Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  We put up the big umbrella amongst the dunes, D’Arcy dozing, I reading. The book, I recall, was about the cultivation of roses. The smaller children slid down the dunes on sacks; the older swam. There was no one else around. The afternoon heat was so great that the further seascape, even the horizon, had been absorbed into the hyacinth haze above the ocean. For the first time in months I felt at peace, doing nothing but watch the breakers scrolling and unscrolling into the glassy shallows, gulls flitting along their crests, dipping their hard red feet.

  From the north end of the beach a man came running, a tall man with a lanky stride, too far away for me to see his face, but close enough to see that he wore an old-fashioned bathing costume, dark in colour, all of a piece from thighs to shoulders, with one strap, the left, broken or undone. Aside from the strangeness of the bathing costume, there was nothing strange at all. He was just a tall man running.

  Immediately in front of me he dived into the sea, flipping through the base of each wave as a penguin does. Two, three, four, and he was almost out of sight. I caught a glimpse of his dark figure before he, like the sky and the sea, disappeared into the hyacinth haze. I waited for him to come back, watching all along the beach, to the north and the south, but he did not come back.

  Awakening my husband, I said, ‘Dad’s dead.’

  ‘We’ll go home straight away,’ he said, and called the children in from the beach.

  As we opened the door at home, we could hear the phone ringing. It was my mother calling from New Zealand.

  This happening was one of freedom, delight, boundlessness. I can see that. But it did nothing for me. I suffered a very dark, moveless grief which did not lift for a long time. I thought of that afternoon at Freshwater again after D’Arcy’s death, when life seemed to have stopped, but again it did nothing for me. There is a truth in there somewhere, but like all truth no statement of it can be final. I still have no theories about it, except that it says something about everyone’s death.

  • 5 •

  Sitting in a taxi, one freezing July day in 1959, I looked at my shoes and realised I had never seen them before. This seemed a mild curiosity, and I stared at them for some time before I became aware that I did not know who I was, where I was going, whence I had come.

  So many years later, I still quake when I remember the horror of that moment. It was plain panic, I suppose, my mind as disabled as my body.

  In such an experience, all the boundaries of one’s little life are gone. One is standing on nothing in the middle of nothing.

  Somewhere in my mind was a stock of general, but non-allied knowledge. The objects that covered my cold hands were gloves, the landscape that rushed past belonged to a city. If I looked in the rear-vision mirror I would see my face. After a long time I looked; the face, which belonged to a woman in her late thirties, was unfamiliar.

  ‘You did say the Manly ferry wharf?’ asked the driver.

  ‘Yes.’

  The words meant not a thing, but a faint stirring of good sense indicated that if this unknown ferry wharf were part of my normal life, the sight of it might make me remember. I shrank from telling the taxi driver of my predicament. In addition to my terror I experienced a hideous embarrassment; I thought the driver might take me for a madwoman and drive me to a police station. Somehow I knew about police stations, it seemed. I also knew about money and where it was kept, because as we drew up on busy Circular Quay, I looked into the totally unknown handbag to see if there was any.

  How cold it was! I walked up and down the Quay shivering as well as sweating, not knowing what to do, recoiling from letting anyone know I was lost in my head as well as in time and place. Then I thought, ‘If I asked to go to the Manly ferry, maybe I live at Manly.’

  Somehow I got through the turnstile, for I did not know what coin to put in the slot, and boarded the enormous old steamer South Steyne. It seemed sturdy enough to go to sea. Was Manly so far away? I sat behind one of the funnels which bore a plate stating that the vessel had been built in a Clyde shipyard. For a fantastic moment I thought I must be in Scotland.

  ‘But the people speak differently. How do I know that?’

  I made up my mind that if I did not recall my identity when the ferry reached Manly I would ask where the police station was, and find help. The decision calmed me; I sat quietly until the vessel began to lift on the swell crossing the Heads, and all in a moment, I knew who I was, I knew where I had been.

