by Robbi Neal
The result would be thirteen miles of trees on either side of the main road out of town. A tree for every man and woman from Ballarat who had answered the call and gone to war, planted in order of when they enlisted. Each tree had a plaque with the soldier’s or nurse’s name and number. The avenue would be a small way to honour the dead, who made up more than a tenth of the town’s population, and it would also honour those who had returned. The Lucas girls started a trend that swept the country and towns everywhere began planting avenues of honour. But everyone knew the idea had begun in Ballarat with the Lucas girls. Three thousand nine hundred and twelve trees were to be planted. It was nearly finished — just a few more Saturdays and the job would be done.
But there was no planting today.
The Lucas girls were with everyone else, jostling in the middle of town at the intersection of Sturt and Armstrong Streets outside the Town Hall, whooping and hollering and hugging. The war was officially over.
The crowd spread all the way from Drummond Street down to Grenville Street. The Town Hall bells rang over and over. Whistles blew and the brass band played and everyone whooped and hollered and the noise could have been heard in Bacchus Marsh if the townspeople of Bacchus Marsh hadn’t been making their own cacophony. Boys swung girls they didn’t even know over their arms as if they were about to tango and kissed them as though it would be their last kiss. The women Beth had recruited into the Women’s Peace Army smiled satisfied smiles and acted as though it was their efforts alone that had ended the war. Women who had been working wondered what would happen to them now and whether they would still be able to have jobs and earn their own money. Boys grabbed the twirling streamers flying from the roof of the Town Hall and tied each other up and yelled grandly that they had captured the enemy. Girls took strands of broken streamers and danced around lampposts as if they were princesses or tied streamers in their hair. Mothers gave thanks to God that some sons would be saved, if not their own.
The soldiers were the heroes of the hour and were patted on the back so often they got hand-shaped bruises up and down their spines. No shop owners argued when the soldiers told them to close up and celebrate. But the tram supervisors insisted the trams keep to schedule, though how they could when Sturt Street was blocked from one end to the other by the throng and the soldiers stepped onto the trams and took the controllers’ keys and hid them so the trams were forced to stop and the conductors happily joined the party. The police later had to negotiate the return of the keys from where they were stashed at the Soldiers Institute. Hats flew in the sky like escaping budgerigars and the brass band played ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’ and everyone sang along at the top of their lungs and then the band played ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ and everyone knew the words to that one too. Then they went back to ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’.
Edie held thirteen-year-old Gracie’s hand tightly as they were bumped along in the crowd. She looked over her shoulder regularly to make sure Gracie was okay as bodies pressed against bodies in the throng and bells and whistles shrilled in her ears. Her blood rushed through her body making her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright. She couldn’t help smiling and laughing, swept up in the joy that encompassed the entire town. The happiness made Maud Blackmarsh lean over and kiss Milton Blackmarsh firmly and lingeringly smack on his lips and she hadn’t done that in a good twenty years. When she finally pulled away he went back in for another kiss. Happiness ran through the earth and into the mines making the gold nuggets sparkle and if miners had been down there they could have plucked them from the earth with their fingers. But the miners were drinking beer in the street and clinking glasses with each other and cheering the girls who gave them kisses, even if they were married. The happiness filled the trees and the sun held back its heat, making it an extremely pleasant day to spend on the streets with everyone else in town. The band started playing ‘Tiger Rag’, men grabbed whichever girl was nearest and swung them wildly, pulled them in tight and then swung them out again and people pressed back to make room for the dancers. Edie and Gracie were swept away from each other. Edie frantically looked for Gracie and caught a glimpse of her laughing as a boy twirled her in his arms.
Suddenly Edie was swung out and in and then the soldier who had danced her away took both her hands in his and his feet tripped here and there in the air and she tried to keep up. He swung her out and his fingers waved in the air, he swung her in and under his arm and out again. He pulled her to him and clasped both her hands in his, their fingers entwined. He spun her around and his chest was pressed to her back as they danced, her feet not quite touching the ground as he carried her weight.
