The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  Rosie lifted both her head and her voice.

  ‘Craniosacral. The treatment is craniosacral therapy.’

  ‘Yes but you haven’t got any evidence at all that it works.’

  ‘I know, but Mum heard about this woman, someone’s cousin, and they swear it’s worked wonders with her. They say she –’

  ‘I can’t hear what you’re saying. Speak up.’

  ‘They say she was in a very bad way. She wasn’t responding to the medication –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She wasn’t responding to medication, and then when she went on the ketogenic diet –’

  ‘The what diet?’

  ‘Ketogenic. That’s something else. But it has problems because –’

  The shower was suddenly turned off, catching Rosie shouting. She lowered her voice.

  ‘– because it’s very high in fat and – but in any case, that’s something else. This –’

  Doug stepped out of the bath in clouds of steam and grabbed a towel.

  ‘The thing is, Rosie-love, this cranio thing’s in Melbourne, isn’t it? You have to go to Melbourne?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And there’s no evidence –’

  ‘Except that –’

  ‘There’s no evidence apart from testimonials from someone your mother knows who knows someone else who’s heard of someone –’ He held his towel up to his chin and raised his eyebrows eloquently at his wife.

  Rosie was silent.

  ‘If it was in Brisbane, I’d be all for it. I’d scrape together the money somehow and cheerfully pay the fellow on the off chance that he could do some good. But it’s not as simple as that. You’d have to go to Melbourne. You’d have to find somewhere to stay. The treatment would take – what? Weeks?’

  He looked Rosie in the eyes, wrapped his towel around her so that it made a parcel of them and moved in close.

  In the winter of 1956, when Laurie had recently turned eleven, Carol and her mother came to stay. Whether it was for days or weeks, later Laurie couldn’t say, for it seemed to her to be a time set aside – a time of wattle scents and winter skies, of breakfasting in relays in the warm kitchen and at night scorching their knuckles as they made toast on a long-handled fork before the living-room fire, of Carol’s red-cheeked company as they waited for the school bus, jigging on the spot and watching their breath hang in the chilly air, their cold hands tucked into their armpits, or clapping them together till they tingled, chanting

  ‘My mother said.

  I never should.

  Play with the gyp-sies

  In the wood …’

  Carol’s cheeks always looked as if they’d been slapped, reddened now by the cold at the bus-stop or then by the heat of the fire, or sometimes by a feverishness of mood that went entirely unremarked.

  Dinner had been almost over when the doctor’s wife and daughter were found standing with their bags in the cold darkness of the verandah and, with quiet solicitations, were ushered in. Rosie had led Mrs Fearnley away to her bedroom, where the door remained closed for some time. Shyly, Laurie took Carol’s hand.

  They were closer than sisters, then. They spent all their days and nights together. Laurie had given up her bedroom to Mrs Fearnley, and she and Carol slept on stretcher beds in the living room, in front of the dying fire. When the lights were out, they would lie there foot-to-foot, heads turned so that they could watch the fire, and talk. The aloof black cat that had come from nowhere would join them there, a connoisseur of fires. It would tuck its paws in, curl its tail and turn into a blob of darkness on the rug. Shadows and firelight would roam about the room like a blind man’s fingers, as if to explore the loftiest parts and deepest corners of this warm, dark place where they talked and breathed and, later, where they slept. And through their eyelids, even in the depths of sleep, they’d see the embers flare and die away.

  By day they ate and dressed together, and went to school, and swung on the swing in the short afternoon singing ‘Jamaica Farewell’, their heads thrown back and their eyes full of nameless longing.

  Miranda tagged after them at times, and was tolerated. But Laurie and Carol were a closed circle, which Miranda knew herself to be outside.

  The house became filled with the aromas of cigarette smoke and a light, disturbing fragrance. It seemed to Laurie that wherever her mother was – sweeping, ironing, cooking, having a cup of tea in the sun – there was Mrs Fearnley, talking, smoking and, once or twice, silently weeping.

  Everyone was civilised about the congestion in the kitchen, the queue for the shower. ‘Excuse me,’ they’d murmur, ‘Sorry!’, ‘No no, you first!’ But the sprinkling of talcum powder on the bathroom floor, the occasional long dark hair in the basin and the rarity of finding her mother alone reminded Laurie that the joys of this convivial time were not unalloyed.

