Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  If Luke Proudlock felt intimidated by Leonard’s spaghetti, he was angered by Leonard’s atheism. He and his wife abominated this young man from Melbourne for corrupting their untarnished daughter. They had picked out that she would marry Randal Twelvetrees, the son of the local minister, not a Godless mechanical engineer from the mainland who knew The Hunting of the Snarkby heart, who believed that religion was like alcohol–“It turns ordinary men into heroes, Mr Proudlock, and heroes into ordinary men”–and whose party trick was to read their futures in a Royal Worcester teacup. The marriage was doomed, even if it was the wish of Him who wept for Lazarus.

  Their prophecies were not realised until Merridy was five.

  “Do you have siblings?” Alex said.

  “I had a brother,” she said in a small, deliberate voice.

  “Had?”

  “He disappeared. But I don’t want to talk about that.”

  Alex waited. Once again, he had a sense of the ocean of sadness within her. But she was not going to elucidate. Flatly, she went on: “The shock gave Mum a stroke.”

  Mrs Bowman was bedridden for a year, receiving her husband and daughter in a pale grey nightdress and holding them sobbing to her paralysed chest. Then, once they were safely out of the room, she returned her face to the wall. Another year before she could speak again or move her limbs. As soon as her muscles were restored, she took up bowls to exercise her arms. And spiritualism.

  On the third anniversary of her son’s disappearance she read an advertisement in the Burnie Advocate. “You may have lived on earth before! New places or people you pass may seem oddly familiar to you; have you known them in a previous life?” The notice cautioned that certain secrets of life and mental development could not be divulged indiscriminately. That afternoon, she sent off for a thirty-two-page booklet, The Mastery of Life, and a fortnight later was welcomed into the Rosicrucians, hoping through them to be reunited with her missing child, who would now be ten.

  For the next four years, she kept in touch with a retired Welsh railway engineer who passed on a series of messages from her son. Then, when Merridy was twelve, Mrs Bowman abandoned Taffy Guest and the Rosicrucians and returned to the faith of her parents. She had come to an excruciating realisation. Her loss was her penalty for disobeying God. Her son had wandered off one Sunday morning when the family ought properly to have been at prayer–not visiting steam engines–and was never seen again. She copied out a passage from the Bible and showed it to Merridy’s father: He was the chosen one for the sacrifice that had to be made and in that fact we may find our guarantee that all is well with him.

  “For goodness’ sake,” Leonard exploded. “God no more exists than I am a purple giraffe.” And quoted David Hume to the effect that the life of a boy, even the life of their precious son, was of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

  “O was an oyster

  “Who lived in his shell

  “If you let him alone

  “He felt perfectly well.”

  But Mrs Bowman had been shaken by religious fear. Whatever her extravagant feelings for Leonard before their son’s abrupt departure from their lives, she now viewed her husband in the clear and unforgiving light of a false shepherd, an idolater, a Satan who had counterfeited the image of Christ. And how was an idolater punished? This she did not show Leonard: Thou shalt stone him with stones, that he shall die, because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the Lord thy God.

  When her parents argued, Merridy was put in mind of an old pump that had lost its bearings through sucking up so much air and mud.

  “Mum used to scold Dad. He was hopelessly entangled in the categories of science. Technological progress had bred pride etc. etc. While Dad kept telling her that she was an idiot for believing in a myth. He hated what he called ‘the Methodism in her madness’.”

  Upon returning to the embrace of her church, Mrs Bowman outdid even her parents in the intensity of her devotion. All the pent-up dicta of her childhood to which she had been pleased to block her ears returned in a furious salvo. Her horror of sexual contact became absolute. Until the evening arrived when Leonard came upon his wife in the hallway, dressed in her peppermint-green coat and zipping up an ancient leather holdall.

  “What ho, Lettice?”

  “I’m going to stay with Doss.”

  “When can I expect you back?”

  “I’m leaving you, Leonard.”