Then she was facing him again and she could see all the happiness she had ever known caught in the blue shine of his eyes. When the music stopped they bent over, laughing. Before Edie caught her breath he pulled her to him, took her face in his hands and gently kissed her lips. She was thirty-two and had never been kissed like this and she never wanted it to stop. Without thinking she gave herself to it and when he finally pulled away, a soft sigh escaped from her heart and he heard it and smiled, as though he knew all there was to know about her.
That knowing smile pulled her to her senses and she put her hands on her hips and tried to look offended.
He didn’t apologise, he leant in and whispered in her ear, ‘You looked so beautiful,’ and he took her hand and shook it vigorously. ‘Virgil. Perhaps I should have introduced myself before I kissed you,’ and he laughed. Above the noise and music and bells, he yelled, ‘What the hell,’ and pulled her to him and kissed her again and she didn’t think another kiss could be better than the first one but it was and too soon it was over and he was standing back and she tried to steady herself. He handed her a card.
Mister Virgil Ainsworth
Lessons in Motor Vehicle Driving
Attend 305 Windermere Street
‘My new business,’ he shouted over the noise as he walked away. ‘I lose the uniform next week. I could teach you.’
Edie stood in the middle of the crowd, no longer hearing the noise or feeling the people jostling against her. It was just her, standing in the middle of nowhere, holding his card.
Suddenly Gracie, puffing and red in the cheeks, was standing in front of her and that pulled Edie back into this world.
‘What are you grinning at?’ she asked. ‘Stop it, Gracie. Stop that right now.’
But Gracie couldn’t stop giggling and smiling at Edie.
‘I saw it all,’ she said between her chuckles.
‘There was nothing to see,’ said Edie, and she took her notebook out of her skirt pocket and slipped the business card inside.
Away from the crowd, watching everything but not a part of it, Paul turned and softly kissed Lilly and she closed her eyes and shut out the rest of the world.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been kissed like this by a man. It must have been thirty-one years ago when she was thirty-three, when Theo was just twelve years old. It must have been the morning her gentle Peter, who she had married despite her parents’ protests, despite everyone telling her she would be nursing him in his old age, had tenderly placed his hand against her cheek and kissed her goodbye on the front verandah. He had walked to the bank in Lydiard Street where he was the manager and when he arrived, his chest, which had never fully recovered from the consumption, filled with fluid and drowned him and he never kissed her again.
Now Paul was kissing her and it was making her tremble and she could feel the warmth of his lips on hers. He pulled away and she opened her eyes and saw Maud Blackmarsh staring at her open-mouthed and she remembered Edie standing up to Maud in her front yard and how good that felt, so she put her arms around Paul’s neck and kissed him back and hoped she remembered how. Somewhere inside her was the person she had been when she ran away to marry Peter. She could almost touch that person and she wanted to stay in this world that was just her and Paul with her lips on his long enough for her to gra
b hold of who she had been. She hadn’t been that person for a long time.
Paul pulled away from her but he was looking at her kindly. His eyes were moist and glistening, as though he was finding himself, too.
‘Let’s get away from this raucous party. Let’s go for a walk around the lake,’ he said.
Yes, she thought, let’s stay in our own world.
He took her arm in his and placed his hand over hers. ‘I’m sixty-four, Lilly,’ he said as they walked. ‘I’m thinking I’ll retire next year — well, partially retire. I’ll keep a watch over things at work but maybe I won’t go in every day. Maybe I’ll take a trip away. Maybe we could go together? Somewhere where only we two will know who we are.’