  I was on my way home from a hospital where I had left my husband in an intensive-care ward. He had had a severe coronary occlusion and was in danger of another. By the time I reached home the phone might ring to tell us he was dead.

  In the meantime I had to get home quickly, because our young children, who had, in the emergency, been picked up from school by a kind neighbour, might be alone. Not in any circumstances did we leave the young ones alone in the house. In all situations the children were our common priority.

  Never again did I experience amnesia. Still, that dreadful hour or so, the consequence of shock and stress, left a legacy. Part of my memory never returned. The years between 1957 and 1959 are largely a blank. Certainly I know what happened at that time; lost years are fairly easily reconstructed from photographs, other people’s memories, and one’s own journals if such are kept, and they are.

  Memory, hold the door, I entreat the goddess of recollection who is also the mother of the Muses. But she moves not a finger. The shoes I had first noticed as unfamiliar, remained that way, and I never wore them again. I felt they belonged to someone else.

  ‘How sick is Dad?’ asked our children.

  I remembered my own childhood, my mother being taken off to hospital, delirious, close to death, and no one telling me anything at all. It was the way of adults then; don’t worry the children, poor little souls. I did not know even if my mother were alive, an ignorance that inflicted so deep a wound of anxiety and grief that my personality changed for ever.

  So I told my children plainly what the matter was, what the prognosis was. And our older boy, thirteen and studious, asked, ‘Is it the same thing that makes him grab his chest sometimes when we’re kicking a football about, or fooling around on the beach? But he said it was a pulled muscle.’

  Other details, other stories. That night, sleepless, waiting all the time for the phone to ring, I came to the conclusion that D’Arcy had had other heart attacks, slight tremors following on exertion, which he kept to himself, refusing to acknowledge that they meant anything significant.

  Heart attacks amongst men are commonplace. By the hundred thousand wives lie awake, dumbfounded as much as frightened. How did this happen to him, they ask, so strong, so decisive, only forty, thirty-five, fifty years of age?

  D’Arcy was never ill; often he worked half the night and never felt the strain. He could lift great weights; walk a hundred kilometres in wild country with a swag on his back. How did this man of the calm presence, my holdfast, stray into the precincts of death?

  In my head all was clamour, dislocated thoughts, fears.

  It was true that he had had a terrible, stressful two or three years. But I had had them too, and I was not ill. We had had many stressful years that had not visibly affected him. Why now?

  ‘I can’t bear this,’ I thought, panic-stricken because I had to bear it. I had scarcely survived the death of my father two years before, though he, careful as always of those he loved, had shown me there was nothing to grieve about. Still, I grieved; I was a slow healer.

  In the cobwebby dark I see someone standing in the doorway, the nine year old. A prickly little article, full of worries and loving-kindness, he is awkwardly placed between the profoundly bonded twins and the teenagers, who carelessly lump him in with ‘the bubs’.

  ‘I just want to know, is Dad going to die?’

  ‘He’ll try not to. He won’t want to leave us. And you know he’s very determined.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Pretty sure. Here, get under
the blankets and warm me.’

  In a moment he is asleep, whimpering and restless. I wonder if he believes, as children often do, that something he has done has caused this crisis. He is always in trouble; always repentant about something. But his presence in the bed calms me; I know that although I shall not want to survive if my husband dies, I will. I seem to be divided arbitrarily into two people, one a mindless assemblage of differing terrors, the other chill and quiet, surveying the transitoriness of human life. Had I really thought that love and care guarded anyone, anything?

  We are rag and bone, rag and bone, nothing beyond, and regardless of the value of an individual life, to such we must be reduced at last.

  It was a long time before I could acknowledge that. For many years my bold rule of life had been: ‘He who climbs the cliff may perish on the cliff, so what?’

  But it is easier to say ‘so what?’ to death than to a damaged life.

