by Thea Astley
Why do this? Was it the boredom of my Brisbane evenings? Brisbane was/is a very boring town on its interrogatory river miles from the sea with its grilling summers, its undramatic winters.
Largely, my inquiries were ignored, not literally perhaps, because nuns are very polite. But they passed over the nub of my letter with evasively courteous replies … we have read your letter with interest (read amusement) but feel the answer to your problem (I had presented myself as a thesis hunter) is out of our range. We suggest you apply to the Australian Music Examinations Board or the Trinity College of London who might be able to give you a list of the years that particular piece (I want to spell it “peece”) was on the syllabus. We believe Trinity College made use of it a number of times as did the AMEB. Perhaps their examiners could help you.
Then they asked God to bless me and remained mine sincerely.
Talk about passing the buck! And I thought they were dedicated, especially to the mania of detail.
I am discovering the limits of dedication, particularly that of others. Am I thinking here of my mother’s tensed interests which seem to make me peripheral? I am certainly discovering, this hot and boring summer, the non-limits of my own, which seem infinite or inexhaustible or perhaps unattainable.
I am dedicated. I have the capacity. Well, that’s how I see it.
There was one letter that delighted me:
I estimate, the trendy nun wrote in impeccable cursive, that over thirty years (I am now retired from active teaching, thank God) I taught that particular work to six hundred students. I cannot possibly recall their names but have based my figures on note-books and order-lists I still have with me. Every one of them played it technically well—I saw to that—and with emotional indifference to which I contributed no emphasis at all.
She didn’t ask God to bless me but was mine amusedly, Sister Mary Perpetua.
There was a postscript:
Your inquiry strikes me, may God forgive me, as idiotic. I hope I never have to hear “The Rustle of Spring” again. At my age that is a joyous possibility.
Hi, Sister Perpetua! Salud!
So I now have two thousand eight hundred and forty-five players, almost all nameless, when I total those schools kind enough to hazard a figure, plus another six hundred and forty-nine that I shall simply list as Perpetua 1, Perpetua 2, etc.
Is there any point in this?
Maybe not, but the exercise has served to whet my appetite for the desired exactness of research, of its contingent excitements, and it has made me, too, want to investigate the psyche of dear Fred Bathgate who, Bonnie and Marie swear, in the five or six years in which they maddened each other, never once made reference to “The Rustle of Spring” and whom, Bonnie insists, although he was long since dead, she once saw waiting near the Grey Street bypass at a particularly busy point where the traffic swings over the river to the new concert center. What was he doing there? Was he about to fling himself beneath the traffic because someone had forced him to listen to “The Rustle of Spring?” He must have been an outstanding man, Bonnie says mournfully, never to have uttered those four words.
He was certainly long-suffering.
“You come here to do your practice,” he reprimanded me during those four years of our own relationship as I sight-read my Czerny for the week—with cachet, I insist. I was a good sight reader and hoped to delude him. I used to practice other distracting measures by illustrating the title pages of my sheet music with mood sketches intended to capture the evocations of the notes. “They look,” he commented coldly once on a texta set of Tchaikovsky mountain peaks and coming up behind me as I played to crush correcting arms about my own, “like ill-fitting dentures.” Then he took over himself, his ginger-haired paws racing up and down the keyboard. “Like this!” he said, squeezing to emphasize. “And this. Or this” Relaxing his pinioning arms. “Now try again.”
Yes. He taught me as well. Mother won that round and I have to admit that his personality, the escape from school routine each Saturday morning and, yes, the music itself, gave me glimpses of a notable centrality. If two circles touch one another, says theorem 48, the centers and the point of contact are in one straight line. Mr. Bathgate, could you have been my center?
There was no question of doing my licentiate. All the girls, mother told me, who played “The Rustle of Spring,” did their licentiate. They dated events from that moment.
“Do you want to play,” Mr. Bathgate would ask me, “or do you want to pass exams?”
“Play,” I would whisper.
“Then for God’s sake practice! And not here. Now do that again.”
And he would stalk away from me in his baggy tweeds and slump, suffering, in an easy chair across the room, or bound back suddenly exasperated, edging me nearly off the piano seat as he demonstrated my musical incomprehension. Mr. Bathgate, indeed you were my center, if only for those brief hours when I strove to implement what you taught.
