by David Brooks
She called her Aunt Katherine, and her mother did too when they were talking about her, but she wasn’t an aunt really, only an old friend of Mother’s and Father’s. She had been married to a soldier, Ellen’s father, but he had been killed in the war in South Africa. He had never even seen Ellen, and Ellen had never seen a photograph of him, since although there had been some photographs once, they had long ago disappeared. Aunt Katherine thought they had gone astray in the process of moving up to the stone house from the cottage they had lived in before, but although she and Ellen had turned the new house over again and again – a strange idea, turning a house over, but they meant only the things in it – they had never found them. She and Ellen knew where Aunt Katherine had hidden the ruby ring, though. On a little hook on the back of the sideboard in the kitchen. It was strange that she didn’t wear it, or want anyone to know it was there. Aunt Katherine had made Ellen swear that she would never tell anyone about it, anyone at all. But although it had disappeared for a while after that it was now back on the hook. Other people could see it too, if they looked, though it didn’t seem anyone had.
It was strange that a new house could be so old, but that was the way it was. They had only lived there for seven years, but that was almost all of Ellen’s lifetime, and a tiny bit longer than Margaret’s own, and it was as if Aunt Katherine had lived there forever. Mother said that another reason the house seemed so crowded was that it was still full of the people who had lived there before: not just of things they had left there or the way they had set it out – she said all old houses were more or less like that – but also of some of the people themselves, as though they had liked it so much, when they did live there, that they had never been able to properly leave. The Glebe house had been like that too, she said, before she had persuaded the strange old lady to go away. On their story nights – they always managed to have a story night when they were there, she and Mother and Ellen and Katherine, although never when Father was visiting – they would argue about who exactly the ghosts were, and how many of them, and what had been happening since last they had been together. There was a very tall, very thin man, who had a stoop and walked with a very long cane, that much was agreed upon, and a much younger woman, though whether there was really anyone else was never certain. Ellen was sure that she had seen a boy, once, but then Ellen was inclined to make these things up so as not to be left out. And Aunt Katherine said there were aboriginals, down beyond the garden, although so far she had never seen them, only heard them once or twice playing music while she was drawing late at night at the kitchen table. Didgeridoo music, mostly, with a kind of soft droney singing, though once or twice it had only been the tapping of sticks. If you were lucky, she said, on full moon nights you could see their shadows move, even though there was nothing to make the shadows in the first place. It had been frightening at first, but eventually she found it much less so, strange and magical, and soothing, reassuring, in a way that she could never really explain.
The surprising thing was that Mother seemed more convinced of these things than anybody. But then Mother saw things, sometimes even before they happened. She said you could smell a person’s death – some people’s, anyway – on its way to them, all the stronger as it got closer, and sometimes even see it, as a pale yellowness about their shadow. She said too that you could smell when there were ghosts about – a sort of burnt-air smell, like cordite, she said, or where lightning had just struck the ground, and a chill in the air in certain places, even in the warmest weather. Most of all Mother had seen Mary, and was able to describe her in details that matched so closely what Margaret and Ellen had been imagining that it gave them an eerie, haunted feeling themselves, as if Mother had been able to overhear their most secret conversations, even though they took such care to make sure that nobody could.
Mary was their secret friend – Margaret’s and Ellen’s, that is, not Margaret and her mother’s. It was hard to say how or when they had met her. It was more as if she had come to be, slowly, in the mind of each of them at the same time, so that one day they had found themselves acting as if she was there, and then some day not too long after had found that she was: that is, that she was a part of their conversations, although never actually needing to use her voice – although even that, too, they eventually found that they knew, her voice, for certainly there was rarely any misunderstanding between them about who had spoken, or what she had said, and then only because one of them had mis-heard, or because Mary herself had mumbled or spoken too softly, as she was inclined to do, being so unused to talking and having to spend so much time alone.
Simply, one day, Ellen had confided in Margaret a secret that she had only just heard from her mother. She had found her mother crying and had asked her what was the matter, and her mother had said it was a memory. She had taken her on her knee and explained that she had once had a baby, before Ellen, and that that baby had died. The baby’s name was Mary and if she had lived she would have been Ellen’s older sister. Ellen found this sad too, but also very exciting. She had always wanted an older sister – or now, at least, it seemed as if she had always wanted one – and so they had started to pretend that one might come, and had set a place for her when they had tea-parties, and had set things out for her, cakes and sweets and presents, and sometimes these would disappear. That was how they first knew for certain she was there.
Mary still lived in the old house, the cottage where Aunt Katherine had lived before, with Mary and Ellen’s father. Other people lived there now and Margaret and Ellen couldn’t go, but Mary was able to live around the new people so that they never even suspected she was there. It was hard, on their story nights, not to talk about Mary, but she herself had asked them not to because it would only make her mother more sad. And Mary was, after all, their secret – or rather, after Margaret had accidentally let her name slip out when she was talking with her mother, and found that her mother knew Mary too, their own, particular, three-way secret, that her mother stressed should remain so, and not be told to anyone.