  Forced to choose between parents, Merridy elected life with her father, but her mother, who went to lodge with her younger sister in a large, depressing house two streets away, had weekend rights, which invariably commenced with Mrs Bowman escorting Merridy to the Friday-night dance class at the Methodist Hall.

  The rest of the weekend was not less grim. In her sister’s house on Weybridge Drive, Mrs Bowman bobbed like a decoy duck on the roughened waters of her faith; her features set in an unalterable expression of piety to draw the fire from her Godless husband and wayward daughter.

  Her son, on the other hand, was equal unto the angels. But he would be worthy of a part in the Resurrection only if she atoned. So she acknowledged her iniquity. She regretted in her daily prayers that she was a backslider who had gone away from God’s ordinances. She had not trained up her child in the way he should have gone. And out of her husband’s earshot never tired of reciting to Merridy her favourite verse from Thessalonians: If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him.

  Merridy preferred her father’s verses about the Dong with the Luminous Nose. She rejected her mother’s petrified morality that nothing could dissipate.

  The bitter truth was, once her brother disappeared there was no purpose to life that Merridy could think of. She, too, now inhabited a “yonder” which bore no relation to earth. She was unable to believe in a deity that had removed her favourite person from the face of it. A deity, furthermore, that had turned her mother into a passionless automaton.

  Merridy’s weekends were an agony for a girl who could recall her mother as a jubilant and loving woman, with a round carefree face. Settled in her new home, Mrs Bowman had the pared-down features of atonement. Once on Saturday, and twice on Sunday, she attended church, the services conducted by the minister whose son she had rejected. Merridy sat in the front row and watched Minister Twelvetrees when he was not looking, his finger pointed upward, his pious face, long and narrow and worn, like the sole of a shoe at the communion rail. What Merridy loved most had been taken from her, and now her mother by God and Minister Twelvetrees.

  So she made a promise: she would not allow herself to love again.

  Her father, meanwhile, stumbled about his wifeless house, neglecting to eat, refusing to take off his wedding ring. Even though she had deserted him, he treasured the woman he had loved and married, with whom he had fathered two children.

  His response to her desertion was to dive back into the hard comforts of science. He threw away his mediocre children’s stories, his fanciful drawings, his squeezed-out tubes of Winsor & Newton paint, and concentrated his energies on what he could build in solid three dimensions. God’s designs for his servants were never so meticulous as Leonard’s plans for the water tower at the paper mill in Burnie, or the mechanised cranes and bulldozers that he once had created for his infant son and now lavished on Merridy, and which she pretended to herself were ponies and dogs. From her father, Merridy adopted her chuckle, her weakness for strong language and her taste for red pasta sauces.

  The nearest Leonard came to Christian piety was the respect he taught Merridy for immortal characters like the Dong, the Snark and the Pobble–part of the comforting menagerie of creatures whom she had learned to cherish in the months following her brother’s disappearance. And for everything electrical.

  Determined to rescue his daughter from her mother’s orbit, he encouraged Merridy to apply to a university on the mainland, to move beyond the confines of the Methodist Hall and Edward Lear.
“I want you to have the chance of doing something miraculous with your life–even if it’s only a tiny miracle.”

  “What about our sieve?” asked Merridy, half-joking.

  “Our sieve?” He had forgotten. “Bloody hell–our sieve!” Colouring, he resumed: “If we’re ever going to build it, all the more reason for you to go to university.”

  She was nineteen when she won a place at Melbourne to study civil engineering. She had completed almost a year when her father was electrocuted.

  After attending a morning funeral in Zeehan, he came out of the pump house in level seven at the Renison Bell mine and was convulsed by spasms. A runaway trolley had trapped an exposed wire as it picked up speed and the live part of the wire flailed against the rail that he was following. The resistance of people to electricity varies, and Leonard might not have suffered so badly had he worn his normal shoes. But he was wearing dress shoes and the leather soles had become damp as he tramped up the passage. The 400-volt shock chucked him off the rail and his hand with its wedding ring on clutched at the side of the shaft and touched a metal support. The flashback burned his face and contracted his hand around the metal. His science taught him that he had four chances every second to pull away, but his body was in too violent a spasm at the electricity rushing in, and it was not until his assistant cracked him away with a wooden brush that he fell free. By then, Leonard was unconscious.

