by Rod Jones
Cathy’s boss at the insurance company called her into his office one afternoon and asked if she was pregnant. She couldn’t deny it. He told her she would have to hand in her notice. She would leave her job in two weeks’ time.
She was afraid to tell David. With his temper, he was just as likely to go in there and punch the manager in the mouth. Finally, she blurted it out.
‘Right, that’s it!’ David shouted. ‘I’m going to have it out with him first thing in the morning!’
‘Please don’t.’
‘Tell me the cunt’s name.’
‘Mr Davidson.’ She felt such a coward, but it was the only thing that would shut him up. Again, she wondered what she was heading into.
In the end, the fortnight elapsed and she left the insurance company without a scene. David’s meagre scholarship had to cover the rent and living expenses. Her father sent her a cheque for a hundred dollars to buy some clothes. Cathy didn’t want to cash it—she knew he wasn’t well off, there were stacks of bills, embarrassing meetings with the bank manager. She went to Myer’s and bought a blue velvet tent-dress and a gingham smock. They weren’t really clothes: they were covering. To hide herself—that was what the world wanted from her now.
David persisted in getting up early to sell his newspaper at factory gates. Although he had handed in his thesis, he still walked down Grattan Street to the university most mornings for seminars. But he spent his afternoons and evenings writing short stories that Cathy typed up.
It was a mild July in Melbourne in 1975, day after day of clear blue days. After lunch, David and Cathy sat in the courtyard, faces tilted to the precious winter sunshine. It was a rare respite from the strain of their life this year. The passionfruit vine was beginning to grow.
Sandra and Connie, veterans with Cathy of the Hammersmith Odeon and of Olympia, arranged to meet her on Saturday in the city at the Hopetoun Tea Rooms. Sandra burst into tears when Cathy arrived. ‘What’s happened to us, Ziggy?’ And, for a minute, two minutes, the three of them hugged and cried. In London, it had always been pubs and parties; now they were in Melbourne in an antiquated tea room for staid old ladies.
They still called her Ziggy, but that was as far as it went. Was there a trace of bemusement in their eyes at her condition? A touch of irony in the way they spoke to her? Cathy couldn’t be sure. She felt—but she had no evidence—that her friends no longer liked her. She wasn’t really Ziggy any more: no longer Cathy the dag who had horsed around and mimed Bowie songs in the house in Swiss Cottage. Now, she was just the first of the old London gang to go the family way.
They were nervous, the three of them. Cathy heard herself saying things she’d heard David say, unwittingly copying him. The capitalist press. US imperialism. Sandra and Connie stared at her, as though they no longer recognised her.
Sandra had been the natural leader in Swiss Cottage. Now Cathy felt some authority because soon she would be a mother. In that, there was something absolute. She was moving away from her old identity, but she missed it. She knew that, once out of her presence, they would talk about ‘how Ziggy has changed’. In the currency of friendship, change was the black penny that should never turn up. They needed to keep pretending they were still the same, even when they were not.
Later, they went to the gallery in St Kilda Road and lay on their backs on the carpet. They looked up at the stained-glass ceiling in the Great Hall, the fragmented colours and shapes. Their talk was fragmented, too. ‘So tell us about this bloke of yours.’
‘Why have you been avoiding us, Ziggy?’
‘We heard at a barbecue at Suzy’s.’
‘Your dad getting the shotgun out?’
‘What a thing to happen, eh? So when’s the big day?’
Cathy gazed up at the ceiling, like the huge window of a church that had been turned on its side. ‘Got a smoke?’ Cathy asked Sandra, at last. She had stopped buying them, as her dad had suggested.
Dad used to be a terrible smoker. He could roll a cigarette with one hand. He always had one going, even on the tractor. One day he had decided to quit and he had never gone near another cigarette again. ‘Don’t teach your baby to smoke,’ Dad had told her. He was right, of course, but you have to have one sometimes.
Out on St Kilda Road, they sat on the side of the moat, smoking. They talked for another half an hour, then went their separate ways. She knew she wouldn’t see Sandra and Connie again. She was no longer the skinny girl they used to have fun with in London. Cathy walked all the way home. Brunswick Street was quiet at six o’clock. A few early customers going into the Last Laugh. The wind had come up, ripping at the lapels of her trench coat.
David took her to meet his friend Henry, who had a room in a student house in Napier Street. Cathy felt nervous about meeting him. ‘Henry is the most intelligent person I know,’ David had told her. For a couple of years now he had been showing Henry his short stories. David said the two of them talked for hours about the books they were going to write.
Henry showed them into his gloomy hallway, packed with boxes and books and bicycles, like a junk shop. He was a tall, handsome young man with tousled hair, dressed in flannel trousers and a wrinkled shirt. His calm gaze reminded her of a head of Apollo she had once seen in Rome: the embodiment of idealism and light.
