‘Yes,’ I replied and packed it away.
†
To his credit, Mr Roper did send me formal invitations to a few of his lunches after I moved. Handwritten notes posted, not hand-delivered and signed ‘John’ with a flourishing ‘J’. They spoke of ‘pleasure’ and ‘company’ and ‘good friends’ and on the first few occasions I replied with carefully worded letters of thanks, my own ‘regret’ and ‘disappointment’ and ‘prior engagements’. Refusals which could not really offend except in their speciousness. Gradually, the months between the invitations extended, and I took longer and longer to write back. I was struck by the farce of writing to say no to a lunch long since baked and eaten and, finally, I left the next card from Mr John Roper unopened.
10
On certain afternoons, living in the flat, I would make my way down to the beach to watch the seagulls and the young people who had begun to loiter in groups on the promenade. Boys and girls who, after school, found the chance to escape their parents’ chores and whisper to one another across the great divide between the sexes. This had become more common than it ever was in my day though I could see the familiar face of girls in my office awaiting the strap, now leaning against the pillars of the pavilion, cigarette in hand, hair pulled back in ponytails or, even more astounding, shorn short. They did not see me, as invisible as the ‘old’ are to youth, so I could watch them closely enough as I walked by. I could see the doubt in their stance: these femme fatales who still wanted to go steady and get flowers from their rebel boys, who weren’t quite sure what they were rebelling against. I would catch the smell of tobacco in the air and hear astounding assertions, like ‘My mother says I am going to hell’.
I would try to hold myself tall, my skirt now loose around my waist and my blouse blown by the sea wind. I followed a regular track: down to the end of the promenade and onward to the post office to pick up my payment.
I had not written to Fred of my move. Given that I had always travelled here to collect his money orders, there seemed no need to alert him to the change. We had long since ceased personal correspondence. The crumpled remains of his letters were once again locked in the desk, now repaired. I had paid a locksmith to come to the house, rather than engage Mr Roper, and the evidence of Mary’s break-in had been erased.
The lady behind the post-office counter knew me from my years of collecting the envelopes. She was married to one of the postmen—I had seen him leaning across the desk for a quick farewell kiss before rounds—and she wore floral dresses that had become brighter as the war receded. She would see me in the queue and smile, happy with a familiar face and task. I had never asked her name, preferring for us both to remain within the one exchange: I would say ‘good morning’, she would say ‘good morning, Mrs Smith’, then move to the pile of registered post and hand me the envelope to receive my ‘thank you’. The thin paper of the envelope spoke of rice paddies, peasants in triangle hats and a mountain called Fuji—romantic landscapes conjured by prints I had seen in Women’s Weekly. Others had moved past hatred and derision and entered fascination: the exotic East rising from the ashes.
‘Good morning,’ I said one afternoon, in my customary flat tone.
‘Good morning, Mrs Smith,’ the post office woman replied. Her voice had a slight trepidation in it I attributed to nervousness at the number of people waiting. She bent down and seemed, as usual, to be locating the shelf that held my post. When she straightened, empty-handed, I knew she had known there was nothing for me.
‘Um, nothing for you, Mrs Smith.’ Though she had never known the contents of the envelope, she had felt my reliance on its arrival.
‘Can you check again?’
She obliged, though her repeated movement had no tinge of hope in it. There were no Japanese stamps on the envelopes, their temples and oriental plum trees standing out against our kangaroos.
‘I am sorry, Mrs Smith.’ She spoke as if someone had died. The violets on her skirt seemed suddenly darker, like patches of mildew.
†
I faced up to the post office one more time, a month later, hoping for a double delivery, the delay a consequence of some tidal change or shifting winds. The postal lady visibly blanched when she saw me enter and as I joined the line of waiting customers she loudly declared to her co-worker that it was time for her break and disappeared out the back through the swinging wooden door with a portal window like a ship. The young girl who served me asked for my full name and wanted to look at my identity card, giving me hope.
‘Oh.’ She stopped, squinting at the tiny writing. ‘I don’t really need this unless there is something for you.’
She giggled and flicked her way through the pile under ‘S’.
‘No, nothing,’ she said flippantly.
I could not see through the frosted circular window of the post office’s back room, yet I swear I could feel the other lady watching, waiting for me to leave.
†
Strangely, I did not believe Fred was dead. Perhaps because I had been the one controlling his death before, I couldn’t fathom him stepping off this earthly realm without my permission. Or maybe because his particular way of recovering from the war had seemed to promise such long life—finding, as he had, his own Shangri-La—I could not imagine it being cut short.
I wrote to the most recent address I had, in Kyoto. The letter came back to me, unopened, with black characters scrawled across the front of it, strange, spider-like strokes which I could only assume were the equivalent of ‘return to sender’. There was no way of knowing if they had been written by her or by some even more foreign hand, the new occupants of Fred’s vacated house?
My situation was not immediately desperate. I had money in the bank to keep me in groceries for another year and I owned my flat, although much of the money left over from the sale of the house had been eaten up by the cost of moving. There was no fear in me I would end up on the streets, as such. The tremor came from losing a regular top-up to my savings. Without anything new being added, the pile would begin to diminish quickly and there was no escaping the fact I had to re-enter the world of work.
