The Greek consul was wealthy in his own right, from yet another family of Brisbane Greeks who owned properties, businesses and shops not only in Brisbane but throughout Queensland. Nicholas Anastas was impeccably dressed, with a cleft in his manly chin that gave his face authority. He was impeccably mannered, too, kissing her hand when he arrived by taxi to pick her up. He spoke excellent French.
She was flattered. She enjoyed being admired. She did not necessarily want to do anything with that admiration, or to have to act upon it; the admiration itself was its own reward. Nicholas was skilled at conversation, at drawing out enough information about her life to give them something to chew on. She liked having a handsome gentleman take her out to dinner; she was hardly old, only in her sixties, with many years ahead.
Nicholas never pressed her to go to bed with him. If she wondered why, she did not seek to address the question, feeling instead only relief that all that bothersome business was over. She had offered up her body once; she had learned everything she knew at the hands of her husband. She could not do it a second time.
He still lived at home with his mother, Demetria, high on a hill. Brisbane was full of hills, up and down like a drawing in a children’s story, buses and cars and people puffing with effort, making their way up only to come careering down. After several months of lunches and dinners, opening nights and being his official partner at consular functions—the rich, handsome Greek and the rich, handsome Frenchwoman, sophisticated, apparently lucky, a formidable team—she at last received an invitation to meet his mother. She herself had not introduced her beau to her daughters. It was none of their business!
The mother was tall, like Nicholas, with an imperious manner, the daughter of a long line of aristocrats, a lost branch of Greece’s deposed royals. Immediately Marie was on the back foot, as if the mother could see all her secrets. Everything vanished—her skill of entering rooms, of gathering herself up, of intimidating Australians. The mother spoke French, having been schooled at the Lycée Fénelon, one of the most exclusive girls’ schools in Paris.
‘What was your family name, dear?’ she asked in French. ‘Perhaps I know them?’
Marie blustered her way through, inventing, lying. Nicholas hovered, bringing Greek coffee in from a distant kitchen, bitter, thick upon her tongue when, in her nervousness, she mistakenly drank to the dregs.
‘Maman,’ Nicholas said, ‘Marie’s family business is McAlisters. You know, the department store.’
‘Yes, I know it,’ she said, making it clear from her disdainful expression she understood perfectly well that Marie came from shopkeepers, traders, men and women who worked for a living.
‘Ask Caterina to bring in the sandwiches,’ she said to her son. ‘Don’t get them yourself, Nicholas. She can refresh the coffee, too.’
When Nicholas asked Marie to marry him a few weeks later, she could not resist getting in a dig at Demetria. ‘Did you get your mother’s permission?’
He had the grace to look disconcerted. ‘Of course not,’ he said, though he had in fact been involved in several heated conversations with his mother about his romantic future.
‘I’m afraid the answer is no,’ she said. ‘I’m fond of you, Nicholas, I really am. It’s just that we are too old, too set in our ways. We each have our own lives to lead.’
‘But our lives would be even better lived together!’ he said, but she had already seen an almost imperceptible expression of relief on his face. It struck her that he was a man only interested in women he intuitively knew would reject him. She sensed that if she had said yes, he would have run screaming from the room. In understanding this, in knowing that there was only ever going to be one man in the world who would risk his life to win hers, she and Nicholas settled into sexless, harmonious companionship.
No more love! No more laying herself out, waiting only for the knife to the heart. If Marie experienced in life only one miracle, at least she had known one. She had seen a rare thing, a miraculous circle of love completed, Syd’s first leap into life and into her arms and his last leap, landing in her arms. She closed the door on romantic love and turned instead towards the other kind of love, familial love, the love a mother has for her child, a love she had never known as a child herself but which as a mother was hers to claim. She knew it was magical thinking to believe she might wake to find disappeared Penny’s dream of France, her daughter’s quest for a French passport and answers to the questions she had begun to ask, her dive into the past, which had suddenly become troublingly inseparable from Penny’s dive into the future.
