by David Brooks
We drove up for the funeral. It all passed in a kind of white blur for me. I remember my grandfather, trying so hard, looking so old and broken. And then, it might have been three or four months later, there was a telegram from my uncle saying that Grandfather too had died. I was in the school play and my mother said it was a shame that I should miss it. A thirteen-year-old Hamlet. She left me with neighbours and drove up by herself. Perhaps she was remembering how badly I had been affected by my grandmother’s funeral. I think we inherited some money. She bought me a new desk and Encyclopaedia Britannica and did some renovations to the house, so that I could have a proper room of my own. We had already begun to go to other places for our holidays. I remember one time she took me to Sydney – we were living in Canberra, but she wanted to show me a big city – and we stayed in a flat by the beach at Clovelly. It was the September holidays, just before I went to high school. It wasn’t really warm enough yet, but on fine days we sat on the sand, and once or twice I swam. On rainy days we’d have breakfast and lunch and dinner in little cafés in the neighbourhood or further away in the City. My mother could afford to do this: she was earning good money working for the Public Service, on her way to becoming the highest ranked woman in the Department of the Interior. Another time we went all the way up to Brisbane, where the weather was warmer. We stayed in a place called Manly because there was a beach in Sydney that had the same name. One time we went to Melbourne and stayed by the beach in St Kilda, near the pier. I guess she had a thing about beaches. A memory of my father, I’d always supposed, but again she never really explained.
There was a man who lived with us for a time, but he was in the Department of Foreign Affairs and got posted overseas, and somehow never seemed to make it back to us. After him she saw other men now and again, but I never liked them much and tended to pretend they weren’t happening. Once or twice I was openly hostile, and I regret that now, though it seems to me also, in retrospect, that my mother never tried very hard to hold onto them. Somehow the memory of my father never seemed to fade. She came to prefer to be alone, just the two of us, and to have her garden and her classical music, and the diary that she wrote in every night. Only a few notes, she said, just to keep track of things. I knew I was not supposed to look inside it. The once or twice I did so I didn’t find anything particularly interesting, just descriptions of what we’d been doing, and thoughts and names that didn’t mean much to me, and some embarrassing things about myself. But it became a kind of ritual with us: every Christmas I would give her a new diary, with blank white pages. Later on I would go far and wide to get the very best and fattest I could. It was a kind of game: I would try to get one thick enough to last the whole year, but they never did. Some years she would finish three. She told me more than once that she’d been writing her diaries since she was a young girl, though she’d burnt the early ones; she never said why.
That’s how I remember my childhood, anyway, or how I’d become used to remembering it. What is truth, after all? The things I experienced were true enough, though I didn’t necessarily know the truth behind them. But some of the things that my mother told me were not true about us. Some of them were borrowed. The stories about the convent, for example. That was the thing that most shocked me when Sim took me into the sleepout, to show me. Or rather, that shocked me so much a few days later, when it all had time to sink in. There was too much to do at first – dealing with the ambulance, the doctor, the local minister, arranging the funeral, trying to get a sense of whom else to call, doing something about Sim herself, who bore up so well that first night, when she told me her own remarkable story, but who could barely get out of bed the next morning, then going through the old lady’s things, trying to make sense of her affairs, finding that for decades she’d systematically destroyed all the traces, kept everything in her head.
It was only as I was driving through the dark on the Hume Highway the evening after the funeral that I began to think more carefully, and even then the associations that Mrs Darling’s death touched off seemed so rarely to make any real sense or contact with one another that my most logical option seemed to be to shelve the whole business as a matter of uncanny coincidence and an old woman’s eccentricity – that, and an extreme case of mistaken identity.
It was the highway, not the old woman, that made me think of my mother. It always had. And if, going through the old lady’s things as I had had to do to try to find something that the minister could use in his eulogy, I came across nothing whatsoever that could confirm her claim of having once known my mother, there was very little information of any other kind either: the few trinkets, curious as they might have been, didn’t add up to anything very tangible, not then, and, as the minister said, she was hardly the first nonagenarian to have outlived her documents. Advanced nonagenarian, as it happened: another eighteen months or so and she would have been a hundred.
No doubt Sim could have told each of us the things we wanted to know, but the doctor was afraid that, as in many such cases, where one person has lived with another so long, she might die soon after. For the two days before the funeral he had her so sedated she couldn’t really think straight at all, and the funeral was no place to ask her anything. Nor, that first night, before he had come, had I been able to find the heart to interrupt her own story, although there were times when I had wanted to. The funeral was a small affair, more friends of Sim’s, it seemed, than of Mrs Darling, who had outlived most of hers. Afterwards a few people went back to the house for tea and some cake. I had to be getting back to Canberra, and now had the sense that Sim had one or two people to look out for her. And then, somewhere between Mittagong and Goulburn, winding along the highway through the dark, I started at last to connect things.