She couldn’t answer him because she was still trembling and she didn’t trust her voice. For two years Lilly had been having dinner with the Cottinghams every Friday night. She would arrive at four and help Edie and Gracie prepare the meal. Now that she knew Edie, she could see why her son had loved the girl so much. She was filled with a dignified compassion for others that she had inherited from her father. If Edie had any sorrow that she hadn’t married Theo, or any bitterness that Beth had married him, she never showed it even once. All Lilly saw was her love for her family, her single-minded commitment to mothering Gracie and caring for Paul. If Edie thought anything was a threat to either of them, her chin went up in the air, her feet dug into the ground and she became immovable. Lilly had seen it when Old Mister Crocket at Queen’s Anglican College had, after many threats, finally given Gracie the strap for singing while doing an exam. Gracie had come home in tears and said that she hadn’t even realised she was singing, it just happened. Edie’s chin had gone up and her eyes had narrowed at the injustice of this crime against Gracie. She dropped the potato she was peeling and stormed off down to the school, leaving Gracie to be comforted by Lilly. When she came back she said she had spoken with the headmaster and threatened him with all the legal ammunition at Paul’s disposal if they ever touched Gracie again.
And Gracie — well, she was just a delight. The girl seemed to have a permanent smile glued to her face. Even when Lilly’s heart was bitter and scorched that she had lost Peter and now Theo, Gracie would smile at her and she would feel her heart softening and she would find herself smiling back. If you are smiling at the world, how can you hang on to resentment? Gracie was thirteen now and would be finishing school next year, and Edie had her chin in the air about that, too. She was angry that Paul wouldn’t let Gracie take a job. He was sticking to his guns that while he could support the girls, there was no need for them to go to work. He said they had a social responsibility to leave jobs for the people who needed them and couldn’t survive without them and that was even more important now there were going to be returned soldiers needing work. So that was that.
Six months after Lilly had started having dinner at Webster Street on Fridays, Paul had started coming home from work early on Fridays so they could play croquet together on the back lawn before dinner. If it was cold or raining they stayed inside and played snakes and ladders, climbing ladders of self-denial and kindness and falling down snakes of depravity and unpunctuality. Soon he was leaving work at lunchtime on Fridays, meeting Lilly at Ligar Street and walking with her to Webster Street. They played rummy and snap and his hand sometimes landed on hers and he’d leave it there and gaze into her eyes until she said, ‘I got there first. I just beat you fair and square, Paul Cottingham.’
Then she would join Edie and Gracie in the kitchen and she’d cook him a different cake each week and they all ate together in the kitchen. After dinner he always took two slices of her cake and she felt filled up and nourished and didn’t eat any herself because she wanted to leave it all for him. What was unsaid between them smouldered away quietly, keeping them warm. Now it had been said and she was afraid everything that had been so wonderful and so unexpected would change.
They walked up Sturt Street towards the lake in silence. Truth be told Lilly wanted to sit down, have a cup of tea and maybe an Anzac biscuit, which would be fitting today, and mull things over. They reached the lake and sat on one of the slatted benches in the shade of a tree. The sun filtered through the leaves, putting its arms around them, and they sat in its warmth. They watched the swans bicker while the ducks cajoled their nervous offspring into swimming further on the lake than they had before. A group of swans skittered across the water, building up speed until they took flight and soared victoriously into the sky.
‘You wouldn’t think such heavy birds would be able to fly so gracefully, would you?’ he said.
‘No, not at all,’ she agreed.
‘You are coming to dinner tonight?’ he asked anxiously.
‘But it’s not Friday,’ she said.
‘I hope you’ll come Friday as well and several other nights too.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I thought you might like a lemon meringue pie. I haven’t made one since before the war. Missus Blackmarsh gave me some eggs from her chickens, so why not use them on something extravagant.’
They walked hand in hand to Ligar Street to collect the eggs, then to Webster Street, where Lilly picked lemons from the tree in Paul’s backyard. She squeezed the juice into curd and whipped egg whites into gentle white clouds while Paul spent an hour taking the boards off the door to Lucy’s room. They came off much faster than they had gone up.
Thirty-Four
Lisbet
Saturday, 8 May 1920, West Coker, England, when Reuben cannot forget Theo.
