by David Brooks
‘Yeah. It was in the paper.’
‘I thought you didn’t read the papers.’
‘Didn’t used to, same rubbish day in and day out, and still is, most of it. Bloody politicians buggering up the place – sorry, Jennifer – and the same disasters. But since you signed up, and knowing they’ve been going to send another mob. I go in every few days, read what Mrs W’s got. Found out last week and we’ve been waiting to hear from you. Your mother’s been in a bit of a state. She’ll be happier now.’ – gripping his son by the knee and smiling at Jennifer across the cab – ‘You’ve done the right thing.’
And then details. The father was thirsty for details. Not for the pleasure of them, for it was clear that there was no pleasure, but out of a father’s need to know. The date, the time, the ship, anything and everything he could think to ask about, less for the answers than for the communication.
They treated her, immediately, almost like one of the family, almost like a prospective daughter-in-law. Not that she couldn’t understand why, or that she minded. There had been the correspondence, after all, only a few short letters, but it was enough to make her feel as if she already knew May in a way. While Ted went down to help Michael’s brother Philip finish the milking, and Michael brought in wood and started a fire in the lounge-room, she found herself, within minutes, helping with cooking, setting the table, listening to a mother’s worries as though – it was assumed – they might almost be her own. Michael was to bed down in Philip’s room, May was saying; they would make up a second bed; and she, Jennifer, was to sleep in the room that had been Michael’s. Something had told her, she said, not to start dinner until Ted got back. She had had a good feeling about the day from the start. There was a leg of lamb, pumpkin, parsnips, a small mountain of potatoes. While the men opened a bottle of beer she would whip up a steamed pudding.
Philip came in and asked most of the same questions. What could be told was told a third time. Two bottles of beer were opened, the steamed pudding made. Over dinner – the aroma of the roast had been filling the house for an hour already – they talked of Army training, explained to each other what they knew of the war, tried to wrap their minds and tongues around some of the names. An argument of sorts – a friendly argument – was averted over the government, or otherwise, of Mr Menzies. Some politician stories were told. Something else lurked, for a moment, underneath, or rather came close enough to the surface to still, eerily, the water above it, before returning to the depths. She was asked about her life in the city, and constructed, as best she could, a hoarding around the gap at its centre, realising that she had still not said anything to Michael about what had really been happening, and why else she had been so ready to come.
They talked, too, of life in the valley, and Michael asked about the children they had seen. No one could explain. May had first noticed them about a year ago, playing a little back from the fence, and given that she – or anyone in the family, for that matter – had only ever seen the man a half dozen times in the last five or six years, thought it quite possible that they had been on the property all along, though something must have changed there for them to be suddenly wandering about. Perhaps the mother had died. You would never know. The man’s name was Hahn, the stock-and-station agent said – a German name, which might explain why he had gone to ground in such an out-of-the-way place – and he was supposedly married, though no one in the area had ever seen the wife. Some pretty strange things had happened in the valley over the years, Philip suggested, and murdering your wife didn’t seem all that unlikely. He then told a story – May had interrupted and suggested that Jennifer didn’t need to hear such things, but Michael, who knew the man in question, was curious – of a farmer two miles further down their own road. Peter Ryder. A big, slow brute of a man whose wife had left him one day without warning or trace, and who was trying to manage the place by himself. Like theirs, his property was part orchard, part dairy. He had turned up at the pub in town three or four months ago, in a foul mood – the front of his truck stoved in, the radiator leaking everywhere – determined to get as drunk as he could and to pick a fight with anyone who looked at him. Nobody would have a bar of him after a while, and eventually he went to sleep it off in the truck. Some time in the middle of the night he woke up and drove home. He didn’t seem to care what damage he was doing to the truck.
