by Thea Astley
‘My grandad owned your dad’s place once. Reedy Crossing.’
‘Bullshit!’
‘It’s true. My grandad was Martin Pelham.’
The other boy reddened. ‘What about your grandma, then? What about her? Some camp gin. Pelham doesn’t count as your grandad.’
‘He went to a better school than this.’
Vine held his breath. Other boys coming across from the playing-fields looked at him curiously.
‘And what was that? Wombat College? Mulga Grammar, eh?’
‘No,’ Normie Cooktown said. ‘It was a place in England.’ He scuffled feet and memory. ‘Rugby. My grandma told me. She was his moodja.’
‘And what’s that then? What’s moodja?’
‘His wife.’
‘Not his real wife, mate. Just a camp gin like I said. Your grandad was a gin jockey, just a gin jockey, see. And what was the name of that posh school again?’
‘Rugby.’
‘Never heard of it,’ the senior boy said, full of spit and contempt. ‘I’ll ask sir.’
Vine pushed the door wide in time to see Normie launch himself at the other boy’s face. There were snarls and blood as he pulled them apart. Normie’s face had darkened with old grievance and Vine knew that the inner anger would stay and harden and wait for its moment.
Sometimes, strolling through evening in the desolation of the school grounds, dodging Marcia, trying not to think of Marie Laroche, he wondered if he were truly alive. None of that cogito ergo sum stuff that merely planted the body in position. Not even tango ergo sum—clutching his fingers so tightly they bit into the palms of each hand. He was part of a dream in God’s eye, as insubstantial as tumbleweed, flimsier, rolled every whim-way. Although he’d chosen, hadn’t he, this furrowed path—marriage, classroom death (yes, it was often that) with its petrifying repetition that greyed hair and mind—he had to hurt the flesh palpably at times to gauge whether he was or wasn’t.
He wasn’t.
Sometimes, too, when he mooched along the dying streets of the Taws, he kept seeing Tony Shell who had broken into his own fantasy, pushing that broken-down wheelbarrow piled with his few belongings, heading for the sea lanes on the margins of that dream. Years gone, yet there was no touching Tony Shell, no connection by flesh or letter to that handsome Apollo substitute, one hand on the shoulder of the captain of the first eleven, or at football practice crushed in a too enthusiastic scrum and, later, God knows what at shower time, his jolly voice raised in jokey hurry-up pep to the team, their genitals shrunken under the cold water.
Where should he start to begin?
I am alone, he told himself, watching Shell and barrow topple over the world’s rim. Watching his wife resentful in the kitchen. (‘Do we have to stay on here now we have Matthew? We need more room.’) Watching his son move through napkins, infant classes, junior school, as if distanced from his aloof, awkward teacher-dad who could not, not ever, chum it up and play happy families. The job made him act out that same part daily with strangers.
That bogus idealism of extracting structure from chaos! There was an unalterable plane geometry to his movements: the clock the tea/toast the clock the bell the classroom the toted piles of exercise books the bell the repeated texts the stale jokes the texts the bell the common-room bitchings the clock/bell the…the…the…
‘I wonder whatever’s happened to Tony Shell?’ his tongue found itself asking as he sat at breakfast.
He watched his wife wrestle with the past, then tighten her mouth and nod warningly in the direction of their son who was wolfing toast. Her faint headshake barred further comment.
‘He’s teaching in Brisbane,’ Matthew told them, working at marmalade. He was full of cheery candour.
They both nagged then: how did he know? He was twelve. That barrow had been pushed across the horizon more than a decade before.
‘Apocrypha,’ their bright kid replied. ‘School legend.’
‘But why would you want to talk about him?’ his naive father asked, curiosity niggling. ‘So long ago now. What sort of things do you boys talk about, anyway?’
Matthew put down his knife and regarded his parents with clear and amused eyes. ‘Whenever Parsons gives us his yearly pep talk on moral duty, special friendships. That sort of thing. That’s when. The seniors who remember the seniors who filtered it down. What a scandal, eh?’ It didn’t even dint their son’s aplomb.
