The Landing

by Susan Johnson

  The day arrived when the house was done; the rooms painted, the carpet laid, and the new plastic-smelling linoleum in the kitchen washed and sparkling. The bedspreads in the bedrooms matched the curtains; there were paintings on the wall and a big photograph of their wedding in the entrance hall. Syd held her hand as they walked from room to room, admiring every one. ‘The dining room looks beautiful, darling,’ he said. ‘I can’t wait till we have our first dinner party.’

  Her heart jumped; she knew she had a formal dining room, but she hadn’t known she would be expected to hold a dinner party in it. She remembered her mother, hysterical with nerves at the idea of having anyone home to the flat, despite having a convivial husband, willing children and a maid. Marie recalled her mother locking herself in her bedroom, the endless self-pitying lament through the door. How terrible it is to be born too sensitive! How horrible it is to be so scorned, alone, no sound but the radio, the ticking minutes, at the end of which lies only death! How terrible to know that her mother’s only concern about the approaching war was that her husband might go off on amorous adventures. How much more terrible to be the daughter of such a mother, never able to tell the truth about her mother’s death: that she was not sorry her mother was dead, not at all.

  The days grew long and empty. Marie both wanted and did not want a baby. The idea struck her as too dangerous, perilous even. The thought of it flew in the face of everything she knew about families and the misery of them. Then Syd insisted she get a housekeeper, which gave her even less to do.

  She recoiled from her well-intentioned new sister-in-law’s attempts to understand that Marie had suffered. Evelyn was funny and smart, and Marie was ashamed that whenever conversation turned to consideration of Marie’s numbered dead she thought, contemptuously, Let me tell you about war, Evelyn, let me wipe from your face your smug understanding, your expression of tender concern, and tell you that the more we have to put up with, the less nice we become. She wanted to tell Evelyn that, in distress, a miserable, cracked family becomes only more miserable; in an earthquake more china is broken than when the earth is still. Even now, all these years later, Marie could list her mother’s cruelties, large and small, her floundering jealousies, her limited emotional repertoire. There was no benefit to suffering, no purpose, no meaning. Suffering did not ennoble; grief did not bind people together but only cast them out into separate spheres of sorrow.

  Every Sunday Syd kindly drove her to All Saints’, a place to which she had become wordlessly, inexplicably, attached, where they sat together in the same back pew at the early Holy Communion service. It was where Father Williams had baptised her into the Church of England in those first lonely months in the boarding house, before she moved in with the McCanns. There was no pardon, no mercy, she knew that; suffering was democratic, differing only in its details. Father Williams baptised her into the new world, into the House of Our Lord, into His promised sunrise; quiet, young, intellectual Father Williams, with his soft, sad voice. Father Williams, murmuring, ‘God keep you, Marie.’ God calls us out of darkness and into His marvellous light. Do you turn to Christ as Saviour? God had not kept them and God had not kept Marie, travelling further and further, her whole life construed as flight. The water touched her head, leaking, like tears. If she was alone, estranged from everything she knew, was it a crime to seek comfort? She thought of her mother: I cannot feel such pain and live! Who will help me? I want to die! She thought of her father writing to her after her brother’s death, only two years after her mother’s, I can’t pray, I can’t. I can’t forgive the war. I can’t forgive God. The church was filled with sheafs of huge, white chrysanthemums, their great blooms fiercely white against their dark leaves, giving out a strange and bitter breath.

  The night her daughter was born the nurses tried to get her to look at the baby. Marie turned, weeping, to the wall.

  ‘Come on, dear,’ said the nurse. ‘You’ve got a lovely baby girl.’

  She could not look. She heard them talking, was aware of the baby being taken away. She slept. Later, a doctor came in, talking and talking, blah, blah, blah, the wonder of life, the responsibilities of mothers; the baby seemed to be having a little trouble breathing, something on her lungs. Was Marie surprised? Why had she ever thought she could be part of that commonplace throng, untouched, dumb, alive? She was physically spent, as if she had run ten miles, as if she had swum the English Channel. All she wanted was to lie in bed and never get up. Then, half awake, her head filled with lucid, terrible dreams, she heard the unmistakable sound of Syd’s footsteps. She lay on her side, turned to the wall, and the footsteps stopped by the bed. Syd leaned over and touched her gently on the cheek, saying nothing, sitting down quietly on an unseen chair.

