by Rod Jones
She was still a long way from being cured of her troubles. On occasions she would appear at his door in a state of near panic. Without a word of greeting she would take off her coat and lie down on Ayres’ ottoman and wait irritably for the massage and the soothing words to begin. When she was tense like this, the words flew out of her—her hallucinations, her old animal phobias, her affection for a dead pupil, little things about Willy and the mission spilled out, jumbled up—nightmare and reality together. It was as though her mind were a pressure cooker full of such fears and images, that the whole lot might explode disastrously in her head without the relief of her weekly visit to Ayres, and another of her hysterical breakdowns occur.
The animals, cunning creatures, lay in wait for her mercilessly: the toads and snakes pursued her wherever she went from the mission school. The starched white sheets and crisp counterpane of Ayres’ bed, the cream-painted bars of the bedstead, were no defence. One Tuesday she awoke after her morphine injection only to find a bloated toad sitting on her stomach, watching her. Many was the time she looked up from a book in Ayres’ sitting room to see the skinny brown snakes writhing in silent scrutiny across the parquet floor. Ayres feared that she might become a constant living rebuke to science.
But at last, after many weeks, something began to happen. The patient’s spirits seemed suddenly to improve, her general health was better and her hallucinations troubled her less often. She was able to engage more fully in the life of the mission school. She reported that her husband had allowed her to resume part of her teaching duties. On fine mornings she took the girls out of doors, reciting poetry under the mulberry tree in the mission garden. She even began to talk of plans for a short holiday. With her mind thus occupied she slept better, and she had apparently ceased her nocturnal wanderings about the city.
Only with the doctor did Julia Paradise continue to explore the world of her illness. In his dark room with the shutters closed, the line of his pipe smoke drifting up to meet the flickering blades of the fan in the ceiling, she was confident, even brazen. She began to impart quite deliberately to Ayres the details of her childhood which had so profoundly disturbed and excited him in ‘hallucinated’ form. Now she began coldly and methodically to build up for him a picture of her father, Joachim Johannes.
She lay in the doctor’s bed, relaxed in the crook of his big pale arm; or turned away from him facing the wall, her eyes open, shifting her head on the pillow from time to time to gauge his reaction; later she climbed over him, kneeling astride his bloated stomach so he could look at her flat little chest and dark nut-like nipples. And all the time she talked, and talked, as though she would never stop.
It was in this way their regular Tuesday afternoon adultery began.
II
When she was thirty and in the grip of that mad music she sang to ‘Honeydew’ Ayres, Julia often wandered back to the Duck River region in Northern Australia where she had spent her childhood. In particular she liked to dwell on that morning when she had drifted calmly away from her horrorstruck father on the roof of the bawdy house at Mem.
Her father, Joachim Johannes, a German-born explorer and naturalist whose feats have now fallen into obscurity, was often away from the big wooden house on the marshy land on the edge of the rainforest he and his English wife had inherited. Julia had been born in that house and she had vivid memories from the earliest age of the sound and sight of the mosquitoes rising in clouds at dusk. She remembered how the Kanaka and Chinese servants chattered in their strange mixture of tongues as they bustled the little Julia indoors and rigged the mosquito nets over the big casement windows. Even then, before her mother’s illness and death, the nursery maids and governesses blighted Julia’s existence.
When he was at home and not scaling mythical western peaks or traversing southern oceans, her father was on the brown Duck River, rowing bare-chested in the tropical sun with his sketchbooks and a wicker-covered jug of wine in the bows. In those hours she spent with her half-tipsy father in the flat-bottomed boat it had seemed to the child that the purpose of her life had already been accomplished.
It had been her father who had first taken her down to the wide slow river in the buggy, who initiated her into the world of the wild river animals. In the boat, straining the great muscles of his chest and arms as he rowed, he took time to point out the various species among the teeming bird life and the dull ribbons of snakes on the brown banks. It was through her father, ‘Doktor’ Johannes, an immense man with his little alpine mountaineer’s hat and his cigar clamped firmly between his teeth, that she first developed her love for the river life. Her father was blamed, first by his wife, then by the women he employed and seduced, for making their young charge such an incorrigible tomboy.
Years later, her father stood with Tina Terrina on the roof of the Hotel Continental in Mem the morning of the great flood, while the buildings and the animal population of the upcountry farms raced past them. He was astounded as he watched his daughter manipulating the tiller and expertly dodging the larger tree trunks and the bloated carcases of pigs, sheep, and cattle which had made their way downriver to the delta and the mangrove country and, eventually, to the sea.
Julia was tiny and the world huge. She had come inside early for her lesson. She loved her father’s study with its leather chairs, the big redwood desk and the walls full of books. But more than this she was fascinated by his laboratory which adjoined it through a door of frosted glass. It was in there her father practised his taxidermy and where he kept all his instruments and his trays of geological samples. Even the strange, awful smells attracted her: formaldehyde, ammonia and methylated spirit. She loved above all else to observe her father at work in there, to watch him with his white apron over his waistcoat and cravat as he cast his scientific spells over matter animate and inanimate.
