Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 10, Issue 1

by Marion Halligan

  Review of Australian Fiction

  Volume Ten: Issue One

  Zutiste, Inc.

  Review of Australian Fiction Copyright © 2014 by Authors.

  Contents

  Imprint

  The Man Who Played the Organ Marion Halligan

  A Widow’s Snow Amanda O’Callaghan

  Published by Review of Australian Fiction

  “The Man Who Played the Organ” Copyright © 2014 by Marion Halligan

  “A Widow’s Snow” Copyright © 2014 by Amanda O’Callaghan

  www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com

  The Man Who Played the Organ

  Marion Halligan

  The man asked her to come and listen to him play the organ. In the Methodist church, not in the little church on the hill but the central one, the main one, down on the main road. It had a big garden and the buses went past. Not that the buses were any good to her, she had to walk, crossing the suburbs, it was almost as far as school, in a slightly different direction. High school was even further than the primary school, it took over half an hour to walk. At least to the church she didn’t have to carry the big port full of heavy books, and she could wear a cotton dress and sandals, instead of a serge tunic.

  She told her mother she was going to the church to hear the organ played. She’d met Colin there, at a Fellowship meeting. Her mother was not particularly surprised at the idea of her walking across to this church, the church on the hill shared the minister. Her mother was an Anglican, not a Methodist, she thought the Methodists had quite funny ways. And she was quite used to her daughter telling her what she was going to do. Pauline was thirteen, and in the habit of deciding her own life, which she told her mother about, informing her rather than asking permission. Behaving well, of course.

  The man was nineteen, at Teachers’ College. He was tall and lanky, with big feet and large-knuckled hands, a long, slightly bent nose with a cleft in the end and a face whose features were deeply modelled. His tight-fleshed bones gave the impression of a carving done with slightly slovenly skill. He had a large Adam’s apple that bobbled in his throat, and he was often sheened with pleasantly scented sweat, because he rode his bike and it was the summer, the weather hot and humid, the sea air offering breezes but dampness as well. He seemed interested in her at the meeting and talked to her, and then invited her to come and hear him play the organ. He was practising. He was quite in demand, people to play church organs being not that readily available, but he had to practise, but it was real music, hymns sometimes but often Bach or Purcell or Handel. She sat in the empty church, and it was beautiful.

  She went several times a week to hear him play. Afterwards he walked home with her, slowly, pushing his bike. He took a photograph of her on the church steps, wearing a cotton dress, pale greyish blue with small pink flowers, made of seersucker, with a V-neck and a pointed collar and a narrow belt loosely round her waist; you can see her small new breasts just humping the fabric. Her head is slightly bent forward and she is looking up shyly, tying not to squint into the sun as in so many of her childhood photographs. Her hair is shiny dark and clean, held back with a bobby pin; it has something of a basin cut. He was keen on photographs. There are a number taken at a church picnic, her sitting on a rock wearing a white blouse and a flowered skirt and her legs looking smooth and shapely dipped in the sea as far as her ankles. In another her little sister is skylarking with her, and she looks startled but calm. She looks pretty in these skilful black and white shots, smiling gently and a little sideways at the camera. She is self-possessed.

  One Saturday he walked home with her and she invited him in. Her father played the organ too, at various lodges, she thought it would be nice for them to meet. And so it was. She made a cup of tea and there was cake.

  When did he begin to make love to her? After a decent interval, it seemed. She sat near him at the organ, and he held her hand. He put his arm around her, side by side, he hugged her when they stood together, he kissed her. His mouth smelt of the tooth powder he used. His shirts were made of nylon, a new thing, very convenient, and she could feel the dampness of his skin under them. He held her hand and stroked her fingers, smoothed his knuckles gently across her cheeks. He did not take liberties, nothing frightening, he did not touch her anywhere embarrassing, he was respectful. Not like the man in Woolworths who had stood next to her at the counter, hung his arm down and scratched her, there. She’d moved to another counter but he’d followed. Stood close, hung his arm down and scratched in that nasty way.

  They talked about the future. He was in his second year at Teachers’ College, next year he would be sent out to a school. Oh I hope it will be here, he said, but I don’t think it will. They never leave you in your own town the first few years. They always send you to the country. They made themselves unhappy, talking about how horrible it would be to be parted, how they would not be able to stand it, they would be so miserable. He wrote out the words of ‘All through the night’ for her:

  Love to thee my thoughts are turning

  All through the night

  All for thee my heart is yearning

  All though the night

  Though sad fate our lives may sever

  Parting will not last forever

  There’s a hope that leaves me never

  All through the night

  He played it on the organ, with powerful yearning chords that twisted her heart, and she said the words over to herself as she lay in bed at night, wallowing in the seductive sadness of her heart yearning. Her father had a record of a Welsh choir, and she found the song there, she played it on the radiogram on her own in the lounge room, listening to the southerly wind shaking the windowpanes. She was overwhelmed with the sadness of it, and she loved that. It was addictive, a beautiful place she could go to whenever the lines came into her head.