I was so distracted on the last part of the trip that I got a speeding ticket on the Hume, just before the Canberra turnoff. In all likelihood, in the dark and the rain, it saved my life. By the time I got home my mind was racing. I had barely said hello to Dita and the kids before I was down under the house, dragging out my mother’s diaries. Before I started to read I called Sim, to ask the most obvious of questions, but also just to see how she was managing. There was no answer. I imagined her sleeping peacefully, aided by whatever the doctor had been giving her. The next evening the doctor called to say that she too had died. He had found her that afternoon, still wearing the clothes she had worn for the funeral. It seemed that, when the last of us had left after the tea and cakes, she had sat down in one of the armchairs in the back room and simply given up. She didn’t appear to have suffered. Most probably she had dozed off, and had a heart attack in her sleep. He could make the funeral arrangements, he said: there was no need for me to come back up if it was going to be difficult. I put the diaries aside and left.
I was back home three days later, and within a few days more – I went at it night and day, obsessively – I had read all my mother’s diaries. A few weeks after that I learnt, from a solicitor in Gosford, that there had been a will amongst Sim’s belongings, and that I had inherited the house at Diamond Beach.
I might have said then, or soon after, that that was an end to it. In the sense of who I was, where I had come from, my life had changed utterly, but it was also a matter more of the past than the present. What I now knew, I knew, and I had to think that I was somehow the better for it – the truth, after all, is best, isn’t it? – but it wasn’t an injunction, didn’t seem to point me in any particular direction. Still, unfinished business has its own laws. I could never have predicted that a couple of years later, reading someone else’s story of a ghost-ridden building, something in one paragraph, one sentence – about an old peasant woman who could see spirits when she walked into a room; how she would ask them, very simply, who they were, and why they were there, and what it was that they wanted her to do in order to help them go away – could have acted so efficiently like an invisible trigger, unlatching a door in my own memory, so that I found myself, there, in the new double bed we had just bo
ught for the house, like some figure from a Boz illustration in an old volume of Dickens, suddenly importuned by the people the old lady had told me about, and by people from my mother’s diaries, surrounding me, not letting me finish my reading, dragging my eyes to a halt, forcing me to get up, half-naked as I was – cold as it was – to find a pen, and paper, to make the first rushed notes: Write us down, they seemed to be clamouring, so loudly I was sure the whole household could hear them, get our names, look at our faces. And I have done, one by one, the best I could, though it has taken me three years: the lighthouse, the runaway, the man who hanged himself, the woman who saw ghosts, the bigamist bishop, the lovers, all of them, sometimes with more detail than ever I was given, for I have done my homework, and sometimes with less, since I now know the lies in them.
Think of it like that. A collection of stories. The links coming, as they came to me, all in their own good time.
Part 2
5
Hoburn
(1915)
The lighthouse is easy. It has an anchor in history. The next part is not so certain. It comes out of nowhere. Or, rather, out of the bush, the scrub: stumbles out of it, sudden and unprepared, onto a country road. Twenty nights now I have thought of it. Twenty nights now, in my dreams or pre-dawn wakings, waiting for the whip-birds, or the first currawongs. A young girl – Valerie, her name is Valerie Tryde – has set out before first light. It is the east coast: the birds sing here before they sing anywhere else on the continent; the light hits the top of the coastal mountains before it hits anywhere on the western plain, even before it reaches the eastward-facing beaches below. And before these things, if only just before, she has gathered together a small, battered suitcase of her belongings – it has been a decision long in the making, although it is only hours since she realised that the time has come – and begun to make her way down the mountain.
She is trying to reach a town called Nara, all she knows of which is what Joe, her father, has told her – that her mother had come from somewhere near there, that it was a town on the coast, that the coast was down at the bottom of the mountains – and what Mrs Goodleigh, at the Crossroads shop, added a little more generously on the day when that huge lady dragged out her little silver cross from between her enormous breasts to show her young friend the tiny moonstone at its centre, so like the one set into the locket that Valerie had just found in the place she had not wanted to tell Mrs G. about. The Nara Mrs Goodleigh described was probably not so much a town as a big village, but a very pretty one, surrounded by dairy farms and rolling green fields and, high on a headland overlooking the ocean, a lovely cemetery. Perhaps Val’s mother might have been buried there had she not moved away, instead of under the sad wooden cross between grey box trees on the gully-side of a patch of heart-breaking nearwaste that her father insisted on calling The Field. No matter what you sowed there, they used to joke, potatoes or cabbages or corn or beans, it always came up rocks.
But first there was the road and, in the early light – she had negotiated the mountain in semi-darkness, her feet so familiar with the paths that she had no real need of the sun – the sudden, alarming matter of choice. She knew this place well. She had come down here countless times to sit and stare into the distance in either direction, waiting for someone to pass, and even wandered a good distance each way, to where on the one side the road curved and descended steeply into a rainforest gully, or on the other began to all appearances to climb the mountain again, and seemed to run out of promise. But she had never before needed to put names to the directions, or needed so definitely to know the names of the places to which the road might lead.
