One Life

by Kate Grenville

  On Monday, Bert went to the convent and got Nance’s things. He came back furious. He’d just paid the next term’s fees and they wouldn’t give the money back. I’ll stop the bloody cheque, he said, and went straight to the bank, but Mother Superior had already cashed it.

  It was a luxury to wake up at home next day with a throat full of razor blades and a shivering that no blankets could warm. Nance lay in her little room in the Cronulla house, hearing the magpies, watching the shadow of the tree move across the wall. At night when she tossed and turned there was a pair of crickets right outside the window that croaked, now one, now the other, now both at once, like a song. She’d never heard anything so clearly, never heard the breeze in the treetops, the way it whispered to you, never seen how a star looked with a branch moving so it winked on, off, on.

  TWO

  BERT ASKED around and heard about St George Girls’ High, one of the government high schools. There weren’t many of them and they were hard to get into. You had to be near the top of the Entrance to High School exam and Nance hadn’t sat for it, because she’d been at the convent.

  Never mind the exam, Nance, Bert said. I’ll get you in. He put on his suit and went off. Came home crowing. These spinster-schoolmarm types, he said. Bit of man’s charm goes a long way. Not a bad-looking woman, as a matter of fact.

  Spinster schoolmarms they might have been, but these teachers were like no women Nance had ever met. At assembly when they sat on the stage in their academic gowns you could see they were all graduates. She hadn’t known that women could have university degrees. They were all Miss, because female public servants weren’t allowed to be married. But they weren’t apologetic old maids. They were forthright and confident, spoke with authority. Miss Barnes, the woman Bert thought he’d charmed, gave speeches at assembly where she quoted Latin and Greek as easily as English. She had a fine way with words. The dragons of twentieth-century life are ignorance, incompetence, slackness and disloyalty, she said. Girls, you must dispel them from your lives!

  Nance was used to school being dull. The repetitions, the drilling, the chanting lists, everything boring because it was too easy. At the start she sat up the back giggling and whispering. There was a girl, Claire Gannon, who she could tempt. The teachers saw, but there were no detentions, no canings. If you didn’t listen and missed something, it was your loss. When Miss Moore asked Nance what homely meant in David Copperfield and she said home-loving, Miss Moore said dryly, Congratulations, Nance, I can see you’re making the most of your education.

  The hardest maths Nance had ever done was the seven times table but here Miss Cohen was doing algebra. Miss Cohen drove a car to school. Nance had never seen a woman behind the wheel before. A girl who lived near her said Miss Cohen smoked and wore trousers at home. Miss Cohen made no secret of the fact that she spent her weekends betting at the horse races. Girls, she told them, I’m living proof that there’s money to be made in mathematics.

  Nance began to see that these teachers didn’t treat the girls like underlings to be disciplined or animals to be trained, but as unformed versions of themselves. It wasn’t much fun being the rebel no one cared about. It was more interesting to be part of the class, all those other clever girls doing plays in Latin in bedsheet togas, or debating whether or not It’s a Man’s World. She made friends and for the first time in her life felt part of things. She even got a warm mention in the school magazine: ‘A new girl joined us in midwinter and is already proving herself one of our best scholars.’ Nance worked hard and did well. Every term she was promoted. After eighteen months she was about to go into the top class.

  She loved living privately, not in a hotel, and loved that the family was together for the first time in years. Max was at Cronulla Public School and Frank came home from Newington every weekend.

  Bert got Nance and Max up for school, gave them their porridge, made their school lunches. The lunch embarrassed Nance. Her father didn’t seem to know what a school lunch should look like. She longed for egg or cheese sandwiches like the other girls but it was always what he would have liked, a working man’s lunch: a cold chop with a couple of tomatoes or a big chunk of strong cheese. The other girls would sit around waiting for her to undo her lunch. At first she thought they were laughing at her, but after a time she realised they’d have liked a cold chop now and then.

  The doctors thought Dolly’s womb might be at the bottom of her moods and always being off-colour, and she had a hysterectomy. It didn’t seem to help. She was in bed a lot of the time. Oh, she was sick. No one knew how she suffered.

