by Thea Astley
From her living-room window I see Dagoombah squatting in cobalt. Closer in, the tottering houses weighed down by mango trees and just beyond them, on the front, the boarding school where Tinker and I and later Claire had been dormitory-bound. Claire, of course, tried to fight the bonds. She went south. She plugged her way through a university course, driven to escape the drear of it all, and ended up teaching in some four-street town in the south-west of the state where despair led her into marriage with another pub-owner’s son. She is merely repeating the cycle. Poor Claire. We write. We exchange dutiful letters. But these days it’s as if we are barely related. Mother, unchiding, uncommenting (she has her own private scandal!), rattles between our unhappy ménages on duty visits.
Back then, then, Tinker and I, that chaste pair, had planned other lives. From Tinker’s window I watch uniformed day-girls trailing out the gates and along the Strand in the afternoon release. And there I am once more in a hushed assemblage of prim-faced boarders as Sister Assumpta slides onto the assembly-hall stage and stares down the chattering mob into dumb delicious terror.
It took only seconds. The geography of her face, the pattern of that well-known landscape, became frozen.
‘There is a girl,’ she informed us with her careful speech that spaced each word so softly she had us all straining, ‘who has had an unfortunate accident in the dormitory. I am sure you know what I mean.’ Our eyes sought each other. There were small and knowing smirks. ‘She has,’ Sister Assumpta continued, fondling her beads, ‘spent some time switching mattresses from her bed to another, to that of an unoccupied one in the junior wing.’ (Instant vision of some weak-bladdered girl lugging the guts into the neighbour room—we did know our Shakespeare!—around midnight.) Tinker let out an unfortunate snort of mirth until quelled by Assumpta’s eye as I shook beside her. ‘Would that girl…’ Long pause. ‘See me at the end of assembly.’ Another terrifying hiatus. ‘And also that other young lady who made that extremely rude noise.’
Our exits. Our entrances. We understood only the smaller dramas.
As we filed out Tinker nudged my gaze towards an unfortunate in the form below. ‘She always looked like a kidney problem. Bet it’s her.’
We all hung around the hall doorway longing to see who might confess. Charity hadn’t claimed us yet.
Nor had it claimed us when wretched Father Brimstone, as we called him, came to take our senior class for apologetics. He was a delicate and nervous young man who cringed from the critical eyes of six adolescents. Somehow Tinker always steered the discussion to infringements of the sixth commandment. Impurity was the only sin that concerned us. It racked our days. Sins of the flesh in thought, word, deed! the mission saviours thundered in the incense-filled candlelit chapel. Of course I realise now I didn’t know how to commit any of them. But Tinker…
‘Any questions?’ Father Brimstone would foolishly ask after twenty minutes of boredom on ex cathedra infallibility.
Tinker’s hand—she was stunningly pretty then, despite a persistent splash of acne—would wave a languid fiddler’s-bowing arc.
‘But not all rules can cover every case, can they, Father? Not in the real world? There are circumstances.’
‘I don’t understand,’ the unfortunate Father Brimstone would say. They had chopped words before.
‘Imagine,’ Tinker would propose—and we all imagined—‘a shipwreck on a desert island. Two survivors—a man and a woman. There is no possibility of rescue. Just exactly, er, Father, what is their position?’
Someone giggled. No one dared say ‘missionary’.
Father Brimstone dropped his eyes before Tinker’s bland knowledge-seeking earnestness. She was achieving a delicate and fervid curiosity. He adjusted his collar. It was very hot in the classroom.
‘The Church is quite specific on the matter. There could be no…um…congress.’
‘Congress?’ persisted Tinker, her eyes wide.
‘Relationship.’
‘But years and years? After all, the Church does teach that the contracting parties are the celebrants of marriage.’
Father Brimstone looked at his watch. Twelve eyes watched him look.
‘The marriage must be blessed by an appointed minister.’ ‘There is no past, no future,’ countered Tinker, irrelevantly as we all thought then. ‘Only now. We only understand now. Which is gone even as I say now.’
‘You’re too philosophical for me,’ Father Brimstone said, managing a slight chuckle, ‘and anyway I can’t see…Look, girls, I think that’s enough for this morning. There’s Sister Assumpta at the door.’
