Playing Beatie Bow

by Ruth Park

  ‘Lucky me,’ said Abigail with equal cheerfulness.

  It was queer how her legs walked, her arms moved, her hand turned the key in the door. It was just as if her body went on knowing what to do, though her mind was numb with shock. She pulled out the drawer of her divan, took out the crochet, and sat in the bear chair.

  ‘Granny,’ she said to the empty room, ‘I have to warn him; you know that.’

  The crochet was more damaged than she had thought. The heat of the incinerator had made some of the old threads disintegrate. It fell into rags in her hands. She gathered up these rags, held them to her chest, and turned her thoughts with all her might to Granny, Beatie at her bench in the Ragged School – anyone at all who might hear her, help her to get back to some time before Judah embarked on The Brothers and drowned.

  She felt the force of her love and desperation tighten her whole body.

  ‘Granny!’ It was a silent yell, as had been the one she had given in her peril at the top of the old warehouse. ‘Granny!’

  The living-room began to waver as though it were behind a sheet of gauze that a wind gently rippled. The window that showed sea and sky and the Bridge darkened and was no longer there.

  She was somewhere, neither in Mitchell nor back in The Rocks. She was suspended as though in a dream, not hearing or feeling, doing nothing but see. And what she saw was a hackney cab, a knot of white ribbons tied to its door, waiting outside the church, Holy Trinity, the Garrison Church. The lean old horse had a rosette of white on his headband, and the cabby himself had stuck a white rose in the ribbon of his hat.

  Abigail gazed at this as though at a picture. She could do nothing, she could only wait. Then Beatie ran out of the church. She was in gala dress, a wreath of yellow and purple pansies on her still-short hair, a white dress with a pleated ruffle. The dress showed white stockings and elastic-sided boots.

  Then came Mrs Tallisker on the arm of Mr Bow, both still in their mourning clothes, though Mrs Tallisker carried a small basket of lavender stalks.

  ‘Granny! Granny!’ shouted Abigail, silently within the silence. The old woman looked uneasily around, then her attention was drawn to the church door, where a crowd of sightseers parted, smiling and clapping.

  Judah and Dovey appeared, tall Judah towering above the small lame girl. She wore a plain grey print dress, and a modest bonnet with white ribbons tied under her chin.

  ‘Judah! Don’t go on The Brothers. She will be lost. Don’t, don’t!’

  But Judah was admonishing a crowd of what were probably his shipmates, skylarking and pushing each other as they came out of the church. Beatie began to throw rice, and immediately the sparrows flew down from the trees on the green and snatched the grains almost under the sightseers’ feet.

  ‘Get away, you blanky things!’ Abigail could see the words form themselves on the child’s lips. Granny smiled and drew the little girl close, saying a word or two to her.

  ‘Beatie, can’t you hear me?’ sobbed Abigail. ‘Oh, Beatie, listen to me, I only want him to live and be happy with Dovey. Don’t let him go on that ship!’

  But Beatie did not hear. She danced about the bridal pair, kicked at the sparrows, half out of her head with delight.

  Abigail was able to look into Judah’s face as if she were only a few inches away. She saw his clear ruddy skin, his dark blue eyes, his white teeth as he smiled down at Dovey. He looked through Abigail as though she were made of air.

  Some of the bedraggled women in the crowd darted forward to touch Dovey’s wedding-ring, as though for luck. Solemnly she held out her hand to them, and Abigail saw the tiny red flash of the garnet in her betrothal ring, beside the thin glint of gold.

  Then she and Judah kissed Beatie and Granny and Mr Bow, and Judah lifted Dovey into the hackney. Granny threw the lavender in after them, and stood back, smiling.

  ‘Granny, Granny!’ sobbed Abigail. She could see the scene losing its colour, fading like an old painting. Granny looked about searchingly for a moment, as though she had heard something as faint as the cheep of a bird, then turned away and waved her handkerchief after the cab as it slowly rattled away, a crowd of urchins following it and pelting it with old boots.