  At that time I was a faithful Catholic, though in fact I was not one at all, as my mother had never had me baptised. But whatever I felt about religion, it was as nothing to D’Arcy’s archaic but ardent devotion, an Irish peasant’s leaning upon God. He found God everywhere, even in people whom I could see were duplicitous and envious.

  ‘Ah, he’s really a decent fella,’ he used to say, seeing some divine nub in a human-shaped bundle of meanness, savage secrets, horrid fragilities, defending him against my sharper eye and unkinder spirit.

  For him the divine force was defined as it was by Hermes Trimegistus: ‘an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.’

  This is obvious in his work, even the slightest.

  So, being a faithful Catholic, I prayed for his continued life, asking the assistance of my friends in the next, undefined world. I did not ask for his continued health; I had no hope of that.

  My fear of recurrent amnesia dogged me; in my handbag I kept a reminder card: My name is … I live at … my children are … But would I even think to look into a handbag become unfamiliar and find such information?

  I spent hours each day sitting beside my husband’s bed, first in intensive care, then in a quiet room where he was the only occupant. He dozed a great deal.

  And I tried to work out how our life had come to this, D’Arcy deadly ill, myself confused, hesitant, my vision of the way ahead obscured. Somehow we had lost the plot.

  For a long time now I had been uneasy about our life, its rush and fret, its chasing after deadlines, the pressing responsibilities of the children as they grew older. But I had thought only that it was fatiguing, not that it was fatal.

  Nevertheless, I had longed to change it. I saw our youth vanishing with little to show for it.

  ‘Aw, come on, Tiger, we have five good healthy children. And this nice house. What more do you want?’

  ‘Life for ourselves, leisure to think. Study. Travel.’

  But he couldn’t see it. Writing was his mainspring. Time spent at the typewriter was time spent doing exactly what he was born for. But I was born for many other things.

  Still, he tried to understand.

  ‘The film will make everything easier for us,’ he said confidently, and if things had gone as they should have gone, this hope would have been realised.

  If the film company had ever paid for the property. Within six months of the release of The Shiralee it became obvious that Ealing Films had no intention of doing so. Letters, cables, representations by a London solicitor were ignored. Ealing was going to make the writer sue for his money. We, as well as they, were aware that no individual who sues a powerful film company is going to get far before he runs out of funds for legal costs.

  The original film of The Shiralee, starring Peter Finch, is still showing all over the world. All D’Arcy ever received was £1,100 sterling, which quickly went in solicitor’s fees. His publishers, who had skimmed off 20 per cent of the sale, saw the hopelessness of the situation and abandoned him.

  ‘We have decided to make no further claim on proceeds,’ they wrote. This translates: ‘Don’t count on us for any help, either consultative or financial.’

  After many months of struggle it was plain that Ealing Films were in an unassailable position, and without honour they sat upon it. It was a killing blow to D’Arcy, who had characteristically trusted everyone connected with the sale of the property.

  ‘I shall have to give up,’ he admitted at last, ‘and it’s bitter, I can tell you. Well, they’ll get no luck for it.’

  Still Ealing did. They made a fortune. At the company’s eventual demise they made another one by selling all the properties, including those like The Shiralee, whose contracts had become void by default of payment.

  The lesson from this piece of highway robbery is one for all writers. Have the best agent possible; never let the publisher negotiate a film contract. Do not trust a solicitor’s advice on the contract. Most solicitors know little about copyright and its intricacies. Never sell all audial or visual rights outright. Always include a clause that prohibits sequels, spinoffs and use of characters in other works or contexts. If possible get an upfront payment, as much as possible, and run for your life.

  As far as I knew, D’Arcy had put the bitter blow of The Shiralee film debacle behind him. He did not refer to it again, and set to work to finish Call Me When the Cross Turns Over, the final title of what had hitherto been known as the Barbie Casabon Story. Once again this novel was a great success, and was published by William Morrow in the United States as Woman of the Country in 1959. Morrow’s were delightful people, already publishing several Australian writers. Like all American publishers they wrote warm and charming letters, and I was able to read these to D’Arcy in the hospital. They stimulated him greatly, for he had been fretting that he could not even think creatively.

