The Bride of Almond Tree

by Robert Hillman

  Exhausted by the three-stage flight to Moscow, and overwrought as she was with the mission entrusted to her, she failed to notice at first that the delegation from Moscow University—six students—were reading entirely from scripts that they held out almost at arm’s length as if uniformly long-sighted. It was all in English: ‘The peoples of the USSR have outrageous good pleasure in making welcome brilliant socialist student of the famous University of Melbourne Elizabeth Hardy.’ Beth replied in Russian: ‘My pleasure!’ One of the students came rushing up with her big black suitcase, retrieved from somewhere or other. ‘Let me carry, please, Miss Elizabeth Hardy!’

  The six excessively cheerful students were the only smiling people she came across on the freezing journey between the airport and the hotel. Muscovites stared at her pleated tartan skirt, her gorgeous blue jersey jacket and black overcoat of the highest-grade merino (from Di Porter) with what seemed a blend of curiosity succeeded by contempt, as if she had come from wherever to offer a special insult to the frumpy citizens of the Soviet Union. Beth had items from her own frumpy wardrobe in her suitcase and she resolved to wriggle into them as soon as she could. She was taken to a monster hotel by the rollicking students, who went so far in their comradeship as to accompany her to her bedroom, about the size of an aircraft hangar. On the centre of the bed, big enough to accommodate six people, sat a huge Persian cat in a state of supreme contentment.

  ‘For you, dear Miss Elizabeth Hardy. For to keep you happy. In the Australia, all the people have a cat for being a pet, yes? This is your pet, for happiness.’ The Russian student in charge of cat introductions, Vasily, explained further that the cat belonged to the hotel, and that the cat’s name was Duma. ‘Someone will come to feed Duma two times a day, and take her to the toilet. You like to have this gesture of friendship, Miss Elizabeth Hardy?’

  Beth liked cats well enough, but offering up Duma as a companion seemed very odd. She said: ‘Oh yes, a lovely pussycat. Thank you!’

  ‘Now we leave you to rest. Tomorrow in the afternoon you give your speech.’

  ‘Should I keep it short? Do you think? My Russian is limited, as you see.’

  ‘No, no, excellent Russian. One hour and a half an hour. In the People’s Auditorium downstairs. One thousand students will attend.’

  And so she was left with Duma, who implored attention and licked her hand with a tongue like an industrial rasp.

  She noticed that the green block of soap in the bathroom would not lather, and the lights flickered constantly. The rug on the bedroom floor was actually two rugs, the one on top hiding a threadbare patch beneath. The portrait of Comrade Stalin on the wall was not defaced with comic captions like the portrait in Di Porter’s house. It was as radiant as if printed only an hour before.

  ∼

  Ninety minutes? What on earth would she say? The shearers’ strike, or even before that, socialism on the goldfields, the Eureka Stockade, Federation, the bicameral parliament, which she could represent as the hoodwinking of the people. She stretched out on a mattress that felt like it was stuffed with stones, but managed to sleep for two hours. When she woke, the image in her mind was that of Wes, his candid expression as he listened to her explaining the Marxist program. It made her smile, poor ning-nong that he was.

  The window of her hotel room overlooked a broad street that ran off Red Square. Snow was falling lightly in a wispy breeze. She wondered what she was doing here. From Almond Tree? Her, Elizabeth Hardy. She sat at a desk set up in the corner and went to work on her speech. The Russians would know what a shearer was, would they? She thought of translating the lyrics of ‘Click Go the Shears’, for the sake of the humour Di urged on her, but in Russian it came out: ‘Noisy Are the Workman’s Tools’. The point she wished to make was that the right to organise as unions among the shearers was the beginning of socialism in Australia, the birth of the Labor Party, which would eventually evolve into communism.

  As she wrote, she glanced through the window every so often at the falling snow. Plenty of foot traffic. Most seemed grim, shoulders forward. She wrote: ‘The people who survived the Great Patriotic War are full of the pride of victory.’ The cat on the bed purred deeply.

