The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  ‘The best view is from around Pandanus Point,’ he told them. His hands went to his hips. ‘That’d be a manta, not a stingray. See the mouth parts? And they’re bottle-nosed dolphins. If you want to see packs of sharks, come when the mullet are running.’

  Laurie sank onto her towel, wiped her streaming nose on one corner and scrabbled in her bag for her glasses. The blaze of light that heaved before her separated into discrete spangles on voluminous blue. Tony was out there somewhere, lost body and soul in the sea. She lay back, her head resting against her bag.

  Her nose ran with seawater. Sniffing, she viewed through half-closed eyes the navel in her brown belly, the coral bikini tied at the sides, the perfect droplets that left tiny residues of salt on her skin as they dried. Her body seemed separate from her and at the same time warmly inhabited. She felt a simple gratitude to it for its sweet sensations, its obedience to her will.

  Beyond her sandy feet glittered the sea, close, it seemed, as if foreshortened by the noon light, dreamily rising and falling, lifting its swimmers like so many corks. The sunshine, warm as oil, had the fragrance of coconut.

  An unruliness intruded. A confusion of leg-shadows snipping the sea’s gleam. She all but closed her eyes. Voices broke over her, raised in banter; then, as they drew close, hushing. A coltish posse of lean-loined boys. She lay perfectly still, scorched by their eyes. She was ready for it, but when the whistle came she couldn’t stop a charge running down her spine. Barely civilised, they were, shoulders jousting, going by some rough code – mocking and dangerous and green as new shoots. Their coarseness repelled her. But the violence of the desire that made them strut and caper, that gripped and held her.

  Laurie feigned deafness and rolled over onto her stomach. She settled her head on her folded arms, absenting herself, to be lulled by the slosh of waves and the distant shrilling of kids.

  A shadow fell on her. Then a spray of droplets. Laurie squinted up at her brother, out of the surf at last and flicking water onto her back. A line of dark hair ran down from his navel to somewhere underneath his low-slung togs. It was an intimate view of him, which made her look away.

  He shook the sand from his towel.

  ‘Watch out for the wolves, Lol,’ he said drily.

  Her brother was growing to manhood – broadening his shoulders, sprouting hair – according to a scheme passed down to him by someone he’d never known. By a dead stranger.

  Laurie’s gaze was on the close-up sand. One eye could see its individual grains. How had he fallen, Tony’s father? She had seen enough Westerns to know that cowboys caught by a bullet pirouetted as they died, and so she pictured Tony’s father – spinning on one booted toe, as if he’d been on a course towards the rest of his life but had then had second thoughts.

  Was he a long time dying? Had he been afraid?

  She glanced at Tony, who had flung himself down on his towel next to her. He must have known that she knew the truth of his paternity, but he’d never let on, so she couldn’t ask him her questions.

  There was no one to ask. To press her mother for answers – the thought appalled her. To broach that sorrow was like opening a tomb.

  Not a happy start. Before Laurie, before even her father, that man had known her mother, her soft flesh and crannies. They couldn’t have been married long, though, before the telegram boy came to the door … And in the wake of that groping thought, while Laurie was still dwelling on the pathos of it, came a new sensation: a plain, barefaced certainty. She flipped over and sat up. They had not been married at all.

  And the corollary of that was that Tony was illegitimate.

  He was lying flat out in the sun, the dark skin of his back spangled with drops of water, the gully between his shoulder blades in velvet shadow.

  So this was the truth. There was no grief-rent wedding veil in her mother’s story, just a wantonness, a lasciviousness, that only yesterday – this morning! – would have been unthinkable.

  After the thrill of shock came distaste. A feeling of uncleanness, as if she had been leafing through a girlie magazine, staring at pouts and cleavages and rolling buttocks.

  Bastard. Laurie’s lips moved silently, trying the word. She glanced at her brother to see if her knowledge had changed the look of him, darkened his complexion.

  He lay in a milk-sweet, coconut-scented dream.

  It was this that lay behind the gaps in the photo albums, Tony’s sullen boasts, her father’s awkwardness, her mother’s silences.

  It was disgrace.

  Carol’s parents would know, Laurie realised. Did Carol?