  Abigail felt that her hands were full of dust. She looked down, saw them on her lap. The crochet was nothing any more but two handfuls of crumbled threads. Nothing was left, not a leaf of the grass of Parnassus, not a twist of the rope border. It fell over the bear chair like yellowed frost.

  The living-room was very cold. She turned on the electric fire and crouched before it, shuddering uncontrollably.

  Somewhere inside her a little thought arose: ‘He may not have shipped on The Brothers.’

  But she did not believe it.

  ‘Good-bye, Judah, good-bye,’ she said.

  Chapter 13

  When Abigail was almost eighteen, the Kirk family returned to Sydney. They had lived in several countries, and the girl felt an immense gap in both time and space since she had last stepped into the unit on the twentieth floor of Mitchell.

  ‘Quick, look out the window!’ squealed Kathy. ‘All the new buildings.’

  But Abigail was gazing wistfully about her old home.

  ‘Peculiar,’ she said to her mother. ‘It looks both smaller and larger.’

  ‘And grubbier,’ Kathy grumbled, looking at the marks on the walls, the many dents and scratches that were traces of unknown tenants’ lives.

  ‘Well,’ said Weyland, ‘if we can’t turn it into something that feels more like home, we’ll sell it and find another place.’

  ‘Art deco wallpaper,’ mused Kathy, ‘fringed lampshades.’

  ‘Red plush toot seats?’ said her husband. ‘I’ll shoot myself.’

  Abigail went into the bathroom. It was still the prettiest bathroom she had ever seen, but her face seemed to be at a different level in the vanity mirror.

  ‘Can I have grown,’ she wondered, ‘as well as all the other changes?’

  The face that looked back was not very different from that of the fourteen-year-old who had so often looked into the glass and cursed that she would never be a beauty. But time had thinned the cheeks, taken off a sliver here and put one on there, given the narrow dark eyes long fair lashes that looked engaging against the tanned skin. Norway had lightened her hair, too. It was now a streaky sandstone colour.

  ‘A bit like Beatie’s,’ she thought. It was queer she could recall Beatie’s face better than she could remember her own of four years ago.

  It had been a curious four years. They had made those months or weeks or minutes in that other century recede a little, like a dream. For the first year, her memories of her life with the Bow family had seemed bitterly real; she had been, torn apart with grief for Judah, a true unselfish mourning that he had not lived to be happy with Dovey, had children, grown old. It had been a long time before she made herself realise that even if he had not drowned, he would have died many years before she herself was born.

  ‘I might have been only a kid, but I did truly love him,’ she said, ‘and I wanted him to have his life, even though I could never share it.’

  Occasionally during those first dislocated miserable months in Bergen she had comforted herself by thinking that she had dreamed the whole story, or created the fantasy because she had been so upset about her parents coming together again. But she knew that was not so.

  ‘And how wrong I was about Mum and Dad, too,’ she thought. ‘What a silly kid to get so harrowed. And what a sillier one not to realise that adults have as much right to happiness as the young do.’

  Her mother peeped into the bathroom.

  ‘What are you mooning about?’

  ‘Just thinking about growing older, looking different,’ said Abigail with a smile.

  ‘You look beautiful, I know that,’ said Kathy, hugging her.

  ‘You, too,’ said Abigail. ‘Do you know what, Mother? I think I’ll go and see if the Crowns still live next door. Remember little Natalie, and hel
lish Vincent?’

  As she approached the front door of the Crown unit, she almost expected to hear the fearful sounds of domestic battle coming from beyond. But all she heard was a piano. Her heart sank a little. The Crowns had moved, after all. She pressed the bell, and after a little the music ceased and the door was opened by a tall, good-looking boy of ten or eleven. Peering at him, Abigail gasped, ‘You can’t be Vincent!’

  ‘That’s me, all right,’ he answered pleasantly. ‘But who are you?’

  ‘Abigail Kirk. I used to live next door. I used to take you and Natalie to the playground, remember?’

  ‘Hey, Abigail!’ He grinned with genuine pleasure. ‘You went away overseas didn’t you – Holland or some place?’ He turned and called, ‘Mum, come here, you’ll never guess!’