“No no no!” He would play the whole work through, easily, sensibly, movingly. My soul would blush.
No licentiate. Maybe my lack of qualification has made me what I am. Once at the most boring slides evening (That’s me at Yellowstone! Look! There I am on the beach at Oahu! See! What a scream!) I have ever unwillingly attended, a chubby matron pal of Bonnie’s asked her husband about a pre-nuptial shot: Daddy, when was that taken? Wasn’t it the year just after I got my letters?
Was it dear? he replied. And he had looked slyly sideways at me and winked with the eye away from her.
There were girls at my school who practiced till their fingers throbbed before taking out their licentiate but they never played a note afterwards. The qualification, not the music, was their center. Funny. Bonnie was rather like that. She learned “The Rustle of Spring” on the sly and took up drums. There’s no accounting.
“No wonder,” old Mr. Bathgate said to me as we talked on the front porch of his New Farm house, lesson over, watching the silver-mud glint of the river and the color blobs of the roses in the park across the road. He refused to repeat the title. I felt treacherous towards Bonnie. As I sipped the cup of tea he always gave me after lessons, I watched him clench and unclench his fingers as he muttered to himself. I hoped he was only exercising his hands.
After I turned fifteen my piano lessons came to an end. Mr. Bathgate had died while holidaying with friends down the coast. His death ached in me like a tooth. For the rest of the school year I missed him, longing for those sparring Saturday mornings when he made reproofs and told me to practice at my own place. Just to know him had done something: I kept on with my practice and bought the sort of music I thought he might like me to learn, and I thought of him often.
Bonnie and Marie had wept for him too and dragged me (unwilling to confront a death) to the funeral where the three of us, aunt, mother, child, stood in a forlorn group at the cemetery and cried for our lost youth as much as for Fred.
III
Three years later I am returned to Villa Marina, student teaching at the beach school, Mrs. Burgoyne about to receive an ovenware farewell, Mr. Renouf removed to a twilight home farther round the bay known as “God’s Waiting Room,” and Bonnie and Marie still rubbing out an existence from their small apartment at the rear of the boardinghouse. I insist on my own room upstairs. I am supposed to be adult. I have never been a child. For one who has been an adult for nearly twenty years I have an idiotic innocence.
Back late from Brisbane one cultural evening of live theater, walking from the railway station into the treed blackness of the uphill road, hurrying and trying not to hurry, I am almost frightened to death by Wazza, the yardman, from Villa Marina, padding up behind me in the dark and growling pleasantly, “I’ll walk you home, Belle.” Wazza is a kindly giant with a tinplate in his skull, a present from Vietnam. He’s a bit—well—thick, they all said.
“Here we go,” Wazza says.
Indeed.
The front steps of Villa Marina are sand-white in moon and seashine but th
e rest of the place is strangely dark. I assume skinflint management or a general fuse. Upstairs the corridor light-switch wobbles uselessly and I feel my way, blinded, a foot at a time, along the people-pens, groping, miscounting doors and opening what I think is mine on a blazing cube of pornographic posters, a peak-hour density of breasts, thighs, pudenda; and swinging on me with a snarl from the bed-edge where it is haunched, a skeleton. Not a skeleton, I observe in the half-gasp all this horror takes. There is evidence of papery flesh, sparse gray thatch, the blaze of a gas lamp. Who is he? When had he come to thrust his miserable solitariness into the house? Never seen at meals. His gauntness humps there on his stretcher-bed below the flaring sumptuousness of the walls. The horror of it! The terrible whiteness! Groined in, his agony of a face is cracking into a yawp. I have a flashing vision of myself five years before flaunting myself on the lawn steps and
“Sorry,” I manage. “Oh my God, sorry!” as he begins to heave himself up even as I back, back wildly, slamming the door on this tiny hell, clawing my frenzied way out in the dark, to hear Wazza calling from the hall below, “You okay there?”
In. Through.
