by David Brooks
He had gone out that day, after the storm, to fish, he said, and to talk to the aborigines, and had come back watchful and tentative, suspended between tenderness and fear. As though, outcasts already from the world at the far end of the beach, they had both realised that they were now somehow outcasts even from themselves, that clumsily, without realising it, they had destroyed a kind of paradise they had been making in the world’s despite and been thrown, by a weakness that was too strong for them, into a wilderness, and could not go back, because once something is known it cannot be unknown. And in this new place, trying to resist themselves and each other, they found themselves in a torn, dazed cycle of desire and fear, desire and shame, so that sometimes it seemed their only real joy had been in the brief, numb blindness in which together they had first crossed the border. Fighting the temptation of her, he would go out alone with a bottle, far down the beach, or drink sullenly in the pub in Hoburn, and then in that same drunkenness, staggering back, have no power to resist what she in her own turn would have fought against, had she seen any way. Or else, in the blindness of the night, there would be something from within the one or the other, an ache, a longing, that could not be repressed, that would touch, if only with infinite tenderness while the other slept, yet find itself answered, held to, not let go. When she herself tried once to leave, the pain, before she was half-way to Hoburn, had become so much greater than any pain of staying that she had had to run back.
So that there were, at last, an end to resistance in what remained of the summer, and days of calm when, alone or together, they could almost recover themselves – even, for a time, seem to forget the other, in work or reading – although always, through it, the other would be returning, from one end or the other of the long beach, so small at first one needn’t have noticed, but growing larger and larger until it was all that one saw, until it blocked the vision and he – if it were he who was doing the watching – could not see until he passed in to her again, finding her always waiting, arms open, drinking him deeply, and that, in a different way, it had been he who had been walking back, that she had not moved, from the last time.
On nights when she was waiting for him, or when she simply could read no more, she would go out and sit on the sand – to feel the breeze on her face and smell the surf, but mainly to watch the lighthouse, for reasons that she would have found hard to explain, though sometimes tried, to herself – a light in the darkness, a constant, always there, that could be relied on, or at least that represented something like that, kept the hope of it alive, a shell, a possibility. Something that only works in darkness, to guide us amongst underwater things, things that cannot be seen.
One time some strange aborigines arrived, not from Disaster Bay, supposedly on their way to somewhere past Hoburn – they talked as if the town were only an incidental, an overlay on a different map – although after several hours, smoking, drinking tea on the verandah steps, telling him stories of some of the things he had found, laughing, they went back the way they had come. Another time he worked feverishly on a political piece, saying that the war was ending, and that he had worked something out, and he was going to read it to her – but did not. Another time, not long after, he came back from Hoburn with the mail and left hurriedly again without explanation, taking the small suitcase, saying only that he would return as soon as he could. He was gone for four days, whether to Nara or to Sydney or to some other place she did not know. She woke on the fourth night in fright, in her room, to hear him stumbling about in the dark of his own. In the morning, before she had dressed, she went in to see him and he made love with such desperation that she became afraid of what she might discover, and asked him nothing. And then, one day less than a week later, he came in – he had risen early, unable to sleep – and told her that she should get up and go fishing, that he had been out walking and seen that there was a mullet run at the lake entrance. He himself was tired now, having been up so long, and would sleep, but if she went quickly with a hand-line they could have a feast.
She went, and it was almost true. There was no run but there were mullet aplenty, a stream of black and silver arrows flowing through the flowing water where it spilled back from the brackish lake into the retreating tide. In less than half an hour she had caught a dozen and was carrying them back across the beach, one silver, shining string in each hand – the weight of them on the trebled line cutting into her fingers despite the weed she had used to cushion it – when she saw, and dropped the fishes in the sand, and her mouth opened in a long, animal moan, and she began walking again, slowly, then ran.