‘Not to anyone? Not even Father?’
‘No, especially not Father!’
‘Especially? Why?’
‘He doesn’t believe in such things – at least, not in that kind of thing, not in the way we do. He might not approve. He might make her go away somehow and you wouldn’t want that. Besides, it isn’t a secret if you share it with too many people. Three is already more than enough. If we tell it to anyone, even one, we might make it too crowded for her. That’s why we shouldn’t even tell her that we have been talking about her, or that we each know that the other knows. We might frighten Mary away.’
***
Her father felt differently about the stone house, and didn’t come up there nearly as much as they did. He would bring them up at the beginning of the school holidays, and after the last of the services for Christmas would come up for the dinner and presents with them, then go back down and pick them up again when the holidays had finished. But he rarely stayed more than two or three days, and never seemed quite at home as the rest of them did. If he was with any one or another of them alone it was alright, but whenever they were all gathered together his mood would change, almost before your eyes. Once when Margaret and Ellen were still quite young, and her father would come up for longer periods of time, there had been a long, edgy, silent day when she and Ellen had sensed something wrong, and then suddenly there were raised voices between her father and Katherine, and then later between him and her mother, but they had gone out beyond the end of the backyard into the forest, and apart from the angriness they couldn’t make out what they were saying. Her father left before evening, that time, and did not come back to collect them like he said he would. They went back on the train by themselves.
Another time – it was quite a bit later – her father had been there again. It was a very hot day and he had agreed to stay and look after her and Ellen while her mother and Aunt Katherine went for a walk. But he settled down to read on t
he bed and pretty soon he had fallen asleep. They had been playing dress-ups in Aunt Katherine’s room with all the clothes in the wardrobe but eventually got bored and decided – it was Mary’s suggestion – to go to look for her mother and Aunt Katherine. Because it was hot they thought they would go and look by the creek where it was coolest, because that’s where their mothers would go. They followed the creek a long way up, into the shadow of the mountain, to the pool beneath the waterfall. As they got closer they could hear laughing, and so crept up quietly through the ti-tree to see. It wasn’t her mother and Aunt Katherine. It was two women they didn’t know, probably from somewhere up in the town. They had no clothes on and were swimming in the pool. When they had finished the game they were playing they swam over to the rock in the middle and climbed up on it, and the one who had been doing the diving reached over to the other one and kissed her, right on the mouth.
When they got home they were in trouble. Her mother and Aunt Katherine had got home before them and woken her father up, and they were all just about to set out to look for them. In the confusion they only said where they had been. They didn’t say what had happened. Her father had been so angry he had scared her. He had shaken her and shouted, and sent both of them to bed. Later he seemed to have calmed down a bit. He had brought them some supper on a tray, though he still wouldn’t let them out of the room.
That was one of the last times she remembered him, her childhood father, before the War had given her such a different one.
He went over to England soon after the War started, just after Christmas, to be in charge of the Australian chaplains. He didn’t have to go, but he needed to. Men were joining up all over the mountains and in Sydney. They went up to the mountains one time and the men were all still there, but when they went up the next there were new people in some of the shops because so many of the men had gone. The post-office boy had gone, and so had the newsagent, and the young station attendant, and most of the men in the sawmill; even the nightman had joined up. And they were joining up in his parish, too, and her father felt he had to especially, because he was from Over There. He talked to the Church about it and they tried to get him to stay, but eventually gave in and made arrangements. A Chaplain’s Chaplain, her mother used to call him, or the Chaplain Major. He was supposed to be in London, but pretty soon he was in France himself, to be closer to the men, and then right at the Front, not safely behind the lines as he’d promised. They’d gathered this from others at the time, and from the way some of his letters got to them, not from anything in the letters themselves which were all about London, or the English countryside, or the strange things that French people ate, but there were also cut-out places that were things that the army didn’t want them to know. Mother said he was stupid, if he was at the Front, that he wouldn’t do anyone any good there, that he was showing a wilful disregard of her and them all.
While he was gone, she and Ellen and her mother and Katherine were all together a lot more. At first she and her mother moved up to the mountains so that Reverend Warwick, her father’s replacement, could have the house, but when another chaplain, a friend of Reverend Warwick’s, was caught in a mustard gas attack, he felt called to be a chaplain too and the parish agreed even though they couldn’t find a replacement and it would mean they would have to combine with the Darlinghurst parish as a temporary wartime measure, which only meant that the minister would come over from there on Sundays and preach the same sermon to a second congregation. They all four moved back into the Glebe house, then, since it was empty again, and Aunt Katherine could have a change and Margaret and Ellen could go to a better school. They were both almost eleven, and education was becoming more important. But that was later.
