbagging! I’ll get those odds and ends up and then I’ll really push off.’

As soon as he goes I sit down hard in the straight-backed chair by the window. It goes without saying that never, never in my life, have I chosen the right clothes for a journey. I am hot in all my silly wool. As I take off my jacket Jack Cust comes back, almost running this time, and looking at me anxiously, as if I may be going to beat him.

‘Where do you want them, Mrs Porteous?’

‘Just there, thank you, Mr Cust.’

His anxiety changes to indignation. ‘But the front bedroom’s all fixed up for you.’

‘Then please, put everything in there.’

He does. He does that. And at last he goes.

It is wonderful to be able to stop smiling. I feel that ever since setting foot in Australia I have been smiling, and saying, ‘Thank you’ and ‘So kind’. I have one rather contemptible characteristic. In fact, I have many. But never mind the others now. The one I am talking about is my tendency to be a bit of a toady. Whenever I am in an insecure position, that is what happens. I massage the smile from my face by pressing the flesh with my fingertips, over and over again, as I used to do when I had that facelift, all those years ago. I long more than ever for that hot bath, but am too tired to move. I am troubled, too, by guilt, because I was irritable with Jack Cust, who was so kind. I shut my eyes, and when, after a few minutes, I open them again, I find myself looking through the glass on to a miniature landscape of mountains and valleys with a tiny castle, weird and ruined, set on one slope.

That is what I was looking for. But it is not richly green, as it used to be in the queer drenched golden light after the January rains, when these distortions in the cheap thick glass gave
me my first intimation of a country as beautiful as those in my childhood books. I would kneel on a chair by this window, and after finding the required angle of vision, such as I found just now by accident, I would keep very still, afraid to move lest I lose it. I was deeply engrossed by those miniature landscapes, green, wet, romantic, with silver serpentine rivulets, and flashing lakes, and castles moulded out of any old stick or stone. I believe they enchanted me. Kneeling on that chair, I was scarcely present at all. My other landscape had absorbed me. And later, when I was mad about poetry, and I read
The Idylls of the King
and
The Lady of Shalott
, and so on and so forth, I already had my Camelot. I no longer looked through the glass. I no longer needed to. In fact, to do so would have broken rather than sustained the spell, because that landscape had become a region of my mind, where infinite expansion was possible, and where no obtrusion, such as the discomfort of knees imprinted by the cane of a chair, or a magpie alighting on the grass and shattering the miniature scale, could prevent the emergence of Sir Lancelot.

The book was one of my father’s. It used to open at the right page because I had marked the place with a twist of silkworm flops, a limp and elongated figure-of-eight. Many readings must have been necessary to drive it into my mind so that I still retain it, because I was—am—a person of undisciplined mind, and in
spite of the passion I had for poetry, I could seldom hold more than a few consecutive lines in my head. The poetry in my head was like a jumble of broken jewellery. Couplets, fragments, bits of bright alliteration, and some dark assonance. These, like Sir Lancelot’s helmet and his helmet feather, burned like one burning flame together. Often, I used to walk by the river, the real river half a mile from the house. It was broad, brown, and strong, and as I walked beside it I hardly saw it, and never used it as a location for my dreams. Sometimes it overran its banks, and when the flood water receded, mud would be left in all the broad hollows and narrow clefts of the river flats. As soon as this mud became firm, short soft thick tender grass would appear on its surface, making on the green paddocks streaks and ovals of a richer green. One moonlit night, coming home across the paddocks from Olive Partridge’s house, I threw down my music case, dropped to the ground, and let myself roll into one of these clefts. I unbuttoned my blouse, unlaced my bodice, and rolled over and over in the sweet grass. I lay on my back and looked first at the moon, then down my cheeks at the peaks of my breasts. My breasts did not have (nor did they ever develop) obtrusive nipples, but the moon was so bright that I could clearly distinguish the two pink discs that surmounted them. I fell into a prolonged trance. I heard the sound of trampling and tearing, but it seemed to come from a long way off. I was astonished when I saw the horse moving along the edge of the cleft. I see him now, a big bay, walking slowly and pulling grass with thievish and desperate-looking jerks of his head. When he had passed I jumped to my feet and quickly laced my bodice. I buttoned my blouse and tucked it into my skirt. My brown hair ribbon lay shining on the grass where my head had been. It was before I put my hair up. I must have been less than sixteen.