He was hanging from a thick branch of a tree on the shaded side of the house. He had kicked the ladder aside, and hardly knowing what she was doing she set it back against the trunk and cut him down with her fishing knife. She wrenched the knot from his throat and tried to breathe into him, and slapped his face, but it was too late – she had felt the cold in him already – and there was nothing she could do.
A whole day passed, sitting numbly by him, and it came to early evening. Somehow she made it into Hoburn and the publican, Mr Wheeler, phoned ‘the Authorities’, by which he can only have meant the lone officer about to go to bed in the back of the small police station on the other side of the railway line. The police and the doctor from Wellington could not come until late the next day. Mrs Wheeler would not let her go back that night. With sudden compassion (that she would not before have imagined) they kept her there, and made tea and tried to talk to her, to coax her to eat. When the time came Mrs Wheeler took her to the best of the three rooms upstairs, and her husband brought her hot milk and brandy, so that she might cry herself to sleep. Well before dawn she woke and, confused by the strange surroundings, dressed and walked back, and knelt by the blanket-covered body in the cold.
In the first clear light of the day – the light after first light – she knew what to do. She was chilled to the bone. She rose, went inside, made herself tea, and with the mug warming her hands, went to the desk.
The letters were in the second drawer, behind the jumbled stationery. She had come across them several times before and had always been curious, since most of his correspondence was kept in a large box by the cupboard, but had never wanted to read them. Now it seemed important that she do so. There were two piles. The first and larger of them was of letters from a woman in Nara who signed herself only Elizabeth. She appeared to be a close friend – a sister, she thought at first, although he had never mentioned one, and in letters from a sister she would have expected more about the past, the family. But neither was there anything in them to indicate a deeper intimacy. They were full of details about the town, her friends, her activities, a library in which she worked or which she managed, the problems of getting books, the titles of those she had been reading, books she thought he might wish to read himself. Sometimes there was a comment about the war or the government, the activities of politicians. Sometimes there was a piece of domestic or medical advice. Then, in the sixth or seventh in the pile – there had been no more than three or four letters a year since he had come to Hoburn, the first few addressed to him at Mrs Biggs’ almost five years before – there was an enquiry about herself, and Valerie realised that it was she, this Elizabeth, who had chosen her clothes. And thereafter, in almost every letter, there was a similar, guarded enquiry as to her health, the progress of her reading. She wondered why, of all the letters he received, he had kept these, whereas those in the box by the cupboard were regularly cleared, burned when he felt he had done with them. But even after reading all of this woman’s letters carefully she found herself none the wiser, not even as to her age.
If the first pile surprised her, the letters in the second shocked her utterly. Signed Robert, they each began ‘Dear Father’ and came variously from Sydney, Colombo, Cairo, a place called Warminster in Wiltshire, and an army forwarding office in London, telling him in excited, telegraphic detail of his first days in the army, his imminent departure for Europe, the wonders and oddit
ies of Egypt, the bleakness of Salisbury Plain, the cold grandeur of a cathedral on an icy winter day, the eerie strangeness of Stonehenge, the difficulty, in one of a number of letters cut almost to a tissue by an army censor, of life on a battlefield the location of which he could not say. One letter asked him about his work, as if this son had no idea that his father campaigned against the war he fought in. Another spoke of the boy’s mother, and of the quiet life she led on a property called ‘Westleigh’, although giving no hint – what need would he? – as to where this property might be. One of the three letters from Warminster contained a photograph taken on a London street of three young men in uniform under the awning of a pub called The Black Venus. They had their arms around each other. Each of them looked no older than herself. One of them was Robert, but only he and his father knew which. She had not thought that Fryer might have a child, a son. She had not imagined he might have a living wife.
She had looked already for a note from him, at the same time thinking how absurd this would be – as if, having come to such an edge, he might have felt a need to justify – and she had found nothing. Now instead, on the desktop where she had been staring vacantly, thinking of what she had read, was his wallet, so familiar to her that she had not yet thought to open it. But it was there, thick with the scent of him, dark with the years of his sweat, the oil of his hands, and no more familiar now that she opened it than the contents of the letters.