THIRTY-TWO
Elsewhere
A French passport, a ticket to elsewhere, another realm of floating life, indistinctly sensed, dimly dreamed. Penny, at twenty-five, imagined an enormous shuttered window flung open to the air, the wash of sky. France was a soaring feeling in her chest, romantic undoubtedly—even preposterous—but that did not make the feeling any less enchanting. She saw red poppies, wet pavements in Paris, a girl, her, painting in a room. She loved best the paintings of the nineteenth century, Gwen John in particular, the human image painted over and over, a face, a mood, a fleeting human breath, breathed into blue air. She wanted to catch that breath, to live in it, her eyes looking out through the enormous shuttered window into everything possible, into every dancing second, every roaring moment. Oh, she wanted everything: to be the breath, and the girl painting the breath; she wanted nothing less than to join her exultant breath to all the other breaths of the world. She was mad to start, to get on with being twenty-five years old and full of breath, a girl with a passport to France.
She found out about Marie not through any effort of will, not because her mother suddenly underwent a change of character, becoming open-hearted and open-mouthed instead of closed, but because of bureaucracy. Penny learned the story of who her mother was because of the record systems humans live by, their wish to name themselves, to record the births of their children, their deaths, unexpected, expected, the ruins of their divorces. As if human life can be catalogued; as if the passage of a single life across time is anything other than a streak! A record of a birth, a marriage, a flimsy buttress against the monstrousness of infinity; a passport recording the movement of a man or a woman or a child through the borders of lands with mutable borders. Pouf! There goes Penny, clutching her Australian passport. But where’s Marie’s birth certificate, proof of her French birth, so that Penny might post it off to a nameless official and secure a French passport of her own? Where is Marie’s missing life, recorded, written down?
Marie could not find her birth certificate. She acted strangely; nervy, unsettled. Possibly she was upset about Penny’s departure, which she perhaps intuited as a bid for freedom. Marie had not been overseas herself since before Syd died, not since that last magical trip to Europe. Penny thought she might be concerned for her, remembering the strain of travel, the small, multiple exhaustions that come with being somewhere foreign that is not home. Penny asked about the missing birth certificate—again and again—but she could not ask Marie about her nervousness. She did not have the language, or rather they did not share a language of intimacy and disclosure. She sensed her mother’s anxiety but she could not ask about its shape, much less investigate its origins.
The weeks were falling away, the days, the hours. ‘What’s the problem, Marie? You’ll just have to apply for a new one if you’ve lost the original. I’ll ring the embassy and get the forms.’ Penny still didn’t understand; not until right at the very end, only weeks before she was due to fly out. ‘Look, I can’t do it from France, Marie. It has to be done before I leave Australia. I’m running out of time!’ Then, a new, unhoused Marie, a Marie Penny had never seen, helpless, exposed, an aged document in her hand, no words in her mouth. In her hand a torn birth certificate, written in browning ink, recording the city of her birth, Oujda, Protectorat de Maroc, in the year 1926:
Marie Azmiya Aréne
Pére: Hippolyte Santu Aréne
Occupa
tion: Référence du fabricant
ge: 29
Mére: Aicha (Emma) Aréne, neé Said ben Mohammed
Occupation: Tâches domestiques
ge: 26
Marie wasn’t even French! Or was she? She was something else, someone else entirely, and Penny’s tongue was a stone in her mouth. Where should she begin? Where should she begin to seek the truth when her mother believed the truth was not good enough to be told?
‘It’s okay, Marie. It’s okay,’ she said, too embarrassed to look at her mother’s stricken face, too mortified by her mother’s mortification, her shame.
