Tirra Lirra by the River (9 page)

Fred loved Elizabethan prose, and often quoted from it. The words I am thinking of went something like this,
‘Want cannot be withstood. A man can do but what he can do, and when the lion’s skin is out at the elbows, why then, the fox’s case must help.’

My lion’s skin, never too sound from the start, must have been out at the elbows indeed for me to adopt so readily the skin of the fox. The image of myself as sneak thief comes back the more vividly for having lain so long quiescent. There I stand, one hand cupping purse or pocket to control the chink of coins, while the other dips, and selects by touch. My eyes are turned towards the door, my heart beats light and fast, and my ears strain to gauge my safety by the two voices in the living room. The coin pinched and pocketed, I prance on tip-toe to the lavatory, where I pull the chain before loudly opening and shutting the door. I then saunter back to the living room, where Una Porteous has just turned on the wireless. Three chairs are grouped about the cabinet. Meek in my revenge, ascendent in my secrecy, I fold my hands, and sit, and smile.

One curious sidelight occurs to me here. At that time there was a newspaper in Sydney called
Smith’s Weekly
, a coarse-grained affair of cartoons and ‘humorous’ articles. One of its regular themes concerned wives stealing from their husbands’ pockets. The popular acceptance of these jokes suggests that in Australia I had many sisters in petty theft. But perhaps such jokes were also current elsewhere in the world at that time. I have no means of knowing.

I secreted all I stole, and when I had enough, I went to see Ida Mayo, being careful to choose those days when Una Porteous visited a cousin in a distant suburb. At Bomera the big double doors still stood open, Folly and Wisdom still faced each other across the marble hall, and in Ida’s rooms the little lamps still shone, though on less opulent and fewer materials. There was a new lot of artists, shabbier than the last, but outwardly just as insouciant.

‘They do help each other out,’ said Ida. ‘I’ll say that much for them.’

‘No word from Lewie?’ I would ask.

‘I did hear he was in Melbourne. Things aren’t quite as bad there. New South Wales is the worst hit. Still, I’m getting by. These slumps don’t last for ever. Just hang on, Nora, and I’ll give you that job after all. And in the meantime, keep your hand in.’

Sometimes the gentle watercolourist would be sitting in Ida’s rooms. ‘That’s right, sweetheart, whatever work you do, always keep your hand in.’

To keep my hand in, I made dresses for Una Porteous and her friends. I had never made a garment for anyone but myself, and at first I was dismayed by my lack of skill in cutting the cloth
so that I was able to construct it round these variously shaped bodies, but they praised me so lavishly and repeatedly that my critical sense gradually diminished, and my standards were undermined. I read Colin’s school books and became fascinated by geometry. I worked through the first theorems and at night deserted the wireless to sit in our bedroom and solve problems. Una Porteous took my chair from the group of three and set it in ostentatious loneliness against a wall. I was thirty. ‘You would never think it,’ said the women for whom I made dresses. And they were right. When I caught sight of my reflected face I was startled to see it still so fair and candid. I discarded Colin’s geometry book, seized his French grammar instead, and found it much to my liking. My mutterings irritated Una Porteous.

‘But what good will it do you?’

I would raise my face and give her a preoccupied smile.
‘Ai-je? As-tu? A-t-il? A-t-elle?’

Helped by the memory of my own school French, I made good progress, except, of course, for my grotesque pronunciation. I began to defend myself with French verbs. When I was furious with Colin I no longer lost my temper, but said with smiling vehemence into his face,
‘Fus, fus, fut, fûmes, fûtes, furent.’

I was thirty-one, thirty-two. Panic attacked me again, the strong bird rising. I began to walk again.