Sometimes, such was his reputation among the local people, she had barged in and found him peering into the mouth of a whiskery islands man suffering from toothache; or miraculously producing a baby from one of the three fat De Vooer sisters who lived at the edge of the little settlement and who all wore identical straw hats with veils and tissue paper roses on them.
Door handles were unreachable and she could hardly lift her father’s black Bible from the lectern. Today she wanted him to read to her but the study was empty and there was only the smell of the leather chairs and the light coming through from the other side of the frosted glass door. Here she saw the shadow of her father bending over something inside—bending over the washbasin, or brushing his beard in the mirror, perhaps.
She stood in the dim study for a long time puzzling over the groans she could hear and watching his bending shadow at work on the other side of the frosted glass. She was putting off the delicious moment when she would walk in and he would show his surprise and pleasure, then turn back to his work at the table and benches.
The little girl in the neat pinafore, her father’s heavy black Bible hugged to her hollows, drew closer to the frosted glass door. The shadows continued to move. As she touched the door and it opened she felt very tired. The book slipped from her hands and was lost somewhere and she entered the room slowly as if she was moving through the warm landscape of sleep.
It came upon her so suddenly that she was amazed she hadn’t time to shout out against it, or even to shut her eyes. Yet now as she heard herself speak, her voice was very old, as though another were saying it: ‘Papa?’
A glimpse of their servant woman, Dolly Hang, full lips, squinting, smooth stripes of scar tissue across her cheeks. Pain and compassion for the child on her face. She was bending forwards over the scrubbed wooden table with her skirt around her belly, buttocks bared. Her father, fully dressed and maintaining his decorum in every way except that his trouser flies were unbuttoned, was in the act of penetrating her from behind. Her father looked down at the woman, whose face had always frightened Julia, as though surprised to find her there, then looked at his daughter at the door.
T
he girl turned and ran with her amazing discovery into the garden, where her mother was buried. Blank blue afternoon greeted her. Benign, mundane day, lacking in any sense of outrage. Wet washing flapped on the clothesline like laughter.
‘Douglas!’ the child called. ‘Douglas come quickly!’
As if by some trick of her father’s time-lapse photography she watched him advance. Douglas Hang leaned forward as he ran from the vegetable garden, carrying the spade he had been using to dig potatoes. Its sharpened head flashed in the sunlight. He swept the spade from side to side low through the air, and in his effortless jerky progress from one posture to the next he was suddenly at her side. But something was wrong. Here was Dolly Hang out in the garden where she was still bent over with her buttocks bared. All the members of the Hang family and their long dead ancestors in ceremonial dress were stepping forward in unison with the same jerky steps, a dance well-rehearsed, the skeleton of a dragon which only the child could see.
There was exquisite timing in their steps, they moved magically, they smiled, these ghosts, and showed by their smiles that they knew she was there. Smiles of unmistakeable recognition. It seemed strange to Julia that they did not attempt to speak to her in language. The blur of ancestral motion focused again into Douglas Hang at her side. She heard the water from the pump splashing into the iron bucket; then she felt the cold water on her cheeks.
Next she was staring up into Dolly Hang’s face. At first she could not understand how the woman could be out here in the yard under the bunya-bunya tree when at the same time she was in her father’s laboratory. Then she realized that time must have passed, and she was lying on the ground, a grey blanket covering her.
The world went dark and when it was light again Dolly Hang’s face had not gone away. Urgently, the child found herself trying to talk. She had never before felt such a blinding need to hack the words pellmell through the walls of her mouth and into the air, but the spell cast by the presence of Dolly Hang, and the blur of the Hang ancestors working their way around her locked the words away behind the root of her tongue, where they died, and in Dolly Hang’s arms the child shivered and itched, and found that she could say nothing.
Her illness brought about a sudden change in Joachim’s attitudes towards rearing the child. Now he became neurotically protective of the little mute, restricting her movements to a cruel and unnatural degree. The child, who had always taken her morning lessons out of doors, was now shut away inside the dark house. Lessons consisted entirely of reading in English. Although she was unable to speak or, apparently, to hear, Julia spent hours with books.
Joachim found that he was able to be at home more, and began to knuckle down at last to the composition of his monograph on the propagation of Pacific coral. Each morning he spent alone in his study, sifting through all the data he had tipped into a scatter of drawers through the years, and writing it all up carefully, in German, with his fountain pen, in a leatherbound ledger-sized journal he had purchased as a youth and had kept all these years for the purpose.
Each afternoon he took his daughter on nature excursions, although the routes he chose for her through the garden were always quite safe.
They made a strange sight in the Queensland sun, the European ‘doktor’ with his neatly-trimmed goatee, his felt hat and walking stick, in his light cotton suit, and the small girl, her face grown into a mask of pale seriousness, with that quizzical look the deaf mute develop. She had no freckles now, not even a touch of the sun in her features, her long black hair tucked up under the brim of her sun hat, her delicately-boned wrist cocked against the thought of any sudden attack from the bushes along the garden paths. Her eyes, flicking from side to side as she walked along the path had, as the summer passed, grown more and more disturbingly dark.
The child had a way of looking through her father which puzzled him. He did not read in it any rebuke for his actions. Behind that cool stare there was something taunting. Or as though she were inviting him to share a glimpse into the place where she continued to live.
