The Landing

by Susan Johnson

  Penny picked up the drinks. ‘That was quick,’ she said. She smiled and walked away.

  ‘Careful,’ said Marie as she approached, clutching the three glasses.

  ‘I worked as a waitress for four years during art school,’ she said. ‘Never spilled a drop.’ Just as she said this, she tripped on the carpet; only luck prevented her from dropping the lot. As it was, a fair bit spilled onto the table.

  Mrs O’Brien laughed. ‘Pride comes before a fall,’ she said. Her mother said nothing, being engaged with flirting from afar with Phil. She was waving at him.

  ‘Don’t encourage him!’ said Penny, hurriedly unwinding the paper serviettes from the knives and forks to mop up the spill. ‘I don’t want him crashing our lunch.’ She was trying not to think of Jonathan and his easy grace, the way he boyishly ducked his head. Why was there always someone for a divorced man but rarely for a divorced woman?

  By the time she refocused, Wendy O’Brien was halfway through a story; something about London, battered and smoggy in the fifties after the war, rationing, but so exciting, coming alive; her first day as a London schoolteacher, how petrified she was and how, before she knew it, she found herself telling the children a ridiculous story about getting her head stuck between the front steps.

  She laughed. ‘Now I couldn’t get my head stuck if my life depended on it! I couldn’t bend to do it!’ she said, as if it were funny, as if it were not tragic how human life led in one inevitable direction. Penny looked away but her eyes were caught by her mother’s face, and a small, unwilling smile on it that looked begrudged.

  ‘It was most amusing,’ said Marie. ‘Most amusing.’ Then she patted her hair, her eyes sweeping the room for admirers.

  Like a coward hoping for safety in numbers, Penny brought up the difficult subject of where Marie was going to live. ‘Are you still at Toowong, Mrs O’Brien?’ she asked. ‘I remember your beautiful garden.’

  Mrs O’Brien’s face broke open with pleasure. ‘Oh, wasn’t it glorious? I always wanted a white garden and Ken made my dream come true. Magnolias and white camellias and orange blossom and jasmine. It was heaven when everything was in bloom.’

  ‘No-one needs a garden at our age, Wendy,’ said Marie.

  ‘I suppose not,’ she replied. ‘Ken couldn’t tend it at the end. For a while Troy did it but he got too busy and we had to get a gardener. Can you imagine? It was dreadfully expensive.’

  ‘Now she has no garden, which is better,’ said Marie.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t have no garden! I do have a garden, it’s a communal garden, very pretty, and very well cared for.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ asked Penny, moving closer.

  ‘It’s a lovely place out past Jindalee, in a suburb called Sinnamon Park. I’d never heard of it before. I wouldn’t know half the new suburbs in Brisbane now.’

  ‘Brisbane extends all the way down to the Gold Coast and nearly all the way up to the Sunshine Coast. It’s like Las Vegas,’ Marie said.

  ‘What’s it called, where you live?’ said Penny.

  ‘Sinnamon Village,’ said Mrs O’Brien. ‘It’s run by the people from the Uniting Church. Before I moved in, Troy and Denise brought all my furniture and things so when I opened the door it was just like stepping into home! It was such a lovely surprise.’

  Penny looked at her mother.

  ‘But it is not home, is it?’ Marie said. ‘It is never home.’

  ‘Oh, but it is! It felt like home straight away. You just haven’t found the right place yet, Marie. Why don’t you come and have a look at mine? I’m sure Penny wouldn’t mind driving you over.’ Mrs O’Brien was a saint. ‘No problem at all,’ Penny said. ‘Any time you want. I’m back at school next week so maybe we could go this week? Or next weekend?’

  ‘No thank you,’ Marie said. ‘I am going to make instead a proposal to you.’ She turned to look her daughter full in the face.

  Penny felt a lurch, as if the floor beneath her feet had moved, as if she had known all along what her mother was going to say.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Little lunch

  Giselle had nothing for little lunch. She sat by herself, picking a juicy sore next to the mole on her leg. She looked for Dan but he was with a group of other boys and all the girls were playing a game together under a tree. In her lunchbox, which she had packed herself, was a sugar-free, gluten-free energy bar which she had taken from the cupboard, together with two stale rice crackers. She was saving these for big lunch. When she left the house to walk up the road to catch the school bus, her mother was still in bed. Giselle had seen a dead person and now she always checked in the mornings to see if her mother was dead. Her mother was not dead, but she was breathing strangely, loudly, croakily.

