How Bright Are All Things Here

by Susan Green

  A heatwave. When it was dark, mothers carried fretful babies down to the sea’s edge to catch the breeze while the men and children took torches and spears out for flathead. Later, whole families arrived with pillows and bedding to sleep on the beach.

  ‘Like we did in the Underground,’ said Judith.

  ‘No, Ju, not the same thing,’ said Rob.

  ‘Sleeping in public,’ she explained. ‘The Henry Moore drawings.’

  ‘But we’re not in danger, are we?’

  How could they even think in this heat? I paddled away from them and their talk. When something moved under my foot, I screamed, lost my balance and subsided into the water.

  ‘Bliss? Are you all right?’ Rob and Judith splashed after me, but I just laughed and lay back with my wet dress billowing out and they each took one of my hands and towed me along, Rob singing ‘Daisy Bell’, and Judith harmonising. I was giddy with the dark, the moon, the heat, the cool, the love.

  Near Rob and Judith’s house, there was a rest home for nuns. They walked in pairs in the early evening, ominous and black-clad, their habits and veils flapping in the breeze. When I read in the local paper that one of them had drowned, I was surprised. As I wrote to Felix, I could not imagine a nun in a bathing suit.

  Some mornings a kind of jungle telegraph would draw us down onto the beach with buckets ready to buy fish. The fishermen pulled their boats up onto the sand and from the full squirming nets they first threw back what they didn’t want. Into the shallows went the bony, the undersized, the puffer fish all stuck with poisoned spines and stingrays that flew immediately away from the shore, dark and demonic on their undersea wings.

  On fish days, Rob would take over the kitchen with Madame Prunier’s Fish Cookery Book.

  ‘Out! Out!’ he’d say, flapping a tea towel as if he was shooing the chooks.

  Later, when we were coming in from our last swim, we would see him on the top of the dune waving a red kerchief to call us from the sea to soupe aux poissons or bouillabaisse.

  Getting undressed before bed, I saw my silhouette as a huge shadow on the wall. There were two exaggerated curves; my belly rounded and full, my breast more conical but with a nipple that stuck out like a cork. I turned, lumberingly, this way and that to admire myself.

  ‘Braxton Hicks contractions,’ I read. ‘Painless rehearsal contractions which feel like a tight girdle being drawn around the stomach.’

  When I asked grandmotherly Mrs Landy next door, she shook her head.

  ‘Never had ’em,’ she said. ‘Are they new?’

  Watching my bulge quiver as the baby changed position, it did occur to me that it would be fun, all of this, with a father. I thought of Felix, and a baby of our own.

  ‘Sorry, baby,’ I whispered, looking over at the pile of pale blue aerogrammes on my dressing table. He – for I had a strong intuition that the baby was a he – was simply a poor little thing with bad timing. ‘If only you’d been sooner.’

  I felt very worldly-wise, very mature, imagining my life as if seen from far, far above like an aerial photograph, with the lines and tracks of fate, the dead ends and the roads not taken all clearly visible.

  I could almost read Felix’s writing, sloping and large like a child’s, from where I lay on the high, old-fashioned bed. There was never much news, but Gerda sends love at the end. An afterthought. Lucie too. What else did he say? I have no idea. Should the tone of his letters have alerted me to his unhappiness? Should I have sensed his dilemma, stopped the pale blue flight of aerogrammes across the oceans and just let him go?

  Sometimes, after dinner, Rob would turn on the wireless and, if he coaxed long enough, Judith would dance with him. Rob was a good dancer, but she wasn’t. Though she knew the steps, she was too stiff. She didn’t move her hips.

  ‘Exercise for the mother-to-be,’ he said once, holding out his hand. He took me in his arms, as far as my belly would permit, and we twirled around the linoleum floor, moving together in time, in tune, perfectly matched.

  ‘Fred and Ginger, Ju!’ laughed Rob.

  Judith laughed too, but we didn’t repeat the performance.

  Rob found an antiquated cane invalid chair. He reinforced it with rope and wire and padded it with an old quilt so I could lie in the courtyard in the sun. I had a two-piece bathing suit over which I’d put one of Rob’s shirts so I could decently bathe, but at home, in the backyard, who was there except Judith and Rob to see my bulge?

