The Landing

by Susan Johnson

  Soon, little by little, being French became a sort of confidence trick she could pull, ooh-la-la-ing all over the place, intimidating Australians, who, to her great surprise, immediately bestowed upon her all manner of superiorities: in fashion, food, manners; in something they called ‘good taste’, an altogether impossible elegance which they found indescribably glamorous, full of romance, an unreachable quality that could never be theirs. Who knew it could be so uneventful, slipping off one identity and assuming another, the dark airless room in Passy swept from view, that old box of malevolent tricks locked, so far away?

  If there was never a moment when Marie stood up and declared This is me, Marie, if you don’t like me, then come out and say so!, there were many small moments, starting with her first nervous dinner party in her new dining room at Ascot, when she failed to properly cook the roast chicken right through. ‘Oh, well, it would be too much for my wife to be both the most beautiful woman in Queensland and the best cook,’ said Syd, and everyone laughed. She was so embarrassed! The blood that ran out when the chicken was carved, the flesh at the centre of the bird oozing like a ruptured internal organ. She blushed and blushed and one of the guests—the buyer for ladies’ fashion for McAlisters, the foppish Mr Stuart Middleton, who was rumoured to be a nancy boy—laughed with especial delight. ‘I did not believe it was possible for your beautiful wife to look more beautiful, but look at her! She is charming, Sydney. She is the most charming creature I have ever seen in my life!’

  It seemed that the new Mrs McAlister was going to be a success.

  She never grew to like entering rooms. She always had to make a little mental adjustment, a sort of gathering-up, an internal call to arms. She learned to make this adjustment every single time, to play at being Mrs Marie McAlister entering the room, ahead of herself, until at last her newly composed artificial glamorous French self could walk into any room, any house, any restaurant, any reception. She supposed she had become like one of those stage actors she had read about, who conquered nerves by pretending to be an entirely different person. She conquered herself by putting her old self in a box and shutting the lid, where that girl of loss lived on, but in the dark, as if with her mother in a locked room. The girl outside the box, the woman, wore the new season’s frocks before they arrived in Australia, attended church when she could, learned to smoke and how to make brilliant small talk. She was an intelligent girl, she knew—like her father always said—and she learned, excellently, how to be the new Marie, just like she learned well how to do everything else. All her moments, strung end to end: the first dinner party and then the second, the third, the fourth; the first opening night, the first meeting of the lord mayor and his wife. One year, two years, five; one daughter and then a second; the new sophisticated Marie, far from vulgar cousins; smiling and kissing cheeks and shaking hands with confidence, learning to cook like a cordon bleu chef, the most beautiful woman in Brisbane. There was a third child, a son. He lived for two days and was buried by Father Williams. He was named for her brother, Eric, gone to join that long, numberless line. But with every passing year she felt a little safer, even though her anxiety about the facts of her past never left her. The day came when she was a stylish, accomplished French woman who could talk to anyone, who could even give a small witty speech to one of the many charities she was invited to join. She went to charity lunches, to the races, to the Moreton Club, where she sat among the fellow wives of rich men, their handbags in their laps, white gloves covering their jewelled fingers. By the time the ladies of Queensland removed their gloves for good, she was one of the most famous hostesses in Brisbane, an invitation to one of the annual Christmas parties she and Syd hosted at the Chevron down the coast one of the most desirable in town. She liked being admired, flirting with Australian men, who seemed to think that her being French as well as beautiful gave them an excellent reason to flirt back. She knew life was counterfeit and her new self was counterfeit, too. She sometimes felt breathless with an inner recklessness at what she, or anyone, could do. Why, everyone was fake; their public faces put on, every single day: her sister-in-law, Evelyn, Syd, even sweet, unassuming little Wendy O’Brien. Why shouldn’t she invent herself?