The pattern I traced this time with my feet, dictated by streets and houses, was rectilinear, and as I walked I looked into the faces of passers-by, and hoped for rescue in fantastic ways. I was thirty-three. I sometimes rang Ida, but no longer went to see her. Deterred by an obscure shame, I no longer left the suburb. I had good food, the necessary clothes, a fire against the cold, a dentist to maintain my teeth, and a doctor to attend me in illness. Newspapers and magazines came into the house, Una Porteous would furnish me with writing paper and stamps on request, and for all other needs I made application to Colin. To explain my growing fear of leaving the suburb, I told myself that I was waiting for ideal conditions. I now used my stolen money to buy lottery tickets in false names. On buying the ticket I would be filled with light-heartedness and a belief that I would, must, win, and at this stage I studied the “To Let” columns of the
Herald
and made detailed and continuously changing lists of the books and clothes I would buy. Trust would then decline to a mere fervent hope, and during this stage I memorized the number of the ticket and whispered it over and over on my walks. But on the morning of the drawing I always lost all hope, and when the results were published I read them impassively, without disappointment.

On my walks, because I never saw any other walker as regular as myself, my thoughts sometimes turned to Dorothy Irey. This was the time when Grace’s and my mother’s letters were telling me of her clever children, her good husband who was ‘doing so well,’ and the extended house that Grace said was ‘the best home in the street’. As I walked I would imagine myself in her place, but would feel neither regret nor envy, because I knew that I did not want that either. Married to Bruce Rainbow, and living in ‘the best home in the street’, I knew I would still have been mad with restlessness, and moreover would have had the guilt of having become the plague of a kindly man.

‘All very well for her,’ I would tell myself. ‘She’s so gentle. But I’m not.’

At that time I also thought a great deal of Olive Partridge. Grace’s tantalizing news of Olive was that she had written a novel.
‘One of those modern things. I can’t say I cared for it much.’
I knew the name of it—
Cut and Choose
—but I had neither seen nor read it. My correspondence with Olive had become thin,
and had then petered out. Recently I had made several attempts to write to her, but the banality that was the curse of my letters to my family now extended to my attempts to write to Olive.

And only now, back in Queensland, in my late seventies, do I suddenly understand why. I was banal because I was lying. If my pride had allowed me to tell the truth, my letters would not have been banal.

The cut in Colin’s salary was well compensated by the drop in prices. He enrolled us both in the Green Gardens Tennis Club and bought me a racquet, canvas shoes, and the stuff for a pleated dress. I still felt the heat terribly, and in the early afternoons I sat inertly in the tennis shed, going into a doze in which the percussion of balls grew louder and louder in my head until it startled me awake. But when the shadows lengthened across the court, and I felt the stirring of cool air on my bare arms, I would jump to my feet and wait impatiently for my turn to play.

The vehemence of my game embarrassed Colin. ‘Tone it
down
,’ he whispered.

All the wives brought cakes or scones to the Green Gardens Tennis Club.

‘They really liked that cake of yours,’ Colin would say, in a satisfied voice, on the way home.

‘I liked Molly Furlong’s cake.’

‘Not a patch on yours. They really liked that cake of yours.’

Compliments on my youthful appearance pleased him less. When the local ‘sheik’ said, ‘I could fall for your wife, Col, I really could’, I would feel Colin’s eyes upon me in a sharp and hostile appraisal that belied his laughing mouth, and that night, without speech or preamble, he would seize me and fling himself upon me in methodical but frenzied sexual labour, while I maintained my detachment by murmuring inwardly, ‘
Que tu sois, qu’il soit, que nous soyons
 …’ For on those occasions when my blood rose, and I could not help but respond, I considered
myself vanquished, and felt humiliated beyond endurance. Far more than Colin’s person, I had grown to hate the physical bond between us, and the moment when we got into bed, and lay down side by side, was for me a moment of intense and bitter misery.

In my plans for escape I included no lover, but in my hours of lonely sewing and musing, when my head was bent over my work, and the crow of the backyard rooster rose above the distant hubbub of the primary school, I would become conscious of a heart-swelling hope, a vibrant space at my left side, a yearning in the nerves of my skin. Never once did I allow these longings to take on the density of an ideal, as I would formerly have done, but nor did I try to extinguish them. I kept them, rather, at a delicate distance.