  When she awoke, she could tell he was still there. ‘Darling, I want to introduce you to our baby,’ he said. ‘She looks exactly like you.’ But she didn’t; her pinched new face was a wretched replica of Marie’s mother’s.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Figure, Asleep

  Jonathan was once more woken by the birds, singing him back into consciousness. It was so noisy, the ringing world; the birds, the wind, the waves, the scuttling of unseen lizards in the dry leaves beneath his window, dogs barking, three geckos clicking upon the wall, a frog croaking, a natural zoo. How could he ever have thought The Landing was peaceful? There was a roar of sound: the birds, the wind and waves together making a tremendous racket, as if there was a giant waterfall somewhere nearby, monstrous as Niagra. Outside the window the branches and leaves of trees bounced and swirled, tossed and spun. The wind was ferocious and the shutters rattled, loud as a hundred people knocking. He felt a kick of excitement, as if something good was about to happen, but he did not yet know what.

  The wind was so loud he could not possibly tell if Marie and Penny were awake and moving about the house. He pictured Anna’s face, then Penny’s, the tantalising mystery of their characters. He could have sworn he knew every single thing there was to know about Sarah, every crevice of her heart, every quiver, but he was wrong. He ordered himself to stop thinking about his useless, leftover love for his wife and jumped out of bed, crossing to the window: already there were windsurfers and sailboats whizzing across the lake, gleeful streaks of red and white and yellow glimpsed among the trees. Immediately below, mangroves and waterlilies and reeds rustled and swayed. A few hardy waterfowl bounced upon the waves.

  He found Penny in the kitchen, pouring herself a glass of iced water from the water-purifying compartment at the front of the fridge. She looked rumpled, sexy; her make-up was smeared. She started when she saw him.

  ‘Please don’t speak. I have the most monstrous hangover,’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘Serves you right, as my mother used to say. I hate to crow, but I feel tiptop.’

  ‘He said, crowing.’ She groaned.

  ‘Would you like a coffee? Hair of the dog?’

  ‘A short black would be wonderful. I will be the one dying on the back veranda. Je suis mort,’ she said, taking her glass outside.

  He had an expensive coffee machine and made himself a long black and Penny a short as requested. ‘Here we are, madam,’ he said, handing it to her.

  She thanked him and lay back on one of the two cane sun-loungers, balancing the small cup on her stomach. ‘When did Australia become a country of coffee snobs?’

  ‘The sixteenth of January, 1998,’ he said.

  She smiled. ‘I thought it was more like the seventeenth. Do you know the fame of flat whites has spread as far as London and New York? I wonder if we can now officially import them to Italy.’ Her eyes were closed so he had a good opportunity for closer inspection. Her face in repose had a classic, ruined beauty, but not so ruined as to be negligible. Possibly she carried a tad too much weight—he saw that her cup rested upon the tiny castle of her stomach and that her upper arms had the telltale swing of muscle losing its tone—but the bones of her face were handsome, and the length of her spread out was elegant, pleasing to
the eye. Jonathan did not regard himself as a superficial man, but he was only human; like all men, he responded to beauty in women. Yet if it was only beauty he wanted, he would by now have selected any number of the beauteous young women to be found at the bars he could frequent if he chose. He was after something else, something rarer, something moral. He wished to find someone who possessed that unfashionable attribute which might be called character, someone vivid, entire, not only large enough to inhabit the hole made in his life by the defection of Sarah, but someone as unabridged as Sarah herself. He supposed he was guilty of falling in love not only with Sarah, but with the way she saw the world, the way she experienced it more intensely than everyone else. He had relied on her to make the world brighter and richer, and for a long while after she left, the world seemed colourless and dull. Her leaving made him understand that it was up to him to restore colour and vivacity: it was then that he booked his walking trip to France. It was while sitting on a mountain in the Pyrenees that the glorious, lucid world came back.