A policeman was in from Braidwood the next day, on another matter. He got wind of what had gone on the night before and drove up to the farm to check things out. There wasn’t any response when he got there and he started to look around. He found the flock of dairy cows all gathered in the yard of the milking-shed, desperate to be milked, and Ryder hanging from one of the rafters with an empty milk-can kicked over beneath him. He looked around some more and found, in the field behind, a dead cow with a lump of bloody two-by-four beside it. It appeared as if Ryder had lost his temper and tried to bash the creature’s head in. The policeman went back to the house – still looking around – and checked the truck. There was blood and black hair around the damaged bumper and radiator, as if he’d hit some other large animal. The hair was the wrong colour for the cow, so he kept looking. He found deep gouges in the grass near an open gate by the driveway, and decided to check that field too. Ryder’s huge prize bull – it had won Best of Show in Bungendore two years running – was lying in the middle of it, dying, bearing all the signs of having been deliberately rammed side-on.
‘What did he do?’ asked Jennifer, incredulous.
‘Who? The policeman? Went back into the house and found Ryder’s gun, and shot the bull, then cut Ryder down.’
There was a brief silence, as May Waters might have predicted.
‘Quiet day for a country copper,’ said Ted.
‘What about the cows?’ Jennifer asked. It was important to know about the cows.
‘The copper went over to Baxter’s, down the road on the other side, and got someone to milk them. Baxter looked after them until the bank sold the place up, then got them himself for a bargain, cows and a field to feed them with.’
Talk moved on to the belligerence of cows and then, eased by the steamed pudding, the fresh cream, tea, eventually to the whereabouts of the pack of cards, for a game of five hundred. May bowed out, wanted to clean up the kitchen and go to bed early and wouldn’t hear of Jennifer or anyone else helping her and so holding up the game. They went out to set up the card table in the lounge room where Philip had lit the fire. There were pictures of a very young Ted in uniform on the sideboard, one a studio portrait and the other with mates just as they were about to board the troopship, the Star of South Africa, for Europe. He had turned nineteen just two days after he got to England, and had been away three years. He had fought in Poziéres and elsewhere. Jennifer had heard of Poziéres. While they played the boys joked about how they had never been able to get their father to talk about the war. Now that Michael was about to go, Philip said, it might be about time Ted opened up. Philip was only half serious but he had touched a nerve. Ted told them to get on with the game, and became very quiet as he played. When the game finished and Michael asked who was in for another, Ted reminded Philip brusquely that they had to be milking before dawn, and that maybe it was time everyone hit the sack. It was nine-thirty. Philip and Michael stayed up talking a while longer. Jennifer waited until Ted had finished in the bathroom, then cleaned her teeth, fought down the disturbance in her abdomen, decided against another trip to the outside toilet, and went to bed.
Somewhere around midnight she woke and heard plaintive voices, Michael’s and his mother’s, weaving around each other, trying to hold on to something too big for them. She lay there unable to make out the words. They seemed to grow calmer, after a time, and one of them, she couldn’t tell who, went to bed. She thought she could hear the other still moving around, became conscious of a pressure in her bladder that eventually could not be ignored, got up in the dark, put on one of the old coats hanging on the back of the door and went out,
through the empty kitchen, into the bright but ice-cold night.
As she sat with the door open clutching the coat around her, marvelling at the stars, she heard the back door close. Thinking that someone else was on their way toward her, she finished quickly and moved back along the path but met no one, glimpsing instead a figure with a kerosene lamp making his way toward the feed shed. It was too tall to be Philip or his father, could only have been Michael. Within a few minutes she found herself sitting there with him, on a broken hay-bale, holding him, whispering to him, trying to calm – or perhaps it was to unleash, for both of them, the sobs that kept welling, and kept being swallowed back. They were both exhausted from the trip down, she thought, all they needed was sleep. She would sit for a while, then they would go back to their beds. But they talked, huddled under a blanket he had carried down there, and then, with the lamp blown out, lay down and held each other to keep warm, and talked further, dozed, talked more. He was afraid. More than she had thought he might be. He had gone into the Army hoping for excitement and direction, something totally different to the valley, but now he was going to a war, a real war, and his mother’s barely suppressed panic had thrown him. Even his father’s all-too-predictable refusal to talk had, now, an edge he’d not thought of, not understood before. He had come down expecting anger, which might at least have galvanised; this other thing, a sad, loving acquiescence, had left him vulnerable.