  He called in often. Her parents liked him, so did her sisters. He practised his primary teacher’s skills on them, telling them stories, playing games. Sometimes the two of them stood in the lounge room and hugged and kissed; she stood in his arms with her face pressed to his chest, quite low down, he was so much taller than she was, they just stood like that, while the rest of the family was in the dining room, though somebody was sure to come by and they had to spring apart. She imagined her parents did not know what was going on.

  The long walks home from the church gave them a lot of opportunity for talking. The year was turning, the sea winds were chill. There were few leaves to change colour and fall, just the cold snaking up, and the gritty wind blowing in their faces. But they walked slowly, so they could have more time for talking. She got home to tea keeping warm over a saucepan of simmering water, drying and hardening, though she did not notice that.

  She had told him she was going to be a writer when she grew up. She said that she thought she would write children’s books, since adult books so often had terrible things in them, and she didn’t think she wanted to do that. He thought that was a great idea. Once he said, stopping pushing the bike, turning to her, I want one day to read your books to your children. I’d like them to be my children too, but even if they aren’t, I want to be there, reading the books to them. She wanted to hug him on that spot, but of course she couldn’t, they had to be discreet, you couldn’t hold hands or touch anywhere in public. That’s why the church was good, usually, there was hardly ever anybody in it. But of course most of the time he had to practise.

  After that they often talked about the time she would be writing her children’s books, when she would be famous, a very distinguished writer, and he would be there, looking after her. It was a very happy future, very
lucky. A happy ever after, with beautiful children.

  His hair was fairish and his eyes were blue. She looked into them out of her own dark brown ones, all her family had dark brown eyes, and wondered if these children would be blue-eyed, if looking into their eyes would be like looking into his.

  Several times he came to the church on the hill to play the organ. They did not really speak to one another, but she sat in a welling consciousness of his presence, and sometimes he looked at her, a look that anybody else would have found quite ordinary, but which she understood, and was heated by. Her skin rippled under her winter clothes, her blood beat, she sat in her own little busy turmoil and paid no attention to the service. People stood around in the porch afterwards, and then he rode off down the hill on his bike, with a wave to all the congregation. She felt stunned, knowing she was the one of all those people that he cared for.

  He did small finely detailed paintings, of riverbanks and trees, full of tiny brushstrokes that built up depth and richness of colour. She knew they weren’t very amazing works of art, but they touched her. He stuck them in her autograph book, with his signature. No messages, not loving and not jokey like the other ones there. When you get married and have twins Don’t come to me for safety pins. Or, Little drops of water Added to the milk Keep the milkman’s daughter In crepe de chine and silk. He was too grown-up for this sort of funny rhyme.

  He was a person of paper. He copied out poems, and words of songs, though he did not write poems of his own, he wrote little notes and letters, fond, affectionate, recalling the future. She had a pretty little flowered cardboard box that she kept them in, a box for chocolates that her father had given her mother in their courting days. She could look through them and always bring him close to her. Though sad fate our lives may sever… When he was sent to the country there would be a lot of letters. And school holidays.

  For her fifteenth birthday he gave her a Thomas Hardy novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, with an inscription in the front saying he was looking forward to her twenty-first birthday. She found this a bit puzzling; it seemed to be suggesting that they would have to wait for her coming of age before being together, that her father was a cruel parent who would never give his permission, that she would have to grasp for herself at the first opportunity. Whereas he seemed to her benign and accepting of the situation. And six years, such a gloomy thought, how much yearning there would have been in that time. She set out to read the book, but could not get on with it. It consisted almost entirely of dialogue, and this dialogue was nearly all in dialect, so that almost none of the words had their English spellings. She could not be doing with it. She found this strange, since that was the stage of her life when she never didn’t finish a book she’d started. It got put on the bookshelf, a handsome hardback with a pale bluish grey dust jacket, with its inscription there to see for anyone who cared to take the book out and open it. It was a story about a choir, it appeared, but very little seemed to happen.

  Spring came, so the dates indicated, and the weather began to warm. He was worrying about the end of year, and where he might be posted. As it happened, she never even found out.

  It turned out that the sister of his aunt by marriage lived next door. Nobody had known this. It was in a building known as the flats, a duplex in fact, two houses joined at their back ends. This woman lived in the one behind, facing on to a large garage in the back yard, a great deal lower than her house, which looked down on it over a small cliff. Mrs Lovat was this woman’s name, Pauline’s family knew her a little, in a neighbourly way, to pass the time of day. She had been watching, watching them dawdle up the street past the sandhills, seen him open the lattice fence and put his bike in the backyard, had reported to her sister the aunt, who’d told Colin’s mother. There seemed to have been a monstrous row, she was never quite sure, since he did not speak to her again, he wrote her a strange note which told her that everything was over, and said terrible things about her which seemed to come from Mrs Lovat next door, that she was predatory and had trapped him, there seemed to be something about tricks or maybe it was spells, too, and the name Jezebel was used. There were odd vindictive mutterings from Mrs Lovat but they never really heard those because nobody in the family spoke to her again. And Pauline was never quite sure what he’d said because after her first collapse into tears on her bed, quietly and stifled so no one would know, she got up and showed her mother the letter and carried the little flowered box out into the back yard and shook its contents into a pile between some bricks on a garden bed and set fire to them. She burned everything. Afterwards she was sorry, she thought the record ought to have been kept, she’d have liked to be able to check up what it might have meant, but it was too late, it all turned to ash, and she smiled and said, There, that’s done, that’s over, thank goodness. She never mentioned him again. In the nights she was not always so strong. That old pleasurable yearning was quite different from the black misery that fell upon her then. But it passed.