  He was taken to hospital in Burnie. Two days later the skin hardened on his feet and his right foot started to go black. Burning from the inside out.

  The shock that had blackened his foot might have killed another man. Instead, Leonard had what Mrs Bowman liked to describe as a life-after-death experience that lasted six minutes. In a lucid interval he reported to his wife, who out of religious duty had returned to nurse him, that he saw a dark tunnel and light at the end of it and felt calm. He waited until he had Merridy on his own before giving a different version, in which he claimed to have observed a large hill with a one-legged man walking with a goose.

  “He wondered if it could be my brother,” said Merridy, staring at the dish that Debbie had brought and separating the three sticks of chicken satay.

  Her father was a month in intensive care. In September, he returned to Zeehan. He had nowhere else to go–he had sold his property in Ulverstone once Merridy left for university. The mining company agreed that he could occupy the house until the end of the year. But a week after his homecoming Merridy heard a gasping sound.

  “No air…need oxygen.”

  She took one look. “Dad, I have to call the ambulance. You realise once I call an ambulance you’re out of my hands?”

  Two further months in Burnie hospital. Another homecoming. But this time harder to follow the twists of his mind. The aneurysm, apart from slurring his speech, had planted on his face an expression that reminded his daughter of the toeless Pobble.

  Leonard’s accident was proof positive to Mrs Bowman of the workings of a divine providence. She lost no opportunity to tell him so when Merridy was not looking. He could only respond by thumping the table with his good fist and saying: “O, O, O, O.” Once, when Merridy heard her father remonstrating, she raced to see what was up. Accused of upsetting her husband, Mrs Bowman defended herself: “I was only saying how much God loves him,” at which he thumped the table again and exclaimed: “O, O, O, O,” shaking his head with an agonised frown.

  Meanwhile, December approached and with it the end of the lease. When, a week before Christmas, the mining company offered Leonard the house for as long as he wanted, Mrs Bowman declined.

  So at the end of January, at Keith Framley’s instigation, Merridy packed her father and mother into the family Peugeot and drove south to Wellington Point. Mrs Bowman was indifferent to her surroundings, as she had been in Zeehan and before that in Ulverstone. In her Bible-clouded imagination, Wellington Point was another filthy step on the Scala Santa. The three principal things that she had to ask God’s forgiveness for in the year 1988 were her lack of warmth towards her estranged husband, her sensuality towards God, and her want of charity to her daughter.

  Merridy had set aside her studies in Melbourne to help her mother look after him. When her father did not die immediately she stayed on against her mother’s wishes.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  TO MERRIDY, HER PARENTS’ unhappiness was a scandal that she proposed to avoid. She looked forward to the day when she could resume her degree, have her own room again–like Tildy.

  “How long have you known Tildy?” Alex asked.

  “I’ve known her since I was”–flattening her hand, Merridy could have been dowsing a flame–“this high.”

  They had grown up on the same street in Ulverstone. Tildy’s father then ran a bed & breakfast three doors down from Merridy’s house. The memory of her cousin was connected with Mandeville Gardens, a wide crescent planted with pear trees, where, on Friday evenings and chaperoned by her mother, Merridy walked to the Methodist Hall for Randal Twelvetrees’ dance class. Merridy was the brighter of the two. Books, films, museums–she had seen the Francis Bacon exhibition in Melbourne. Tildy occupied herself, rather, with men.

  “She hasn’t changed. And now she’s fallen for Ray Grogan,” Merridy said, her laugh edged with disapproval. Or was it regret?

  “Like every girl in Wellington Point,” and felt a spark of envy for his old schoolmate.

  “You don’t like Ray, do you?”