When I had time to think, I found myself angry. How dare Fred let me down again? What sort of man was he to leave me to the pity of postal workers? To make me go out there again? What could have possibly happened on his cherry-blossom island to justify this new level of selfishness?
†
Dear Gracie,
Do you remember the fruit bats in the gardens at twilight? Do you remember we used to pass under them when you would come to meet me after my working day at the bank? Their squeaks like budgies, their wings expanding like prehistoric yawns, hanging from the trees like trumpet flowers (too many similes you would tell me, I know). Packets of fur and black skin, ugly things up close, we used to laugh at them together. The fruit bats come to me now. It is as if I hear their chattering everywhere.
I have tried to understand but I cannot really help her. I look into her face and I do not see what I once did. The Nips stick their noses into our pram and say ‘how the daughter holds the sins of the fathers’. I tell her not to care but she is ashamed.
I have the blackest dreams. The war days have returned and it is all I can do to struggle towards the light. If I let myself go I do not know if I will ever come out of it. You stand alone under a shooting star. You told me you had wished for me to come home and when you told me—you are not supposed to tell!—I knew it could not come true. You would have known, my superstitious Gracie. I imagine you looking at me with the cold clear eyes of the righteous. Is there a home left for me?
The fruit bats are hanging in the trees and I try to claw into the light. The fragrance in the dark stinks of rotten fruit. In the light, it is jasmine. Where it is clear of all scent I do not know,
Fred
[Letter returned: no longer at this address]
11
Once again, I found myself sitting in the morning sun looking through the newspaper, drinking tea.
The breeze through the open balcony door was a clear easterly, tasting of salt. I scanned column after column of ‘Positions Vacant—Women and Girls’ and knew the world had awoken to prosperity. Fred had forced me to do the same.
The position I obtained was in the administration wing of a hospital. It was far less responsibility than I could have had—I could not face the prospect of teaching again—but I was happy to succumb to the excuse of leaving higher employment for the returned men.
‘The younger girls, well, they leave us when the babies start arriving.’ The chief administrator, Mr Anderson, a man whose thick moustache was matched by his bushy eyebrows, frowned at me during the interview. ‘I have lost many a good female clerk to the natural way of things.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said and adjusted myself in the leather chair to avoid the beam of mote-filled light falling across my hands.
‘But we will not have that problem with you.’ He smiled, as if he had paid me a compliment. I would learn later that Mr Anderson’s wife had six children, her skin turned to crushed paper by the weight of them.
My office was a small room next to Mr Anderson’s. It had one window looking down to a courtyard with a flame tree at its centre, where the doctors and nurses gathered for irregularly timed lunch hours, to smoke and flirt. I watched as the women chanced their arm and the doctors, aware of both their appeal and their scarcity, left them to dangle under the fiery flowers for another day. I did not join this outside theatre. I ate lunch at my tiny desk and days could pass without me hearing a single voice except Mr Anderson’s on the telephone next door, either loudly conveying instructions to his employees or murmuring words of reassurance to his over-run wife.
I read the stories of the patients whose files I retrieved and replaced inside the steel filing cabinets lining the walls of my room. I saw files grow and grow, the sick whose papers were extracted to add another page to the saga, detailing diseases and maladies: polio, rubella and eczema, tinea, cancers and the occasional mention of ‘war neurosis’. I was pleased to feel little sympathy for most of the cases—I was still hard enough to cope with the horror, a necessary coating to keep me going—and I only felt the slightest shiver when the list came in, at the end of every fortnight, of those files to be moved into the ‘closed’ cabinets in the basement of the building. Thankfully, it was not my job to carry the files of the recently deceased down below. I placed them in a tray on my desk every second Friday and by Monday they would be gone.
If I were honest, I would admit I read patient files with an eye to the past. Father Benjamin was dead and Mr Roper out of my life, and I felt Mary was lost to me. I could only foolishly search for her in the patient files, knowing the city held many hospitals and the chance of her crossing my path was small. Still, they were known to be often ill, their weakness for alcohol increasing the possibility of a visit to these wards. My heart would skip a beat when the words ‘octoroon’ or ‘half-caste’ popped up and I would look away, just glimpsing the surname out of the corner of my eye so as not to be confronted head-on with the name. Mary Rose Fraser. When it did not appear my trepidation dissolved, only to rise again with the opening of the next file. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.
†
The tree in the courtyard dropped its flowers and one of the nurses announced her engagement to a senior doctor, the one I had deemed the ugliest. A party was organised, which I did not attend, and the ‘closed’ list appeared to be longer that Friday, as if diligence had slackened in the face of a new future embarked upon.
That night I felt a presence in my bed, almost the same I had felt as a child when the Virgin visited, except the essence of the arrival was, unmistakably, male. It was not as simple as the spirit of the Mother of Christ. This wandering, unnamed spirit scared me just as much as the spectral Mary. I could feel his need, the burning beside me. I lay, repeating to myself I no longer believed in such things—surprised to find this was the truth I harboured—but I could not shake the sense a soul had entered the room. I did not turn my head toward him and, eventually, I fell back to sleep.