The War changed other things too. In the mountains they had lived in a very private world, the four of them together, but also each one of them alone. Especially after the War had started, and you saw even less people about than you did before. Without human clutter and human voices you begin to hear and see other things. And with the humans that you live with, you live so closely that you begin to speak much less. So it was with them, anyway. Even she and Ellen and Mary began to use a kind of coded language, the greatest part of which was silence. It was Mary’s world, more than anything, that they had been drawn into, a world of houses in the tree limbs, cities in the grass, whole countries in different parts of the forest. There was a part of it down near the waterfall that was the English Countryside; there was a part of it that was Paris; there was a part of it that was the War. They could play in it all day and no one else would know. They could leave it one day and come back the next and nothing would have been touched. And if there was school five days a week even in the mountains, that hardly changed things, since she and Ellen could still spend all their time together, and there was a part of the playground that was theirs and even the long walk to and from school had been built into their play. Mary would leave them a hundred yards or so from the school gate and would always be there waiting for them when they got out. Until the time when Margaret had been board monitor, and had forgotten and had to go back. Things began to change then, though it wasn’t their fault, or Margaret’s own, or anybody’s. But they changed.
The board hadn’t taken her long. The teacher, Miss Blake, had already done most of it. She had been in a good mood, and laughed when Margaret came running. So she had emerged from the school again sooner than she had thought, and had been in the hidden clearing beside the road for five minutes now. Maybe Mary and Ellen had got tired of waiting, but it didn’t matter. She was hot after the running and wanted to sit for a while. It was a warm afternoon and the clearing was shady and cooler and beautifully silent. She had heard a gang-gang when she first arrived, the slow, grating, croaking sound that Katherine said was like a winch being tightened. Maybe if she sat a while she would hear it again and she could work out better where it was. And listening in that way intently to the silence, running her fingers lightly over a tiny patch of dark moss flowering under the tree beside her, she became aware of something stirring within the silence, far off but coming closer, a cool, ambiguous, blue-green thing that she realised with sudden interest was also a human sound, a woman somewhere, singing, moving slowly towards her.
She parted the branches of the cotoneaster that hid the clearing from the road and waited while the voice grew stronger. Instead of getting clearer, however, so that she could hear the words, it continued strange and mysterious because the words were not words after all, but sounds, a whole variety of sounds, aching and full – or if they were words after all, since songs do have words, then they were words in another language, for which flowing, liquid, garden colours were more appropriate than grammar or lines on a page. The melody was beautiful – she thought of bellbirds or the clear stream that fed the waterfall, just at that smooth, delicious moment when it bent at the cliff’s edge, and began to fall – and repeated itself without stopping, as if the song had a great many verses and refrains or the person were singing it over and over, making its seams inaudible.
At last, rounding the bend in the road about thirty yards away, the source of the song became visible – a woman almost as beautiful as the song she was singing, tall and slim, with long dark hair and wearing a long, cream-coloured dress that the light caught from behind so that it seemed an aura of many layers about her. She was carrying a parasol and looking at the ground, and the broad brim of her straw sun-hat partly obscured her face, though there could be little doubt, from what could be seen, that this was as beautiful as the rest of her.
Margaret leant forward and listened intently. Now that their source was visible, the words of the song might become clearer and take on meaning. But still they retained their mystery. All she could tell, with an instinctive certainty, was that the woman was very sad, or was thinking of something sad, or was remembering something very wonderful but that now was gone and would not come again. She was so lost in it that she seemed hardly to see the path she was walking on, or to be in a
nother place, walking a different path entirely.
The voice continued after the woman had rounded the next bend of the track, but eventually faded into the same silence it had come from. The spell, on the other hand, lasted for hours, and in some ways far longer. Margaret was never to see the woman again – probably she was a guest at the Carrington or one of the other grand hotels on the other side of the ridge, come out to see the Three Sisters or the Jenolan Caves – and in all her own life would tell only three people of what she had seen and heard. On the way home she began singing the same song herself, straining to recapture the sounds and shapes of the words. She walked very slowly, trying to fill in the gaps. By the time she reached the house she had arrived at something that sounded to her very like the song that she had heard, and was singing it seamlessly herself, over and over. Much of the melody and almost all of the words were her own, but that hardly mattered. (Several times in her life, in the midst of some French or Italian aria and sometimes in a border ballad or old Spanish folksong, she would think she had found it, but, learning it, mastering it, filling herself with it, would think at last that perhaps it was not, that probably now it could never be known, that it was The Song, as she came to think of it, and every other song she might sing could only at best be a memory of it.)
And then everything changed. For some reason, soon after, Mary left and did not come back. Ellen saw her for a while longer, or at least so she said, but it became too hard and strange to talk about with her, and perhaps also Margaret was afraid to learn the truth, thinking that she might have done something wrong, or had somehow hurt them both – or even that it was the song that had banished Mary, as if there were only room for one or the other. Later Margaret would think of it differently – that with the song, Mary had somehow entered and become her, that she had Mary inside her. But that was unkind to Mary. It was never that simple, never that clear.
