The Landing

by Susan Johnson

  That dark night on the Sunlander, swaying, rattling, swinging around corners, they lay like children, holding hands. ‘You are safe now,’ he said. Although she did not believe him, she was moved by his declaration, comforted by the thought that there were still people in the world who believed that safety was a static concept and not provisional; people who did not know that the world around them, even life itself, was counterfeit. The wall was thin, too thin even to be called a wall; everything else was the vanity of human wishes, hoping to remake that which was already done.

  Later, they became true man and wife. He was unschooled, she was unschooled; in the sticky Cairns heat they fumbled their way forward. It did not hurt, as she had expected; there was not even much blood. If she did not enjoy the act itself, she enjoyed lying on his skinny chest afterwards, listening to the rapid beating of his heart.

  She did not know what to do on a beach. She did not know why Syd laughed and said, ‘Call that a beach?’ It looked like a beach to her; it had sand, and waves. ‘That’s a mudflat,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you to a proper beach when we get back.’ He explained that Cairns was a harbour and what she was looking at was not the ocean. He wanted to sit by the pool instead, reading books. Under the shade of a broad umbrella she was hot and restless, and Syd laughed again, telling her that was what swimming pools were for, to slip into when you got too hot.

  Reluctantly she allowed herself to be led by the hand to the water. She could not swim. She remembered Eric pushing her in and, years later, how the girls laughed at her when the school was commandeered by the army during the war and they were evacuated to Keswick, outdoorsy, ruddy-cheeked English and Scottish girls who had grown up on vast estates, walking and climbing in the hills, swimming in cold lakes. Rowing on Derwentwater on the last day of summer term, the stupid little Frenchie had fallen in, flailing and thrashing, everyone laughing. ‘Come on, I’ve got you,’ Syd said and she gingerly attempted the steps, where Syd was waiting at the bottom. ‘I’ll teach you,’ he said.

  But she would not put her head underwater. She dared not venture further, conceding only to lowering herself into the water up to her shoulders, her frightened little head in its bright flowered swimming cap tipped up to the tropical sky.

  They ate in their room most nights, only occasionally venturing out into the hotel dining room. She didn’t want anyone to know she was on her honeymoon; anyone venturing a guess as to what they might be getting up to at night. She kept her eyes lowered.

  It was strange, awkward, being alone with him all day. She feared him discovering that she was a girl of air, hollowed out. What was she supposed to talk about? He chatted on unselfconsciously, telling her all about the business and his role in it, talking about his friends, or the first time he had seen a black American soldier when he was a boy during the war or about the sacred moments before his father died, and how Alan had squeezed his hand. ‘I’ll have that forever,’ he said. For a young businessman he had a very soft heart, full of feeling. In the mornings when she awoke, he was already looking at her, his eyes full of astonished love.

  TWENTY

  Vive la France!

  Scarlett had been ringing her mother’s landline since seven o’clock in the morning and now she was pissed off. Where was she? Even her mobile—never reliable—kept switching to voicemail and Scarlett had left at least four messages. She always knew where her mother was; it was unlike her not to pick up. Hippolyte had been screaming his head off all night; every time Scarlett fell asleep, there he went again. Paul slept right through, but Scarlett was wrenched from sleep so many times that, after a while, the sound of his howl entered her skull as an image, a sort of black, gaping hole, a shadow at the window. The strength of it, the fury! When she thought of the force of the rage Hippolyte carried in his small body, she could not help but wonder where all that fury went in adults. How did everyone learn to keep that rage in? Or did it subside? It certainly did not appear to have subsided in her mother, who, these days, was always furious. Scarlett was forever telling Paul that her mother was a total bitch and she was never going to see her again, and then one of the babies would get sick or have an accident, or she would run out of washing powder, or else she would get so lonely, stuck with the babies all day, she would end up wandering over to her mother’s. Her mother was excellent for taking the boys off her hands, for telling her to go off for the day to Brisbane, if it was school holidays and Penny didn’t have to go to work. Sometimes she babysat while Scarlett and Paul went into Noosa for dinner (she drove; Paul drank), even though her mother made it clear she did not like Paul and never would. ‘I’ve got two choices,’ she said when the scandal broke. ‘I can never see you again, or we can remain in contact. But if I choose to see you, it doesn’t mean I have to see Paul.’