  When they came in from the cold of the yard, Miranda in tow, Tony was sitting sidelong in an armchair in his socks, eating bread and golden syrup and reading The Dam Busters. At their arrival, the black cat spilt off the sofa and vanished from the room. Miranda dashed after it and brought it back in her arms, stroking its head hard and biting her bottom lip with fierce affection while its ears lay flat and its tail lashed.

  ‘What’s its name today, Miranda?’ teased Tony from the heights of his superior years.

  ‘It’s Eli.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I dunno … Eli’s just right.’

  ‘But Quixote was right yesterday.’

  ‘Too hard to say.’

  ‘And Mrs Malaprop was right last week. Has it changed sex since then?’

  Miranda pulled a face and turned away from him. Eli made a break for freedom.

  Made shy by Tony’s presence, Carol had fallen silent. In the kitchen, she found her tongue.

  ‘Your brother looks like Dirk Bogarde,’ she whispered in Laurie’s ear.

  Carol was vague about the reasons for their sojourn here.

  ‘We couldn’t let things go on the way they were,’ she confided in the firelight. ‘Things were sinking into perdition.’

  ‘What’s perdition, Mummy?’ Laurie asked in a quiet moment while Carol was in the shower and Mrs Fearnley was making herself a hot toddy.

  Rosie looked taken aback. ‘Perdition? It means damnation. Hell. Why?’

  Later, tacking home against the westerly, Carol attempted another explanation of the parental troubles. ‘Daddy let his dinners go cold,’ she said, her voice carried off on the wind. ‘He was becoming cavalier.’

  They stood under the tree. Carol, head tilted, was refastening the clip in her hair. Her nimble fingers had chewed red tips, nails bitten to the quick. A sensation of inner spaciousness, of immensity, swelled in Laurie’s breast. She took her mother-of-pearl shell out of her pocket. ‘This is for keeps,’ she said, pressing it into the hollow of Carol’s hand.

  Then, as suddenly as they had arrived, they were gone. The smoke slowly cleared from the house, the winter airs drifting in to take its place, and the scent faded. Only in Laurie’s room did they linger, a reminder, both bitter and delicate, that someone else had slept in here, and carefully dressed, and lain on the bed smoking, thinking things over.

  ii

  Spring

  In those days, weekends stretched away like peaceful broad-waters of time, where the far shore, though visible, was too distant to be troubling. Becalmed, one Saturday, in just such a fetch of endless afternoon, Laurie dawdled out to see if the frog was in the letterbox, stepping around Tony and over his tools on her way. She was reviewing in her mind a pleasant scene of the day before, when Ursula and Carol had vied to sit next to her during the Armistice Day school broadcast, and they’d all three crammed into a seat meant for two.

  The letterbox was empty.

  Eli was keeping Tony company from the jacaranda shade, balancing on his haunches (he’d been declared a tom) and twisting his head to groom his back. The two of them made a small society there in the quiet front garden.
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  With a couple of parting flips of the letterbox flap, Laurie idled back along the path, avoiding the scotch thistle that grew evilly in one of the cracks and considering the difficulty of catching Eli to administer a fondle, the chances of finding any Anzac biscuits left in the tin …

  ‘He wants to sell the River House,’ Tony said as Laurie’s shadow fell over his work. He was passing the inner tube of a bike tyre through a bucket of water, watching for bubbles.

  Laurie glanced at the house and then came closer. ‘Dad?’

  Tony nodded.

  ‘Why?’

  Tony stood up to re-inflate the tube, bracing his skinny legs and pumping hard. He was longer in the torso now, and harder about the face. The edge of his shoulder blade showed wing-like in his bare back, and something about the muscle in his jaw and the way he stood and the effort of it made Laurie think of her father, working to get the primus going in the hazy long ago.

  ‘Why?’ Laurie repeated.

  Tony straightened up. ‘Money,’ he said.

  He squatted down and pressed the stiffened tube into the water, turning it slowly, watching. Then he grunted. Laurie peered in. Bubbles were rising from the black rubber in a silver string.