Shrug shrug shrug. Incompetent at handling this. Was Matthew really his biologic child? Vine wondered. He had peered for traces of Doctor Quigley’s broad and handsome Irish face and could find no genetic endowment. In fact, his son sported a junior version of his own anguished ascetic mug. But healthier.
‘A fine lad,’ Doctor Quigley would comment on those few occasions they ran into each other at the coast. ‘A grand boy.’ And he would chuck the resentful Matthew under the chin.
‘My lad,’ Vine couldn’t resist emphasising.
‘’Tis a wise man,’ Doctor Quigley murmured offensively, lapsing into a deliberate and rich brogue. ‘Have you time, then, for a drop of the crayture?’
Vine felt doomed to remain in that inland mining town and soon after his son’s twelfth birthday, yielding to his wife’s complaints, rented a house on the town outskirts from whose creaking walls he would walk the dusty mile to school. His wife gave up her duties as matron and was replaced by a local war-widow. A resigned Pretorius took over as resident master.
The move did not stop him thinking of Marie Laroche.
At certain times of day in bright sun and at certain angles created by wind, the struggling eucalypts brandished daggers of light reflected off their oily surfaces. Dagger upon dagger. He was learning, too late in life on the treadmill, to find grace in the tiny beauties and amazements that came his way. Wife and son moved in separate worlds. He nourished a longing for tenderness.
There was nothing, he told himself and his wife one morning at breakfast, like the loneliness of marriage.
Behind them the radio blared carefully edited reports on AIF activity in Buna and Kokoda. Vine winced at the cultivated dispassion of Gerald Morrow, known locally as the Voice of the North.
‘You’re telling me!’ Marcia rattled cutlery. She had picked up Yankee idiom in shopping forays at the coast. And what else? he might have asked. She had frequent mysterious appointments, absent midweek for days at a time. ‘War work,’ she would not quite explain.
He didn’t want an explanation.
Surprised again.
‘The garden mourns—Der Garten trauert,’ Schwarzkopf sang one morning as Vine shaved, bracing for the day. ‘Sommer lächelt erstaunt und matt in den sterbenden Gartentraum—Summer smiles, astonished, weary, into the garden’s dying dream.’ And he realised—he knew—he was in love.
In love for the first time in forty-odd years.
Dismissing a misty film of the girl who sang ‘Die Forelle’ as a warm-up prelude to this.
A middle-aged man’s whimsy, he self-accused. Folly.
No. Never. He could have wept as Schwarzkopf sang those final five words: ‘Ist dies etwa der Tod?—Can this be death?’
Don’t answer.
The love object was not but soon must be made aware. After all, they worked together, more or less, she with her classes in French, her sketchy assistance with the school choir. (The visiting music master had long gone and died at Lae.) Replacements came and left and the headmaster struggled with numbers and tried never to replace. ‘Make do,’ he kept saying. ‘There’s a war on.’
Vine had his private war. What was it about her?
Marie Laroche was small, almost invisible one might say but for the passion of unruly hair that shadowed her unemphatic features. She would sit quietly in the staff common-room, her head bent over butchered translations and exercises, to glance up, when her name was spoken, with a short-sighted blink of violet.
This day she was blinking at the wrong man, a pudgy army reject from the south who had come to take Cl
arrie Somerdew’s place. He wrote poetry and had published a small collection of verse, copies of which he left lying about. His rich, world-weary accent was a source of mimicry to the junior forms but his cherub face below a crusting of black curls regarded his classes with an amused assurance. He was unashamedly bored by sport.
‘Did you say something?’ Miss Laroche asked, smiling at the cherub face.
‘Not I,’ Mr Warlock said. His own smile, directed at Vine, was too knowing, Vine thought furiously.
‘I did,’ Vine said. ‘Nothing much really. Just that that must be even more tedious than the stuff I mark. More room for error.’ An uncrossing of his skinny legs, discomfort in the stomach, a contraction of the heart.
‘Not really.’ She smiled. Her face became oddly pretty, slightly lopsided under the shadow of her hair. ‘These things have their humour.’
‘Do they? Do they really?’ He was simply shoving the conversation along. Mr Warlock rose, gathered books ostentatiously and left the room.