In it were twenty-six pounds, two small photographs, and a small sheaf of papers, worn at the edges, so tightly folded that it was as if the pages had begun to merge. One of the photographs was of Robert – younger, but she could identify him now – and the other, formally posed, of a woman, but who was she? Elizabeth? His wife? She was in her late twenties, perhaps, or early thirties, but there was no indication of when it might have been taken, only a photographer’s crest lightly embossed into the lower left corner, a Geo. Duffield, 386 Pitt Street, Sydney. The papers were no more communicative, or at most were only indirectly so: a Trust Certificate for seven hundred pounds made out two years before to Elizabeth Farrow, of the same address from which the letters had come; a Birth Certificate, a Certificate of Marriage. His father had been a Cyril Edward Fryer, grazier, of Bowral, his mother Mary Pauline, née Webb. His wife’s name was Evelyn Jane Ross. He had been married for twenty-two years. Had he lived another month he would have been fifty. She took most of the money, knowing that she must. After pausing over it for a moment, she also took the Trust Certificate.
Then found it, as she was putting the papers back, wedged so tightly into the bottom of the main pocket of the wallet that it had not come out with the rest. A telegram, dated a week before: ‘It is with deepest regret… your son, Pte Robert Ross Fryer …’, in a military hospital, in Sussex. No further details. No indication of how long he had been there, what wounds, if it were wounds, what battle, what day he had died.
The men came mid-morning, sooner than they had said; only two of them, a policeman and a doctor who had once treated Fryer, for something that he did not explain. They were stiff and tired from the long early drive, and gruff in the manner of those who wish to disguise their uncertainty over what they are doing. They asked her if she had any idea why he might have done such a thing, and she shook her head. They asked her to stay in the house while they examined him, and she did so, staring at the sink in an icy numbness until jolted back to herself by their voices coming nearer. Not knowing what else to do, she made them tea, placing the two enamel mugs, Fryer’s and her own, on the edge of the verandah. After a half hour, having covered him again with the tartan blanket and wrapped him firmly in a tarpaulin, they lifted him onto the back of the dray, then asked her to come outside while they searched the house. Clearly they thought she had little right to be there. When they had found what suited their sense of what should be wanted – they took a file of bills and bank papers as well as his wallet, with the telegram wedged again where it had been – the policeman explained to her that, with the aid of the doctor’s files, they had already identified the next of kin and had sent word of the death. When she asked who this next of kin was, he said only that it was a close relative, in Bowral, and that they anticipated, as was normal in these cases and since Bowral was no great distance away, that this person would request the return of the body. When he asked her if there was any other question he could answer for her, she could think of nothing. He said that there would most probably be a funeral, though he did not know what kind it might be, and – it seemed to her a veiled instruction – he could imagine that she might not wish to be there. Nonetheless, he would try to leave a message for her at the hotel in Hoburn as to where and when such a funeral might be, if it chanced that he was given the information himself. If she wanted to know about any other arrangements, she could contact him in Wellington, if she liked, and he would endeavour to find out for her.
There was, of course, no message, although she did walk in to see. Instead, on a day upon which a funeral might have taken place, a man came from Nara, a Mr Albert Harman, who gave her his card and told her that it was the wish of Mr Fryer’s next of kin that the house be vacated as soon as possible, and that it was his instruction to assist her in any way in order to bring this about. His sense of urgency was apparently not acute, however, or at least not in the direction in which it might have been expected to be, since upon delivering his ultimatum he turned about and marched – or hobbled, rather, since he appeared to have one leg shorter than the other – back to his trap, which he then mounted with some difficulty and, raising his hat in what might have been an attempt to regain composure if not dignity, drove off in haste as if this were not the only eviction to be performed that day. Presumably she was to contact him, too, if she required any assistance.