  ‘It’s as if I’m a fountain, and the water has died down to a trickle.’

  ‘It’ll come back. Don’t you worry.’

  It was fortunate, I know, that not for some weeks were we to learn that Angus & Robertson, in London, and William Morrow had between them botched the copyright registration of this new novel, and it was now in the public domain.

  When he returned from hospital, D’Arcy spoke to us as a family group. The doctor had been frank about the strong probability of his having another coronary, which his damaged heart could not survive. He had been franker with me.

  ‘Any time, any time,’ he said.

  But D’Arcy felt reasonably well, and his optimism had returned.

  ‘I’ll do all the sensible things,’ he said. ‘Keep to a fat-free diet, have regular long walks, try to keep away from stress. But I don’t want to be an invalid, or be treated like one. I’m going to keep on writing, because that’s what I am, a writer. I’d rather die at the typewriter than anywhere else. Understand?’

  One thing he did not give up was smoking. He was warned by his doctor and the specialist, though this was before general alarm at the connection between smoking and vascular disease was publicised. He said he couldn’t believe that smoking could really affect the heart.

  But I think he was truly addicted. He was not a man who would wilfully throw away family, career and the exercise of his talent just for the sake of tobacco. The truth was that he could not give up smoking. There are some like that, I know.

  Life resumed, but now there was a subtext. It is nothing unusual; millions experience it, the subtext of dread that underlies the life of those who live with a doomed person. (And whatever their affliction, how can it compare with that of the parent of a doomed child?)

  My husband had almost eight more years to live, but as far as I knew he had three days or five weeks. Ground had gone from under my feet; insupportable anxiety consumed my days and nights. It was as though my quotidian life was smothered, extinguished by a great dark wing. In shame and confusion I told myself that many had lived through this pain and handled it well. But that made my own condition not one whit better.

  Now I awakened with
a start twenty times a night instead of eight or nine, and every time I awoke I put my hand on D’Arcy to see if he were still breathing. Then one night out of the darkness he whispered, ‘Just cut it out. I know why you’re doing it, and it’s no good for you, or me either.’

  Helpless rage at him, at myself, at the entire situation made me say, ‘Oh, go to hell!’

  ‘That’s the stuff,’ he said, chuckling, and gave me a hug.

  He had, it seems, come to terms with his fate during his six weeks in hospital. No doubt he had felt fear, panic even, amazement that it had happened to him, as we all feel when sudden illness strikes, anxiety for me and the children … Who knows? He never spoke of what must have been many days of cogitation, reflection, and prayer. How much I would have appreciated hearing of the stages of his reasoning, his reconciliation with the knowledge of death. It might have helped me. But I was never told.

  Yet I know from his completely natural, tranquil and even joyful demeanour that some reconciliation had taken place. To have his life cut short, maybe even at less than forty years of age, was no big deal. Not for many years was I to learn that the words ‘nothing special’ applied to almost anything in human experience, was a treasured Zen saying, so subtle, so life-encompassing that books were written about it.

  I can only conclude that this awareness of an enormous truth was either D’Arcy’s by birthright, or his Christian beliefs and practice had led him to it. It was not so with myself. For years I made my way through brambles and briars and never came out into any clear space.

  In this story little is said about our children. Yet they were the unarguable priority of both our lives. As the children and I grew older together, they became my dear friends rather than offspring, but while they were young I was as fierce as a bitch with a litter.

  Once I wrote that in an article, but the editor recoiled, saying, ‘We can’t have that.’ As he had a bale of clichés ready to hand, he changed it to ‘as fierce as a tigress’. But I haven’t seen a tigress with cubs, and I have seen a bitch with a litter. And I recall a tiny bitch I once had, an angel in poodle form, who, knowing that her puppies were too young to be picked up, had no other defence but to gather them all under her chin and look up beseechingly with watering eyes.