  Penny and her sister, Rosie, were always the best-dressed girls at any party. They wore frilled ankle socks to Sunday school with white patent-leather shoes, a single strap buckled at the sides. They wore the latest, most expensive dresses from McAlisters, their dresses lined and fitted with stiff petticoats. They wore their hair the same, in tight little plaits, but even then Rosie’s were forever coming undone, escaping constraint. Even then Rosemary was practising her getaway, digging the tunnel through which she would travel beneath Australia so that she could pop up, victorious, on the other side of the continent. Bye-bye, Penny, bye-bye, Marie, good luck, nice knowing you and all that.

  The girls attended St Margaret’s, one of the best girls’ schools in Brisbane, a short walk from the house. Penny chose French over German, but Marie refused to help with her homework. ‘Honestly, who speaks French these days? A few natives with bones in their noses,’ she said.

  At parties at home she made the girls carry trays of nibbles, offering smoked oysters on Jatz biscuits, and it seemed to Penny that the only time her mother was ever pleased with her was when important people complimented Marie on her polite and pretty children. Their mother had no sentiment, no pity, no time for childish dramas and no time for foolish memories held dear. She threw out Penny’s favourite books and gave her favourite toys to charity the moment she judged her to have outgrown them. ‘You are too old for that foolishness,’ she said when Penny burst into outraged tears at finding her favourite doll vanished. ‘Arrêt!’ she shouted at last, when Penny would not stop crying. ‘Arrêt! Arrêt!’ Marie only spoke French to shut her up, when she was at the end of her tether, and soon Penny equated French with the language of withered tears.

  Penny knew her mother was different from all the other mothers. Nobody else’s mother was French, nobody else’s mother was as beautiful or as exotic. She was not like all the other mothers from somewhere else, not like Kris Comino’s mother, from an island in Greece called Kythera, who was small and squat and dowdy, dressed in black. Kris was the only Greek girl in the whole school, and when Penny went to the Cominos’ house one weekend everyone talked Greek, all at once, and it seemed impossible that Kris Comino could be the only Greek at St Margaret’s. There were so many of them! But they all went to State High, or suburban high schools in far distant suburbs; none of them was lucky enough to be the daughter of rich Stav Comino who owned a string of Queensland restaurants and cafes and wanted nothing but the best for his only daughter. Penny’s mother was nothing like the mothers of the Italian girls from New Farm either, that noisy group who together caught the tram every afternoon to cluster around the school gates, talking, laughing loudly, so different from her own mother, who laughed loudly only at parties.

  Penny and Rosie constructed fabulous stories about their mother. She was a descendant of Marie Antoinette, their ancestral home was a turreted chateau in the Loire. Sometimes, when they begged her, her mother would tell them about a wonderful summer in a forest, enormous bowls of hot chocolate, a box at the Paris Opera. It was clear she came from the aristocracy, and that a great tragedy had befallen her.

  ‘Maybe we are countesses,’ said Rosie, who was never as avid as Penny to find out everything she could about Marie. Rosie didn’t seem interested, because what was happening to her, Rosemary, was so much more interesting than what happened to anyone else. Penny was jealous of her sister’s attractive ease, her insouciance, her lack of regard or interest in other people. Unlike Penny, Rosie did not care what other people thought of her, which gave her an air of giddy freedom.

  ‘Don’t you want to know the whole story?’

  Rosie shrugged.

  ‘Really? You’re not even a bit interested?’

  ‘She’s here isn’t she?’ Rosie said, leaping up to answer the phone. The bo
ys were already calling for Rosemary, whose beautiful, unexamined life was just beginning.

  What was clear to Penny was how irritated her mother often was with her father; how his benign, gentle smile caused her to fly into unpredictable rages. What was not clear to her was that Marie was reminded of her father’s smile, disappointingly passive in the face of her mother’s endless onslaughts, Marie wishing her father would raise a fist and knock her mother clear across the room, silencing the ridiculous, self-pitying words rushing from her mouth. Marie was nothing like her mother, nothing, and yet here she was, in a room with a smiling husband.

