The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  At first her place had been on the other side of the table, opposite Carol, but Carol had dragged Laurie’s chair around with much clashing of chair legs to her side, and followed it with her setting of cutlery, gathered up in one fist so that she could direct Laurie with her other hand.

  Now, seated under Dr Fearnley’s eye, Laurie felt awed by the bulk of him, and by the faint whistle of his breath coming and going in his nostrils. She knew as if by instinct that family customs thicken around the dinner table and it was here that she would be most the outsider. Things were understood here that were for her a series of hurdles and pitfalls – when to unfold your napkin, what to do with your hands, whether to ask for the salt … What if they have choko? She’d have to get it down without gagging. ‘They’ll prob’ly say grace,’ Tony had casually dropped, and Laurie had felt a throb of anxiety.

  A low lamp with a large saucer-shaped shade hung centrally over the table, and by its downcast light Laurie could see the details of Dr Fearnley’s face. He commanded the end of the table like an actor on a stage, his arms encompassing the breadth of it. Even trying not to look, Laurie was aware of the reddish cast of his skin and a smudge of whiskers on his jaw. A glass of claret stood at his right hand, ruby under the light, and he lifted it with a swirl to his nose, sniffed and drank. Behind him the picture window, which that afternoon had looked out into the branches of gum trees, was hidden by floor-length curtains in a bold abstract design.

  ‘’Course it is. You like salmon mornay – Lorna, is it? Laurel. Of course. Young Laurel.’ He gave her a wink that involved his whole big dark shiny head in an inflected nod. ‘Partial to it myself.’

  Carol, who had been hopping on and off her chair to position it as chummily close to Laurie’s as possible, wriggled her bottom onto the seat, glanced witheringly at her father and bent her head to Laurie.

  ‘He always says that about everything,’ she said with a roll of her eyes.

  Laurie, sitting close to her friend, took this aside as a sign of their alliance. Her friend. Carol. Laurie had first noticed her for her pigeon-toed puzzlement and Milly-Molly-Mandy haircut as she clung to someone’s hand in the sunshine that pooled at the base of the Old School stairs on that long-ago morning when life at school began. Later they found themselves together in the classroom, squeezed up against the gamesome Ursula, who smelt of laundry soap. Carol, on the other hand, smelt delicately but distinctly of Cashmere Bouquet and cigarette smoke. It was her smell.

  Something similar was enveloping Mrs Fearnley as she moved to and from the kitchen, her lacquered nails showing red against the pot-holders – some smoky perfume mingling with the aroma of the salmon mornay. She was beheaded by the shadow cast by the lampshade until she took her seat, when her long neck, small face and looped-up, sable hair reappeared.

  When they were all seated, Dr and Mrs Fearnley both said ‘Ahh’ in a pleased way and looked around the table. The salmon mornay steamed in the middle. There was also a dish of green beans with dollops of parsley-butter melting on top and yellow sweet potato in a blue speckled bowl. Then Mrs Fearnley began to serve the meal. She served Laurie’s plate first, and there was a joke Laurie didn’t get; she shifted uncomfortably on her chair. Carol laughed, though, the tip of her tongue showing between her teeth.

  The phone rang in some other room. Mrs Fearnley rose, but her husband waved her down as he pushed back his chair and left the table. His mouth had turned into a hard line.

  Mrs Fearnley made chitchat as Carol tackled her mornay with her fork and Laurie copied her method. She lifted a forkful of mornay to her lips, blew on it to cool it and then warily took it in her mouth. It tasted surprisingly good. They could hear the doctor’s voice in the other room, its deep, reassuring tones.

  ‘Hey, Daddy,’ said Carol when he returned. ‘Guess what.’

  ‘Couldn’t possibly guess, Monkey.’ He was tired of them now, Laurie could tell. His mind was elsewhere. Carol didn’t seem to notice. ‘It’s all right,’ he said to his wife. ‘There’s no hurry.’

  ‘We’re sleeping in the recreation room tonight. On the floor. We’re gonna camp.’ At her words, Laurie felt a surge of the companionable excitement she’d felt all afternoon, when they’d sat in saucer chairs, their feet dangling, telling secrets, and her legs swung happily.