  Laurie found excuses for her mother in her heart. It was wartime. They would have married but he’d been sent away. But her mother? With her quiet voice? So controlled, so reserved? It was hard to imagine that she could let herself go so far that she’d call down shame, not only on herself, but also – in due course – on her son.

  On them all. They were all caught up in it, as if they’d walked into a spider’s web. They couldn’t see it, but they could feel it clinging.

  Was that what made Tony so hard to reach? Was that what made him cry out in his sleep?

  ii

  February 1960, Brisbane

  She was slightly knock-kneed in a cute, feminine way that made her hips pivot and her skirt sway, so that you always knew it was Carol when you glimpsed her slight frame stepping off the bus or turning into a shop or taking a shortcut across the park. Or today, coming out from under the wind-silvered trees by the river, her dark hair blowing across her cheek and her hand brushing it away.

  Here she came in pink polished cotton (black piping, scooped neckline, rustling skirt), emerging from under the trees into the ten o’clock morning sun, swinging her bag by its strap, sauntering in her new black T-bar flatties along the footpath against the flow of the cruising cars and up onto the Boathouse verandah.

  Catching sight of Laurie, who stood waiting out of the wind for the sake of her hair, she broke into a smile of greeting.

  ‘Lol!’ she cried, and with a dip of gratitude hastened up to meet her and caught her arm. She stood back and viewed her friend. ‘Gee, you’re so brown! I love your shoestring straps!’

  Laurie knew her sundress showed her tan to advantage and that the aqua colour chimed with her eyes. Her arms were bare, save for the little silver watch she’d been given for her thirteenth birthday, her skirt was full and rustly, and the belt that cinched her waist was fastened at the back and widened becomingly in front. She stood in a memory of apple blossom, dabbed behind her ears and on her wrists where the pulse beat close to the skin. She’d looked pretty in the mirror, turning this way and that, borne on an apple-blossom cloud. But standing next to Carol she felt suddenly oversized. She looped the strap of her shoulder-bag over her head so that it hung diagonally, tram-conductor style, and wondered if the carefully cultivated upward kick at the end of her hair was holding. Carol’s was.

  ‘You look gorgeous, Carol!’ she returned. Gorgeous wasn’t the word, she thought. Not gorgeous.

  Carol leant in close to her, covering her mouth with her hand, and Laurie could see that she’d applied foundation to lighten the dusting of freckles across her nose. River odours came up to them on the wind.

  ‘Sugar!’ Carol confided. ‘I thought for a minute you weren’t here! There’s no way I was going in there without you!’ She peered quickly inside, where boys and girls were milling, some diffident, some bold, their voices resounding in the large space of the hall.

  Laurie’s thoughts dived inward. Various elements of her ensemble made calls on her attention – the upward kick of her hair, the seams of her stockings, the hem of her rope petticoat and, in particular, her brand-new strapless bra. For a moment Laurie wished she’d gone to swimming training with Ursula rather than coming here, prettied up, beset by such anxieties.

  ‘D’you think Ursula’ll come?’ asked Carol, as if picking up a strain of Laurie’s thoughts. ‘Oh no. I forgot. Swimming.’ She looked about. ‘I don’t t
hink she’ll ever come, do you?’ She was already shaking her head in anticipation of the answer.

  But Laurie was silenced by the novelty of the occasion and the gravity of impending social demands.

  Carol glanced at her narrowly. ‘Where are your glasses?’ she asked. ‘Can you see?’

  Laurie looked through the doorway at the mass of merging and parting shapes, and then beyond the verandah to the band of light that was the river.

  ‘Sort of,’ she answered, in a voice diminished by the poise and stylishness on every side, the fresh poplin prints and eau de cologne and glossy page-boy bobs, by the banter and bright laughter.

  The hall was filling up, but the brilliance of the river made it hard to see inside.

  ‘Do we go in?’ Carol asked, touching her bottom lip.

  It was difficult to work out what was happening. Faces were indistinct, just discs of borrowed river light. Laurie felt a pang of regret for the deficiency of her eyes and a sudden homesickness for her room, her microscope and small, close things.