  One afternoon after school, just before her father died—one of the many mercies of the future, griefless and beckoning, unknown, ahead—Penny unexpectedly found her father at home. Penny knew the famous story about her father jumping off the bridge and—besides the usual difficulty in imagining one’s parent young—she could not imagine her bespectacled, conservative father doing anything so rash. His was the steady hand within the family, the calm voice among the raised. He was evenhanded, even-tempered; the only clue to his outsized capacity for emotion were the tears which sometimes ran shamelessly down his cheeks during sentimental movies or when he let out small wrenching sobs while listening to Adagio for Strings. His was a closed world, as much as her mother’s was; their family life a trackless, wordless place.

  ‘Dad,’ she said, ‘what happened to Mum’s family? Why won’t she ever speak about it?’

  He looked at her, his expression unreadable. ‘I can’t tell you, sweetheart. It’s up to Mum to tell you, not me.’

  She felt hot, flushed; furious with him. ‘It’s not fair!’ she cried. ‘Everybody else’s mother is normal! I hate her! I hope she dies!’

  How was she to know it would be one of the last conversations she would ever have with her father? How was she to know that words fly off, rushing through the years, moving too fluidly, too fast, never unsaid? The words were spoken, her father died, her mother—alone with him on a beach at Umina—caught him.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The full mechanics of a swift departure

  Suddenly, Marie. Suddenly, Marie, wobbly on her feet, holding on to the screen door. She stood as straight and tall as she could, conscious only of overcoming her embarrassment. She had fixed her hair as best she could and rehearsed both her entrance and the full mechanics of a swift departure. What she had not reckoned on was such a crowd, an audience comprising half the population of The Landing. She had an advantage, though, the noise of the crying children being so loud she managed to assess the crowd before it assessed her.

  ‘Good morning,’ she announced to the startled audience. ‘Your entertainment has arrived, but I fear it will not be as amusing as last night.’ She looked at Jonathan. ‘Forgive me. I was under the impression it was only drunken teenage girls who put on such an impressive display.’

  He smiled, protesting at once; Penny leaped up and Scarlett rushed towards her, crying, ‘Grandma! Are you all right?’ Everyone made a fuss, Celia with her flowers, which she insisted everyone admire; Phil with his collection of red-back stories, with his unwanted spidery advice. She was made to sit down, she was made to accept a cup of weak camomile tea. Then Penny raced off to bring back the car and it was straight to Gympie Hospital, tout de suite, Scarlett insisting she come along too, together with her two impossibly behaved children. Marie loved her granddaughter, but her love did not yet extend to her wailing great-grandchildren, who were altogether too grimy, perpetually covered in dirt and snot. In her day, children were clean, freshly scrubbed, and did not wrestle interminably on the floor or fight over every single thing. Penny and Rosie never fought in their entire lives, not once.

  At the hospital, Penny watched with a sort of grudging, withheld respect as her mother resumed command. Yes, she wore a hat to sit out in the sun in the garden of that abominable retirement home from whence she came. No, she had not felt a bite; the stupid nurse at that abominable place thought she had an eye infection! The spider was possibly a resident of her hat; the doctor advised that on her return home she should turn out her hat, all her clothes, give everything a good shake.

  ‘You might check the bedsheets, too,’ the resident emergency doctor added; he was a personable, smiling young man from Kenya. ‘They are devilish little fellows.’

  When he momentarily stepped from the room, Marie said in a loud stage whisper to Penny—who insisted on coming into the room with her—that she had never seen such black satiny skin in her life. ‘Black as the ace of spades,’ she said.

  On his return, she gave him a grilling, designed to make sure he had not bought his medical degree over the internet. Satisfied as to his credentials, she clearly remained unconvinced about the extent of his grasp of Australia’s native wildlife.

  ‘Do you have red-back spiders in Kenya?’ she enquired.

  ‘No, ma’am, we do not,’ he replied. ‘We have funnel-webs, however—though unlike yours, our funnel-webs are harmless. Our dangerous creatures are usually larger.’ He laughed, showing all his teeth, dazzling against his black skin.