  She wanted to ask Dan if he would go with her looking for magic cupboards around the school. Her teacher was reading them a story about a girl who entered another land through the back of a cupboard. She had already gone into all the cupboards at Jules’s house but all of them had backs. All of them were ordinary places, for clothes, for shoes, old plastic bags, exercise equipment and suitcases. All of them ended.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Good news, bad news

  Amanda said she would have the fish of the day. She looked too skinny; Jonathan could not remember young women ever being so thin. The accepted ideal shape for a woman was getting smaller and smaller; soon all young women would be expected to be the size of infants. Amanda’s waist was ridiculously tiny; if he put his two hands around it his fingers might meet. She wasn’t drinking.

  ‘The Hunter Valley, please,’ he said, ordering himself a glass of Shiraz to go with his lamb, even though it was lunchtime and a weekday.

  ‘So. How are things, sweetheart? Work okay?’ He realised Amanda never asked him anything about his life. She was still young enough to believe he was born when she was; for her, he had no real existence beyond her own.

  ‘Work’s fine. I’ve got a gig with an after-school program.’

  ‘That’s great news,’ he said. He waited for her to elaborate, but she did not. He’d forgotten that conversation with his children was a question-and-answer routine.

  ‘Seen Mum?’

  ‘Yeah. When you and Mum are finally divorced, she and Cath will probably rush off and get married. Maybe they’ll ask me to be bridesmaid,’ she said.

  Amanda was watching him, a sort of smirk on the face that was so like her mother’s. He saw that she was asking for reassurance; through the smirk, the old fear, the desire for a mother and a father to be like the sun and the moon, irrevocable as the earth’s turning.

  ‘She won’t get married again, sweetie. Not in a million years.’

  Amanda looked relieved; she was a child, not yet willing to put on the harness of adulthood.

  Sarah wouldn’t get married again, would she? He recalled a dinner party, shortly before she left, with two gay architect friends, and an impassioned debate about the value of same-sex marriage. He recalled Sarah saying that marriage was essentially a patriarchal institution devised to protect the rights of men and why would any two women want to parody it, let alone two men? But Alex argued that was irrelevant; the critical point was human rights and gays should have the same rights as heterosexuals. If only Jonathan had listened harder; if only he had ears and eyes and a heart that would tell him everything, every secret sigh, every secret breath, every secret faltering step a person takes in moving away silently but surely from another.

  Amanda was going to carve in ink upon her skin the name of her new boyfriend.

  ‘I hope he’s got a nice name,’ said Jonathan. He was pretty certain the ink would last longer than the boyfriend.

  ‘He’s got a beautiful name. Raphael. That’s partly why I’m getting it done. I’ve always loved that name. And now I’ve met the man to match it.’

  He pictured her baby skin, unbreathed upon, her miniscule fingernails, the merest flakes, like slivers of shells. The tender envelope in which she came wrapped, still
carrying some sacred scent, and now traced with needles, branded like a cow. He would never get it, the carving, the blood, the ink; once the province of hard men who went to sea, prisoners, low-lifes, and now the realm of privately educated, middle-class young women. She had a twenty-centimetre blue butterfly tattooed on her back and a ladder of tiny Chinese characters running up the nape of her neck.

  When they had finished lunch he said goodbye, feeling vaguely unsettled. In his head Jonathan carried a cherished picture of family conversation, in which true words were said, their exact meaning conveyed. In this imaginary conversation there was perfect accord, perfect understanding. As he walked away from his daughter now he recognised there was not much difference between Amanda’s yearning for parents as fixed as night and day and his own dream of a perfect conversation. He was beginning to think this conversation—indeed the cherished, idealised family to which the conversation belonged—did not exist.

  Back at the office, Jerry knocked and stuck his head around the door. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ he asked.

  Jonathan opened his palms; a gesture of helplessness.

  ‘DERM are pretty keen on it going ahead. The DG’s got a bee in his bonnet because the minister wants it. Good news is that they’ve got Buckley’s. It’s bullshit.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Jonathan. ‘I think.’

