by David Brooks
They fought, bitterly, and she fled her own house. Having now missed his train and been left for a time to realise, bleakly, the enormity of what he might have just done, he went out into the dark to look for her, and stumbled about for an age before thinking of the cliff – where, high above the waterfall, he found her staring almost lifelessly into what at that hour was a black and frightening abyss. With declarations, assurances, retractions that surprised him, he coaxed her back, and they wept together, and held, and at last moved passionately and darkly into the intimate place they had not revisited – that they had been avoiding – for almost four years.
And by the morning had perhaps exhausted it. He could not tell how long ago she had risen, or how or even whether she had come to terms, but by the time he woke from a brief but deep and delicious sleep, bacon was cooking, and tea made, and the autumn sun was covering the breakfast table, and something had clearly been resolved. She did not mention the night before – neither of them did – but instead spoke only of the day, the light, the trains, the softness of the garden in this season, plans for a new painting. He left in the early afternoon, feeling that something had been given back to him, with all the mixed feelings of relief and disappointment that such a thing now seemed to entail, and that something that he had carried around with him for a very long time seemed to have gone from his shoulders.
Storms are like that. They do clear the air. And people are like that also – subjective. What had seemed to clear in Angus’ mind might not have been what seemed to clear in Katherine’s. Perhaps what remained unspoken should have been spoken urgently. And neither of them spoke. The point at which one becomes lost can be so small and so simple a thing – the mere dismissal of a thought in the calm and brightness of a mountain morning – that one can spend the rest of one’s life trying to find it.
When Claire saw Angus again, in any case, he was lighter. Had she thought to register it, but at the particular moment she did not, she might have said subsequently that it was at about this time that she realised that the child had left him, although she might yet have been unable to hazard why, or to where.
They married, Claire and Angus, with her own father presiding; and shortly thereafter, early in 1906, Angus was appointed to the Glebe parish of St John’s, beside the Harbour and right on the City’s edge. Wishing to come to the marriage without secrets, he had told her about Katherine and about the child, and had been surprised and encouraged by how much she seemed to have guessed already, and already understood – not, as she herself suggested, that there was a great deal unusual in the matter, or a great deal to forgive. We live in our bodies, much as we might try to escape them. She herself had wanted him, after all, and had had him, not only in her mind, well before their wedding day.
But the secrets returned. Shortly afterward – it was barely ten months since the official consummation – a child, Margaret, was born. By this time Angus was aware that she was not his second child, but his third, although the second, whose name at this point he still did not know, was barely six months the elder. It was not a thing he felt he could ever tell his wife, whose own pregnancy had been difficult enough in any case. Understanding as she might ultimately have been – she had demonstrated, already, an almost uncanny capacity to understand and forgive – it had been hard enough to tell her about the first.
Indeed, it was a knowledge he was still trying to deny himself, feeling at one and the same time a victim of the most bizarre and cruel, almost vicious of fates, and a self-loathing, countervailing sense of abject weakness that had him repeatedly and unpredictably on the verge of throwing all away. He would find himself, in the midst of a thought or action or conversation, suddenly assailed again by the realisation – which could only seem, at this point, a life-long sentence – and all would go blank, as some part of him catapulted into a kind of mindless despair. Once it happened in the midst of a sermon – a virtual demonstration, if only his congregation had known the truth of it, of the very point he had been making.
He had written, if not so much to invite her as to inform her of the event, but had not heard from Katherine at the time of the wedding. Although it had caused him a measure of discomfort every time he recalled it, he thought he understood why. Hoping that time and some continuing signs of friendship might repair the matter, he had written a second time, briefly, from Melbourne where he and Claire had honeymooned, and then again three months later to offer her an account of his life since and to tell her of Claire’s pregnancy. And at last a letter came, laden with a very conscious irony, telling him of their second child’s birth:
There can be no doubt that you are the father. No other man has ever been offered the opportunity. Sometimes I regret so much having offered it at all that I cannot imagine any other man ever. But even if there could be any doubt it would be dispelled by the look of her, for she is so much the image of Mary that I could imagine I have slipped back in time.
You need not fear that I will do anything about this, or cause you any deliberate embarrassment. There is already too much pain in the world to go adding to it with vengeance, for all my feeling that I have had an unfair share. Besides, though I tell myself often enough that I should, it is not you that I hate, but the circumstances. But I would be lying outright to say that I do not have need of whatever assistance – money – you might be able to spare. Indeed, if there is anything spare at all I think I have a right to it. Nothing else can be done now anyway, so please do not try. I suppose that I let myself in for this all along, and even now I find that I love her and want her, and think sometimes that she must still be a blessing of some kind, that I unconsciously invited. But it is going to be a long life for us all, and will seem so from now on, no matter how brief it turns out to be.
I cannot think of a name right now, no matter how hard I try. Perhaps you can think of one, since you will now be thinking of names …
There was more, or had been – a line and a half at the end were so thoroughly inked out that he could make nothing of them – and then, simply, the name Katherine. He had written back almost instantly, sending her twenty pounds that he then had to claim had gone mysteriously missing – so lies beget lies – but had been in shock and, even as he posted it, began to be confused about what he had said.