  But of course she did; it was impossible not to. How hard it was to keep hating Paul! He was smart, charming, so dashingly handsome, and he refused to be shamefaced; he refused to be cowed; he was polite and well-mannered with her mother and father at all times. For the most part, her mother ignored him; if she had to speak to him, it was cursory, abrupt. She knew that a dramatic exchange had taken place the night Scarlett had revealed her love; that her mother had raced off to confront Paul, leaving her stranded with her father in the kitchen.

  ‘Life, eh?’ said her hopeless dad, shrugging his shoulders. ‘It never goes in the direction you expect.’ Why did he seem excited, even pleased?

  If her father was expecting her life to go in the same trite direction as his and her mother’s—disappointment, disillusion, the dull predictable adult entrapments of mortgages and nine-to-five jobs—he was mistaken. She was more like her grandmother, fearless, born for adventure. She was more like her grandfather, jumping into the river of life. Scarlett was already leaning sideways out of the architecture, climbing high and free to a distant rapturous place.

  Paul had never told her what her mother said. ‘Don’t you worry about it, my love,’ he said, kissing her. ‘You and I are going to run away where no-one can find us.’ And they did, they ran all the way to Paris, to a many-roomed apartment on rue Mazarin. She was a quarter French, wasn’t she, a fact of which she was inordinately proud, even though she was too lazy to learn the language and had given up, defeated, in Year 10. They sat in bars and cafes and ate the plat du jour and drank wine by the carafe (watered down for her) and did not go to art galleries. They stayed inside and made love, or else walked along by the fine mansions on the islands of the Seine pretending to be French, and once they watched a wedding party in one of the restaurants by the quai D’Orléans which was just like a movie. A bloom of white; laughter, waiters in black with long white aprons, trays of glittering glasses held aloft. Light, warmth, colour itself, love was a revelation, and Paul approached love and her, its object, with something like reverence. He was going to count the hairs on her head, he said; she was his life’s work. One night they leaned out beyond the curly iron rail which ran around the open-shuttered window. ‘Vive la France!’ Paul shouted, and everyone looked up. ‘Remember this night, Scarlett,’ he said. ‘Remember I told you the secret of life.’ She leaned closer, so he might whisper the words in her ear. ‘It’s no good heading for the grave with your eyes shut. Open them. Wide.’ He kissed her; it was the most exhilarating moment of her life.

  If it was hard to continue to live at such a romantic pitch, Scarlett would never admit it. If there was a first, awful time when she knew what sexual move Paul was going to make next, she never let it show. She was always thinking of ways to arouse him, to amuse him, to turn herself inside out, to be the girl of his dreams. They would go to the Middle East and ride camels in the desert under the stars; they would move to Sri Lanka, where she had heard you could live on less than twenty Australian dollars a day. Lots of Australians were moving to Bali or Thailand or other parts of Asia, countries where you could survive on nothing but air. Paul was in IT, and IT consultants worked everywhere. He was forever sending off CVs or being interviewed
for jobs, and if he’d had no luck yet, that did not mean that both of them were not going to get out from under, slipping free of the net of ordinary existence. They had demonstrated the prodigious strength of their characters; they needed only the perfect surrounds to match their formidable wills.

  Neither of Paul’s two daughters spoke to him or to her now, not even Jacinta, who had once been Scarlett’s best friend. If Rosanna could speak to them, why couldn’t they? If ever she ran into Jacinta or Ruby at The Landing—they both lived in Brisbane but came up to see their mother—they pretended they hadn’t seen her. Once, Jacinta gave her a filthy look and seemed about to speak, but Ruby touched her arm, and they turned away.