  Still, she had some good times too. Bert bought a car and she learned to drive, like Miss Cohen. Most Saturdays they’d drive to the races and the children were free to do as they pleased. In winter they took pancake batter in a jar and went into the bush near the house, made a little fire and cooked the batter. Nothing had ever tasted as good, the lemon and sugar running out of the rolled-up pancakes, the smoke easing its way through the leaves, the water that bright wintry blue in glimpses between the trees.

  But at home the old tensions were starting up again like a toothache. She tried to hear what Bert and Dolly were arguing about behind the closed door. It was broken bits of sentences but she heard Bert say, You’ll have the income from the flats, then something from Dolly she couldn’t hear, then Bert again, You can live here and I’ll manage. Frank and Max knew something was up too, but the three of them said nothing to each other, as if by ignoring it they could make the trouble go away.

  One night Bert and Dolly told the children that they’d bought the Caledonian Hotel in Tamworth. It was the first time they’d bought the freehold of a pub as well as the license. Eighteen thousand pounds. They’d mortgaged everything. We’ve got the touch, Bert said. Pay off the mortgage in no time.

  Tamworth was only ten miles from Currabubula and Nance knew it from staying with Auntie Rose. She remembered it as a dull and dusty country town. Why Tamworth, do you think, she asked Frank.

  It’s the salmon-returning thing, he said. You know, going back to the place where they started. Showing everyone how well they’ve done.

  Mrs Trimm had started the Caledonian back in the 1890s and it had always been the top pub in town. Hot and cold water in the bathrooms, a grand piano in the parlour, a lock-up garage. The cheapest room was sixteen shillings a night and a meal there cost four shillings when you could get a good feed at the Greeks’ for ninepence.

  Bert and Dolly were lucky they’d inherited all the staff from Mrs Trimm, because the two of them were out of their depth. The first week there was a problem with Mrs Chipp who ran the laundry. Dolly had noticed that the starched damask table napkins were ironed only on one side and thought Mrs Chipp was skimping on the job. Marched downstairs to give her a piece of her mind.

  Oh, Mrs Russell, didn’t you know? Mrs Chipp said. You only iron the napkins on one side, otherwise they’d be slipping off people’s laps. It’s how it’s done in the best houses, Mrs Russell, I assure you.

  Dolly was cranky the rest of the day.

  Con and Arthur knew everything about the catering trade and ran the dining room perfectly. Quiet men, both of them, each seemed to know what the other was thinking. They were more tactful than Mrs Chipp. They pretended Dolly knew what a fish knife was and what shape of glass you drank burgundy out of.

  In the polo season the bar and dining room were crowded all day with rich people. Honeymooners stayed in the Bridal Suite under a golden taffeta bedspread with a black appliqued crane winding across it. When the famous soprano Florence Austral came through, with maid and manager and accompanist, she sang for the guests in the parlour. Isador Goodman played Chopin and admired the tone of the piano. Jim Anderson and Jack Crawford arrived with a dozen tennis racquets each. Nance was in awe: Wimbledon champions!

  Fifty years after Mr King had told Dolly’s father to stand back, my man, the Kings were still out on Goonoo Goonoo Station, still the local aristocracy. The King girls came up from Sydney
for the polo and they loved to scandalise the locals by wearing pants and smoking in the street. Oh, provincial with a capital P, Nance heard one of them say to the other, laughing, tossing her cigarette away without a glance as she got into the car behind the chauffeur.

  Some well-to-do Maunder relatives, Dolly’s cousins, came to afternoon tea. Nance saw straight away how smooth and polished they were compared with her parents. Those cousins hadn’t gone to humble Currabubula Public School and sat in Grade Six until they were old enough to leave. They’d gone to the Dominican Sisters in Tamworth. Hearing their quiet well-spoken voices Nance thought, Is that why Mum kept trying me with the Catholics?

  Dolly insisted on giving them a tour of the place. The Bridal Suite, everyone staring at the gold taffeta bedspread. The parlour where Florence Austral had sung. Dolly told them how much it cost to have the piano tuned. How someone had offered her twenty pounds apiece for the firedogs. The Maunder ladies said, Oh really, Dolly. Fancy that. Nance saw that her mother was the only one in the room who wasn’t embarrassed.