  The speech she made the next day appeared incomprehensible to the audience of students, most of whom seemed to have come from an urban background and had no idea about shearing. Whenever the students cheered, it was in response to Beth’s references to ‘the Great Patriotic War’ and the unparalleled suffering of the Russian people. Also to the warmongering of the Americans. She quoted Wes’s sister on the devastation of Hiroshima, but made no mention of prospective Soviet nuclear weapons.

  Her happiest memory of the visit was the day she stood in the centre of Red Square with the sponsoring students circled around her. The snow had gone for the day and the sky was bright blue. Here she was at the pulsing heart of the Soviet Union, where crowds gathered each year to celebrate universal justice. She felt exhilarated and turned in a circle with her arms held high. The students clapped and sang. Some soldiers passing joined in. They were singing the ‘Internationale’ and seemed delighted that Beth knew the Russian. ‘A patriot!’ they shouted as they clapped. ‘In Australia, one day!’ she called out. The Russians applauded. ‘In Australia!’ they replied.

  Chapter 7

  WHILE WES was away from the Quaker meetings in the army, the singing was ordinary. His was the voice, a rich tenor tutored by Penny Farebrother, that could carry any note without a hint of a waver, although those in the congregation who knew about singing might have noticed that Wes kept to sentimental ballads and folk songs that did not test his range.

  The singing of hymns was largely ignored by Quakers—too many insincere lyrics voiced by Friends that meant nothing, or were at least dubious in their expression. But the George Fox Farebrother tradition was another matter. George in his day enjoyed singing, and the tradition had been preserved. ‘The Ash Grove’ and ‘The Water Is Wide’ were the favourites. When Wes sang, there was no joining in, except in occasional phrases (‘build me a boat that can carry two…’), such was the quality of his voice. George’s surviving brother, Martin, who resembled his older brother right down to his pendulous earlobes, kept this idiosyncratic musical tradition. The singing enhanced Wes’s allure to the Quaker maidens, seven between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Plenty of modest overtures were made, but with his heart set on avoiding courtship, he barely noticed even the prettiest of the Quaker girls. If Wes loved God, as he ought, he should think of marriage. But he didn’t.

  Wes loved God. God was a veil that covered the earth. But he had been raised to love God and it didn’t require effort and made no difficult demands; just refraining from murder and exercising kindness. There was no broad program of redemption for the human race in his religion. But Beth, who had no god, had adopted a blueprint for the salvation of humanity that exceeded in its ambition anything he’d been able to imagine. It made the Quaker fraternity seem isolated and self-satisfied. On Martin Farebrother’s radio—the only radio in the Quaker community—Wes heard the increasingly dire news of confrontation between the Soviet Union and the West. He also read, avidly, his sister Patty’s letters from Hiroshima. You didn’t need to be a genius to work out that it wouldn’t be long before the Soviet Union developed the nuclear weapons that had made a wasteland of Hiroshima and the veil of God was ripped to shreds.

  ∼

  Beth asked him to visit her at University College just the once in her first year, before her trip to Moscow. They went for lunch at a small place in Parkville and were joined by an older man, a lecturer, also a communist. The conversation was almost entirely between Beth and her friend. He may have been fifty, with long, greying hair, handsome in an aging way. And everything he said to Beth was tinged with humour, and flattery. ‘The comrades will adore you, Bethy. They’ll have you in bed within days.’ Beth said, ‘Tush, tush!’ Not with a smile. Wes blushed from his neck to his hairline. When Beth finally brought Wes into the conver
sation, it was to tell her friend—Louis—that Wes was building stables up at the Almond Tree racecourse. ‘He’s a very good carpenter.’

  ‘Ah, a working man,’ said Louis, and he reached across the table to pat Wes’s shoulder. ‘Me, I haven’t done a day’s work with my hands in my life, I’m ashamed to say.’

  ‘Wes has begun to take an interest in politics. He asked me to tell him all about Marx. Didn’t you, Wes?’

  Wes didn’t reply. He was disturbed by the way in which Louis kept touching Beth’s hand. It wasn’t jealousy, more a piercing disappointment. Beth certainly did not appear to be enjoying it. She didn’t wince, but she stiffened.

  ‘My great-grandfather, though, was a blacksmith. Up in Tocumwal. He married a woman who was ‘above his station’, as they used to say, and she insisted on her three sons getting out of trade and into college. Like D. H. Lawrence’s mum. Sending old David Herbert to Nottingham Uni.’