Employers were advertising in the
Herald
once more. Junior Shop Assistant. Expert Shorthand-typiste. Experienced Tailoress. They could still afford to take their pick. I had quite stopped telephoning Ida. On Saturday nights, Colin, with his legs crossed and one foot jigging, sat between his mother and me at the local picture theatre. He bought a Dodge motor car, and every Sunday morning he cleaned and polished it on the driveway near the front gate. I think the closest I ever came to attacking him physically was one Sunday afternoon, when, as I got into the front seat beside him, he said in one of his genial outbursts, ‘Well, Mrs Porteous, aren’t you proud of your nice clean car?’ On most Sunday afternoons, he would take Una Porteous and me to visit those of his relatives who had not suffered too badly in the Depression. The men collected round ‘the Dodge’, while I sat with the soporific women. In this society, where there were no ‘sheiks’, they said I was artistic and refined, but had no sense of humour. ‘Nora’s a bit like Bette Davis,’ someone would occasionally remark. But Bette Davis was nobody’s favourite actress.

These relations, and the tennis people, because they were shared acquaintances, did siphon off some of the tension caused by the co-habitation of bitter enemies. Their conception of our marriage presented us with a model by which, if we pretended to follow it, we could avoid total disaster. Thus passed many months of meaningless harmony, slick as a ribbon but studded with carbuncles of silent misery. Who was I? Nora Porteous, née Roche, thirty-five, domestic worker, amateur dressmaker, detested concubine, and student of the French subjunctive tense.

‘Why don’t you charge for those dresses you make?’ asked Colin one day.

‘I thought you didn’t want me to.’

‘Times have changed.’

I had so settled into our uneasy jogtrot that it took me some time to realize that Colin had also changed. For years only the compliments and criticisms of others had made him notice me, but now, as if he had stepped over an invisible line, he began to circle me and rake me with his eyes.

‘Your legs are getting thin. Why are your legs getting so thin?’

He reached out and ran a finger along my jaw line. ‘That’s where you’ll go first, when you start to go. When you bend your head you’re puffy just there.’ I would wake to find that he had turned his head on the pillow and was staring at me with hatred, and I would turn away or leap out of bed. At the table I would bend over my plate to escape the same brooding stare. It was an invasion. My enemy had entered my hut and was squatting in a corner, waiting. Now, when I was alone and sewing, I was no longer visited by longings for love, but by dread that attacked me like an unhealthy mist. When I went into the bathroom, and a moth flew into my face, I screamed and sobbed. One day I embarked on a walk but at the first corner turned suddenly and made for home at an ugly panicky trot. I grew thin and silent, and as I knelt at the feet of the women, with pins in my mouth, I was conscious that their commonplace words held undertones of pity and curiosity.

Una Porteous walked about the house heaving sad gusty sighs. ‘If only you had learned how to
handle
him!’

The depression was over. The women were happy to pay me for making their dresses. At best, I could have left entirely, and at the worst could have sought alleviation in change. I did neither. I excused my terror of leaving the house by telling myself that I must not waste time and money on the mere alleviation of my state, but must stay in the meantime, and work, and save for total freedom.

Three months after I had begun to earn money, Colin came home with a girl.

‘This is Pearl,’ he said.

Pearl burst into tears and ran to the window and stood with her back to the room. I looked at her back, observed with distant accuracy the set of her raglan sleeves, and then turned to Colin. His eyes were waiting for me, and the hatred that had brooded there so long now flared out clear and victorious.

‘I want a divorce,’ he said. ‘I want to marry Pearl. I’ll do the right thing about money, of course. And then, there’s your dressmaking.’

My voice, when it came, was thin and meek and choked.

‘All right.’

But then anger struck like a gust from outside me, making me dizzy. I can hear my voice now, loud with spite.

‘I hope she will be able to
handle
you!’

Pearl turned from the window. ‘I’ll tell you one thing I won’t do,’ she cried through her tears.

I was taking the opportunity thoroughly to inspect her, so I suppose I sounded preoccupied. ‘What won’t you do?’

‘I won’t take Col’s hard-earned money,’ she wailed, ‘and give it to queenie boys.’

‘Where are they playing tennis, Doctor Rainbow?’

He has just arrived, and has put a thermometer under my arm. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I woke up hearing it. Can’t you hear it?’

‘No, I can’t.’

‘I often hear it. The first time I thought it was a dream, but this time I’m sure. Listen. There it is again.’

‘Oh,’ he says, ‘that. That’s shooting from the rifle range. Miles away, but this northerly brings it.’

‘It sounds exactly like tennis.’