  ‘The minister’s a dill. He won’t listen to advice from the department. Have you seen him? He’s about two feet tall, totally up himself.’

  Jonathan smiled. ‘Sounds dangerous.’

  ‘Mate, you know my theory about small men. Everything they do in life is compensation. Hitler? Five foot eight. Napoleon? Five eight. Stalin? Five eight. I rest my case. This bloke’s about five foot nothing in his platform shoes. Lucky he’s not in charge of an army.’

  ‘Better not say that too loudly,’ Jonathan said. ‘I’m sure there’s some anti-discrimination law you’re breaking.’

  ‘I’m an unreconstructed alpha male, mate. We’re a dying species.’

  It was true: for all his Labor left politics, Jerry did not get feminism, sexism or homosexuality. He equated Sarah’s going off to bat for the other team with someone going insane. There was much in modern life which Jerry did not understand, much less approve. Jonathan feared for Jerry’s daughters and sons, for all the tattoos to come, the wrong boyfriends, the wrong wives, for all the inevitable wrongness ahead.

  The next day he called Anna and, just before lunch, they met and walked around the Gallery of Modern Art. It suited her, the elegant space, the blinding white, the amplified air. She wandered off and he watched her form, her grace, the effortless lines, tapered legs seamed to curved hips. They ate in the restaurant on the terrace; the air around them spicy, fragrant, perceptively changing from spring into the warm reach towards Queensland summer. Anna spoke in her winding, meandering paragraphs about Hartford House, where she had lived, with such tenderness.

  ‘It was built by Latrobe, the architect who designed the White House. It’s Palladian, in the spirit of Greek temples, which were never originally intended as human shelters, of course, but as houses for specific gods. Latrobe’s god for Hartford was Apollo. His inspiration was the Temple of Apollo on Delos.’

  He watched the movement of her mouth.

  ‘Apollo’s the god of hunting, you know, as well as the god of music and the arts. There’s a beautiful plaque above the entrance to the library of him playing a pipe, wearing the skin of a wild beast he’s just killed.’

  He tried to picture her life of hunting and grand houses; a son with a French name at boarding school in the country. He took a sip of wine. ‘You seem remarkably well informed.’

  ‘It’s only because I adore Hartford. I wanted to find out everything about it.’

  ‘I thought those grand houses were all owned by the National Trust. Death duties and what have you,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘Most of them are. Various large chunks of the Hartford estate have been sold off over the years, but the family’s managed to hang on to the house. Hartford’s open to the public three times a year, too—to paying guests—and we always hold a village summer party.’

  He saw her, dressed in white, walking on green lawns adorned with bright flowers. She was like someone from another century.

  ‘The army requisitioned the house during the war. We had the library refurbished a few years ago—dry rot—and we found American cigarettes and army scarves under the floorboards. Once I found a Georgian doll in an attic room. Porcelain, beautifully preserved. It was like stumbling across a perceptible ghost.’

  He could not say what compelled him towards her. She had no job, no visible means of support, and had apparently spent her adult life flitting from husband to husband. She lived in England, for God’s sake.

  ‘You remind me of Jean-Christophe,’ she said. ‘The same tristesse.’

  He waited.

  ‘Gaspard’s father.’

  ‘Is that good or bad?’

  ‘Oh, definitely good. Jean-Christophe was the most sensual man I have ever met. Our carnal appetites were exquisitely matched. The trouble was every other woman also thought he was the most sensual man she had ever met. And he loved women.’ She gave a hopeless sort of shrug.

  Did she move her hand towards his, or was it the other way around? He looked down and their fingers were laced; he felt the warmth and softness of her skin, which lived in greenness, in mists, beyond the reach of the Queensland sun. ‘We should make love,’ she said. ‘I’m tired of tears.’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Nowhere on earth

  Penny had heard of grown women who lived in countries far from their mothers—economic migrants, say, or political or religious refugees. She had heard some mothers and daughters did not squabble over a daughter’s life, as if over territorial rights, as if a daughter’s life was a contested land. She knew mothers and daughters sometimes lived in the same country but in different cities, starting with her own sister. Her closest friend, Karen, the other art teacher at school, had an aged, widowed mother in a nursing home in Melbourne, two thousand kilometres away, whom she saw once or twice a year. Penny had long anguished conversations with Karen about mothers, but the anguish was all Penny’s. Karen was pragmatic: ‘My family lives here. My first commitment’s to them. She knows that.’ Did Karen’s distant mother believe it? What sort of mother relinquished her own claim? Penny pictured Karen’s faraway mother, selfless, speechless, like a bride of Christ in a silent, enclosed order of lonely old women, moving soundlessly down empty, echoing halls.