  Marie hoped he knew what he was talking about. She still felt slightly nauseous, and the lump on her eyebrow throbbed. She was not dying after all; today was not her moment.

  In the waiting room, Scarlett was having trouble controlling her children. ‘Oh, please sit down,’ she said in a hopeless sort of voice, as if she did not expect them to pay the slightest attention. They were in the children’s corner, playing with the toys, which meant they were chucking things at each other. An exasperated nurse kept shooting hard glances at Scarlett, which she either did not see or chose to ignore.

  ‘Come on, Scarlett,’ said Penny in a cross voice, picking up Hippy, slinging him on one hip. With her free hand she tried to guide her mother and her frame out the door; Scarlett fell behind, trying to round up Ajax, who was evading capture, shrieking, running around hysterically.

  ‘I’m going to buy you a blue heeler, Scarlett,’ Penny said. ‘A cattle dog could do a better job than you.’

  Now it was Scarlett’s turn to fling a hard glance at her mother. ‘Don’t give me the evil eye, young lady,’ Penny said.

  By lunchtime, order was restored; restored as far as it could possibly be. Both boys were asleep, collapsed like puppies on a rug in front of the television. Further up the corridor, Marie was asleep too, floating upon brand-new sheets, carefully checked for devilish fellows. There was a knock at the door. Annoyed, Penny moved as quietly as she could up the corridor.

  ‘Can I play with the babies?’ Giselle asked loudly, her anxious little face a triangle of hope.

  ‘Sorry, sweetie, they’re asleep,’ Penny whispered, making a shushing shape with her fingers and lips. She smiled, shutting the door.

  ‘When will they wake up?’

  Penny opened the door a crack. ‘I don’t know. We’re pretty busy today, Giselle. Why don’t you try another day, sweetheart?’

  The child did not move.

  ‘Off you go, love,’ Penny said encouragingly.

  With a sad, solemn acknowledgement of her head, Giselle turned away.

  Inside, Penny wordlessly indicated to Scarlett they should move away from the sleeping children and into the kitchen. Fortified by coffee and Panadol and water and fizzy vitamin pills, Penny had started to revive. She shook the image of Giselle from her head: some watermark of shame was upon Penny still but, now, in the quiet gloom of the shuttered house, no-one present other than her own family, she allowed herself a moment of respite. What could she possibly do for the poor child? She had enough problems of her own: for some time she had wanted to talk to Scarlett about going back to study; she wanted not to erase her daughter’s mistakes, but to adjust them; she knew enough about mistakes to know some were incurable, even fatal. Penny would live forever with the sight of Scarlett emerging through the arrivals tunnel at Brisbane International Airport, her face anxious, puffy, her belly full of baby, her life undone. She and Paul, back at The
Landing, not in glorious triumph but because Scarlett was, after all, only a frightened teenage girl, suddenly in need of her mother.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Lady of the lake

  Jonathan had swept the leaves from the front lawn, checked the water tank levels, taken a quick reconnaissance walk around the boundaries of his castle. Of course there was no way the walkway would get approval; surely the council or the Department of Environment and Resource Management—he’d have to check but he assumed DERM would be the responsible body—surely everyone would see that while the lake itself and the bit of beach at the front of his house might not technically belong to him, his privacy did. He’d check, too, the precise boundaries; Jerry—the firm’s senior property lawyer and one of the other partners—could have a look and give him some advice about how to proceed. While Jonathan understood the disquiet engendered by the continued private ownership of some of the most beautiful squares in London, The Landing was not a private square but an Australian lake: generous, beautiful, the property of the people—including him. The people owned it, except for this one tiny bit, this little private slice of paradise, these reeds, these waterlilies, the harmonious Japanese quiet that existed only because it was cultivated and tended by him, Jonathan. He loved his portion of The Landing, the wash of the waves, the tiny beach; the whole pleasing aspect laid out before his eyes. It was his, he had made it; it was his own Sarah-free space, the first place on earth where he had reclaimed sovereignty, and the more he thought about the possibility of its loss, the more exercised he became.