Penny went to the kitchen and made a pot of tea, her hands shaking, using the Royal Doulton teapot and the cups her mother always used, a wedding gift, still unbroken. She didn’t know anything about Morocco, or why her mother would be ashamed of being born there. Did that make Marie an Arab? A Muslim? If her mother wanted to turn herself into someone else, if she could only live with part of herself annexed, who was Penny to object? Everyone made compromises, everyone lived with half-truths or old outgrown principles, some perishing set of beliefs that enabled them to get up in the morning. How many self-deceptions did Penny live with, how many evasions? She was in the middle of another unhappy love affair, with a man she knew was seeing other women, and yet she wilfully looked the other way. How much truth could anyone handle? Did Penny really want to know this man would never love her or that her ludicrous faith in art’s healing properties would not necessarily lead to satisfaction; that she would never reach the life she intended?
When she went back into the lounge room with the tea tray, the faded document was gone. Penny poured the tea, her hands still trembling, her mind completely swept of anything to say. Back there, in the kitchen, only moments ago, she understood the situation perfectly and all the right words were ready in her head. Now, facing her mother, she was speechless.
‘Mama never adjusted to Paris,’ Marie said, her voice small. ‘Jamais. Sa vie était finie.’ Her life was over.
Penny dared not speak.
‘None of the other women would speak to her,’ Marie said.
She wanted to ask which women but did not.
Marie took a sip of tea, a lone tear coursing down one cheek. ‘She used to take us to Belleville. Eric. Moi. We weren’t allowed to tell Papa. Her sister lived there.’
Still Penny did not speak, frightened that if she did, she would say the wrong thing and her mother would stop. It seemed that all her life she had been waiting for this moment.
She waited. She waited for her mother’s confession, for Marie to unscroll her life, starting from the top, for the people and places and smells and colours and sounds to fall magnetically into place, like a beautiful equation solved or a perfect poem or painting. She waited for the inconsistency to be explained between our vision of life and the wanting, imperfect truth of living; she waited for her mother to tell her everything.
‘Papa was from Ajaccio,’ she said. ‘Corsica has the clearest water I have ever seen.’
Penny waited. She took a sip of tea, which was already growing cold.
‘I never learned to swim. Eric pushed me in. I nearly drowned.’ She put down her cup, wiping her cheek.
‘You have no idea what it was like,’ she said. ‘They never accepted us. Never.’
‘Who never accepted you?’
‘Where is my handbag? Mon sac? I need a handkerchief,’ Marie said, looking helplessly around the room. Penny leaped from her chair and rushed into the kitchen, scooping up the handbag from a bench. By the time the bag was opened, the handkerchief procured, the cheek wiped, the moment for revelation had fallen away. Tears, leaking noses, the plainsong notes of everyday life rushed in to flood that soft discrepancy, that receding dream, that yearning gap that, wide awake, can never be filled.
THIRTY-THREE
Breastfeeding
Scarlett sat down the back of the bus, as if she were still at school. Hippolyte was on her knee and Ajax next to her; he wanted to sit near the window. ‘Hold on, A,’ she said, which was what she had begun to call her first son, because even a short name can be shorter. No-one ever called her anything but Scarlett.
Paul had the car and she had seen her mother driving off, fast, a while ago. Besides, she couldn’t ask her mother to drive her into Tewantin. Her mother saw everything. Her mother was a bitch. She, Scarlett, was going to be a different sort of mother; she was never going to ask about homework and assignments and getting into university and doing something creative with your life. She and Paul were already thinking about Steiner schools or alternative education, or possibly no school at all. What was wrong with home schooling? What was wrong with taking off to see the world, two kids tied to your coat-tails, flying behind? They would learn a lot more out of school than in it. She had heard that kids picked up fluency in another language in only a few months. Why, they could go anywhere!
And then she remembered her reason for sitting on the bus. She was still breastfeeding and no-one got pregnant while they were breastfeeding. She couldn’t be pregnant. She would never fit into her wedding dress.