My narrow single bed. The blessed bareness of my own cell. The book on the dressing table still open at the page I had last reached, the ordinary saneness of it, and the light, thank God, working for only a moment before it flutters out. I shudder into bed to swelter sleepless in summer fug, mosquitoes droning in from the opened window, the mosquito net suffocating, a chair rammed under my door handle.
What is the reason for my outrage, my terror? The old man’s frailty snuffed out any notion of physical threat. I am not a prude yet I am disgusted by his needs. I have read a lot about sex and I am still a virgin. I am assaulted by the realization that my gender is meat.
Days later as I sit observing the dust filter its brown flowers into that sun-hard room, student friends from town knock on my door to commiserate, to see, to … “Talk,” I order them. “Talk talk talk. Please. I’m going crazy for lack of talk.” (Bonnie and Marie are swanning around a Barrier Reef island on annual leave from the checkout.)
We wander into afternoon along the cliff road above that shifting bay crescented with mud flats in an ebb tide. We talk. We watch night settle onto the water and the lights come out along the shoreline. And we talk. We find the fish café open beyond the trees in the park and the moon comes up above the sea and watches us watching it.
“You can’t stay there,” my friends advise, almost elderly in their concern. “You can’t. It’s unspeakable. It sounds like a squat for loonies. It’s not amusing seedy. It’s the pits.”
“Mother,” I say. “Mother’s there. Well, not at the moment. But mostly. She’s there as it were. A presence.”
“But how can she bear it either?”
“She’s eccentric.”
I swallow resentment that tastes of fish and lemon.
As we sit, the moon burns out from orange to ash, floating through its own illusion of freedom. Like me, I think. Moon Belle. I am urged to give up teaching, to get a job in the city, to find work that doesn’t dehumanize. My friends analyze my situation with ruthless tongues. Their pejoratives spare nothing. The scumline, they say. What is? Your job. Your living situation. Well, what can one do with an eight-by-twelve cell, a puritanically narrow bed, one door, one window, even the old man (whom I am beginning to understand through my repulsion) in the next room? What can one do with a communal bathroom, a waterlogged downstairs laundry? Years later, baking on the coral sand at Poindimié before another epiphany, I ask myself if I had ever used that bathroom, that slum of a laundry. I must have. And I marvel at the mind’s ability to obliterate the distasteful.
With respect, they tell me, your mother’s a nut. No offense.
“That’s what I like,” I say loyally. “I couldn’t bear it if she wasn’t.”
Forward slouch! Mr. Bonsey, committed socialist and teacher of grade six, shouts whimsically to the morning assembly.
I am the only one to choke on giggles. Mr. Bonsey who is small and neat and faintly Lebanese-looking flashes me a smile of appreciation without really catching my eye and I see Mrs. Burgoyne along the line of staff (it is her last day but one) make a critical bud of her mouth. Rose thou art sick.
“I have been meaning,” Mr. Bonsey says to me as we stalk the schoolyard doing playground duty in the lunch hour, “to ask you away for the weekend.”
We pause and watch small boys bully other small boys. One cherub face comes up and slips his hand chummily into that of Mr. Bonsey who is distracted by this and can only bend and pat the sunny thatch of the kid. Ice gray eyes gaze upward.
“That’s the boy,” Mr. Bonsey says. “Off you go now, Harry.”
“You mean?” I ask.
“Yes, of course.”
“Oh,” I say. “Oh. I have never.”
We pass Harry flailing around the edges of another little group. He is shouting excitedly.
“You mean you maintain the virgin state?”
Harry’s words translate themselves from a distortion of cherub rage. “I hate Mr. Bonsey,” he is yelling to the world. “I hate him. I’m going to kill him.”
“Ah, boys!” Mr. Bonsey says.
We are both embarrassed.
“Yes,” I say, feeling I should be ashamed. Does he pity me? Does he think I am unwantable?
“Oh well, then.” Mr. Bonsey crosses over to two tusslers and prises them apart, an ear in each hand, elbowing Harry neatly as he does so.
“Should you change your mind,” he suggests looking at me with obvious second appraisal, “let me know.”
Why am I not excited? Flattered? Why? Is something amiss?