  ‘Roll on in, boys and girls,’ came the dance instructor’s voice, cutting loud and clear across uncertainty. ‘Don’t be shy! Now, take your partners for the quickstep. Mira –’ He held out a gallant hand for his wife, who spun balletically into his arms. ‘Like this. S-l-o-w, s-l-o-w, quick-quick, s-l-o-w –’ And then came the smooth, undulating, big-band strains of Victor Silvester, on which they were all tactfully, swingingly, borne inside.

  At once Carol was taken by an eager youth and Laurie lost sight of her. The dancing instructors, a lithe middle-aged couple of small stature and continental complexion who moved with sinuous authority across the floor, were scooping up the laggards and drawing them out of their corners. From somewhere nearby, a boy took Laurie’s hand and pulled her into the throng. She was in.

  Laurie and her partner quickstepped with single-minded concentration around the perimeter of the room, executing the corner turns smartly, she taller than he, neither speaking. She had a close-up view of his neat short-back-and-sides as he steered her across the floor, of the comb tracks where he’d slicked his forelock back, and of a tiny muscle active in his temple.

  ‘Is your brother here?’ whispered Carol as she was driven for a moment within close range. Her eyes underscored her inquiry over her partner’s shoulder, before she was rotated again, and lost to view.

  Laurie was careful, as she reversed in four-four time along the length and across the breadth of the room, not to let her lungs deflate too far. That way she could feel the band of constriction about her chest, which reassured her that her strapless bra was holding firm. Her partner did not meet her eyes. His gaze was fixed on some point over her left shoulder and the line of his mouth was grim. At the sight of the tie askew under the white collar and the occasional twitch in his jaw, Laurie felt the stirrings of sympathy, but mostly she was too busy mentally reviewing the line of her stocking seams, watching out for the handsomer boys (having to go by demeanour rather than detail, for what she saw of faces was all the phases of the moon in jumbled agitation) and hearing in her head the refrain of s-l-o-w, s-l-o-w, quick-quick, to care about the discomfiture of another being. Once, as they plied the hall’s length, she was driven almost into Tony, who was prowling on the margin with some of the older boys. He raised a thumb at hip height in smileless greeting but did not otherwise acknowledge her, and her own smile died on her face.

  The number was winding up. A scuffing of shoes and clashing of shoulders as couples parted or stood about uncertainly. Her partner, looking elsewhere, kept hold of her hand, claiming her for the next dance. Though it was a relief to be spoken for, she would have liked some other consort – someone smoother or brainier or more loose-limbed – so she was not sorry when the next dance turned out to be a progressive barn dance, and she was freed.

  It was some time during this dance that Laurie, distracted by the boisterous thumping of heels and the serial unions and divorces, lost concentration and exhaled. She stopped dead. With the slackening of her aching intercostals, she could no longer sense the grip around her chest. As the wheel of girls gathered momentum, revolving counter to the wheel of boys, a terrible insecurity possessed her. As if flung out by centrifugal force, she broke free of the wheel and, cheeks burning, fled the crowded floor.

  The toilet mirror told her that the salience of her bustline had softened. She sneaked a quick look down her front. As she’d feared, the bra was riding low. Nipples were dawning over the lace.

  Laurie hunched forward and, her fingers working through her dress, undid the clasp at the back.

  A girl in lavender gingham came in to touch up her lipstick as Laurie was fishing her bra out from the front of her dress, and they smiled at each other in female collusion. Stuffing the bra into her shoulder-bag, Laurie checked her profile in the mirror. The girl in lavender gingham checked it too. ‘You can’t tell,’ she said.

  Laurie hitched up the petticoat under her skirt, adjusted her shoestring straps and corrected the seams of her stockings. Through the wall came the muffled sound of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, and the scrape of scores of shoes, more or less in time, on the wooden floor.

  Carol rushed up to her when she made her way back to their corner of the verandah, which gave a view downriver to the bridges.

  ‘Where’d you get to?’ she asked. ‘I couldn’t find you anywhere!’

  ‘I was in the Ladies,’ said Laurie. ‘Divesting myself.’

  ‘Di-what?’

  ‘Vesting myself. Of my Berlei. Look.’ Laurie opened her shoulder-bag for a moment so that Carol could peer in, and quickly snapped it shut. ‘I am now au naturel.’ She spread her skirt and did a jaunty half-spin.