PART
V
THIRTY-FOUR
Home and away
Penny said she would be delighted to take Marie and Mrs O’Brien into Tewantin for lunch. ‘But can you bear to go out again? You’ve only just arrived,’ she said to Mrs O’Brien, who looked too defeated by the press of too many days to go anywhere. Penny knew there was a person in there somewhere, beyond the curved spine, the forest of bone and the sorry head, bowed as if in supplication, forced to look perpetually at the ground. She tried to picture herself trapped in an old person’s body, and failed. She knew it was a privilege to grow old, she knew it was a dispensation from God, from fate, to be bent crooked and walking the earth, each working finger a mercy. Yet when she looked at her own hands, she saw hands grown dispossessed, ugly. She no longer liked looking in mirrors. She yearned to be like Mrs O’Brien: crooked as a storybook witch, oblivious to mirrors, catching trains, dispensing love.
The two old women settled into the car, Marie in the front (the better to tell Penny where to go and give her advice about road signs) and Mrs O’Brien in the back, her bent head nodding like one of those novelty dogs that used to adorn the back windows of cars. On the way out of town she saw Giselle again, darting through the bushes.
‘You’ve gone the wrong way,’ said Marie.
‘No I haven’t. I’m the one who lives here.’
‘The other way is shorter.’
‘Are you in a hurry?’ Penny said, trying not to snap, mindful of the old woman sitting in the back.
‘Oh, Marie’s always in a hurry,’ Mrs O’Brien said. ‘She’s been in a hurry ever since I met her. It’s how she gets so much done. Look what she’s achieved!’
‘Hmm,’ said Penny.
‘She’s driven, that’s what she is. Driven.’
‘Oh, don’t speak such nonsense, Wendy,’ Marie said. ‘You always speak nonsense.’
‘Marie! Don’t be so rude!’ said Penny. ‘I’m sure she doesn’t mean it, Mrs O’Brien.’
Mrs O’Brien laughed. ‘Oh yes, she does. I don’t mind.’
Penny glanced at her in the rear-vision mirror; Mrs O’Brien was smiling.
‘Look out for that stop sign,’ said Marie. ‘And mind your own business, Penny. Don’t speak of what you don’t know.’
It was a gift, her mother’s genius for alienating the very people she should have been drawing nearer. What was it about people that made them so stupid, including herself? What was it in them that made them smoke the cigarettes that might kill them, marry the wrong people, push away everyone they loved?
Marie suggested they go to the Royal Mail.
‘But it’s full of pokies,’ said Penny.
‘Knowing Marie’s luck, she’ll win,’ said Mrs O’Brien admiringly.
The original wooden pub was built at the end of the nineteenth century, during the heyday of timber and gold
, but the brick monster that replaced it after it burned down was a hideous mid-twentieth-century affair. It was peopled by the retired, by unemployed men who drank and smoked too much, by gamblers, fishermen and occasional holiday-makers.
‘Look, there’s a Thursday special,’ said Marie as they drove by. ‘Two for the price of one. Schnitzel with chips, sixteen ninety-five.’
Anyone would think her mother was an old-age pensioner, living from payment to payment. Penny gave up and turned the car into the hotel driveway.
‘Three lemon, lime and bitters, please,’ Penny said to the barman after ordering lunch. She could see them in the mirror; two old ladies, their walking sticks and frames resting by the wall, their heads close together.
Someone tapped her on the shoulder and she turned around. ‘You can’t get away that easily,’ said Phil from the shop.
She laughed weakly.
‘Having lunch?’ he asked. ‘I always come on a Thursday before I do the banking. Don’t tell Sylv.’ He winked.
The trouble with staying in one place, Penny knew, was that you couldn’t hide. She couldn’t pretend to be anyone else, someone better than she was. Living in a small community exposed you, made you vulnerable; she was Penny Collins, the mother of scandalous Scarlett, who used to be married to Pete, known as PP. She was the high school art teacher, too elitist to send her own daughter there. She had less room to manoeuvre than if she lived stranded within a foreign tongue in Paris or Rome; away, she might be anyone, but at home every gesture was recognisable, every signal familiar; at home she was doomed to be only herself.
‘Did you hear young Jonathan has teamed up with Gordie’s daughter?’ Phil asked. ‘She’s down in Brisbane staying with him.’
The Landing Page 16