‘Of course. Look. Let me show…’
And earnestly she searched out some idiocy in the scrawled misinterpretation of vocabulary-weak juniors. But Vine wasn’t listening. He was watching her hair, her mouth, the fragile curve of her neck, all in an imbecile and unexpected lust.
‘If you have a moment,’ she suggested shyly.
He had all the time in the world.
He began shadowing her movements, secreted a copy of her timetable in his desk. There was the music room emptied after choir practice where Miss Laroche, seated at the scabby Bluthner upright donated by the wife of the town clerk, would explain the follies of unpardonable chordal errors by the lads who had just destroyed a three-part version of Nymphs and Shepherds. But then she would add, might add, ‘Still, frankly, I can’t see why not.’
And she would play a sequence of chords. ‘You see? It sounds, well, interesting.’
He would agree that it did. He would agree to almost anything.
‘But this—’ hands striking at too ordinary resolutions, ‘this is what Doctor Parsons will expect on parents’ day.’
He suggested she might have Stravinskys in the making, Messiaens. The violet washed to the edges of his encumbered world.
‘You understand then? You like Stravinsky?’ If only she wouldn’t leave her lips so parted. He wanted to pop a chord between them.
‘Only now,’ he would have liked to answer.
Forty-seven, dear God, and in the throes of idyll, unexpected as rainstorm, as those rains that never came.
Yes, he could swear it was unplanned, unavoidable. That sudden stumble of the heart, a brief crippling that had not happened ever before, contracted from that first encounter a term ago at a staff meeting.
‘And this is Mademoiselle Laroche.’ Pretorius was ponderously making tea as they waited for Doctor Parsons to arrive. ‘Who will be taking our laddies down cultural Gallic groves previously unknown to their tasteless skulls.’
She blinked with embarrassment, uncomfortable at Little Graph’s heavy-fisted humour, and had gone to sit uneasily on the edge of a chair by the window.
‘May I?’ Vine had asked, rinsing out a clean cup for her at the sink. And she had nodded and taken the cup from him with a well-shaped hand that, later, he hoped might discover another confidence in his. Her smile was annihilatingly sweet. Madman!
It was inexplicable. Walking home that afternoon through the dust beside the yellowing paddocks, he could not even recall if she were pretty. He supposed she was. In any case, he reformed her so, moulded an object of worship that was faultless in contour.
He found he was driven by his ferocious obsession. He lent books, waylaid her in corridors, added biscuits to her saucer at morning tea, began once more translating suitable or unsuitable Horatian odes that he slipped shyly onto her desk.
He had to talk about it. Mention her name.
‘There’s a new member of staff,’ he couldn’t resist confessing at dinner one evening. ‘A young woman.’
‘Oh yes.’ Marcia was dishing up vegetables. She didn’t glance up. ‘What’s she like?’
‘She’s the new French teacher. A little music as well. The choir.’
He began eating, keeping his eyes busy on chops. If he looked up his wife might see the explosion of light.
‘That’s the last of the meat coupons,’ she said, tackling her own meal. Displaying enormous uninterest. Their son looked from one to the other as if watching ball-play.
‘You should be especially nice, Dad,’ he said, ‘to Ted Werner. His dad’s the butcher. Old Parsons is always giving him special favours.’
‘I’m incorruptible,’ his father lied. He glanced over at his son and smiled in a way that was almost complicit. And from that moment Marcia was aware.
Abstracted by love.
He barely thought of Marcia, who had announced one desperate night after he shrank from her chafing fingers that she thought it time for her to think of her own sexual comfort.
Good God! What was she doing uttering words like that in the days of prudish pursed lips and euphemism—had the American presence brought with it a climate of laissez-faire? The weather certainly created its own equation with the passions and when Vine was informed by a noted town gossip (eyebrows raised, gobble-mouth downturned) that his wife had been seen driven coastwards by American staff cars—‘She does work hard for the war effort, Mr Vine!’—he felt nothing but relief.
‘Ah, yes,’ he had said to the gooseberry eyes of the local grocer’s wife. ‘Ah, yes. These are changing times, aren’t they. Bully for her!’ He gave a little bow. ‘And bully for you, too!’ A courteous afterthought that made the lady flush.