Unspeakable. Unthinkable. I can hardly hand out the mapping pencils for affront. It is still some time before the days one said How about a fuck? Only the year before I had eavesdropped on two fellow students in the college art classes—females I add—who were discussing Michelangelo’s David.
“Great gear,” one of them was saying. “Great equipment.”
“You mean his shoulders?”
“No, stupid. His ‘parts,’ as they say.”
“They don’t look so great to me.”
“Well, maybe. Maybe you’re right. I’m trying to look at the whole man.”
“Are you? Actually, it’s rather small, isn’t it, considering the size of the rest of him. Too small.”
“Economy size, you mean! Well, I suppose so, but look, it’s not …”
“No. But even then. I don’t think …”
“Still, great shoulders.”
“Yes. I’ll give you that. Great shoulders. Biceps. Thighs.”
“Right.”
“Okay. All of that. But it’s a pity about the other, though. I mean, size matters. Does it matter to you?”
“Only the way my size matters to them. Of course it matters. But it shouldn’t really, should it?”
This conversation gives me pause, as they say. Never have I achieved conversation of such frankness with mother or school friends. I begin to list the sexual epiphanies of my life.
Home on the ranch.
I am eleven, back for school holidays under the protective thumbs-up of the Virgin Rock and am walking home from the next property a mile away where I have been visiting a neighbor’s daughter also home from boarding school, when I decide to cut through the paddocks rather than trudge the dirt road that passes both homesteads and adds another mile to the trek. The tree scrub on our shared boundaries is dripping the lilacs and purples of late afternoon. I am familiar with every sheep-pad, horse-track, scrub thicket. Yet that afternoon, the landscape’s subtext is one of alarm. The warning notes are inexplicable and something in the quality of the light and the silence makes me hurry.
Although this way is shorter, at once I am sorry I have chosen the paddocks rather than the road but it is too late to turn round. Automatically I pick up a stout piece of fallen branch, feeling more secure as I wave its thickness and weight about me
as I walk. The track penetrates more deeply into still uncleared scrub round one of the creeklines and in a gloom compounded of leaf and water I am surprised and unsurprised, as if I have been expecting this, when the scrub crackles alive at the next bend and a man steps from the trees and straddles the path, blocking me.
Unsurprised?
My heart thuds as if it will knock its way through my chest wall as I stop dead, half-turn, falter and take another pace into terror.
Why? He’s a smiling man.
I have no smiles. He’s a stranger and looking back now I realize he could not have been much more than seventeen though then he seemed older. I note a soiled bush jacket whose checks blur for me above the washed-out jeans. His face, which I have carried into my present, fixes itself on memory like a stamp. Rawness, a beaky hunger and hair that is too long and uncombed. I see these things somehow and wonder how I know that the smile has the gummed fixity of desperation.
“What’s the hurry?” he asks.
I cannot answer. Even the trees are fleeing. The minute I move he shifts and makes a playful blocking, arms extended as if it’s some kid’s game.
His smile is overpowering in its static quality. It is no longer a smile.
“Come on,” he says. “Show me your pants.”
He moves a step closer.
“Show me.”
Only I can hear the high-pitched scream that is whistling into silence in the topmost region of my skull.
The smile diminishes until it is a mere stretch of flesh.
“Show me show me show me.” He’s repeating the words, softly, as one might encourage a baby animal.
I am alone here on this track. Where are grandmother, mother, aunt?
Then he misjudges. He lunges and the action unfreezes me and I crack at the outreaching arms with my stick, hearing him yelp as the wood cracks bone before he can grab it and fling it away. But I have darted sideways into the trees, stumbling and shrieking, thrusting in and out between branch and trunk, heading for the clear pasture where the home paddock comes down to the fenceline, but never looking back, not even when I hear him crash through the bushes after me, shrieking until I reach the grass flats, gobbling and gulping and not realizing his thudding pursuit had ended long before, frightened off by my racket. When I gasped across the slope to the homestead, a safer silence swept in around me as I sucked in broken breathless glimpses of roof and veranda and grandmother outside at the kitchen vegetable patch. Within a sob of that curved weeding figure, I come to a wheezing halt and manage at last to look back at the creek gully and the trees, knowing them emptied, the leaves moving as gently as ever in the late-afternoon breeze.