  The air in the kitchen was fragrant when Laurie found her mother there, surrounded by clothing and linen, some crumpled and heaped in a basket, some rolled tightly, some fluttering from hangers on the curtain rod and various knobs, some in neatly folded piles. She was ironing. Now and then she’d dip her fingers into a jug and baptise the garment on the board. There’d be a hiss as the iron passed over the damp fabric, raising as it did so a small cloud of steam.

  ‘Mummy,’ said Laurie.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Are we going to sell the River House?’

  A slight frown crossed Rosie’s face. ‘No,’ she said.

  Laurie was silent.

  Had Tony simply made it up, then? If so, why? For spite? It didn’t seem likely. It seemed more likely – and this was confirmed for Laurie by her memory of the brevity of his delivery and the tone of his voice – that Tony was telling the truth. ‘No’ was what she’d wanted to hear – no, the River House would not be sold – and here it was, yet she was still troubled. For it meant, she saw, that her mother and father were at odds, for reasons that she had no knowledge of … that there was a rift between them, which her question had let daylight onto and into which she and Tony and Miranda and all their homespun easiness could fall. She thought of Carol’s parents and the whispers of divorce … It was a relief to hear that ‘no’ from her mother’s lips, and she couldn’t think of any other reply she would have preferred. And yet …

  ‘But Daddy wants to,’ Laurie said.

  Rosie lifted her iron and looked at her sharply. ‘Did he tell you that?’

  ‘No, Tony did.’

  ‘I see,’ said Rosie.

  She returned to her work, smoothing and pressing. And as she did so, she told Laurie that her father had had to take out a loan to finance the development of his Coolacane product, and, what with all the neurologist fees they’d had to pay, and the medication and special therapies they’d tried, and various other expenses, and the prospect of school fees for Tony the following year, and the fact that they never went to the River House now and no one wanted to rent it because it was too remote, and all they were doing was paying rates on a big area of land for nothing, her father felt that it made sense to put it on the market.

  ‘There’s a hundred acres left of the old cattle property there,’ she said, ‘with a lot of river frontage. It would fetch a very good price.’ She sighed. ‘Selling it would solve all our financial problems.’

  ‘But you don’t want to?’

  ‘No.’

  Laurie waited, breathing the sweet, cooked smell of hot fabric, listening to the gentle thump as Rosie set the iron down to turn and fold.

  ‘Where’s Daddy now?’

  ‘He’s gone to the university. To talk to someone. Do some research.’

  Miranda was at ballet. They were alone then, except for Tony, fixing his bike.

  ‘Daddy just wants to sell it for the money?’

  ‘That’s the long and short of it. But don’t run away with the idea that he’s being greedy. There are very sound reasons –’

  ‘But you don’t want to.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  Rosie took the shirt she’d been ironing and hung it up on the curtain rod to air. ‘Because –’ she said.

  She picked a dress of Miranda’s from the basket, spread it out on the board and, dipping her fingers into the jug, began to flick water over it. Then she rolled it up, stowed it on the end of the board and reached for another.

  ‘– we don’t own it.’

  Laurie couldn’t take it in. ‘What?’

  ‘We don’t own it.’ Her mother looked tired.

  ‘But –’ Laurie was bewildered. If they didn’t own it, how could they sell it? She picked at a scorch hole in the cover of the ironing-board. ‘Who does?’

  Rosie tucked in the sleeves of a dampened shirt and rolled it up tightly.

  ‘Tony,’ she said.

  Laurie stared at her mother. Now she was shaking out a pillow-slip, straightening it on the board. ‘In a sense.’ One hand smoothed the pillow-slip, one bore down hard on the iron. Steam rose. Then her hands stopped. It may have been the light reflecting up off the white things on the ironing-board, but she looked old. ‘Morally,’ she said.

  Her eyes closed and her thumb and forefinger pincered her forehead.

  ‘Laurie,’ she said, ‘be a love, now, and run off. I’ve got a shocking headache.’

  Laurie was on the swing when her mother called to her. She’d gone down there to be carried away by the swing’s rhythm – rushing up, plunging down. U-u-p. D-o-w-n. U-u-p. D-o-w-n. Tony was gone, leaving his kit strewn about on the path. A silver string of tiny bubbles rose from somewhere to the surface of her mind.