  Carol slapped Laurie’s arm in open-mouthed shock. ‘You slay me!’ she declared admiringly, and narrowed her eyes to inspect Laurie’s bosom.

  Passing by later in someone’s arms, Carol caught Laurie’s eye and folded up with mirth. Laurie surveyed her primly over her partner’s shoulder and had to look at the ceiling to suppress her snuffling laughter.

  ‘Di-vesting,’ said Carol in an undertone when their paths crossed again. And for a while the merest glimpse of the other across the room would set them off. ‘It’s not that funny!’ they agreed, heads together as they left the floor, and glanced at each other, and solemnly composed their features.

  Snatching a moment of respite out on the verandah, they stared across at seedy docks and warehouses on the south bank, grimy railway buildings, soft-drink factories, milk depots and wastes of cheek-by-jowl housing shimmering in the summer heat. ‘There’s Blue Moon,’ said Carol, and Laurie nodded, though to her the skating rink on the opposite bank was nothing more than a smear of greasy light.

  Respite was brief. They were flushed from cover by a jostle of boys, obliged to smile and look knowing and hazard a laugh at baffling jokes. Laurie left most of the work to Carol, who was more adept at it. She had a way of laughing – leaving her mouth open when she had finished, with a small movement in her throat, as if she expected more amusement to follow – that drew attention, unconsciously it seemed, to her ripe lips. Her hazel eyes, narrowed almost orientally by folds that hid the upper lids, were skimmed by eyebrows as neatly jointed as swallows’ wings. The composition gave her a certain look – not sly, but interior, as if even that soft laughing mouth, staying open, would not give everything away.

  ‘“In the Mood!”’ called someone. And moments later Glenn Miller’s hit blared out into the brassy midday heat. Heads lifted, and hearts lifted too. Feet began to tap and shoulders to pump. From out of the crowd, a grinning boy skidded up to Laurie and staked his claim with a perfunctory ‘Dance?’ and, as the perky syncopations loosened their limbs and they forgot their adolescent irony, dance they did, with the high spirits and freedom of kids.

  At the end, the lead trumpet capered dizzyingly to the C-above-high-C and the trombone’s witty come-down brought them all staggering to a stop. With her hair wild, her breasts untrammelled and her stocking s
eams errant, Laurie felt a warm kinship, not only with her undersized partner, but with all those other gawky, half-grown, sweetly odorous adolescents whose scent of sweat and Californian Poppy and Yardley’s Tweed mingled so intoxicatingly with her own.

  As they were leaving, Carol leant affectionately against her, her face averted, looking about.

  ‘I didn’t know your brother –’ But then in their excitement others pushed between them, the tune still ringing in their ears, heads still wagging, shoulders jigging, and her words were lost in the hubbub.

  iii

  In July 1960, Nan put a puzzled hand to her temple as she stepped from the shower and sank unconscious to the floor. Four days later she was dead. Laurie was in her second year of high school at the time, Tony in his last and Miranda still confounding the expectations of teachers at primary school.

  ‘But she was off to England,’ Grandfather Whittaker said in the first hours of his bereavement, and then later, with decreasing frequency, in the days and weeks that followed, as if this plan of hers was evidence that her death was an error that could somehow be rectified. ‘She’d already booked her passage. She’d gone through all that rigmarole to get her passport ready. Look, I’ve got it here.’ He’d fetch it from the bedroom and open it at her photo with shaky hands. ‘See, look at that. Now that’s a woman in the prime of life, wouldn’t you say?’

  Ten bewildered months on, Grandfather Whittaker, fifteen years her senior, quietly followed her.

  They left a small legacy to each of their grandchildren and divided the rest of their estate between their daughter in London and Rosie, who used the funds to settle debts, pay school fees and wire the River House for electricity. A stove, fridge and septic were also installed.

  Nan and Grandfather had left, as it were, without preparation, and the family reproached themselves variously for their negligence – for generosity overlooked, for affection unspoken, for laxity about keeping in touch. Nan, mettlesome farer of the world’s vanishing ways. Such a bright star in their firmament – had been, ever since most of them could remember – that the nights were darker without her.