  ‘Bivouac, eh?’ said Dr Fearnley, being the host again. He furrowed his brow and wagged his fork at them. ‘Well, mind you put all that mischief you’re planning out of your heads! No raiding the provisions at midnight, now! No watching for hostile natives into the wee sma’ hours! We don’t want Rosie’s lass going home with big dark circles under her eyes.’

  Carol made a cheeky face and ducked her head.

  The conversation fell away, and there was only the click of forks on plates and then, way off, the howl of a distant train crossing a bridge. In the kitchen, the fridge began to hum. Carol caught Laurie’s eye and suppressed a giggle.

  ‘Rosie’s girl, eh,’ said Dr Fearnley. He shook his head thoughtfully over his mornay. ‘Seems like yesterday. Eh, Helen?’ He looked up at his wife for confirmation and poured himself another glass of claret from the bottle that stood at hand. Laurie was noticing that the bottle had left a dark ring on the tablecloth when to her surprise he set his glass down, leant over and wordlessly patted her hand.

  Returning to his wine, he lifted the glass to squint into its ruby depths, and when he spoke again his voice had taken on a distant, storytelling tone. ‘I knew your dad during the war …’ he began.

  ‘No!’ came a startled cry. Mrs Fearnley’s hands had risen an inch or so above the table on either side of her plate, and by the ten red dots of her nails Laurie could see that her fingers were splayed in dismay.

  ‘What?’ said Dr Fearnley, with baffled brows. ‘What?’

  Mrs Fearnley half rose from her chair and then sat down again.

  ‘Have some more mornay, dear,’ she said to Laurie, smiling, and without waiting for an answer leant over and scooped another helping onto her plate.

  Dr Fearnley sat back in his chair and pulled his ear.

  In recognition of the neat pothooks on their slates, Laurie, Carol and Ursula had been moved up, into the back seat. It was a different view, with all the class in front of them. This morning the girls who weren’t sitting primly were deep in conversation, and most of the boys were still wandering about or banging their desk lids. Outside the open window, the playground dust hung in the blue air, and beyond was the blur of hills. Ursula sat alert, her plaits caught up in loops by bows tied above her ears, the lobes of which, Laurie had been fascinated to see, had tiny holes right through them, allowing small gold rings to hang there, as if they were as much a part of her as fingernails. In the tender skin of her upper arm a small, circular indentation that marked her as a New Australian. On Laurie’s other side, Carol was spitting delicately on her sponge and cleaning her slate with the studied care of a cat washing its face. In the rows in front of them, neat, round heads were swivelling on small necks. Mrs Buchanan had turned her back on the class, spread her elbows as if trying her wings and raised her heavy red arms, and now she was drawing round letters on the blackboard with one hand, duster ready in the other, the hem of her floral dress rising and falling with her reach.

  ‘Everyone sit down QUIETLY,’ she called above the hubbub, without looking round.

  The room was still more or less in disorder when Laurie awoke to the knowledge that she felt at home. She felt greeted by it all – the frosted glass of the old windows, the sunlight beginning to slant in, the bean sprouts on the windowsill, the boys fidgeting and bobbing up out of their seats, and old Mrs Buchanan reaching up to the blackboard on the stumps of her legs.

  Laurie lifted the lid of her desk and took out her piece of shell. It was rough and chalky on the outside, but on the inside milky and smooth as silk. She showed it under the desk to Ursula on her left and Carol on her right.

  ‘Mother-of-pearl,’ she whispered.

  ‘What?’
said Ursula.

  But now Mrs Buchanan had turned and was peering at the class over her glasses. Laurie didn’t like it when she wore her glasses. They gave her face a fixed glare, like a witch. With her blackboard ruler Mrs Buchanan was tapping the letters she had chalked on the board behind her. Tap tap tap.

  ‘Hands away, girls and boys! Lips buttoned! Are you all paying attention now? Good. Now I want you to say these letters as I point to them.’

  Laurie, fingering the mother-of-pearl behind her back, ducked her head to whisper to Ursula, ‘Is it the ABC?’

  ‘’Course,’ Ursula whispered back, ducking her head too. ‘Can’t you see?’

  Well, she could. Almost. Not quite. ‘It’s too blurry,’ Laurie said, mostly to herself, and felt a lonely shame.

  Tap. ‘Ae-ee,’ sang the class on a rising note. Tap. ‘Bee-ee.’ Tap. ‘Cee-ee.’ Tap. ‘Dee-ee’ …

  Laurie sang with them. Her gaze drifted to the high windows and the blue dust of the playground. She didn’t need to look at the board. Behind her back, her fingertip ran over the piece of shell.