She left, then, that morning, in anger and humiliation, knowing there was a train, leaving the house as it was, locking it up as best she could and then, not knowing what to do with the key, throwing that as far as she could into the scrub on the edge of the forest. If anything physical was to be regretted, it was only the books, which she looked at a long moment from the door. In the small suitcase, not much heavier than when she first stood on Mrs Biggs’ doorstep, were a locket and a small, whittled toy her father had made for her (all that remained of the belongings she had brought from the mountain), the clothes Fryer had bought her, the manuscript of his Secret History, some pebbles from the beach at Disaster Bay, and a thick, bright-blue-covered, ‘pocket’ edition of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
She was almost nineteen.
7
The Library
(1918– )
Behind the grandiose sandstone facade of the Nara Mechanics’ Institute, the library was a small, warmly sacred place, not only for Valerie, but for most of the people who came there, whether the older schoolchildren seeking background for their projects, the earnest young men who saw in the reserved and beautiful young librarian a kind of Vestal priestess, the autodidacts, male and female, in their various hot pursuits of one or another of the final forms of truth, concerning which they would sometimes assail her for hours at the lending-counter, or the several older men, some of them indigent, some merely seeking to vary the boredom of their front verandahs, who would come to the cool sandstone building to sit out the hot or wet or windy days, to watch her as she worked or perhaps simply to think, as they themselves might have put it, or nod off over a two-day-old copy of the South Coast Register. The deep leather armchairs and washable antimacassars, rescued from a church sale in Kerrivale, had been among her additions, as had the shelf near her desk of Australian books, and the children’s section, the shelf of poetry and fiction in other languages, the display of foreign dictionaries, and the display, expanding or contracting according to their availability, of books discussed in recent editions of the Bulletin or Smith’s Weekly.
Another section, too, Valerie thought of as hers, although in truth Elizabeth had done almost all of it. The mere mention of Fryer�
��s books had been enough, as if they had been on Elizabeth’s mind as much as they had been on Valerie’s own. Two weeks after she herself had turned up at Elizabeth’s door, to be welcomed warmly and gently and offered her place in the house and the library as if they had both been long planned for, the books themselves arrived, unwanted by the next of kin in Bowral, considerably jumbled by Mr Albert Harman in his haste to have them in boxes and be away, but otherwise safe and undamaged. A tall but narrow flank of shelves was devoted to them, and the library expanded and intensified accordingly.
That had been the way between them in anything to do with Fryer. An unspoken agreement – almost a complicity, intuited rather than stated – that mention of him should remain on the one level only, as of someone each of them had once known and whom each remembered with similar affection and only sometimes with a carefully prepared, tentatively offered anecdote, as often withdrawn partly sketched as actually completed, even when the weather in such quarters seemed finest. Valerie often wondered, in the early stages, what his relationship with Elizabeth had been: a woman his own age or a little older, who had once been beautiful and still was in some lights, when they were both reading by the fire or had paused while eating, and Elizabeth took off her glasses, thinking, and a trace of colour emerged through the steel-greyness of her hair and softened the taut sternness of her features. Or when, as happened, neither of them could sleep and they would meet by chance in the house somewhere, and would talk softly over milky tea and Elizabeth’s hair would be unwound and thick about the shoulders of her long white nightgown, and a soft, ancient Irishness would sometimes curl the edges of a word, or weight its ending, as it never did in daytime. But although she sometimes spoke of others she would not share him, or what it had been with him. Even five years later, in the agonies or unguardable morphine-calms of her dying – which she would not do anywhere else, or with anyone else but Valerie, the grippings of it, the messes, the spongings and strokings of her forehead to which she responded more as if to a parent or lover than this strange almost-daughter, who had come to her so late – even in these she had not shown, or said, and so Valerie had come to believe there had been nothing to share, that he had been a friend and friend only, whom Elizabeth had helped and advised as she did so many others. Until, months after, she woke from a dream, and realised.