  Penny had fallen asleep. She certainly had character, he thought; possibly a little too much. He crossed the veranda and carefully took the cup from where she had placed it on her stomach. She looked artfully composed, Figure, Asleep, arranged as if a painter’s model. She was one of those lucky people who, during sleep, appeared temporarily closed down, suspended, rather than one whose mouth hung open, as if the bound self was boundless, rent. He stood above her, looking down. His eyes registered that she was indeed beautiful. Instinctively he leaned down and swept from her forehead a tendril of hair. Gently, he traced the curve of her cheek. She stirred but did not wake.

  Walking back into the house, quietly closing the screen door behind him, Jonathan listened for movement from inside, but there was no sound from Marie’s room. He walked up the corridor and stood in front of the bedroom, his ear to the door. What if she had died? He knocked quietly. There was no response: he was in two minds whether to open the door or steal away, but the possibility of her lying dead, or mortally ill, caused him to open it.

  Marie appeared to be asleep, but he still couldn’t be sure she wasn’t dead. He entered the room and stole across to the bed to make sure she was breathing; as he crossed the room, too late he realised she might wake and see him. As silently as he could he crept close enough to witness the rise and fall of her breath. He turned and fled.

  Two women asleep in his house; surely it was not too much to ask that one materialise into the woman of his dreams? Must he go through life cutting his dreams order to fit the quotidian cloth? It seemed to him he did not want much; he wanted to love and to be loved in return. But perhaps even that was too much, too impossible, like wanting to be happy—whatever that was. Perhaps the whole point was to arrive at the understanding that the cut cloth was life? Perhaps existence was meant to be a half-formed thing, never quite coming together, a trackless forest, everyone doomed to wander off in the wrong direction. He was not unhappy; he was financially secure, well-fed, loved by his children and by his friends, generally regarded by everyone who knew him as a good man. And yet, and yet . . . he was a starved romantic, a secret unknown even to his vanished wife. Jonathan Lott, construction law specialist, senior partner, willing, waiting, surrounded by a sea of womanly choice, in love with his runaway wife.

  After he had showered and shaved (in the privacy of his own ensuite), he ventured out again. Marie had still not appeared and Penny—also now showered and dressed, he noted—was pacing up and down the lounge room, a worried look on her face. ‘Do you think it’s strange that she’s sleeping for so long?’ she asked as soon as she saw him. ‘She’s usually an early riser.’

  ‘The poison in her system has probably knocked her about. I wouldn’t worry.’ How would he know what was normal? He had thought that if a venomous red-back spider bit you, you died in the absence of antivenom.

  ‘I wanted to get her checked out at the hospital first thing. What’s the time? It must be well after nine.’

  ‘Nine thirty,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think I should wake her? Maybe letting her sleep is the wrong thing.’

  Why did women always assume that men knew everything, even clever women like Penny? He did not know about red-back spider bites, how to start a stalled car, how to stop longing.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m just speaking my anxieties out loud. I know men never do. It used to drive Pete crazy.’ She made a wry sort of grimace. ‘What a pair we made, me rabbiting on about everything in the world that worried me, and him rabbiting on about the pointlessness of me rabbiting on. It’s like a cosmic joke, isn’t it?’

  He smiled. ‘It’s amazing how anyone stays married at all, really.’

  She looked at him. ‘And yet we keep getting married. We keep hoping.’

  They stood, staring at each other.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said, looking away hurriedly. ‘What’s the point of being alive if you don’t have hope? The triumph of hope over experience and all that.’

  He looked away too, moving quickly in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Can I get you another coffee?’ he called over his shoulder.

  Penny thought he resembled a shy, startled boy, with his rumpled hair and his way of not looking her in the eye, and she was struck forcefully by his physical attractions. She had repaired herself as best she could; when she awoke mascara stained the pillow but enough remained smudged around her eyes so that she could smear it around the rims of her eyelids. These days, left undefined, she resembled a skinned cat, but this morning was one of those happy mornings when she looked half decent, despite her hangover.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she said. ‘Make it a double shot. I’ll go and check on her again, if that’s okay.’ She walked down the hall, fast.