  Mother-of-pearl. Soothing troubles, serene as a dawn sky.

  ii

  1952

  ‘Well, my dad was runner-up Queensland diving champion,’ Raymond Curtis declared, flicking his bus fare in the late-afternoon light and catching it on his arm. Behind him the echoey commotion of the baths went on in their absence, walled in by changing sheds and the tiers of seats that backed onto the fence. A few remaining swimmers would be ploughing on, making a small wash against the edge. Only occasionally, the thump of the diving board and the splashy retort. The turnstile ticked intermittently as other swimmers, now clothed and scarcely recognisable, left with their wet bundles and slicked-down hair.

  Laurie sniffed and hunched one shoulder to wipe her nose on her sleeve. Her eyes were raw. She could still smell the chlorine.

  ‘That’s nothing,’ Snow Harris was saying. ‘My dad was nilly picked for the Olympics.’ He smoothed back his cowlick and hitched up his schoolbag.

  ‘So what?’ Tony replied. He was backed lazily into the give of the wire fence, his fingers clawed above him in the netting, using one foot to set it squeaking. Squeak squeak, went the wire. His khaki shorts were buttoned loose around his skinny waist and his shirt had ridden up to show a hollow brown midriff. Behind him rose the crisscross scaffolds of the seats.

  Laurie stood swinging her shoulders gently in the end of the day’s warmth, feeling her bag shift in lagging rhythm. Inside it was a certificate with her name in copperplate. Now and then a slop of water-light reached them from the baths and lit them from underneath, as if for a moment they were standing on the sky. Laurie was content, knowing she was among the chosen. Her hair was beginning to dry fluffily and her arms and legs and shoulder blades felt radiant, as if they had been vigorously rubbed. But she was hungry now, and she fancied she could smell someone’s dinner cooking.

  ‘When’s the bus coming?’ she asked no one in particular. Snow Harris folded his arms across his chest. ‘So a lot,’ he said, and Laurie understood, after a moment, that he had returned to Tony’s taunt.

  ‘How come he wasn’t, well?’ asked Raymond.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Picked. How come he wasn’t picked?’

  Snow didn’t answer, choosing instead to shy a stone at a telegraph pole. He screwed himself around to pull a corner of his towel from inside his bag and wipe his nose. Then his blond eyebrows indicated that his glance had flicked to Tony. ‘Anyway,’ he said airily, locking his thumbs into the straps of his bag and turning to look in the direction of the expected bus, ‘he hasn’t even got a dad.’

  Raymond stopped tossing his coin and attended curiously to this new development.

  Laurie closed one eye to see more clearly and frowned from Snow to Tony and back again. Who was this fellow to so casually wipe her father out, like a sum sponged off a slate? Her hands went to her hips. ‘Has so!’

  ‘Has not,’ said Snow.

  Tony picked his nail. ‘Says who?’ He was standing amid papers that had collected at the base of the fence, with his head down and his eyes hidden by a fall of dark hair.

  ‘Says me. Says everybody.’ His back was still turned on Tony.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Tony.

  ‘Yeah!’ returned Snow, hitching up his schoolbag again.

  Laurie craned her neck at Snow. ‘’Course we’ve got a dad,’ she yelled. ‘Whataya talking about?’

  Tony lifted his head to fix Snow with his eyes, but all that met the challenge of his stare was the shorn nape of Snow’s neck.

  Laurie squinted at the boy, her lips compressed with disgust. ‘You’re mad,’ she said.

  ‘If you wanna know,’ Tony began, then looked away and addressed the sky, ‘my dad got a VC. Fighting in New Guinea.’

  Snow snorted. ‘Tell us another one!’ He glanced at Raymond for solidarity.

  ‘Milne Bay.’

  ‘’S’not what everybody else says,’ Snow said, shooting another glance at Raymond. ‘They say different.’

  ‘Yeah? Like what?’

  ‘Like’ – Snow’s eyes were coy under his pale lashes – ‘you don’t even know who your dad was.’

  ‘Bull!’

  ‘That’s what they says.’ Snow’s sing-song tone was maddening.

  Tony pushed himself off the fence with his foot and Snow heard the squeak of the netting and half turned to him as Tony approached with a slow, contained swagger.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Tony. Raymond yipped with nervous excitement and moved in closer.