  Justine was overjoyed to see Abigail. The unit had been redecorated and was reasonably tidy. Justine herself looked plump and contented.

  ‘But Natalie, where’s she?’

  ‘Oh, she’ll be here in a moment, she’s out shopping with Robert. It’s her eighth birthday, you know. She’ll be so thrilled!’

  ‘She won’t even recognise me.’ Abigail laughed. ‘She was so little when I left.’

  ‘I’ll get back to my practice, Mum,’ said Vincent and, excusing himself, he went off into the next room. The piano started again.

  Justine said excitedly, ‘He’s so promising, his teacher says – something quite out of the ordinary. Remember what a fiend he was? Well, the moment he started music lessons it acted like magic. He just suddenly became an ordinary, decent kid. Bill and I couldn’t believe it. We say prayers of gratitude every night.’

  ‘Bill? Isn’t your husband called Robert?’

  ‘No, no; Robert’s my younger brother. He’s Nat’s favourite uncle, being so young. He’s only twenty. Should be here soon. Now then, start from the very beginning and tell me about everything. Did you go to Oslo University? Did you have any romances with glamorous Norwegians?’

  ‘Oh, three or four.’ Abigail smiled. ‘They’re irresistible people. Not serious though.’

  ‘You’ll die being back in this old mundane place,’ said Justine.

  ‘No, not at all. Oh, it seems a bit hot and bright after those northern countries, but I’m going to finish my degree at Sydney University. I’ll soon get used to it, and everything that happened in the last four years will seem like a fairy-tale.’

  The doorbell rang, and Justine jumped up. An older, bigger Natalie rushed in, her arms laden with parcels.

  ‘And Robert’s downstairs with all the big ones,’ she cried. Her gaze alighted on the visitor. For a split second she looked dumbfounded; then, yelling ‘Abigail!’, she dropped all her packages and hurled herself into the older girl’s arms. ‘Oh, you’ve turned into a grown-up, but I’d know you anywhere, anywhere!’

  As Abigail’s arms closed around the wiry strong little body she had an instant pang of regret for the troubled and tearful child Natalie once had been. It was almost as if she were jealous that Natalie had found a braver, surer self without her help. The child’s big grey eyes were frank and lively, the mournful little face was gay.

  She thought, ‘I suppose she’s forgotten everything’; but even as the thought entered her mind, Natalie put her lips close to Abigail’s and whispered, ‘Do you remember the furry little girl?’

  Abigail nodded.

  ‘She’s always been our secret, hasn’t she? Because no one else saw her, you know.’

  A key fumbled at the front door, and Natalie shrieked, ‘Oh, there’s Robert! Wait till you see the super things he’s bought for my birthday!’

  ‘How he spoils you monkeys!’ scolded Justine as she went to open the door. A tall young man entered, grinning over an armful of large packages. ‘Don’t jump on me, Natty, or I’ll collapse. Where’s Vince? There’s an un-birthday something here for him.’

  Abigail was half-hidden by the arm of a wingchair. She felt as if she were going to faint, as though the blood were draining down to her toenails.

  That voice – she felt again the old agony of longing, the tenderness, the unbearable sweetness of being fourteen and drowning in love for someone who thought her a child.

  ‘It’s all going to start again,’ she thought in panic. ‘But it can’t; I burnt the crochet. If it does I won’t know how to manage it now that I’m older.’

  She cringed back into the chair, trying to hide herself until she could collect her thoughts.

  ‘Put all those down and come and meet one of my oldest friends,’ she heard Justine say. ‘Vincent, stop that racket. Robert’s got a surprise for you. Hurry up, Robert.’

  She felt him standing there. For a moment she could not look up, she was too afraid.

  Justine was chattering. ‘Abigail, you must meet my favourite brother, Robert. Robert Bow, Abigail Kirk.’

  Abigail raised her eyes.

  ‘It was the most weird thing,’ Justine told her long afterwards. ‘All you did was to give him the sweetest smile I ever saw. I always thought you a bit of a sobersides, you know – but this! I practically melted. And then Robert said what he said … wow, it was really odd!’