Tinker smiled. ‘Next week. We’ll talk about this next week, Father.’
‘Of course, of course.’
Sister Assumpta’s eyes drilled through the six of us impeccable in our navy uniforms, our white blouses, our slyly curling mouths.
‘I hope the girls have been behaving.’
‘Indeed. Indeed.’ Father Brimstone on the run. He dreaded the ritual of conventual politeness. He wanted to dodge morning tea: the best china, the slice of sponge cake.
‘I will speak with you girls later,’ Sister Assumpta threatened with a cool knowing eye, then hurried after Father Brimstone to uncover imagined lodes of misbehaviour.
Tinker never did discover what could or might happen on her deserted island. She cut a swathe through the conservatorium she attended in the south. She played violin with an elegant effortless careless passion and after her unfortunate affair with the cellist wed, on a recuperative holiday at home, after a weekend’s courtship (What kept you, Tinker!), a baby-faced local whose parents owned several stores in downtown Sugarville—Gerald Morrow’s ironic name for this town.
‘Are you in love?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Tinker had stared gloomily about the empty rented house crammed with appalling furniture that her father-in-law had donated from the slow-sales section of one of his stores. There was a threatening double bed in brilliant orange high-gloss, a fake cedar dining-table with six matching chairs, and a squat and uncomfortable three-piece cliché of Genoa velvet seatery complete with inset arm protectors of wood veneer.
‘Jesus!’ she had said on my first visit to the love-nest, ‘I didn’t know it meant this.’
‘Then why did you do it?’
‘Oh God! Who knows? Who’d damn well know!’
She began making up for it as she thought of the now, the vanishing present.
I think I mouth off! What about Tinker? She was a feminist apologist before her time.
Not long after Tinker returned north, that ugly phrase, that arithmetical summation of females—vital statistics—began to appear in print and resound from the lips of cheapskate radio announcers salivating over beach-girl competitions. Thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six had greater authority then E = mc2. Our saviour pals from the New World weren’t shy about using it. One day at a bus-stop in Flinders Street as I waited with Tinker, a cheeky GI with an engaging grin sauntered up and lingered. ‘Say,’ he said, breaking the tropic ice, ‘you girls have terrific vital statistics!’
Tinker looked at him coldly. ‘And what are yours?’
‘What are my what?’
‘Your vital statistics. Eighty? Sixty-five? Two?’
‘I don’t know what you mean, sugar,’ he said moving a little closer.
‘The largest number is for your intelligence quotient,’ Tinker said smoothly. She smiled.
‘And what about the others?’
‘I think you can work that out.’
‘Ah c’mon, lady!’
The bus was just pulling in. Tinker moved forward to follow my nervous flight and with one foot on the step turned and said clearly, ‘IQ, height, dick.’
After the island, as I said, and after I finished school, I became part of a cast: two bank clerks, one wharf foreman, an elderly teacher and a junior from Burns Philp. Mother cooked and cleaned, doing a Martin de Tours, patron saint of reformed drunkards and innkeepers. Not t
hat there were any reformed drunkards. They were quickly shown the door. Two young girls helped in the kitchen and with the laundry. We weren’t a cheerful lot and I was unmoved by any of those lumpy boarders who sat apart from us at mealtimes below the lazy ceiling fans. By eight o’clock each morning they were already sweating into their shirts.
Outside this louvred building perched on the lower slopes of the hill, trees plotted and spied upon our half-shuttered evening windows, sending leafy warnings to the lonely men sprawled with their sticky dreams upon their bachelor beds.
I tried resolutely never to think of our last weeks on Doebin, of the horror, the killings. Yet the house and its tenants repeated some kind of pattern. I, too, would have to marry to escape.
Would that be escape? Already Claire was planning flight to Brisbane and a university course. Would that help? Would anything break apart those conventional constraints?
The piano had come back from the island, jangling across on a barge. Now it stood like a carved trophy in one corner of the sitting-room whose windows gaped downhill towards the wharves and the jangling waters of the bay. Schumann in the tropics! Mozart! Grieving joyous crystals of pure white!