  ‘I feel like a pear sitting on a windowsill in the sunshine to ripen,’ I said to Rob.

  ‘A Beurre Bosc, then. You’re so brown.’ His shadow fell over me. ‘I must say, it’s impressive. May I touch?’

  ‘There’s some sun lotion over there. Rub it in if you like.’

  His hand moved rhythmically and I closed my eyes, stretched and must have purred, for Rob said in a strange voice, ‘Your freedom brings me joy.’

  ‘What did you say? Is that a quote from your friend Tolstoy in his dacha?’

  ‘It’s a quote from Rob Freeman.’

  I opened my eyes, and we stared at each other for what seemed like a long time. He was so close I could have put my hand around his neck and pulled his face down to mine.

  I don’t know. I will never know. The sun was like brass and I thought, obscurely, of the Rank Organisation. You know, at the cinema, the big gong and the muscle-bound man. No? The sun, a brass gong; the hammer striking and the sound reverberating, echoing. Awake, arise; like something from the Bible. Open the gates of the city . . .

  Rob sat back on his heels and said, in a different voice, ‘Did Judith ever tell you why we can’t have children?’

  I jerked myself upright and pulled the shirt over me. ‘Yes,’ I said, sitting up. ‘Can you hand me my sunglasses? Thank you. An ectopic pregnancy. Isn’t that it?’

  ‘Yes. Afterwards, she kept having pains, awful pains, and she put up with it for a couple of years, and finally her aunt gave her the money to see a specialist. He was a Harley Street doctor, Sir Robin Markham, consultant to the Duchess of Kent, that sort of thing. Apparently all his patients adored him and she was terribly lucky to get on his list. He told her that she had scarring and overgrowths of tissue on her fallopian tubes, and that he could fix it up for her. Did she tell you that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He fixed her all right. She came out of the operation thinking that now at last she might have some hope of conceiving, only to find that without asking her, without telling her, Sir Robin had performed a total hysterectomy.’

  There were only two of us in the maternity ward on my due date. Mrs Arthur was a rough sort of woman – working class, I suppose you say – but kind.

  ‘You a Pommy, are you?’ she asked me, and it seemed easier to say yes.

  ‘Where’s your hubby?’

  It seemed easier to say he was dead.

  According to her, her insides were so loose from child-bearing this baby was just going to fall out. Her husband, a little weasel of a man, came every day with the other children and took his orders for the running of the household.

  ‘It’s almost worth it for the rest,’ she said, laughing and shifting her bulk.

  Only four hours. It was a remarkably short labour for a first child, they told me. I was on my own for most of it – that’s how it was in those days – but one of the nurses gave me her hand to hold as I pushed him out. There was a bovine sound that I did not recognise as my own voice; the sight of blood and, moreover, the smell of blood; the waxy, pulsing cord; the floppy maroon afterbirth like a giant slab of lamb’s fry. Afterwards, I was handed something wrapped in a blue blanket. Judith was there, and Rob holding a big bunch of yellow roses.

  ‘It’s a boy,’ said Rob.

  ‘He’s beautiful,’ said Judith.

  I looked down at him. A red squashed face. Eyes shut in sleep, but little pursed mouth practising how to suck. A tiny, powdery fist with miniature transparent nails.

  Something in me rose. Or could have risen. It was
a welling, an up-swelling . . . but I soon put an end to it.

  ‘He’s heavy,’ I murmured, and the nurse took him from me.

  ‘I’ll take him back to the nursery,’ she said, and then I heard her telling Judith and Rob, as if excusing me, ‘She’s very tired. They can be hard, these short labours.’

  Mrs A didn’t say anything about my crying. She didn’t ask what was wrong. She said, from her bed across the aisle, ‘Don’t worry, lovey. It’s normal. And what with you losing your hubby, too, no wonder. Give yourself time. They’re a bit of a shock at first. Not all plump and pink and cuddly like you think they will be. The crying can be a bit hard to take, and not having no sleep. Like I said, give yourself time. Have you got a name for him? You can’t go on calling him baby. What was your hubby’s name?’

  ‘Gerald.’

  ‘You oughter call him after his dad. In his memory.’

  ‘He’s not dead. I left him. I hate him.’