  There were a few Russell relatives too. That was a surprise. Dolly had always said Bert was an only child and his mother was divorced, but here was Uncle Alan. He was a bookie, had a strong voice that filled the bar. His son was another Alan, a tall dark young man with a moustache like a film star and eyes so brown they were almost black. His daughter Rita was a Spanish-looking beauty with pale skin, brown eyes, straight black hair and red lips. Why didn’t I get those looks, Nance thought.

  Bert was a man arrived at his dream. New dark suit, a lovely piece of cloth. He served in the bar, but there were plenty of workers to take over when he wanted to spend the afternoon in one of the big armchairs with a Western, or out in the backyard with the magpie he was teaching to come back to his fist.

  Frank had grown into a tall young man. Nance thought him handsome, but Frank hated his big ears and kept to the side of family photos. He was out at Uncle Willie’s being a kind of jackaroo, because he wanted nothing more than to go on the land. Max was now a term boarder at a fancy school in nearby Armidale. He got on with the rich boys in a way Frank never had, because he was good at running, boxing, anything to do with a ball. Nance missed her friends from St George Girls’ High, but having everyone contented for once—they even had a dog, like a proper family!—made up for a lot.

  Tamworth High was another government school and Nance thought it would be like St George, except with boys. She felt the difference, though, from the first day. It was back to classes that were too easy. No more algebra, no more plays in Latin. No one was too fussy about things like what homely meant. If you got the general drift, that was good enough. Most of the students couldn’t wait to leave. Every week another pupil in Nance’s class turned fourteen and there was another empty desk.

  Being with boys gave the classroom a heavy unsettled feeling, like an undertow. Most of the teachers were men, and if you were on the girls’ side of the room it was hard to catch their eye. They think we’re all just going to get married, Una said. Don’t want to waste their time on us. The undertow could turn nasty if any of the girls beat the boys in a test.

  Most of the teachers were fresh out of Teachers’ College, working through their country posting so they could apply for a transfer to Sydney. They didn’t know how to keep order. The new French teacher was full of innocent enthusiasm. She came in the first day and wrote on the board: With Every Language Learned, Man Gains a Soul. Some boy up the back guffawed. The teacher only lasted two weeks, ran out of class in tears one day and never came back.

  Esme told Nance there was no point in learning French, anyway. None of them was going to go to France, and if a French person came to Tamworth they could bloody well speak English. Still, the idea that you could gain a soul stayed with Nance. When it was her turn to read out a sentence in French, she felt her face changing around the new sounds. She did feel different. It wasn’t gaining a soul, exactly, but there was something.

  Mr Crisp their English teacher was older and knew how to keep order, even when he was teaching them something as sissy as poetry. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Yes, Nance thought, that was autumn. The apple tree in the backyard at the Cally, with the wasps in and out of the rotting windfalls and the sad smell of burning leaves, the low syrupy sun along the stubble of Ison’s paddock, the pale morning fog hanging over the Peel. Reading the poem was like having a conversation with this man, even though he was a hundred years dead and had never seen Ison’s paddock. He’d given words to ordinary things that they both knew, and turned them into slow beautiful music.

  The poem about Chapman’s Homer made the class restless. Bards in fealty to Apollo! What was that when it was at home? Mr Crisp raised his voice and stared down the ones at the back. Cortez was amazed at seeing the Pacific from a peak in Darien, he explained. But the poem was really about Keats being amazed by a poem. It was like seeing your reflection in the three-way mirror at home, Nance thought, because here she was, being amazed at a poem written by a man who was amazed at a poem.

  When Mr Crisp read poetry out loud, they could hear the little shake in his voice. Esme nudged Nance under the desk and smirked. Nance didn’t smirk back. She was astonished at the thought: Mr Crisp was feeling the same thing she did, a tenderness towards these words that had the power to make the world look different. It was like a secret handshake. You weren’t the only one.