  ‘Laurie –’ came her mother’s voice.

  Rosie took Laurie to the living room, sat her down beside her on the sofa and put an arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Sweetheart, there’s something I need to tell you.’

  Laurie waited. Her heart thudded slowly, almost as if, by slowing right down, it could begin to edge backwards, cancelling the present and returning them all to a time that was long ago, and easeful.

  ‘The River House is Tony’s – morally – because, when she was alive, it belonged to Una Morgan, and Una Morgan was Tony’s grandmother.’

  ‘But –’ began Laurie. Her mother put a gentle finger on her lips, and then nodded, as if to say, ‘Wait, and I’ll tell you.’

  ‘You see, my little Lorelei, before you were born – before I met your father, even – I knew a young soldier called David Morgan. We met in 1939. He was just a boy. I had a job at Prentice Studios then, as a tinter, a hand-colour-ist – I prettied-up photos by adding tints of colour to them, staining them, you might say, so that they looked more real, truer to life – and that’s where I first saw him. But then … Well, I was running for a tram, and he … Anyway, the long and the short of it is that we got to know each other. We had less than a fortnight together before he was sent overseas. Then we could only meet when he came back on leave. It was wartime, you see, and all the young men were wanted to fight. He – that is, David – he was Tony’s father, though Tony never saw him, because he died.’

  Laurie’s head swam. Her mother’s voice went on, explaining, telling her what it was not fitting she should know. It made her see her mother’s flesh strangely, its softness and freckles, and notice the smell that came from her, like bread dough rising. Una Morgan, she explained, now she was Tony’s grandmother (not Laurie’s), and also a widow, gravely ill when she, Rosie, took baby Tony to her bedside. She died too? She died, yes. Why? She was so ill. Laurie’s daddy was David’s friend; that’s how Rosie came to know him. They married. (But did you – were you –?) In due course Laurie was born; an
d then Miranda; and that was their family. ‘And Eli, of course,’ Rosie smiled. ‘Mustn’t forget him.’

  Then Tony wasn’t really her brother, Laurie thought, not completely. And her father –

  ‘That means Daddy is Tony’s stepfather.’ Stepfather.

  Rosie nodded. ‘Though of course …’

  ‘But he looks like Daddy,’ Laurie protested.

  Rosie took a moment or two to answer. Then she gave a little smile. ‘Not really, sweet.’

  ‘Around here …’ Laurie touched her jaws.

  ‘He’s a boy, darling. Growing up. They’re both male.’

  A memory came to Laurie of Raymond Curtis flicking his bus fare in the afternoon light as they waited for the bus, of the squeak squeak of the wire-netting fence, of the almost-fight …

  ‘So he was a Yankee, then?’ she asked.

  ‘A Yankee?’

  ‘Like Raymond Curtis said –’

  The puzzlement cleared from Rosie’s face. ‘That was just gossip, Laurie. Ignorant gossip. People like to – embellish.’

  ‘So he was an Australian. Like Daddy.’

  ‘Yes – but does it really make so much difference?’

  Laurie didn’t answer. It seemed to make a difference. It seemed to matter to Tony.

  They sat in silence.

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘You mean D–’

  ‘Yes.’ Sparing her mother, dodging the name.

  Rosie was silent for a long time. ‘Not tall,’ she said eventually. ‘And he was young, of course. Younger than me. He had olive skin.’

  And brown eyes, Laurie thought. Tony’s black-lashed, dark-brown eyes.

  ‘Tony knows?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does Miranda?’

  ‘No.’

  The iron roof was ticking in the heat.

  ‘Why did you pretend?’

  Rosie sighed and looked out the window. ‘It wasn’t a happy start, Laurie.’ She munched briefly on the thought. ‘Your father wanted us all to feel part of the one family. He wanted Tony to feel he was his son.’ She gave a little huff through her nose, though what she was thinking Laurie couldn’t guess. Laurie herself was thinking of a sandbar and the sea, and two figures, one big, one small, dodging, twisting, scuffling, on a continent’s edge, it seemed, in brilliant, salty light.