I would not have convinced anyone, had I had anyone to tell of my nighttime experience, yet I remained certain there had been a visitation. I had only to discover who he was.
†
The next Sunday afternoon I caught the tram into the city, wanting the bustle of strangers, their expressions of indifference. I alighted at St James with the help of the conductor—‘Mind your step, Missus,’—and, with some intention, I stood near the Archibald fountain, the spray pushed by the winter wind towards my face, fine droplets sticking to the back of my gloves. I tried not to look as if I was searching, casually strolling around the edge of the pool, reading the bronze plaque. I wore a black dress, one of the few dresses I had, the smallness of my waist now allowing me a full skirt, one I thought reasonably fashionable, although my straw, wide-brimmed hat was from ten years ago. I should have been wearing a tight fitting cloche but they seemed, to me, to provide no modesty at all. There were many women now who didn’t bother with such things. Two such twenty-year-old creatures sat on one of the park benches in pencil-line skirts, chatting loudly, swinging their shiny, curled hair around as if they were at a dance.
To resist the pull of the War Memorial I headed toward the harbour. In the Domain, the huge expanse of open lawn holding out against the city’s encroachment, cricketers in white called to one another, hastening to finish their game before the sun drained from the grass bowl. There was a crowd at Speaker’s Corner. Bordered by Moreton Bay figs and their leaf litter, groups of firebrands declaimed against whomever or whatsoever they thought hadn’t brought them joy. Prosperity had not spread everywhere, pockets of malcontents remained. They stood on stepladders, perched high enough to proclaim their answers to the world’s problems. I had caught some of their ranting on previous Sundays, as I skirted past them, following the path down to the Point.
I intended to do the same this day but as I walked I found my gaze drawn to a small crowd focused on a man standing precariously on a fruit box. He was silhouetted against the pale-blue afternoon sky, a glimpse of the Harbour Bridge just above his head.
‘We were sent to the other side of the world,’ the man spoke. ‘Sent to kill, to maim, to starve, to die, all to maintain the Empire and what did the Empire give us in return? She betrayed us. How many died because the Brits were more concerned with themselves than with us? Abandoned us like we were nothing more than rats. And, so the Yanks came in with their super-bombs and did … and did … and did … what they did. And then Korea.’
I knew the voice. Perhaps I had known from the first. He was, essentially, the same man, his moustache, his lean shape, his hair sleekly black. He raised his hands to encompass the crowd and—here was the difference—his fingers were quivering.
‘Should we really go into all these wars without question?’
I heard the murmur of ‘pacifist’, spoken with clear disapproval.
‘No, sir, I am not a pacifist. I simply ask the question: when does it end? When does … when does … when does the light return?’
I was still some distance back and could only just make out his shiny brown suit. It’d once been a fine suit but the pin stripes were faded, an outfit from St Vincent de Paul. His hat had also lost its firmness, joining his shoulders in a slow sloping towards the ground. I stood behind rows of similarly garbed men, mustiness rising off them. A few glanced in my direction, clearly surprised to see a woman.
‘Surely we have a duty to God, to our fellow man, to question the need for all this … this … blood … shed?’
I could not follow the train of his thought, though I could hear the weakness in his voice and the men around me could hear it too.
‘Catholic,’ I heard someone else murmur and the group began to move away towards another speaker calling out passionately about the rights of the workers.
I remained still while he climbed off the rickety box. He stood looking down at
it, as if it was to blame for his deserting audience. Fred. I thought of those I had wanted to return—my mother, my father, Auntie Iris, Mary—and could barely believe it was my never-dead husband who had, instead, come home. Had his spirit visited me the other night, as a calling card for his imminent arrival? I had enjoyed my mourning. At some point along the way, the loss had become embedded and I did not need, or want, to lose it. This ghastly figure beside the box was inconvenient enough to cause flight.
He had not yet noticed me; I could walk away, let the shadow remain a shadow.
‘Fred?’ I said.
He seemed to take a long moment before raising his head, the Domain suddenly quiet, only marked by the sound of my breathing.
‘Gracie.’ He said it simply and raised both his hands to remove his hat. The distance between us was the same. I had not moved from my position at the back of the vanished crowd. He looked to the ground and I foolishly followed his gaze to the grass, thinking I had missed something important.
‘Gracie,’ he repeated, his head coming up now to find the point over my shoulder.
‘Hello, Fred.’
‘I wondered … I thought you would find me, some way.’
‘I haven’t been looking for you,’ I answered. I needed him to know this, for there to be no misguided perception of weakness in me.
‘But you have found me.’ He smiled meekly, a mere joining of the lips, and took a step towards me. ‘Gracie …’
I wanted him to stop saying my name. With his frame hunched forward, his hat pathetic in his hands, he could have been a tramp about to ask for spare change.
‘Where are you living?’ I asked.
My coldness seemed to stop him.
‘Here and there.’
I could not imagine how his Oriental woman had agreed to living ‘here and there’. They were Here, after all, no longer There, where they belonged.
The Heaven I Swallowed Page 14