  ‘We’ll talk about it later,’ Penny said.

  ‘There is plenty of room—more than enough,’ said Marie. ‘I could have my own entrance. My own key. We do not need to build internal stairs.’

  Internal stairs! Her mother winding up the stairs, into her life, penetrating even further into her existence. Marie’s envelopment of Penny’s life would be complete, her inhabitation absolute. She had recently read that an infant left in its mother’s body traces of foetal cells, thereby ensuring their mutual DNA was forever intertwined. Whose body was it? Whose life? In biological terms her mother’s body was a chimera, the house for every living thing it had created. Penny was still there, and Rosemary, and their dead brother, Eric, a tracery of souls. Was this why Scarlett leaped? Scarlett, effectively jumping from the window, making a dash for freedom, running off with Paul. Scarlett was possibly cannier than she was, following a blind, instinctive urge to save herself, leaping from the body of her mother’s house, fast.

  Mrs O’Brien was fine, thank you. She did not need anything for the journey; she did not need water.

  ‘What is this foolish nonsense about carrying bottles of water?’ asked Marie. ‘As if everybody was about to march off into the desert.’

  They were almost at the train station, with twenty minutes to spare. When they arrived at the empty car park, Penny wound down the windows; there was a cloying smell, like talcum powder. Perhaps it
was 4711 Eau de Cologne? Yardley’s Lavender? It was some scent from her childhood, from when she was standing at the same height as the dressing table, watching her mother dressing to go out. Her mother wore her hair in what she called a French roll, swept up in a glamorous twist; Penny watched as she manipulated the pins, clamping the ones she was about to use between her teeth. Her mother was a swirl of hair, perfume and mystery.

  ‘Did you hear that old Peggy Burton died three times on the operating table?’ Mrs O’Brien asked. ‘You know—Peggy from across the road.’

  Penny wondered how old ‘old’ was to an eighty-six-year-old, or whatever age Mrs O’Brien was.

  ‘I cannot remember any Peggy Burton,’ said Marie. ‘Not even one who died three times on the operating table.’

  ‘They gave her a pig’s heart,’ Mrs O’Brien said.

  Penny laughed. ‘Surely not. No-one’s been given a pig’s heart. Only bits of them—veins or valves or something—because a pig’s heart is similar to a human heart.’

  Marie, in the front seat, gave a derisive sniff. ‘With many people it is hard to tell the difference.’

  ‘You must remember Peggy, Marie!’ said Mrs O’Brien. ‘She had the most enormous bosoms. Ken used to say that one day poor Les Burton—he was only a little chap—would fall between them and never be found again.’

  ‘I don’t remember any enormous bosoms,’ Marie said.

  Penny rolled her eyes; she was still thinking about pigs’ hearts. ‘Didn’t the hunter who was ordered by the wicked stepmother to bring back Snow White’s heart give her a pig’s heart as a substitute? Come on, ladies, we’d better get moving.’

  She went around to the back seat door and helped Mrs O’Brien from the car. Marie insisted on getting out and the two old women embraced. As in a fairy tale, they said goodbye, their human hearts still beating in their old chests, their shared human moments gathering about them. They were witnesses to each other’s vanished selves, each to the other representing a sum testament of lived experience. Was this the last time they would embrace, the last time they would speak of this and that, of pigs’ hearts and forgotten women with enormous bosoms who died three times? Marie allowed herself to be embraced, and Wendy held her fast. To Penny’s surprise Marie clasped Wendy hard, as if their shared past danced about their heads, hot nights in a wooden house on wooden posts, a set of matching luggage, two young women wearing gloves, a noisy schoolroom in Primrose Hill, two women of beating human hearts and numbered days.