  ‘Lawrence was a famous writer, Wes,’ Beth provided. ‘His father was a collier.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  He wished Beth would tell Louis to stop. But it wasn’t his business.

  It was Beth who spoke up. ‘Louis, stop that.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Stroking me.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that I was doing so.’

  ‘You’re aware now, so please stop.’

  Beth took her arm off the table.

  ‘Am I annoying you?’

  ‘A little. Yes.’

  ‘Then I apologise.’

  And he did stop. Instead he glared at Wes, in a sudden change of mood. Then stood and left without a word. Beth called after him but was ignored.

  ‘He’s like a little child,’ she said. ‘I didn’t ask him to come. He invited himself.’

  But he returned, pushed his way to the table and leaned over it. ‘Be aware, mister carpenter. She’s sapphic. I don’t know why I was wasting my time.’ He turned and left again.

  ‘What does he mean?’

  Beth didn’t answer immediately, but sat with her elbows resting on the table, her arms folded.

  ‘He means I’m a lesbian. You know what a lesbian is?’

  ‘Beth, I’m not a fool. Yes.’

  ‘I’m not, but it gives him pleasure to think I must be if I don’t find him attractive, which I don’t. I think you were a bit embarrassed?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Sorry, Wes dear. If I wanted anyone to stroke me, it would be you, of course. But I don’t. I can’t think of boyfriends at the moment. You know the girl you should be asking out is my sister, Franny. She’s crazy about you, Franny.’

  Wes smiled. ‘And Franny is what? Sixteen?’

  ‘Twenty-one. We get married in my family at twenty-one. All she’ll want to do is have sex and babies. But for me, Wes, there’s justice. Do you see? I’m going to Moscow for a week soon.’

  The waitress served the lunch, lamb cutlets and a salad. Wes picked at his. Beth wolfed hers down then started on Wes’s left-behinds. He had ordered a glass of beer, for which he’d developed a taste in the army, strictly against the dictates of his faith. While she ate, Beth babbled about the obvious way in which we—we humans—had made the world, not any God, and that we’d also made injustice, which now had to be unmade.

  Wes didn’t interrupt. But when he’d paid the bill and was preparing to leave for the station, he said this one thing, heartfelt. ‘I don’t believe that God made the world, Beth. But I believe that without God, there can’t be a world.’

  He excused himself and wandered the city all the way to Spencer Street for his train back to Almond Tree. Every step on the way to the station jolted pain into his chest, as if his heart were treading on pebbles.

  Two days later, Wes wrote to Patty in Hiroshima and received this reply in a fortnight:

  I don’t know what Beth means about her red comrades getting a bomb of their own to ‘even things up’. If Beth could see what a single bomb can do, she wouldn’t want to ‘even things up’. She’d want to get rid of the bombs altogether. I just don’t have any belief in the stupid propaganda of her mob, nor in anything the yanks have to say. Wes, this is the world. We’re not going to get another one. I’m nursing patients at both the American hospital and the Japanese hospital who are sick as poisoned pups with radiation illness. Bloody awful. Oh, and about Beth’s friend, Louis. I happen to know who you’re talking about. I met him once at a teachers’ college do; he came along with his girlfriend of the day, a kid of about fifteen. Not really, but young. I didn’t like him at all. One of those chaps who revel in being thought witty. Even then, he was a big show-off in the movement, so I gathered. Mind you, the chap who’s paying attention to me is also a show-off, but in an attractive way. He’s happy to be contradicted. But he thinks he’s beautiful, which he ain’t. I’d like to show him a picture of you, little brother, then he’d know what a handsome man looks like. Oh but Wes, it’s so awful, Hiroshima. They have a mayor now and he wants to rebuild. The Americans say, Sure, go ahead. But what about the radiation? It’s bad enough for me, what would it be like for people trying to live on the desolate waste?

  His mother, Daisy, had made it her task as he was growing up to explain all the world’s religions to him, those of which she had knowledge. She thought it important for him to understand that the God of the Friends was not the only god. She spoke once of a belief popular among the Roman legionnaires that the world was divided forever between good and evil, which were eternally in conflict. The legionnaires naturally thought of themselves as being on the side of good, murder and rape and torture notwithstanding.