Reuben had a splinter that was festering deep inside him. It was the loud hum of the plane engines, the explosions of metal and bodies, the rage and sorrow that tore a man apart. The voice of God constantly nagging, reminding him life was finite, and the voice of the Devil asking if he could live with mortal life and its disappointments. God challenging him to make use of what he had and the Devil tempting him to throw life back in God’s face. Or were they the same voice — God and the Devil? The voices and noises crashed in his head, fragmenting into shards like the thinnest glass shattered on the floor. Reuben remembered the cart taking the dying Aussie away from him. The man’s breath had been hot on his face and he must have caught something from him because after he’d touched that man everything changed for him.
It was in the moment of death, when the boy with the cart had finally come back and they had loaded the silent body onto it. As the wheels of the cart had started to roll away over the dirt, the man had opened his eyes and looked at Reuben, trying to tell him something. Reuben had run to the man he knew only as T Hooley and put his ear against the man’s lips, waiting for a whispered secret of life, the secret you only knew too late, in the moment of death. But T Hooley whispered no secrets to Reuben and Reuben stood, disappointed, and the man seemed to take his last breath so Reuben banged the side of the cart to go on. As the cart rolled away Reuben felt something rush from him after the man and the cart. He was sure it was his soul. That night the voices and the nightmares began. He was officially diagnosed with shell shock, and given a few weeks to recuperate. Then he was declared fit for duty once again and was sent back into the circus until the next time, when he could take no more of it. He spent the rest of the war like that, in and out, in and out.
‘I shouldn’t have come back,’ he said to Holmes. They were sitting in his father’s study in Ashgrove House, in the dark. The light from the moon glinted off the whisky bottle but their faces were hidden in shadow. They were drinking his father’s best whisky and smoking his cigars. His father Doran and mother Lisbet had gone to bed.
‘But you did come back,’ said Holmes.
‘What?’
‘You did come back, Reuben,’ said Holmes, and he puffed white smoke into the night.
‘Why, do you suppose?’ asked Reuben, and they leant forward, as if searching the darkness for some deep truth.
‘You came back in one piece, to boot,’ added Holmes, ‘and everything’s going ahead.’
‘I heard
things are going to get bad. There could be a civil war, like the French, if there’s not enough work.’ Reuben spoke without any hope for the future, his future. He took the cigar box and offered another to Holmes, then took one for himself and bit off the end. He lit it with his RAF-issue lighter and passed the lighter to Holmes.
‘Rubbish. Where did you hear that nonsense? From an accountant, I’ll bet,’ snapped Holmes, and held his glass out in the moonlight for a refill.
Reuben filled his glass until the whisky slopped over the top and spilt onto Holmes’s fingers.
‘Cheers,’ said Holmes, licking up the spilt whisky.
The war had made life so utterly dreadful for so many people. How could worse possibly be coming? Worse just wasn’t possible, but Reuben knew worse was coming, he could feel it inside him. The voices in his head told him. They told him over and over and never shut up. All the optimism and glory had been shot out of him. His soul had been shot out of him, and this was what was left.
‘My father is at me to find a job. I tell him that I’m leaving a job for some more needy fellow,’ said Reuben.
‘We had the war to end all wars and now it’s time to get in on the action. Buy stocks, property, whatever you like. It’s all booming. Get focused,’ said Holmes. ‘You don’t have to work if you don’t want to, but for God’s sake get yourself a wife, Reuben. There’s plenty to choose from — more of them than us thanks to the war. There must be some piece of skirt out there you haven’t yet seduced that you could settle down with. Look at me, Reuben, I’m married and happier for it.’
Reuben raised a sceptical eyebrow. Holmes had married his family’s choice of bride, not his own, and spent more time between other women’s legs than his wife’s.
‘Before the war, a fellow of standing was expected to be a gentleman of leisure; but things have changed, Reuben. Get a wife and then think about a job — that’s what I have to say on the matter.’ Feeling that he’d done his bit and shown Reuben the way forward, he stood up. ‘I think I’m done in.’