  ‘Yeah?’ Tony said again, his mouth hanging open, and gave Snow a poke in the shoulder with his knuckle.

  Snow started in surprise, hesitated, and then with a grunt shoved Tony full in the chest. Tony was knocked off balance, and his face flushed with the shock of it, of being struck. He wiped his nose hard on the back of his wrist and rocked from foot to foot.

  ‘Wanna fight, Harris?’ he challenged, but his voice was so changed, so squeaky, that Laurie had to look again to be sure that it was Tony speaking. ‘Wanna fight?’

  ‘Tony,’ Laurie pleaded, not really expecting to be heard, and pulled at his shoulder. ‘Tone!’ He shrugged her off. There were tears starting in his eyes.

  ‘Bus coming!’ shouted Raymond Curtis. ‘Hey! Bus coming!’

  Their faces all turned towards the big silver bus bearing down on them like a sweet chariot of salvation, its rattly windows catching the sun, and in that moment Snow was fishing in his pocket for his fare and Tony was hunting about on the ground for his, and the bus was waiting in a cloud of black exhaust fumes, and they were climbing aboard. Snow was up the stairs and already had his ticket when he leant back over Raymond Curtis, who was next in line, his hand on Raymond’s shoulder, his head stuck around the door, and yelled down to Tony.

  ‘Everybody knows your dad was a Yankee!’ he called, and then scooted through the throng of standing passengers, burrowed like a bandicoot, down the back to safety.

  Laurie found her mother in the kitchen, shelling peas.

  ‘Mum, what’s a VC?’ she asked.

  ‘Hmmm?’ said her mother, glancing back over her shoulder as the sound of muffled blows and loud thumps reached them from the living room. ‘You’ll split those cushions if you keep that up, Miranda,’ she called. ‘There’ll be kapok everywhere.’

  Miranda was rarely seen the right way up. Something original in her made her view the world from odd angles, like a carpenter squinting along a length of planed timber. She was forever tumbling, flipping, standing on her head, so that the arrangement of the features of her face – gap-toothed smile, floppy fringe, chin dimple, sly eyes – became loose and confused in Laurie’s mind, detached one from another, free-floating. Miranda could assemble herself in a twinkling this way, that way, as if from a magician’s sleeve. Then, hey presto! Miranda scrambled!

  ‘VC. What’s a VC?’

  Thump! went Miranda in the living room. ‘Oh, it stands for Vi
ctoria Cross. Here, pet, help me with these.’

  ‘What’s a Victoria Cross?’

  Thump.

  Rosie leant back to send her voice down the hall into the living room. ‘Miranda …’ she called tiredly, and gave her attention to the peas. ‘It’s an award – a medal soldiers get for brave conduct in war. Don’t frown, Lorelei.’

  Thump. ‘Tarantara!’

  Laurie pressed her thumbnail into the groove that ran from stem to tip. ‘So Daddy got one?’

  Rosie looked at her daughter strangely. ‘No, my pet,’ she said. ‘Very few people get the Victoria Cross. It’s a very great honour.’

  Laurie was puzzled and let down. She broke the pod open and flicked the peas out with a rippling ping into the enamel bowl. So Tony must have made it up, just to have something to skite about.

  ‘Watch this, Mummy!’ Miranda called. And there was another thump. ‘Mum! Did ya see? That was a perfect loop-the-loop!’

  Laurie picked up a second pod. The kitchen window gave a view of the old mango in the back yard; in the evening light its highest leaves were a glossy magenta. These things happened, the mango changing its leaves, the seasons passing, without the supervision of anyone. It was reassuring to remember this. Life was not like a jumping-jack, banging all over the place, going off under your heels. Things followed from other things in an orderly way. The fact of her father, her warm, air-breathing father, with his kind eyes and his silly jokes, could not be wiped like sums from a slate by the words of Snow Harris. She would ask. Tony, when she’d queried him, wanting to get the sense of it, had just swung on the hanger and said, above the bus’s roar, that Harris was a liar.

  Laurie watched her mother’s pale face carefully. Her eyes were on her work, and the lids, lustrous as mother-of-pearl, kept them half-hidden. ‘Was Daddy a Yankee?’ she asked.

  Rosie pulled back and looked at Laurie in surprise. ‘What?’ she said.