  “Oh, Ray’s all right.” It was just that nothing was interesting to Ray unless he could see it undress. When he contemplated Ray’s ornate womanising, Alex wondered if the man was not in fact gay.

  “I warned you. One more lie–and I’m leaving.”

  “No, he’s fine,” Alex hurried on. “He’s done very well with his business. He can sell sand to the seals, can’t he? Maybe it’s his moustache I don’t like. Who does he think he is?”

  “Errol Flynn?” she ventured, amused.

  “In his mother’s dreams.”

  “Speaking of whom, I met Mrs Grogan last night.”

  “What, the president of our bowls club?” He thought of the owl-beak nose and asbestos face, soft and grey, and smiled.

  “That would be her. She’s invited my mother to become a member.”

  “Everyone suspects her of stealing from the kitty. It wouldn’t surprise me.” Nothing about the Grogans surprised Alex. “Was it Ray you were speaking to on the phone just now?” looking up.

  She lowered her eyes, nodded.

  He was unable to stem his thoughts: Merridy appeals to Ray because she’s new. Every other girl here he’s had, save for Tildy–and that’s because they’re two peas in a pod.

  She said: “You haven’t told me why you dislike him?”

  “I sat beside him in class when we were kids.”

  “Is that a crime?”

  “He cheated. He wrote the answers to exams on his hands.” Afterwards, at school in Cumbria, Alex could never look at the English landscape without seeing interposed Ray’s palm. The words written in blue biro in shambolic capitals. Sycamore, beech, elm.

  She nodded. “Sounds like Ray. Anything else?” Cheating was not enough?

  “Oh, I don’t know,” and tried to laugh. “Wasn’t he bitten on the chin by a tiger-snake who died in agony? I don’t think Ray ever lost that ugly look on his face.”

  “A lot of people find him attractive.”

  “I don’t like the way he treats people, that’s all.”

  “How does he treat them?”

  “You’ll find out if you let him.”

  “Maybe it’s a local thing. Isn’t that how you behaved with Tildy?” Her blue eyes returned a bold stare.

  “It’s not how I wanted…it’s not how…” he repeated uselessly. At the same time, a need to speak of his lapse with Tildy seized him with the force of a cramp. “No, you’re right, it was my fault. I could have said no. I should have said no.” But they clinked like kidney stones in a jar, his words.

>   To the rescue bringing more tea came Debbie, with another glass of red wine for Alex.

  Alone again with him, Merridy said: “So Ray cheated. Is that all?”

  He did not want to tell. But his expression was crying out.

  “Alex…”

  He jutted his chin, not because he was brave but because other young men did when not wanting to dob.

  She had decided. “If you don’t tell, I’m going. This minute.”

  Merridy half-rose from the chair and waited there, suspended. The flesh between her breasts had the unnatural whiteness of the powder that his father laid in trails for ants.

  Then to keep her from leaving he was blurting it. A revolting rite of passage devised by Ray for Alex to prove that he was an Aussie who belonged and not a Pommy bastard who had no place here. Even now, sixteen years on, Alex could hear ringing in his ears the voice of Ray Grogan bullying him across the playground, pushing him with all the authority of an eleven-year-old captain of cricket to assault the newest member of class as he set up a pyramid of marbles. And so Alex had strolled up to Jack Cheele–who smiled trustingly at him, “Hi, Piers, wanna go?” who had no idea what was about to occur–and kicked him, hard, in the balls. An action so out of character and committed from a wish to try and include himself in the local hoonery. At least that was his excuse. Ray Grogan had no excuse. He had kneed everyone in the balls all his life. But the astonishment in Cheele’s face was something that Alex had carried with him ever since; a pinch of shame in his guts that preyed on his mind at inappropriate moments. “Piers…” gasping. Doubled up on the ground. Those anguished, accusing, ineradicable eyes. It was practically Alex’s last memory of the school. He never told his parents and they never found out. A week later, they set off in their car for the auction room in Campbell Town.