  Dropping an atomic bomb on the people of Hiroshima and another on the people of Nagasaki was an act of evil, but no more so than dropping bombs of any sort on human beings wherever they were. And yet Wes felt that his sister in Hiroshima was aware of something that transcended other examples of evil. She said in one letter, ‘Something has changed, Wessy. My friend the major who was a physicist in civvy life, and will be going back to it soon, says that within a few years the Americans will have bombs that can kill a million people in a second.’

  Beth sent him a postcard from Moscow, Lenin’s tomb, guarded by two towering soldiers, impeccably outfitted with boots so highly polished that they looked as if an entire tin of Kiwi must have gone into each one. It amused him to imagine two less conscientious soldiers turning up for duty one day, caps askew, scruffy boots, unshaven, not even sure who Lenin was. Beth’s message was corny. ‘One of the world’s great men. It made me weep to stand there in the queue. Best wishes.’

  Beth must have said something to Franny, because she left the rabbits to come around and watch Wes while he built the stables. She was by far the prettiest of the Hardy girls. On her visits she wore lipstick, a deep pink without being red.

  ‘Has Beth been talking to you?’ Wes asked, pausing from his carpentry and looking Franny in the eye.

  ‘Yep.’ Franny was famous for her candour.

  ‘And what did she say, if you don’t mind me asking.’

  ‘No, I don’t mind. She says I should show myself off to you.’

  ‘So that’s what you’re doing? Showing yourself off to me?’

  ‘The lippy. Anything wrong with that? Beth’s never going to marry you. She wants to be the Stalin of Australia. I’ll marry you.’

  ‘It’s kind of you, Franny. And I’m not hoping to marry Beth.’

  Franny could see he was reaching for a hammer, and since she was nearer, she handed it to him. ‘See? I’m useful. Marry me.’

  ‘Franny, this is nuts.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Okay, I’ll marry you in a week.’

  Franny’s face became as bright all over as her lippy. ‘Really?’

  ‘No, Franny, not really.’

  ‘See, you’re stupid! I’d make your life heaven, you idiot.’

  She came every day, sometimes neglecting the rabbits. Always with lippy. She acted like an apprentice, asking the names of
the tools and standing uncomfortably close to study Wes at work. She chattered ceaselessly about her rabbits and the arguments between Gus and her husband Pete, and Maud and her husband Algy. ‘They don’t know how to be married. They had babies just so they’d have more to argue about. The kids are happier with me than them. You know why? Because I love babies. Gus calls them halfwits, her two. Maud just ignores Jonathan, the poor thing. What you need, Wes, is someone who understands babies. You know why I understand them? Because I’m a woman. Gus and Maud, I don’t know what they are. And Beth is goodness knows any sort of thing.’

  He agreed, at least, to go riding with her down to Port Flats, a wide expanse of pasture that had been left to go to ruin once Nick Port had shot himself through the head with a shotgun when he tripped chasing a fox. No heirs. The shire said they had the right to claim the flats, but in the end couldn’t be bothered. The rack and ruin of the pasture was perfect for riding, logs just right for jumping and a huge gallop from the bracken at the hilltop down to Port Creek. Franny was an excellent horsewoman, the best rider in the district, and had educated her gelding, Brown Snake, to do everything short of sitting for matriculation at the high school. Wes was not even the second-best local rider. That would be Byron Peters from over near Chinese Town, seventy years old, who now and then rode with Franny, and could outrace her if he chose, which he didn’t.

  Franny took the jumps at full gallop, whooping, and easily beat Wes to the creek, face flushed and her maple hair thrown everywhere. She worked Brown Snake to the flank of Wes’s mare, Maggie, and put her arms around him, around Wes.

  ‘See,’ she said. ‘I can do everything with you. A saddle cuddle. Isn’t it nice? How long are you going to go without making love? Your whole life?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘That’s not human! Don’t you see that you’re not being human?’

  Brown Snake nuzzled Wes’s mare. Wes kissed Franny on the cheek. ‘Better get back.’