These things, and more. Dreams he had had about the future that he was afraid might now never happen, and needed suddenly to talk about. Things he had felt, or not felt. She was on the verge, once, of telling him about Daniel and the baby she thought she was carrying, how scared she was too, but held it back, let it show as tears only, thinking it might be too much for him, not wanting him to go away with any other feeling than this, that he seemed to be needing – the surprising, long, exhausted kisses, that she allowed though she allowed nothing else, that each of them seemed to be needing.
She woke and it was just dawn. Cows could be heard from the milking-shed, and the sounds of buckets and milk-tins, and Ted and Philip calling to each other. She tried to nudge Michael gently awake but, this not working, slipped back to the house herself, and into her bed. As far as she could tell she had not been observed. Philip would have noticed Michael gone but there could be a couple of explanations for that. With luck he hadn’t yet checked the feed-shed. She fell quickly asleep again and woke only in the late morning, well past eleven, just in time to help May with the lunch. Although at one point, coming into the kitchen, she found Ted and May in a quiet conversation that they ceased the moment they became aware of her, no one during the meal behaved any differently toward her than they had before, or gave any other sign of having noticed anything.
Afterward Michael took her climbing up a hill at the back of the property, from where one could get a wide view of the valley. Past the top fence they were in the open bush, following a rough track up through the ironbarks. Where he could, Michael held her hand as they went, saying little. He showed her, in a clearing half-way up, a large, rusted winch and the place where he and his father had made a heavy cover for an abandoned mine-shaft, for fear that someone might one day fall into it, and then at the top of the hill – the high point of a ridge that ran a long way eastward into the range – a large rock overhang under which, he said, when he was a boy, there had been some ancient aboriginal hand-paintings.
‘Where are they now?’
‘I don’t know. I guess I always thought they had washed away, or something, just left these lighter patches on the rock.’
‘Ancient paintings? It seems strange that they would have suddenly washed away, after lasting so long.’
‘Yes. That doesn’t make much sense, does it? I’d never really thought about it. Someone has washed them away, obviously, scrubbed them off. Bastard. Some idiot trying to clean up the countryside … ’
‘They must’ve been pretty determined, to carry a bucket and scrubbing-brush all the way up here.’
‘Well … they wouldn’t have needed to. I think you’d just need a flat stone, to grind it away. You see, here.’
They were gone almost two hours. When they got back, after a cup of tea, Michael chopped and stacked wood. She sat and read in the window, watching him. Afterward he took her down to the shed to teach her how to milk. It seemed to her more a means of entertainment for Ted and Philip than of relieving the one poor cow assigned to her, that was probably only too glad when her hands began to cramp and Michael had to take over. There was still no clear sign that anyone had noticed anything the night before, though now, and through dinner, something seemed to hang unstated in the air. It could have been anything, most probably and most simply the knowledge that Michael was leaving the next day. They talked about the hand-paintings. Ted thought it might have been Mrs Funnell, from two properties up, about ten or twelve years ago. The rumour had got around that she was half-caste and she had been very anti-aboriginal for a while, trying to prove otherwise.
Jennifer cleared the meal – insisted that May let her do it alone – and then went to bed early, leaving the parents and their two sons to talk quietly around the table. At some point deep in the night she woke briefly, heard someone moving about in the kitchen, straightening things up, evidently unable to sleep.
Ted drove them to Bungendore at six a.m., after the milking, in time for the nine-thirty train. Beyond Goulburn their compartment was empty, warm, and the landscape bathed in late-autumn sunshine. They talked, dozed, talked again, all the more easily as the train approached Sydney. She’d not been looking forward to returning but something of Michael’s relief and mounting excitement – the sense, at least, that all was now out of his hands and that he could do little but throw himself into it – seemed to carry her past herself.