After almost a year, since the distraction and doubleness seemed to have been harming them both, he told Claire.
She had suspected something, or might have, but not this. He had been preoccupied for a long time now, shown less than his usual affection, even spoken harshly to her once or twice. At first she had thought it was the pressure of the new parish, the coming child, but whatever it was had continued steadily beside or beneath these, independent of them. She would say things that he would only half hear, and need her to repeat them. Sometimes he himself would speak out of context, or murmur as if he were carrying on a separate conversation with someone not there or within himself. Now and again she had thought that she glimpsed the child – the other child – but it may not have been her, and there had been, in any case, a darkness about him that she had seen before about others, a film of shadow that clung to him, irrespective of the light. One night, or very early morning, she had even woken to find him – his ghostly form – sitting on the very end of the bed, silent yet doubled in grief, his elbows on his knees and hands covering his face, and in starting up to comfort him had found him still lying in the bed beside her, warm, living, deeply asleep, and so had not reached out, not touched, but had lain and watched, and eventually slept again. But what he now told her, this living man, to whom she was inextricably tied, shocked and frightened her beyond anything she might have anticipated. She did not know what to do. She had believed him, and thought it finished, and now this. But she also understood. That was the appalling thing. She – some part of her – understood. And hated, rejected at the same time. As if the doubleness in him had brought out a doubleness in her also, or broken open a surface, to reveal a doubleness in everything. Fearing that she
would burst, split open at the temples if she stayed – the house, the furniture, the crackling of the fire suddenly crowding in upon her – she snatched up Margaret, her own child, and fled, leaving the front door open behind her, gaping on emptiness.
***
It was a still, moonlit night. Even as he stood there on the street outside the house, verging on panic, with an unlit kerosene lamp in his hand, he registered this, the stillness, the silver light coming down through the trees of the park opposite, and was grateful for it.
He had no idea where she had gone. He should have followed her immediately, risked a scene in the street if necessary, and swore at himself for this delay. But he too had been shocked and had not known what to do. And could not, now, think why he had blurted his confession out. As if the solution to the confusion and pain he felt could ever have been to impose it on another! He had thought that she would return almost instantly, once the air had cooled her, for she would not, surely, go to her mother and father, and he could think of no other place she might go. And then, envisioning her out in the darkness with the child, so near the harbour, the park, the mangroves, he began to imagine what might happen to them, whether she had sought it or not.
He walked about the streets of the point – Avenue Road, Alexandra Road, Eglinton Street – but could find her nowhere and eventually, growing more and more worried, set out over the moonlit grass of the park toward the rim of thin scrub and thicker mangroves at the water’s edge. There were tracks through it, and two different places where they had come on summer afternoons to sit on outcrops of rock and look across the harbour, one place close to the house, the other a quarter of a mile further down, near where the park itself gave out into a last patch of bushland. The moonlight was of little assistance in the thickening vegetation and, lighting the lamp, he found the shadows it threw onto the irregular path amongst the rocky steps and exposed tree roots almost as treacherous as the dark itself. She was not at the first place and, so rough was the path even with the aid of the lamp, it seemed unlikely that she would have made for the second. But be had been looking for over an hour now – it was well past midnight – and short of crossing the city to her parents, dragging friends into the matter, exposing the whole, horrid mess to everybody, he did not know where else to look.
Clouds had covered the moon. As he approached the second place the lamp, struggling for some time now, at last went out: he had forgotten, in his confusion, to check the level of the kerosene. He felt his way in the dark, his eyes only slowly adjusting, and within a few yards came upon the glimmer of water, the feel of rock beneath his feet. He was not sure if it was her or merely some deeper area of shadow, but the soft sound of the baby gave her away. Claire was sitting watching the water, feeding her. She seemed to know that someone had come – that it was him – but gave no sign and did not turn her head. He did not speak – there was nothing to say – or touch her. Instead he sat down and almost immediately, silently, against every effort that he made, began to weep, whether out of relief or sorrow, if it mattered, he could not have said.
And perhaps to her it had ceased to matter. One might almost have said that whether relief, or sorrow, or even the profoundest regret, it was ultimately his own, private affair, as perhaps it very often becomes. For there is no one else – or certainly it soon came to him to feel that this was so – except, as he had to believe, one’s God, as became the subtext of his darkest sermons. She stood and moved off, leaving him there. And by the time he returned to the house, an hour later, having stared that long into the dark, oily water of that part of the harbour, she had moved with the child into a separate room, telling the servants in the morning that it was to be with Margaret through her troublesome nights, and to let Angus sleep. And for almost two years she did not speak – at least, not to him, in their private moments, which in their own turn became fewer and fewer as a consequence. And yet, as if deliberately to tease him, she would seem in public to address him directly, with remarks, comments, suggestions, questions, that he none the less knew were no more directed to him than are the learnt lines of an actor addressed to the person of the actor playing opposite. For almost two years, day in and day out – the awkwardness of it broken only by short periods of two or three days when she would go, with the child, to visit a friend – they communicated largely through servants, from whom nevertheless he sensed she tried as much as he to keep the truth of the situation, and probably with no greater success.