  She was fourteen and it was the Intermediate year. It was easy to be top of the class, coasting along on what she’d learned at St George. She did so well in the exam that she got a prize, a leather-bound, gold-embossed Poetical Works of John Keats. Bert and Dolly were proud, but Nance thought more impressed by the quality of the leather than the success in the exam. Dolly riffled the pages so the gilt edges gleamed in an expensive way. Then she wrapped it in brown paper to keep it nice and put it in the glass-fronted bookcase.

  The day after Speech Day, Mr Crisp came to the Cally and talked with Dolly in the Ladies’ Lounge. Nance hung over the banister, right above them. She could see the bald spot on Mr Crisp’s head and Dolly’s crooked part. She heard Mr Crisp say, Mrs Russell, it would be an absolute tragedy if she doesn’t go on. She thought then she’d hear her mother’s voice going high and indignant but Mr Crisp kept talking, his voice a coaxing up-and-down, like a man breaking in a horse, Nance thought. A credit to you, she heard. You and Mr Russell both.

  Nance supposed going on to the Leaving would be all right. She didn’t know what she wanted, but she knew it wasn’t what Esme and Lois and the others were going to do: leave school and help at home or get a job in a shop, till someone came along to marry them. She’d be the first person in her family to stay at school for so long. Frank had done the Intermediate, like her, but he didn’t want to go on. Max was no scholar, didn’t even want to do the Intermediate.

  Nance knew she was never going to be beautiful, but once she knew not to do too well in class the boys liked her. She was lively, ready for a bit of fun, and she was exotic, the girl from the city. Wade Watson walked her home, Ray Brawne held her hand in the pictures, Tom Vidler kissed her after a dance. A handsomer boy than Tom Vidler or a bolder one than Ray Brawne might have got further. She didn’t know if she was glad or sorry they didn’t try. She’d have said no. Not that she thought it was wicked. It was that there was no way not to have a baby. She didn’t want to be hustled into marrying any of these boys.

  In summer they’d make up a party, half a dozen boys and girls, with Bert along to make it all right, and go down to the swimming hole. She loved the hot air hanging under the trees, the cicadas boring away into the afternoon, the silky feel of the water. She’d duck right under and swim along through the tea-coloured water, seeing the rounded stones and the little fish flickering away. Esme and Lois didn’t swim, not really, because they wanted to keep their hair dry. They bobbed up and down in the shallow part, only their heads showing. Nance couldn’t be bothered. But they’ll see, Esme said. You know, the shape of your�
�you know. Oh, let them! Nance said. Nothing much to see, is there?

  A dozen went on to the Leaving at Tamworth High that year: ten boys, plus Una Dowe and Nance Russell. Nance knew that Una was cleverer than she was but old Dowe didn’t believe in education for girls and there was no money, so Una was only allowed to go on if she had a job. She had to rush out of school every afternoon to work in the kitchen at the hospital. At least I get a decent feed, she said.

  There weren’t enough going on to the Leaving to have a choice of subjects. They all did English, Latin, French, Maths, Modern History and Botany. But there was no proper teaching for the senior class. Mr Crisp got them started with Macbeth but then his promotion to principal came through and he left for Sydney. The new English teacher was marking time till he retired and his idea of teaching was to make them copy passages while he popped out for a smoke. The Maths teacher left and there was no replacement for six months. They had five French teachers in a year. The Botany teacher was really a History teacher and admitted in a weak moment that he was reading the textbook every night to stay a page ahead of the class.

  In the final year everyone put their names down for a Teachers’ College scholarship. Nance didn’t know if she wanted to be a teacher, but for a girl there was only that or nursing. She thought Dolly would be pleased but she exploded. Over her dead body Nance was going to be a teacher! She didn’t say what she did want for her daughter, and Nance didn’t ask. You didn’t argue with Dolly when she had one of her rages on.

  At the Leaving, Nance got five Bs and a Lower Pass in Botany. That meant she’d matriculated, though barely. The university would accept her. She’d have liked to go, study History and English and more French. But what was the point of thinking about it? You couldn’t do anything with History and English except teach, and Dolly wouldn’t have that.