  He was on the veranda when she returned.

  ‘How is she?’ he asked.

  ‘Still sleeping. I suppose one benefit of her being asleep is that she can’t talk. She can’t tell me about everything I’m doing wrong.’

  He laughed. ‘You’d never think she was in her eighties. She’s like a seventy-year-old. She’s quite something.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t she? If she wasn’t my mother, I’d probably think she was quite something too.’

  They fell silent, Penny struck, once again, by a feeling of disgrace; not by her mother’s illness, but by her own unveiling. She was alert to the proximity of Jonathan’s body, of its sensual grace. There was a new, charged tension that hadn’t been there before; her hangover did not help, making her hyper-aware, vulnerable, as if all her wordly disguises had been peeled away. Last night was upon her still; what a fool she had been, and was. How was she supposed to present herself now, so as not to appear so grievously disappointed? She had a horror of appearing needy, of being the person who was pitied. It seemed vital to make it clear to the world, and to Jonathan in particular, that she had got everything she wanted. She was happy! Really, she was!

  Jonathan was starting to wish he could get on with his day; there was something about Penny that was making him uncomfortable. He had awarded himself a long weekend and he had only the rest of today and tomorrow morning before he had to head off again. He wanted to see about the garden; if there was enough water in the water tank. He wanted to see if he could talk to Anna, alone; whether she stood up to closer inspection. Then he heard someone coming up the path beside the house and quickly identified the yoohoo as belonging to Phil from the shop, loudly announcing his arrival all the way along the path and up the stairs onto the veranda, where he stopped and did a double take at the unexpected sight of Penny. ‘Well, good morning to you,’ he said, a lecherous grin on his face.

  ‘Hi, Phil,’ she said. ‘Jonathan put me and Marie up for the night because she was ill.’

  Phil looked disappointed.

  ‘What’s up, Phil?’ Jonathan said, his morning ruined, any plans fast disappearing.

  ‘I’ve just come to let you know about a proposal for a walkway around the western side of the lake
,’ Phil said.

  ‘What? You mean this side?’

  ‘That’s right, my friend. It’s going to run from the camping ground around the front past the shop and right up to Frogmouth Point.’

  ‘Right past this house?’

  ‘’Fraid so,’ Phil said. ‘A fixed walkway. Built over the water.’

  ‘Knock, knock. How’s the patient?’ It was Celia, coming up the stairs with a bunch of native flowers. ‘I was hoping you’d still be here. How’s she doing?’ And then a fearful wailing, a screaming child, and Scarlett folding up the stroller at the bottom of the stairs, sending the bellowing child up ahead. Jonathan stood up just in time to glimpse Giselle below, hiding in the bushes.

  ‘Oh, Hippy!’ Penny cried. ‘What’s wrong, darling? Come to Nana!’ And yet another child, being led by the hand by the beautiful, dishevelled Scarlett, a new child, also beginning to cry.

  ‘Never rains but it pours, eh, Jonno?’ said Phil, singularly pleased.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Ooh la la

  There wasn’t one single, shining moment when Marie came out of her corner, swinging. Her move from the shadows into the light was gradual, uneven, one step forward two steps back, as was her resignation (never acceptance) regarding the facts of her life. She did not speak French to anyone because she did not know another French person—and besides, that part of her life was gone. There was an irreparable rift between her and her native place, between her tongue and its home. She did not look back but forward, never speaking French to her babies, because they were Australian and another language would only confuse them. If language was the house of being, Marie was changing addresses.

  But slowly it began to dawn on her that being French was an advantage. The Courier-Mail breathlessly reported on the latest fashions from Paris, and one morning at the breakfast table she was astonished to read a local woman journalist’s highly glamorised account of her trip to the Continent, and to Paris in particular, where she observed that when a French woman came into a room, ‘the first thing you notice is that she walks better, her head and feet are better dressed, her clothes finer and better put on than any woman you have ever seen’. Marie laughed. What was this nonsense? She must remember to try it out, being ‘French’, more splendid than she had previously supposed.