‘Och, you don’t want to be playing that any more, mavourneen,’ the good doctor had cried when he bounced in one day not long after we had moved there. He was still limping, but attractively, from the wound in his groin. (We did not discuss the wound. We did not discuss that fearful night. It was as if we had all taken vows of silence.) He tossed Kinderscenen on top of the piano and began to rummage in his bag. ‘Here! I have a little something for you I had sent up from Sydney. It’s been a while coming at that.’ Deftly he adjusted two volumes on the piano rack. I picked up the first. Fauré. The music appeared different, difficult. I sighed and replaced it beneath the second volume, Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire.
‘Let me tell you,’ jolly Doctor Quigley said, ‘about Baudelaire.’
Ah, the avidity with which I absorbed the lurid gossip, still biting, of another world, another time. Baudelaire’s then. (My now.) ‘So you see,’ Doctor Quigley murmured, one fatherly hand upon my fatherless shoulder, ‘“mère des souvenirs, maîtresse des maîtresses,” you are becoming aware. There’s another world altogether beyond this place, this flat boring pancake of a country.’
Those words prepared me, of course, for attendance at a concert the next week at a theatre in town. A chamber music group was travelling through the north (were they lost?) raising funds for the unemployed at the more populous centres. Everyone doing his bit, as it were. Halfheartedly I accepted an invitation from one of the bank clerks, an earnest lad, a reader with a permanently blocked nose who appeared at breakfast one morning, two tickets anticipatorily in his hands. ‘Go, darling,’ Mother urged. ‘There’s so little here.’
The bank clerk dinked me into town on his bicycle. My best dress flapped in the darkness as I clutched at the handlebars, feeling his boyish arms encircle me. His phlegmy breathing honked in my ear. There was a short, horrifyingly fast ride downhill before we spun dangerously into the main street to skid to a stop right outside the theatre where he wedged his bike between two parked trucks and chained it to a hitching-post—survivor of horse-and-buggy days. He was so young, so enthusiastic. In the dim light of the foyer his blond stubble glinted. Already he needed a shave. He sucked in air and smiled at me with a kind of triumph but all I could think of was the now of his mucus-ridden snorts, the pimples, forgetting the enthusiasm that was so moving. (He was wearing his best tie.) The now of it all.
Now. It affects me.
We edged our way past those already seated. In the row behind were Doctor Quigley and Matron Tullman, already recovered from a gunshot blast to the neck and smiling stiffly as the acute doctor spotted me and leaned forward to make quacking sounds of welcome and pleasure. (Even the words I chose those days of sharpened awareness seemed to have a derogatory flavour.) Old charmer Quigley looked wonderful in a dinner jacket that smelled slightly of mothballs. There were only three men in formal evening wear in the whole concert hall.
All through the Haydn I could feel the doctor’s eyes warm the back of my neck. There is no magic in a young woman being aware of who is aware.
At interval my snuffling partner raced away to purchase synthetic orange juice for us while the town’s cultured spoke confidently and informedly about the players. Well, some of them. You could see most of the husbands were hating it as they shuffled and fiddled, dragged there by wives anxious to display silk and beadwork. Bank clerk Dennis genuinely loved music and was so excited at the prospect of a Beethoven quartet in the second half he almost forgot my presence as he guggled his soft drink, and not even the swooping of Doctor Quigley as I modestly sipped alerted him to the possibility of a senior, more sophisticated attention.
Matron Tullman’s blazing coolness simply breezed past to burnout.
‘Enjoying it?’ quizzed Doctor Quigley, leaning to catch my reply, a little too close. Both of us were all eyes. ‘Quite a cultural explosion for this part of the world, eh? The man next to me was snoring through the Brahms. But only softly, mark you. His poor wife kept nudging him awake.’
‘He’ll be worse during the Beethoven.’ Dennis grinned, exposing large healthy teeth. He blew his nose vigorously. Shamed and delighted—yes, both!—I dropped my eyes and stared into the orange flare of my waxed paper tumbler. Not drinking but drowning.