  She saw him again when she was nineteen. It was the Anniversary at church and he came to play the organ. He must be back in town, he must have done his stint of postings in the country. She had a new white piqué dress, in a pattern the family had just acquired and was very pleased with, the bodice was made with little gussets under tiny cap sleeves so you could get a really neat fit without strain; it had a wide scooped neckline and a tight-fitting bodice with darts into the waist and a skirt cut on the bias in panels with small pleats so it spread wide from its tight narrow belt. She had a little hat of yellow straw with a red velvet ribbon, her handbag was a small lidded basket with a bunch of cherries on it, and her shoes were dark red with low curved heels. She was sunburnt, very dramatic with the white piqué dress. Very pleased with the way she looked. She saw him but did not speak to him, and she knew he saw her but he did not speak either. She was in third year at university by then.

  Afterwards he got on his bike and rode off down the hill. It was a very steep hill and he hadn’t got far when something went wrong and he pitched over the handlebars of the bike. She didn’t see it happen but she saw him come back up the hill, trembling and badly hurt, with the heels of his hands ripped by the asphalt of the road and the knees torn out of his trousers and terrible scrapes that were bleeding seriously. People sat him down and rushed to get water and antiseptics and cups of tea while he shivered with the shock of it all. How brave, people said. There were lots of church ladies who thought he was such a lovely young man, and played the organ so beautifully. They worried, would there be permanent damage, what if it spoiled his playing, oh how painful, oh how brave. Perhaps they thought he would cry. She watched from the edge. She felt quite cold, not even really sorry for him, he was far away from her, she had cleaned him out of her heart. But she did feel, in her hands and her knees, little quivers of how nasty the pain must be.

  A Widow’s Snow

  Amanda O’Callaghan

  Roger, Maureen decided, was the kind of man who would appreciate an old-fashioned pudding. She flicked through the best of her recipe books, toyed with ideas like spiced apple tart with a rich pastry crust—Gerald’s favourite, so not really an option—and all manner of sponges, even soufflés. She braved the mole-eyed newsagent (twice divorced, blinking at the door for a new, early-rising wife) and bought a couple of cookery magazines. The desserts there, lashed down by guy-ropes of toffee, subdued under heavy drifts of icing sugar, still seemed to totter on their plates. One wobbly chocolate affair, stacked high and leaning, put her in mind of the ramshackle old house on the Scottish coast where she and Gerald had gone on their honeymoon. She remembered lying in his arms for the first time, naked and happy in the cavernous room, wondering whether the whole creaking place might, with one more movement, tip into the howling sea.

  By the end of the week, she’d discounted them all. Too insubstantial. She’d seen how Roger conducted his business. ‘No, not the sort of thing I’m interested in, thank you,’ he’d say, dropping the phone back into its cradle with a
decisive clunk. There was a certainty about everything he did. She envied that. Now that she was cooking for him for the first time, she didn’t want the merest touch of a dessert fork dismantling the whole effect. She wanted something that kept its shape. Something robust. Later on, she’d make one of those fragile confections. Not for this dinner.

  She stirred the heavy batter. The scent of the mixed spices curled around her, reaching languidly across the oak table and into the corners of the warm, square room. It was a long time since she’d made fig pudding. She’d forgotten its festive perfume. Just a week into a new year, the kitchen shelves still edged with ivy, it seemed an appropriate choice.

  Looking out the window towards the neighbouring field, where a pony had been startled into cantering for no obvious reason, Maureen felt happier than she’d been in a long time. Contented, she corrected herself, as the huge wooden spoon—once her mother’s—lifted and turned the mixture.

  The sky, which earlier had been choked with cloud, had all but cleared. It was bright now, but it would freeze later, she knew. She guided her small palette knife around the bowl, garnering the last of the mixture. She scraped the batter from the spoon, running the knife down its bone-strong length until it was picked clean. She smoothed the hillocks of mixture, laid discs of paper over the top, bound them in place with a craftswoman’s nimble fingers.

  ‘That should do nicely, Maureen,’ she said aloud. Since losing Gerald, she was not afraid to talk to herself, to hear her voice ring out in the empty rooms.

  As she pushed the basin into the oven, her eye was drawn to the bench top, where she saw that the roses in her new vase, the one Roger had given her, were beginning to droop. She must change them before tomorrow night.