  She remembered running into Rosanna in Tewantin—she was such a massive hippie!—soon after they came back from Paris, literally running into her; Rosanna coming out of the post office, Scarlett going in. Rosanna laughed and said sorry, as if Scarlett was just some random she’d bumped into. You have lost and I have won, thought Scarlett. They did not speak; not then.

  Where was her mother? She knew her grandmother was visiting, that her mother had driven down to Brisbane to pick her up. She had been meaning to go over but hadn’t got around to it yet. She loved her grandma, who had indulged her all her life, feeling sorry for her because Scarlett was an only child. Her grandma had paid her university student loan, even though she had only completed only one year of Arts at the University of the Sunshine Coast before running off with Paul. She was the one who suggested the name Hippolyte, which was her father’s name. Her grandma was exotic, indulgent, everything her mother wasn’t. Grandma bought her a car when she got her learner’s; Marie was the only person who kept her head when every other person in The Landing seemed to be running around, gossiping. Grandma had requested an interview with Paul, which he reported went very well. ‘She wanted to make sure my intentions were honourable,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t tell her how dishonourable they were now, could I?’ He took Scarlett’s hand and led her to the bed. He told her once that he was so skilled at cunnilingus because he had watched a YouTube clip of a female porn star demonstrating through explicit manoeuvres upon another female porn star how to do it. ‘You are my food of love,’ he said, lowering his head.

  •

  Finally, at ten o’clock, when Scarlett could stand it no longer, she put Ajax and Hippolyte in the double stroller, intending to wheel them around to her mother’s house. Paul was down at the lake, taking the old Hobie out for a run; like everyone who grew up by the lake, Scarlett could sail too, but it didn’t thrill her as it thrilled Paul and countless others. The setting up was too tedious, the time-consuming tying and knotting of too many sails and ropes; the untying again at the end. But Paul always came back happy; sunburned, windblown, momentarily swept clean of any worries he might have about what they were going to do when they ran out of money. Fortuitously, Paul and Rosanna had bought their house at The Landing when prices were low; there was barely any mortgage left on it, so Rosanna had been able to buy out Paul’s share through a low-interest remortgage. They had a pot of cash to live on, paying rent until their marvellous new life in an unknown land could begin.

  Hippolyte was still howling. ‘Oh, be quiet, please,’ she said. He arched his small furious back as she tried to strap him in, as only Hippolyte could do. Already Hippolyte and Ajax’s personalities were wildly different: Ajax timorous, gentle, easily startled, but clingy, whiny, and devastatingly overactive once he got going; Hippolyte a raging beast, a madman, a party animal. ‘Ha ha, you can’t get out, you can’t get out,’ she said in a singsong voice when she had at last wrestled Hippolyte into the stroller, snapping the belt shut with a satisfying sound. In truth, the only time she felt she had any control over them—other than when they were asleep—was when they were strapped in, unable to get out, her prisoners. They could howl until their heads fell off for all she cared; she was the keeper of the key. Mostly, the boys recognised the futility of fighting against their capture, and fell back, vanquished. They usually enjoyed being wheeled about, tiny emperors of all they surveyed, but this morning Hippolyte continued to yell.

  As soon as Scarlett got out the door and onto the front lawn, Giselle emerged. Did she do nothing else all day except lie in wait for her to come out?

  ‘Hello, Giselle,’ said Scarlett. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Can I push?’

  ‘If you like,’ she said. ‘I’m only going to Mum’s.’

  Giselle rushed forward, pushing hard, but not hard enough; she was too small, too thin; the combined weight of the babies and the stroller defeated her valiant attempt to push them over the lip of the gutter.

  ‘Here, let me,’ Scarlett said, manoeuvring the heavy stroller up over the gutter and onto the road. Now Giselle took control, looking into Jules’s house to see if her mother was watching, wielding her load with great importance up the road.