Henry’s room was even more disorderly than their own place. From what David had told her, Henry was so absorbed in his work that he could type all night. He seemed not to notice the peeling paint on the walls.
Cathy liked Henry immediately. He treated her with consideration, even chivalry. He seemed not to be aware of the curve of her belly, or perhaps he was too tactful to comment.
The affection between the two young men was touching. They argued—was that all university people did, just sit around arguing?—but their conversations lacked the spite of the household in George Street. For once, David did not need to be right all the time. She liked the natural way the two of them talked, David perched on the edge of his chair, his head tilted, gesticulating in that nervous way of his, or sitting back, passionately listening to his friend. They disagreed on everything, but she could see that Henry’s ideas inspired David.
They were talking about Henry’s thesis on Dante. Once again, Cathy felt her lack of education like a weight. ‘So what if you haven’t read Dante.’ Henry smiled at her. ‘There is still plenty to talk about. Books are important but the things they point to are more important, you know.’
Cathy felt, that first afternoon, that in Henry she had found an ally.
About five in the evening, the late winter sun briefly blazed and the golden light poured into the room. With the cigarette smoke hanging around their heads, the light seemed to give each of them a saturation of colour—David the deep ruby red of a glass of wine, Henry a pure burning cerulean blue. In that instant, she could see the two of them so clearly. The sunshine seemed to emanate from within them and she felt the mystery of their connection. The sensation was over in a second, but she was convinced that what she had witnessed was something of the spirit. It was as though the two young men had been sitting there for centuries.
Cathy felt her heart swelling with love—for her unborn baby, for David, for something she could not even give a name to. She felt a twinge of envy, too. If only she could have a friend like Henry, then perhaps she would find her way in life, and even find that career in photography which had so far elu
ded her.
She shivered: a breeze of intuition caressed her skin. She realised, even as she was opening her mouth to speak, that she was about to tell Henry the secret they had not dared to share with anyone—the house on the rocky hill above the wine-dark sea.
She knew why they had not told anyone at the George Street house. David would have felt ashamed. They would have been accused of petit-bourgeois individualism, and instructed to go away and practise self-criticism.
With her decision to reveal, Cathy felt suddenly embarrassed by their plans, but Henry understood everything in a moment. ‘Good,’ he nodded. He turned to David. ‘We all want to write novels, but you, you bastard, you will really do it!’
Cathy knew just then that Henry would always be the true north by which she and David would navigate life together, for Henry had that quality she had found lacking in David’s other friends—integrity.
After that evening, Cathy and David went to see Henry regularly. They strolled down Brunswick Street in the evenings, drawn by some need. It was as if they were thirsty and Henry was water.
When they got to the Perseverance Hotel and turned the corner into Moor Street, Cathy suffered a moment of panic, as if they might have been heading for the battleground of George Street instead of the sanctuary of Henry’s room.
Cathy saw that there were two Davids. There was the hothead of George Street, burning for the revolution, and another, more thoughtful David, drawn to Henry’s world of books and ideas—the David she hoped might indeed become a writer.
When David showed her his stories, she encouraged him. But his heroes were martyrs, obsessed with social justice: a mirror for David. The mirror failed to reveal anything of his interior world, his secret life. His stories lacked psychological insight. But how would Cathy ever find the right words to tell him all this?
The aura of solitude which seemed painful in David was in Henry something serene. Henry spoke little of his own work—he wrote poetry, as well as completing his thesis—but he said succinct and sensible things about the stories David showed him, not puffing him up with praise, but not tearing him down, either. Cathy admired how Henry gently guided David’s attention to the passages where his prose ran purple, then beyond them, to possibility. David had told her that Henry was the most intelligent person he knew, but to Cathy he was the purest.
The silvery prescience of Henry’s mind, the way he was able to see the good in her and David being together, gave her soul relief. She let her guard down with Henry and came to trust him.
Girls came to Henry with their poems in progress. He wasn’t fierce or intimidating like David. The only time she saw a different Henry was when Daphne was there, a lovely pale girl with dark bewitching eyes. Love took away Henry’s tranquil power of thought. His love was unrequited: it was this, Cathy realised, that made her and Henry allies.
SHE WAS DRIVING David’s 1964 Volkswagen, Bahama blue, fickle six-volt battery, to Arcadia, the familiar earth and skies of her childhood. Here, once upon a time, simple delight in the world had been possible. Now Cathy was coming back for the weekend.
The blond paddocks spread out on either side. Ahead, she saw the wheat silos at the railway siding; here she slowed and turned off onto the dirt road to the right. In her mind, she automatically said the names of the owners of the properties she passed—the Bunyans, the Glicks, the Griersons. When she came to the last main crossroad before the farm, it was the beginning of her family’s land.
From a break in the gum trees along the side of the road, she saw the hill that rose in the distance, the only hill for miles in the plain; from her bedroom window as a girl she had watched the sun rise behind it.