Sometimes in all this, lonely and oppressed, he would long for Katherine, physically, with a deep, restless longing that might have had less to do with her than his distance from Claire, but also as someone he might at last speak to without restraint or pretence, and for a time might not have to feel so divided, so kept from himself. He had begun in his mind at least a dozen letters to her, each of which had proved unfinishable, and few of which ever reached paper. Twice he had gone so far as to set out for the station, to catch the Blue Mountains train, though on each occasion turned back, realising that there had to be an end to things, that any such contact or openness – presuming Katherine would tolerate it in the first place, which he felt sure she would not – would most likely only prolong the pain, only ultimately underpin the very dividedness it might be an attempt to heal. When you descended into the flesh, it seemed, you descended, however great the pleasure that led you, into pain and confusion and paradox; it was a long and difficult road back, to the uplands of the spirit, the rocky, wind-swept, bracing uplands.
Then, when it was high summer and Margaret was barely a month past her second birthday, she came to him in his sleep – not Katherine, but Claire. He woke at some unknowable time past midnight, in the large bed she had abandoned, to find her, naked, half over him, her hand stroking slowly and firmly his sleep-erect penis, her breath hot about his ears and throat – at the same time resisting, in annoyance or impatience, any response he tried to make, so there was nothing he could do in turn but lie there while she took what she wanted.
And the next morning she spoke. He had woken to find no one there but the tangled sheets, the crusting semen, the smell of her proving that she had been, and had waited nervously at breakfast for her to appear. When she did it was sternly, bearing no sign other than the renewal of speech itself, with a set of instructions and revelations almost as shocking as those he had delivered to her two years earlier.
He was to see his child. Ellen was her name. He was to see his child, fortnightly if possible, and to arrange a regular payment to Katherine. They were all to act, as far as distance, decency and plausibility permitted, as if they were of one family. Margaret was to be encouraged to consider Ellen a kind of cousin. They would, when other things permitted, spend holidays together. She and Katherine would manufacture, and he would support, whatever fabrications were necessary. He would, henceforth, conduct his life in a manner they determined, or risk exposure of what the world would surely see as nothing short of bigamy.
11
Mothers and Daughters
(1914–1919)
There were times when the whole forest was filled with one long, continuous scream of summer heat. The source of the scream was invisible. Her mother had told her that it was the cicadas. That was one fact – the harder, or maybe it was the easier one – but ever since she had first heard it, one interminable January afternoon when she had wandered alone into the garden behind Katherine’s house while everyone else was sleeping, it had also been something else. It wasn’t a bad or a frightening scream; there was almost something happy about it. It sharpened you, wound you up somehow. If you listened to it long enough it became a sort of tight silence.
Katherine’s house was surrounded on three sides by the forest, and seemed sometimes to have become a part of it. Even Mother agreed about that. Even Father, when he relaxed. At other times he had called it a mad-house, though perhaps it was not so much mad as full, certainly much more so than the Glebe house ever was. There were always friends there – even though there were
not so many people up in the mountains, Mother said, they were close, and would visit all the time – and there were also the animals, and the others.
Everything was broken, chipped, or mismatched, or about to be. And every corner and cupboard and shelf and corridor was crowded with painting things, or things about to be mended. There were things that she and Margaret had made. And the walls were crammed with Katherine’s paintings or those that other artists had given her. Everything smelled of oil paints or turpentine, or dogs and cats and food. There was always a jumbled pile of Wellingtons and shoes at the door, and a ton of coats on the rack. There was a pig named Portia – it was a Shakespearian joke, Katherine said – that someone had given to Ellen as a pet but that had grown rapidly and now, huge as she was, couldn’t be kept out of the house, although mainly they confined her to the kitchen where she would get stuck under the table, if you weren’t careful, and send the dinner crashing to the floor. There was a parrot that someone else had left there to be looked after for a while but had never come back for, a fact that the parrot never allowed anyone to forget, since every time there was a new disturbance in the living room, where they kept him in winter, or on the back verandah where they kept him the rest of the time, he would start cursing someone named Stephen, although Katherine assured them that this was not the name of the person who had left him. And then there were the five cats and two dogs. There were elaborate snibs and latches and locking devices on all the cupboards, made out of rubber bands and pencils and pieces of wire, because of the cats. One of them, Abyssinia, was so smart she could open almost any cupboard or window in the house, and Katherine was sure she had been teaching the others. One night they heard a great commotion in the kitchen – a breaking of plates and glasses and falling of bottles and crashing of cutlery to the floor – and tiptoed out there very carefully, thinking it was a burglar, or at least a possum gotten into the house through the chimney, but it was Abyssinia, letting in an accidentally locked-out dog through the window above the sink where the washing-up had been left to be done in the morning.