  ‘Fair enough. You won’t be calling the baby Gerald, then.’ She shifted position, unselfconsciously heaving her breasts so that they sat either side of her chest. ‘What about your own dad? What’s he like?’

  ‘He was . . .’ I couldn’t think of a word. ‘His name was Malcolm.’

  ‘Malcolm. That’s nice. How about Malcolm?’

  I nodded, and she beamed. ‘That’s lovely. See. You feel better already, don’t you?’

  I left Australia on the Orcades on the first day of April, 1953.

  Judith said, ‘Now you can go to the Coronation after all.’

  GOING HOME

  ‘She never told you she’d had a child?’

  ‘No,’ said Paula.

  ‘I wonder if Dad knew,’ said Anne. ‘The secrets are piling up, aren’t they?’

  That comment and Anne’s stifled laugh were inappropriate, thought Paula. Unkind. Her chest felt tight with love and pity. ‘Perhaps in those days . . . well, there was a stigma attached to being a single mother.’

  ‘You’re quite right, Paula.’ Judith nodded for emphasis. ‘Divorce, separation – it all mattered so terribly much back then. A woman on her own with a baby would not have had an easy time of it. Nor would the child.

  ‘Malcolm was conceived after she and Gerald separated. She never told me how it happened but I often wondered if he’d coerced her. He could be abusive. Violent, too – I saw that for myself. Bliss was quite clear she wasn’t going back to Gerald. She didn’t want to start life with Felix, her new young man, with a baby that wasn’t his, and she didn’t think Gerald would want to have him.

  ‘So adoption was really the only answer. But I don’t think Bliss was ashamed, Anne. When she married your father, I think she’d come to a time in her life when she simply wished to put the past behind her.’ With a hard edge to her voice, she added, ‘Not realising, of course, the sheer impossibility of the task . . .’

  ‘Did Malcolm know? Did you tell him who his parents were?’ asked Paula.

  ‘Naturally, we told him he was adopted. He was always free to find out who his parents were. In any case, he would have seen the birth certificate when he applied for his first passport. Not that it would have been terribly helpful. He had never known Bliss as Elizabeth Adair, and as for Gerry – his full name was Vincent Bernard Ignatius Gerald O’Grady. Whether or not he ever followed up the issue of his paternity, I don’t know. But I think your question is, did he and Bliss ever . . . what is the correct term? Reunite? The answer is no.’ Judith started rubbing her hands together as if they itched. ‘Anyway, Bliss was anxious to get back to England to marry Felix. I never met Felix. He killed himself not long before she arrived. It was very sad.’

  ‘This is like a Greek tragedy,’ said Anne. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Oh, poor Bliss!’ said Paula.

  ‘And poor Felix. It turned out he was homosexual – life couldn’t have been easy for him. Of course, Bliss being Bliss – even though she lived among artists and God knows, half of them were – she didn’t have a clue. Anyway, she decided to stay in England and married James, who was Felix’s foster brother.’

  Paula didn’t want to hear any more. It seemed to her that Judith was relishing the delivery of this series of shocks. She showed no sympathy, no warmth, but a cold-eyed judgement. She wished they could leave.

  But Anne was leaning forward in her seat, encouraging her to continue.

  ‘She was impulsive and highly emotional – a romantic, if you like,’ said Judith. ‘So was my husband, and I suppose that’s why the two of them adored each other. For Rob, it was a way of seeing, a choice – and, I might add, a choice that kept him out of the mainstream of art for many years. For her, it was more instinctive.’ The old lady’s eyes were burning bright. ‘I used to tell her to grow up. I used to tell her –’

  She sighed and seemed to shake herself, as if loosening the grip of these memories. In a different tone of voice, she continued, ‘It’s actually a pleasure to talk about Bliss, to remember those days when we were young. We were, at one time, very close. But she . . . It is all a bit coloured, I’m afraid, by the disagreement we had about Malcolm. It was understood, when we adopted him, that he was not to know she was his mother until he was an adult, and then only if that was what he wanted. It was more than an agreement; it was a promise. And then, when she married your father and moved back to Melbourne, she wanted to tell him. I think she had some fantastical idea of us all blending together into one big happy family.’ She shook her head. ‘Actually, we argued rather badly. I told her no. No, absolutely not.’