Her father had recently ploughed these paddocks but the tractor was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was making repairs in the machinery shed. It was a sunny Friday afternoon; perhaps he was already in town, in the bar at the golf club.
The redbrick farmhouse came into view, same as ever, surrounded by fifteen hundred acres of wheat. The sheep had been taken to graze in the paddocks at the back of the property where the land sloped down to the Yerri-yerri, broad and still and brown, with the bleached trunks of dead gum trees poking up through the water, their smooth branches jagged at the ends, like arms without hands.
She pulled into the dirt drive, felt the slipping and bucking of the car’s wheels in the fissures and runnels after rain. On either side of the drive were rows of sugar gums, mature now. Cathy remembered when the drive had been bare, and her father had planted the rows of saplings. They had been smaller than she was.
The weekend passed peacefully. After lunch on Saturday, Dad headed back to the paddocks in the ute. Cathy decided to visit Mrs McAlpine, who lived on the neighbouring farm, and who had often cared for Cathy in those difficult years after her mother had died.
She drove up to the house and called out at the back door. A voice within replied: ‘Cathy, it’s you!’
Mrs McAlpine was in the middle of washing up. Cathy went over and put her arm around her. She felt the older woman stiffen. Cathy picked up a tea towel. Mrs McAlpine had her head down, concentrating too intently. There was an eerie quiet in the kitchen, just the sound of the plates bumping in the sink under the soapy water.
At last, Mrs McAlpine asked her: ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to get married?’
‘I don’t know. I mean—we haven’t decided yet.’
‘You must know that your father is worried,’ Mrs McAlpine said, in a sympathetic tone.
There was no one around when Cathy returned to the farm. She sat in the August sunshine in the protected angle of the verandah. A rooster crowed. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was the quiet hour of the afternoon, the dreamy hour, suspended from time. Much of her childhood had been spent at just this spot. Waiting for dinner. Waiting for tea. Making up stories about how her life would be. The man she would marry. A house of their own, a bit of land. As a little girl, when her mother had still been alive, Cathy used to look at the clothes line, the clean washing dancing in the sunshine, and saw herself as a grown-up, hanging out the washing, the days of wind and sun, a husband to look after her.
A girl can only be happy with a husband. That’s what everyone believed, didn’t they? And those uni girls who said they didn’t—weren’t they just kidding themselves? You could end up a single mother because the man was not tied down. How to tie him down? Would a ring do that?
She used to play the part here in the garden. On the lawn next to the roses, a boy doll and a girl doll. A wedding dress from scraps of sheet. She would spread the rug on the lawn and perform her miniature wedding ceremonies with her dolls and tea set. ‘Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?’
The world had changed, but now Cathy was back, staring at these worn verandah boards. She folded her hands over her belly. David said he was looking forward to being a father. He meant it. He was idealistic. He believed everything he said. But they were twenty-two years old. She knew he had not really understood all the responsibilities becoming a father entailed. And she had no idea, really, about what being a mother meant.
She went for a long walk. Through the gate, past the chook shed, along the dirt track towards the sandhills. Clear burning blue sky, red earth. The ghost gums showed the muscles in their round white arms.
If she could be a child again. Standing there, completely alone, unobserved, not being judged, f
or once. She looked at the lone hill, purple and brown in the distance. She had climbed its slopes often as a child, setting off with her friend Marion on their bikes with a cut lunch. The lives of the people in Arcadia had grown stagnant, perhaps, but at least there was stability here, while in Fitzroy there was only change and prickly, irritable people. In the city, people spoke their thoughts even before they had time to form them. When they laughed, the inside of their mouths was black. Instead of merriment there was sarcasm; instead of conversation, the exchange of political positions. The only time Cathy really liked to be in Fitzroy was walking by herself in the half-hour after rain. Now she understood, here, how miserable she was there.
She came to an eroded gully near the Yerri-yerri, full of rabbit burrows, where she always came as a child when there was something wrong. She had spent long days alone here when the evangelicals were causing trouble at the little church.
It was five o’clock on a Saturday night. David would be lifting his first pot of beer to his lips. Vanessa and Murray would be with him at the pub. David, caught up in the demands of that friendship, without a thought for Cathy. It wasn’t like her to think the worst of people. They were just idealists, too, who wanted to change the world. Nevertheless, she resented the influence they had on David.
On Sunday morning, Cathy drove with her dad to the old Pierce place, a few miles away on the far side of the Yerri-yerri. The farmhouse was now owned by a couple of schoolteachers, away in Europe for a term. Her dad had promised to keep an eye on the place. The house was for sale; the teachers were moving next year.
Inside, everything was shabby, she thought, but also stylish in a bohemian sort of way. There were leather armchairs, a dining table for twelve, books in every room, paintings on the walls. There was even a ballroom. Her dad told her that a house like this could be bought cheaply: the surrounding land no longer belonged to the dwelling, and it was the land that was valuable. ‘School teaching’s not a bad job,’ her dad added.