  Giselle waited with the pram outside on the driveway while Scarlett fetched the spare key from its hiding place. ‘Mum? Grandma?’ She went from room to room, but no-one was home. The light in the living room was still on. She was coming out again when she saw her mother’s handbag by the front door. Her heart banging in her chest, Scarlett opened the bag; her mother’s mobile, wallet, the keys to the house and the car, everything, was inside. Scarlett pushed open the front door, rushing out in a scramble of panic, to find Sylv and her mother-in-law, Phyllis, talking to Giselle. They were on their way back from church in Tewantin and had stopped the car to ask if everything was all right. Sylv was an old busybody, and Scarlett couldn’t stand her; she tried never to run out of milk or bread so that she never had to set foot in the shop.

  Everyone looked at her as she ran towards the car. ‘They’ve gone!’ she said, her voice cracking with alarm.

  ‘What do you mean they’ve gone?’ said Sylv, pleased to have inadvertently stumbled upon a drama.

  ‘Mum’s not here! Or Grandma!’

  Sylv, who was driving, sat up self-righteously in the driver’s seat. ‘Well, I saw them heading off that way last night,’ she said, nodding her head in the direction of Bunya Street. ‘On foot.’ ‘Who were they with?’

  ‘There was your mother and grandmother, your father and Cheryl,’ she said before taking a breath and looking at Scarlett with an expression she hoped conveyed a meaning of deep significance. ‘And Rosanna.’

  ‘Where were they going?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Sylv said.

  Just then, Scarlett’s father drove by from the other direction, coming back from his regular Sunday morning clarinet lesson in Noosa. He was in the first thrilling throes of infatuation. ‘What’s up?’ he said, winding down the window and turning down the clarinet music he was playing full blast.

  ‘Do you know where Mum is?’

  ‘Nope. Isn’t she home?’

  ‘Of course she’s not home! That’s why I’m asking! There’s no sign of her, or Grandma, and her bag with everything in it is inside.’

  ‘She’s probably driven Marie into Gympie Hospital—a red-back bit her,’ Phil said. ‘But not on the bum.’ He cracked up laughing. ‘She might be still at Jonathan’s,’ he said, when he stopped.

  Scarlett saw that one of his side teeth was missing. A spider? She knew her father and grandmother got on each other’s nerves. Their personalities were antithetical, in that her father was fatally passive, acted upon, while her grandmother acted upon life, taking as much control as she was able. If Marie knew control had its limits, if she had been taught early a hard lesson in exactly how much life controlled you rather than you controlling it, it was a lesson she had learned well. Never passivity for Marie if she could choose action.

  Scarlett looked contemptuously at her father, laughing with relish, exposing the gap in his teeth.

  She wheeled the pram down to Jonathan’s house, Giselle trotting beside her. Giselle fell away at the frangipani tree, stopping to collect the fallen flowers, crushed, browning; gathering them up into a bur
sting bouquet of perfume, yellow and white, already dying.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The responsibilities of mothers

  Marie leaped up from the table as soon as Syd finished eating; he had to school her in the art of relaxed conversation after dinner. The doctor advised her to take up smoking for her nerves and together they sat smoking after meals, Marie holding her cigarette as if it were a pencil. ‘Darling, like this,’ Syd said, showing her yet again. When she took a puff, she took quick, darting sucks in rapid succession, which looked wrong. It looked odd, too, the way she blew the smoke out again, pursing her lips as if she were blowing a bubble.

  ‘It’s no good, sweetheart; you’ll never make a smoker,’ he said, laughing, but because the doctor had instructed her to smoke, Marie felt compelled to persevere.

  ‘I’ll get the hang of it,’ she said.

  Syd smiled. I’ll get the hang of it was her favourite expression. She had heard it in an American movie and now she used it all the time. Oh, how he loved her.

  Women were not allowed to work after they married. At first this idea seemed tolerable because Marie had so much to do, setting up the house, furnishing the rooms. ‘Don’t be frugal,’ Sydney instructed, but it was impossible for her to give up the way she had lived for so long. She could not get used to having so much money.