During the season when it rained at the same hour every afternoon he often came upon her on the veranda on the southern, cooler side of the house, which he had filled with pots of his exotic plant specimens. One day she had her back to him and was apparently unaware of his approach, although Joachim was never entirely convinced of the genuineness of her affliction. The sound of the torrential rain drumming on the roof and in the trees was very loud.
Unseen by her, he spoke, describing all the wickedness he had in store for her, while the girl continued to stare ahead into the rain. When at last he walked around in front of Julia, for a long moment she seemed not to see him. These bouts of apathy he began to think of as her ‘absences’, in the mental notation of the scientist.
Although Joachim long worried that her brain had in some way been affected, the girl continued to display in her reading an undoubted intelligence. But as her twelfth birthday drew near and she began to menstruate, her grasp of the mathematical diminished to his profound disgust. She had no interest in staying up late into the night with her father in his wooden observatory in the garden, with his telescope and his charts, plotting the path of an approaching comet against the stars. This was of course Halley’s Comet, as its orbit approached that of the earth in 1910. Now the girl’s only interest was in romantic literature, and she did not stop at the cheap romantic novelettes she borrowed from her ill- educated governesses. She devoured all of Shakespeare in a matter of weeks, then memorized entire slabs from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. She read over and over obsessively that poem in which Coleridge describes how he approached the palace of Kubla Khan and heard the music played by the damsel with the dulcimer. All of this Joachim dismissed as contemptible, although as a scientist as well as a German he had to admit a grudging admiration for the works of Shakespeare.
The man went to extraordinary lengths so that his daughter might have European governesses. Invariably these young women wasted their train journeys north. Once he received a letter in reply to his advertisements in the coastal weekly newspaper from a widowed lady who happened to have a twelve-year-old daughter of her own. He thought that the companionship might have jolted Julia from her torpor. The other child, a spiteful, tow-headed Dutch girl, whose experience in the mission school on the coast had equipped her with a malice and cunning which far outmatched Julia’s, was always favoured in disputes by the mother. Joachim could not bear to see the look of uncomprehending misery on his daughter’s face, and he sent the woman away, although she was in all other respects a good and careful worker. But he sent her away not before he had taken her one night when she expected it least into his wooden observatory and seduced her in full view of Halley’s Comet.
In the classified columns of the Mem Courier his search for a governess continued. If only Joachim would have admitted it, his search was impossible because he was not looking for a governess so much as a successor in his bed to Julia’s English mother. And only a woman who resisted his advances out in the wooden observatory would be worthy of this honour.
He thought he might have found such a lady when the Scottish-born Vera came up to live at the house at Duck River. Her nationality was close enough to English in his eyes to substitute for his darling dead Elizabeth. She was invited out into the observatory one night soon after she had arrived.
As she bent forward over the eyepiece of the telescope he ran his hand up her cool leg. She began screaming with such intensity that it required the administration of so much laudanum as to render her insensible. It was as she lay drugged that night that the scientist finally conquered her. When she awoke and deduced from the bloodstained sheets and from the extreme tenderness of her private parts what had occurred, she went away. Nevertheless, Joachim remembered her fondly afterwards as that rara avis, the genuinely virtuous woman.
Julia was thirteen and had begun to grow breasts. She was as isolated from her father as ever, almost as inaccessible, he told himself, as the mountains at t
he source of the Duck River he had once explored. Even with his scientific zeal, he found that he could not chart his daughter’s ‘northern reaches’.
His daughter’s skin, now that she avoided the sun so completely, had begun to take on the same appearance as his wife’s during her long period as an invalid: pale, anaemic, the ‘English complexion’. And one day at luncheon while they were eating soup he noticed that the shape of her teeth was changing. Her eye-teeth were developing in such a way that when she opened her mouth for food and closed it again the tips of her eye-teeth rested on her lower lip—just like his wife’s, when she had been young. He felt the involuntary shower of memories rain through his mind.
On their infrequent visits to the coast he treated his daughter in public as though she were already his wife. He took her to the shops of the little port town dressed in her mother’s clothes he had bought in Europe twenty years before. Her mother had been a tiny woman, but even so Julia had to lift the hems of the long dresses as she tripped along the hot main street under the verandas. They were beautiful clothes. She wore a tailored dress with tight-fitting sleeves and a short-backed jacket trimmed with velvet, embroidery and braid. There was another dress of lace-edged lilac chiffon she loved to wear, with a jewelled buckle on the velvet belt. Her father allowed her to wear to town her mother’s little hat trimmed with an ostrich feather and a mauve veil which fell to just below het eyes.
With her grown-up dresses and extravagant hat he took her to the town’s sad tea room, the Astoria, gloomy behind its wide veranda, next to a draper’s. The draper, a short man in a grey apron, always scurried up to the door of his shop to watch them pass. There they sat up to tea and cakes in the window before taking the narrow-gauge train home in the late afternoon. Glimpsed through the window of the tea shop, or in the carriage of the train, the effect of the cosmetics and haberdashery was convincing, although when you looked more closely her painted little face was grotesque.