  Absolutely not. Like an aged aristocrat laying down the law. But back then, thought Paula, Bliss and Judith were young; it was two mothers and a tug-of-war over a child. It didn’t matter now. None of it mattered. Both women had outlived their son.

  On the return journey, it was Anne who wanted to talk.

  ‘It’s just so amazing,’ she said. ‘God, we’ve got . . .’ She jerked her head towards the canvases, each wrapped in a blanket. ‘Hundreds of thousands of dollars. I just hope we don’t get rear-ended on the way home.’

  Anne paused but Paula had nothing to say. ‘It’s just like Bliss, isn’t it?’ she went on. ‘Leaving it till now to let off all these firecrackers. Bang, bang!’ Talk about mystery woman! It’s so weird. I mean, I always thought she was English, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Malcolm, her son . . . How about that? I thought she’d never had any children.’

  Paula still didn’t speak, and Anne changed tack.

  ‘I remembered the house as soon as I walked through the door,’ she said. ‘I mean, I’d forgotten all about it, but now I remember it quite clearly. I must have been – oh, maybe four or five. And Malcolm, he was so nice to me. I adored him, I wanted him to come home with us. Actually, I wanted to swap him for Tom. I cried for the boy – that’s what I called him, just “the boy” – I cried for him in bed that night and Bliss said we’d go back again sometime but I don’t think we ever did.

  ‘Funny, I can remember exactly what Bliss was wearing. D’you remember that reversible trench coat she had? Leopard-skin one side, white the other. And a white fur hat with a big brooch. Only costume jewellery, but that stuff can be worth a lot now. Vintage. Was it with her stuff?’

  ‘Yes, she kept all those clothes. They’re at home. We still have to go through them.’

  ‘Paula, are you planning to tell Bliss we know about Malcolm?’

  After a few seconds she said, sharply, ‘Paula, are you going to answer me? It’s a simple question, yes or no?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Paula said, feeling suddenly exhausted. ‘Perhaps if she asks us . . .’

  ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if Bliss and Judith’s husband were having an affair, would you? You heard her say they’d always adored each other. Maybe Malcolm was really his. That would explain a lot, don’t you think? I wonder –’

  ‘That car’s indicating, Anne.’

  And, Anne, would you please, plea
se, just shut up. Don’t you have even a scrap of compassion now you know Bliss lost her son? Is it really only scandal and gossip for you? How can you be so detached about the woman who mothered you?

  Anne accelerated away from the lights a little too fast. ‘But that would explain it, wouldn’t it?’ She turned briefly to Paula.

  ‘It was all so long ago,’ Paula said. She knew if she breathed one word of her feelings, the fragile communication she had with her sister could be lost for months. This wasn’t the time to risk it.

  Anne had an avid, excited expression on her face. ‘It would explain why she came back to Australia and why she let them adopt the baby. Though I can’t help thinking, how could she? I mean, she had him with her for two whole months! I suppose I shouldn’t judge, but, then, she was never a very maternal person.’

  ‘Anne! Have you no idea how much she loved us?’

  ‘She wasn’t,’ said Anne. ‘Maternal, I mean. I should know.’

  ‘Anne, Bliss loves you. She couldn’t have loved you more if she’d given birth to you. I know you think she pushed you into the art studies and that wasn’t what you wanted but, honestly, can’t you see how she’s always loved you? You have no idea how it’s hurt her, this . . . I don’t know, what do you call it? This distance you’ve made between you. She adored you, Anne, from the first, the first day she arrived. If that isn’t maternal, what is?’

  Anne braked quickly and hard to avoid a cyclist, then changed gears with eyes straight ahead. Paula could tell she wasn’t going to get a response. She said, in a gentler voice, ‘Keeping Malcolm must have been just too hard for her. I’m quite sure she did the best she could.’

  ‘Of course.’ Anne’s voice was crisp, as if she was correcting a mistake of Paula’s. ‘That’s what I said. You shouldn’t judge.’

  But you do judge, thought Paula. Anne was one up on everyone; it was her default position. She was the perfect wife and mother, with her faultless house and garden, her committees, her community work, her hobbies and groups and circle of friends. Admired. Envied too, probably. And she was so unhappy.