He embarked at two p.m. the Saturday following. There was a street parade of almost a thousand men – they were sending a whole battalion – and she stood by Harris Scarp’s on George Street, trying to make out Michael in the ranks, but having seen him, or thought she had seen him, more than a dozen times, she realised that she had probably not seen him at all. She went down to Woolloomooloo expecting no better luck, and was surprised not only to be able to find him on the crowded dock, but to see May already standing with him. It had been a last-minute decision, apparently. She had come down on the train the day before and stayed overnight at the Country Women’s Association. It was only her third time in Sydney, in nearly fifty years. After a speech from the Premier, the crowd-cramped, tearful farewell on the dock, then what seemed an age watching the troops on the decks watching them, they watched the troopship – the Devonshire – draw slowly out into the harbour and then, afraid they would not see it once it rounded Garden Island, walked around the shore to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair and sat there, on a bench under the giant fig-trees, following it as it inched its way toward the Heads.
By a quarter to five the sun had gone and a cold breeze was coming in from the water. They turned and walked back toward the City through the darkening Domain. The gates to the Botanic Gardens, when they passed them, were being locked by a tall, bald guard Jennifer had never seen before. She fought back a longing for Daniel, walked in a thoughtful silence for the next four minutes. It was just on five-thirty. Early cooking smells assailed them from cafés as they made their way up Elizabeth Street and they agreed on an early tea. May had taken her bag to Central Station in the morning after checking out of the Country Women’s Association, and so all they needed to do after dinner was to walk up to the station in time for the night train.
At the Hellas, a small Greek café opposite the park, they had steak and chips for one-and-three each and sat talking over a pot of tea for nearly an hour afterward, May asking Jennifer about her family, her childhood, and talking about her own so easily that Jennifer found herself opening up to her as she had not, in this way, to anyone for a very long time. May presumed a relationship with Michael that simply was not there, but Jennifer could not b
ring herself to disillusion her. They promised to write to one another with any news they had from Michael. At the station they hung about outside the carriage until the conductor blew his whistle, then hugged each other with genuine affection.
And a month later Michael was dead, the victim of an ambush while on patrol only days after his company had reached the front. Jennifer had not even heard from him yet. She thought that the letter from May might contain the first news. She had thought of Michael often, and read the newspapers carefully each weekend to get a sense of where he might be and what might be happening to him, but she had also had her own difficulties to deal with.
Her second period had not arrived. Wary of going to a doctor and so of reducing her options by announcing her condition to the world, she tried to answer some of her teeming questions by reference to books in the state library. The medical detail by turns shocked and enthralled her, but was of no real help. It wasn’t what she needed. Walking back from the bus on a Friday evening, she found one of the regular downstairs soirees in full swing and realised, suddenly, another option. Naomi Longstaff was a nursing sister at Bondi Hospital. She had always been friendly, and had invited Jennifer several times to join the other nurses and young doctors for their end-of-the-week party, in the beach park during the summer and her flat in the colder months, but Jennifer had never gone. She regretted this now, but perhaps it was not too late. She went upstairs, changed, came downstairs again, knocked, found herself welcomed with pleased surprise. She drank shandies, danced to the records, talked with Naomi when she could. Then, on the Sunday, when she could see that Naomi was alone, Jennifer went down to thank her. Naomi invited her in, made a pot of tea, and they talked casually for an hour before Jennifer felt she could bring the subject up.
The older woman had eyes like a hawk, it seemed. She had noticed Daniel over the last eight months or so, and had also noticed his recent absence. She was delighted that Jennifer had come to the Friday party, but sensed that Daniel, or the absence of Daniel, might have had something to do with it. And now she put two and two together. She passed no judgment. These things happened. Although she made no direct admission, she spoke as if such things – this thing – had happened to her also, or might have, and gave immediately the most practical and sensitive advice.