Envy, he judged. And he blanketed his own guilt.
So, it was not difficult for him to announce as they washed up together some days later, ‘Marcia, I’m afraid that we must separate.’ He did not notice his son paused by the door.
She asked, lathering vigorously, ‘Why? Why now?’ After years, she added, of indifference.
There was nothing concrete he could offer, only infidelity of the heart. He gave the dinner plates an extra polish and put them carefully on the rack. He admired their bland circular neutrality. He rubbed between fork tines. He moulded the teatowel into every cup.
‘You can’t do this,’ Matthew said, shocking them both. His hands, separate, were clenched in tight fists. ‘Please don’t do this.’
This rented kitchen in this rented house with its vertical timber walls, its picture-rails hung with the cultural loot of years—his and hers—as disparate as their owners. He had contributed two Renoir prints and a stuffed bookshelf, a pottery bowl he had picked up in Tuscany once on a walking holiday, and an anonymous pen-and-ink sketch of palazzi in Venice. She had an array of landscapes of never-to-be-visited European lakes and waterways and some terrifying rednesses of the wide brown land she had cut off butcher Werner’s yearly calendars.
Vine put down the last cup as gently as if it had been formed of sand, hung up the towel, noting the obduracy of his wife’s shoulders as she mopped last drizzles from the sink-bench, the startled and appalled eyes of his son.
‘Oh Matt,’ he said hopelessly, arms loose at his sides. Then quietly he let himself out the back door to stand beneath the guava tree.
How could either of them resist the essential loneliness of marriage, that artificial marcotting based on paradox? As a couple—was ‘grew’ the word?—sweltered together, they also grew/sweltered apart. First rule of family. Familiae regula prima: amor odium est. Love is loathing. In a perverse way he was glad she had had her fling with a group captain, American colonel, whatever, and wished for his own sake it might have lasted longer. It exonerated him, he reasoned falsely.
But.
There was always a but.
I love you, he had confessed to Marie Laroche, trapped between piano and store cupboard. He noticed the yellowness of the piano keys, the permanent depression of one of them, a missing ivory, the flaking of polish
from the front boards where the candlestick holders had been removed leaving permanent sores.
Three days before, he had endured an improving session in the school chapel while a visiting cleric harangued. Hello, boredom, he had whispered, safe at the very back of the room from reports of mutiny. Hello.
Should he pack a bag?
Should he move to a downtown hotel? (He had caught sight of his son’s expectant profile at that point.)
Should he do nothing?
What could be more and less attractive to his natural sloth than that?
If only Marcia would leave.
The silence surged out from his rented house one mile away to pummel him there.
So, I love you, he had admitted, but without much force.
The young woman did not know what to say. The abruptness of his words shocked. She thought, perhaps, that he was old enough to be her grandfather, a grandpère with fanatic eye.
She began stacking music sheets.
I am serious, he insisted.
She watched her hands shuffling and ordering torn pages within folders. All those little attentions of the past month had meant friendliness, she believed. Not this.
Say something! he demanded. Please! (Animation at last!)
What?
You must have known, he floundered. Since you came I…We could leave here. (Eagerness took over.) There are other schools, other places. We could go away now, next week. Oh soon!
Excuse me, she had said, pushing past his groaning body to shut the piano lid and place herself on the forte side of safety. Samuel, she added.
His first name came as a surprise. It seemed years since anyone had used it. The young woman’s face had flushed a terrible red that just as quickly drained away, leaving freckles startled by his declarations of love.
Please, he begged. He felt tears scorch his eyelids, a gulp clamp the air in his throat.
Not now, she said gently. We can’t talk about it now. She could have wept for him. She made the mistake of placing a consoling hand on his arm and in a second he had her clutched to his bony frame that shook with the despair in his blood. Her response was small cries of fright, of struggle and shove. The piano stool crashed against his elderly shins and almost as quickly he released her, humiliated, shamed, to begin the endless apologies that would dog him till he died. He heard her protest that they were little more than strangers, that she would have to love him as well. She did not.