  ‘Abby!’ the young man exclaimed. Then he turned scarlet and said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. For a moment I thought I knew you. I don’t know why I said that; I don’t know that people call you Abby for short at all.’

  His eyes were deep blue, his hair was fair. He was taller than Judah. His hands were not hard and brown.

  ‘But then, he’s lived to be older than Judah ever did,’ thought Abigail, ‘and he’s never worked as hard as Judah.’

  The children were making such a commotion over the presents that Justine rocketed away to supervise.

  Robert sat down on the floor beside the chair. He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘We’ve never met, have we? You must think me a nut, bursting out that way. Can’t think what made me do it.’

  All the confused, half-frightened, half-rapturous feelings that had churned in Abigail’s interior a few moments previously had gone. Judah had not shipped on The Brothers. He had lived, he had lived! The empty place in her heart filled with peaceful benign happiness. She knew that it was settling over her face, that if she looked into a mirror she would see the ghost of a middle-aged woman, still married, still in love, rich with contentment. She almost put out her hand to stroke Robert’s cheek as she had dared to do to Judah in that long ago year. But she did not. It was not yet time. He did not know what she knew.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘how does your name happen to be Bow when Justine’s surname is …’ she broke off. ‘But of course, that’s her married name. You must excuse me. I was quite young when I lived in the unit next door.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I know,’ said Robert. ‘Natalie’s often mentioned you. You used to take her to the playground.’

  What else, she wondered, had Natalie told him?

  ‘I knew some other Bows once,’ she said. ‘I had a friend, he was called Judah.’

  Robert looked dumbfounded. ‘But that’s my name too! Robert Judah Bow! Where did you know them? They must be cousins or something. I must ask Justine.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Abigail tranquilly. ‘She didn’t know them. We’ll talk about them another time. Just let’s sit.’

  She wasn’t sure afterwards what they talked about. It was too natural and ordinary to remember. She told Robert about Norway, and he told her about the marine engineering course he was doing.

  ‘I’ve got this feeling about the sea, you see.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I think my ancestors came from Shetland or somewhere, so I suppose the sea is in my genes.’

  ‘Orkney,’ said Abigail half to herself. He looked at her half puzzled, half fascinated.

  ‘May I come and see you?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m right next door.’

  They smiled at each other like old friends.

  As she went out, Justine whispered, ‘Isn’t he a doll?’


  Abigail smiled. As she bent to kiss Natalie, the little girl whispered in her old way. ‘You won’t go away, will you, Abigail? Everything’s going to come out all right now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Abigail.

  When she returned to her parents’ unit Kathy said, ‘We’ve decided art deco is too frightful. Maybe Norwegian, with the doors painted with garlands and bouquets in dim colours.’

  ‘You’ll start a trend,’ said Abigail absently. She did not feel she would be living in that unit very long, so she was not very interested in how it would look. Kathy asked her about the Crowns, nodded with pleasure over the miraculous change in Vincent.

  ‘He was jealous of Natalie, you know,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Abigail. ‘Kids … whoever knows what they’re thinking?’

  ‘And who else was there with Justine, that made you look the way you’re looking?’ asked Kathy, slyly.

  ‘A university student called Robert Bow,’ answered Abigail.

  ‘And?’

  ‘He’s dropping in Saturday afternoon. You’ll like him.’

  Kathy was about to say something teasing when Abigail added, ‘He’s bringing the family Bible.’

  Kathy looked bewildered.

  ‘We just want to look up a family tree,’ explained Abigail.

  At the week-end Robert arrived. He towered even over Weyland Kirk. Abigail saw now that, aside from his height, there were small differences from Judah’s in his face. The eyes and hair and features were the same, but the teeth more regular. The smallpox scar that had dimpled Judah’s cheek was missing; the hair was cut altogether differently.

  ‘He’s had an easier life than Judah, just as I’ve had an easier life than Dovey or poor little Beatie, probably. I wonder what happened to her?’

  The Bible was a mighty volume. The green plush had hardly any pile left at all; the brass edges were black and bent. They had not been polished for many years.