‘Nasty cold you’ve got there,’ the doctor commented. ‘You need an early night.’ Mock-warningly he smiled at the pair of us, me in my best skimpy blue and Dennis with his strangled Adam’s apple bulging above an unaccustomed tie. Doctor Quigley was playing concerned uncle while Matron Tullman dropped a light but possessive hand on his arm and began steering him away. ‘Time!’ she cried girlishly. ‘Time to go in!’ The doctor rolled put-upon eyes at us and made flippant protest gestures as he was led off.
‘He seems a nice chap!’ Dennis, too, was a nice chap. A pity about the acne and the permanently blocked nose. Wiser, now, perhaps I would settle for those negatives. But I said, ‘Yes, yes he is.’ I said I would tell him later about our first meeting, about Christmas, about the horror. I whispered, as we edged back to our seats, ‘He was witness at a murder trial,’ and was energised by the exhilarant gulp beside me, the sudden electric tension in my companion’s arm who now could not wait for the concert to end.
‘Shh!’ People around were scolding as he pestered with half-questions. ‘Shh!’ The theatre lights were already down.
That was my only outing with the bank clerk. What is left of that evening but the recollection of a chaste and dry-lipped peck on the cheek and a copy of The Man Who was Thursday left at my breakfast place? He persisted, of course, with invitations, other books, but Doctor Quigley had swung into courting mode within the week, dazzling me into partnering him to a number of private dinner parties (where was Matron Tullman?) and mind-numbing musical soirées at the homes of old Sugarville families. I would shock them with the Wald-stein, all three movements, while they shifted sweaty legs and attacked my prestissimo with coughs and Doctor Quigley beamed sadistically. Afterwards I would ask, ‘But Marcia?’
‘Never mind about Marcia,’ he would answer. ‘She’ll be taking up a post at the Taws. Don’t worry your adorable—and it is adorable—little head.’
I feared I was going to enjoy being someone’s pet.
Mother was not altogether pleased with this turn of events. She gave minatory eye-rollings.
I hadn’t even begun to grow up.
My head is not so little.
When, on one of those evenings of pearl and ash so common during the cane burn-off, Doctor Quigley suggested marriage, I accepted. Partly I was charmed by his continued attention; partly I wanted to escape the boarding house and the stream of elderly deadbeats the Depression had brought, men who stayed one night or two, then slipped away without paying. Mother could hardly afford that. But, ‘Poor things,’ Mother said. ‘How could they pay? There’s so little wor
k. All they can do is keep walking.’
And that was true enough. Those gaunt faces still float across my memory alongside a picture of Mother buying cheap cuts from the butcher and spoiled vegetables to keep a giant soup simmering just in case more half-starved desperates should come by. Mother was softening, softening.
‘The classic pot-au-feu,’ Doctor Quigley announced, tucking in and not minding at all sharing the kitchen with a tramp whose trousers and shoes let in the weather. I liked him for that. I wanted to soften too. That was the day I said yes.
‘You’re a grand woman,’ he told Mother. ‘Grand. Women should be soft.’ (I know now he meant malleable!) ‘I like a soft woman.’
Mother, of course, was soft and hard. An interesting amalgam of opposites. Maybe tough would be a better word. There she was, a tall fair-headed woman with fine bones and a sufferingly determined mouth and chin. Handsome was the word others used and even her foolish refinements had been knocked askew by levellings tempered to the winds of pre-war. Not that any one of us was aware of war looming. The purges in Germany meant little to us south of the equator. After all, as Doctor Quigley pointed out, we were still doing our own purgings, working off our own guilt-driven cruelties on the indigenes. Who cared? There was general silent approval. ‘The buggers,’ as the manager of one of Sugarville’s banks said over dinner, ‘aren’t even human.’
Yet a few days after I agreed to marry Doctor Quigley, these general concepts received a blow in a surprise visit from missionaries Starck and Weber who had come into town for some kind of spiritual sustenance.
They had no trouble running Mother to earth and had a favour to ask. I was banished from the sitting-room and went to twiddle fingers in the kitchen, peeling endless piles of potatoes and pumpkin pieces for dinner. After half an hour Mother fetched me back and the missionary ladies exclaimed with delight over my health, my proposed marriage. All the usual politenesses. They, I must confess, looked worn out from their work in the field. But they glowed with a terrible zeal.