After a few moments she determined upon the gully and whatever lay beyond it, and struck out in that direction, stopping after half an hour to listen to a bell-bird at the ford – it was as far as she had ever come before – and to catch the last of the morning’s cool before climbing toward the sunlight on the other side. There were farm buildings there which she had never known about, and two large men moving around outside a barn, loading heavy sacks onto a dray. Instinct told her to avoid them and she waited in the shadows beside the road until they went back inside the barn, then moved on as quickly as possible into the thick trees that formed a bower over the road on the other side of the small selection. Almost an hour passed, she encountering nothing on the road, and nothing passing her, before the men in the dray came up behind. She thought she had had good warning and again stood in the shadow behind a huge, low-forked ironbark, but they must have seen her before she heard them, and were on the lookout. The bush was too thick to clamber any further into. She had no real alternative but to stand her ground.
They pulled up a few yards beyond her, and one of them, an older man with a stomach so large he had difficulty turning far enough to look at her, called back:
‘Where are you coming from, Missy, that you have to keep hiding from us?’ and then, when she offered no answer, ‘Don’t be afraid, love, we won’t dob you in, whoever you’ve robbed or murdered. But unless you’re going to the Germans’ you’ve got a long walk ahead of you, especially lugging that suitcase, small and all as it is. It’d be easier on your feet to come with us.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said after a lengthy pause, seeing her continuing apprehension, something in his voice, rather than whatever it was that he was saying, reassuring her a little, ‘I won’t bite, and the boy here –’ smiling at the other man – ‘isn’t old enough to think of it …’
Again there was a long silence, her mind working furiously. Where was Nara? She would have to ask somebody, and at closer range these men seemed harmless enough. Better still, they seemed not to know her. And they had to be going somewhere. And somewhere – anywhere – would be a place to start.
‘I’m going to Nara,’ she called, tentatively, for the moment resisting the temptation to take a pace forward.
There was a brief silence, and something like concern or puzzlement passed over the men’s faces. They looked at each other, as if conferring with their eyes alone, and then the younger, who had not yet spoken, bunched his long black beard in his right hand and said, more softly and gently than had the other.
‘Well, it’s the Nara road right enough, lassie, but Nara’s the other way. You’re walking in the wrong direction,’ and then, when she again offered no response, her mind once more working at the information, ‘It might be better for you to come with us anyway, since there’s a train that stops today at Tarren Bridge, that we’re going to meet, and it goes down that way. It will get you there a lot faster than your feet will.’
She came forward then, and they helped her up, the old man heaving himself over to make room for her on the seat, and one of the horses – to her astonishment, partly at the lack of any reaction in the men – expelling, scarcely an arm’s length from them, a sudden bounty of glistening, steaming, golden-brown globes, which she then, as the dray moved off, twisted back to see – which in dreams she would twist back to see – as if it marked one of the places where her life had changed.
After a mile or two of silence – at first uncomfortable to her but during which she relaxed increasingly into the sounds and repetitive jarrings of the dray, the ambling jaunt of the huge grey horses, the rhythm of light through the canopy above them – the older man pointed out a homestead coming up gradually on the right and mumbled something about the Germans that she did not catch. Out of a sudden guilty politeness – she had almost forgotten that talk might be a part of things – she asked him what he had said and a conversation began that lasted, intermittently, until the hamlet they called Tarren Bridge, a conversation that, although about many things, never actually got back to the Germans, almost as if it had been embarked upon in order to avoid them.
Unsure of what to say to this strange, shy girl with her shock of bright hair and hauntingly mature face, who seemed to have so much going on inside her that she had few words left for the outside world, but also and simply because he liked to talk and his son had
already heard too many times almost everything he had to say, the older man began to tell her about the places they were passing or that were coming up, not just the properties but the hills and patches of forest, places on the ridges above them or at the foot of the gullies they had crossed, fords over creeks with names like Sweetwater or Eight-Mile or Cabbage-Tree or Dead Man’s, which in themselves, every one of them, seemed to bring on a further comment or explanation or story – unaware, as she was too enraptured to tell him, that although she had lived all her life at the head of one of those same gullies – the first one, the one just past which they had found her – the stories he was telling were opening up a world for her, investing it with associations she had never dreamed it possessed and of which the gossip of Mrs Goodleigh – which, whenever she could, she had drunk like a delicious water – had shown her only the tiniest part.
They were farmers, these men, named O’Brien, father and son. There had been a brother, but he had been killed in a bushfire eleven years earlier, and the mother, the older man’s wife, had died some years before that. The selection had not worked out, and though they still kept some parts of it up – there was a field that grew beautiful potatoes, but only a field, and who could live on potatoes? – they had started to work as blacksmiths in Molo, seven miles up the line from Tarren Bridge, and – since someone named Norgard, another blacksmith, had died six months ago – they serviced the hooves of most of the working horses down almost as far as St Marys. Before he was married, the older man had worked on Beverley, a large station about fifteen miles back from where they had picked her up, and loved the area, despite its being so hard sometimes. The scarp had been barely settled then, he said – Beverley had been one of the first really viable properties – and he had more or less grown up with it.
