The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  Rosie became consumed by the need to document her parents’ lives. She ransacked cupboards, garages and ancient trunks, uncovering mouldering collections of memorabilia and extracting letters, snapshots, postcards, newspaper clippings, house plans, deeds of sale, licences, passports, diplomas, concert programs – evidence that these two had once been vividly alive. Mostly she was businesslike, and there were times when she’d crow with pleasure when she’d tracked down a birth certificate or traced the provenance of a pressed rose. But sometimes, coming across a photo of Nan on a long-forgotten outing, clamping a fly-away hat on her head at a windy lookout point, or a recent shot of the two of them smiling straight at the camera as they stood arm-in-arm among trellises of zucchini in their mountain garden, Rosie would lose her sense of purpose. Her shoulders would sag and for minutes at a time she’d cover her face with her hands, possessed by who knows what regrets and memories, her elbows slipping on unstable hillocks of primary source material.

  But the money came in very handy. To Laurie her parents’ candour about this seemed almost indecent. All three children could now be sent to Grammar without financial strain, and small luxuries could be bought – a television set, for example, with a cabinet of Queensland maple. Freed from money worries, Doug let himself dream a little, and the Coolacane project underwent a revival.

  iv

  August 1961

  Sky above, sea below.

  ‘I don’t want to think about going back to school,’ Carol moaned. She was lying on her back with one knee bent, gazing up at the clouds.

  Laurie’s only reply was a grunt that was lost in the warm crook of her arm. The sun and the breeze blessed her all down her bare back and legs, to the soles of her feet. The warm winter sun.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I’m not going to think about it,’ Carol concluded, and flung her arms into the grass above her head. She was such a slight thing, lying there in her red-striped shorts with their buttoned-up cuffs, her breasts just a suggestion of softness on her ribcage, her stomach sinking down almost to her spine.

  Laurie’s contentment was alloyed with yearning. It was a feeling that was with her most of the time. Sometimes regret was its dominant tone. Sometimes expectation. Sometimes – when, as now, the sea lay spread below her – sometimes a kind of dissolving, such as mystics and drunks must feel.

  Thinking about it made her sit up and hug her knees. All she could see of Carol now was her legs, and even as the paleness of the blade of her shin and the boneless softness of her small foot faintly repelled her, she felt a longing to take her in her arms and lie with her in the warm grass.

  ‘I can’t believe some of those girls, though,’ Carol was saying behind her. ‘Can you?’ Her voice came lazily from the back of her throat. ‘They’re so conformist.’ She flopped over onto her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows, and chewed a stalk of paspalum. ‘Even Ursula. I mean, she’s such a brain, but all she ever thinks about is exam results.’ She spat daintily.

  ‘Mmm,’ Laurie grunted. There was not the faintest hint of breeze.

  ‘We’re the odd bods, Laurie. You and me.’

  Just sky and grass. Sunshine. Sea. She was really too drowsy to reply.

  ‘I think’ – Carol’s change of tone showed that she’d found a deeper current in her ruminations – ‘people think they’re happy, but they’re not. You know? Lol? They’re – you know? Docile. I mean …’

  But Laurie was thinking counter-thoughts – about that August fortnight a year ago when they’d cleared the groundsel. Where had it gone, that peace? Dad and Tony had fallen back into their old edginess as soon as they’d got back to Brisbane. Sometimes it was Dad to blame, sometimes Tony. Mostly Tony. Being moody. Citing facts. The truth was that they were all strangers to one another. Now here was Carol, quoting Tony and getting him wrong …

  Waiting for her to respond.

  ‘I am, yet what I am, none cares or knows …’ Laurie said.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘John Clare.’

  ‘But you know what I’m saying, Lol –’

  Laurie sighed and stretched out again, closing her eyes, listening, through Carol’s pursuit of her point, to the sea’s moan. She loved that poem. It was so satisfyingly melancholy. The grass below; above, the vaulted sky. It spoke of her aloneness.

  ‘It’s like being a bird compared with being a – cow. Soaring through infinity’ – Carol waved a theatrical arm – ‘while … I’m not saying Ur isn’t brilliant. God. She is. She’s brilliant. But, you know …’

  She’d paused. Laurie could hear the rustle of grass as she stirred. ‘Don’t you feel that? You know, that being alive is –should be, that is – a process of self-realisation. There is some essence in us, isn’t there, and life is – I don’t know –’ Another pause. ‘What do you think?’

  Laurie’s arm was being tickled with a stalk of grass. She opened one eye to look at her tormentor. The question, the way Carol presented it, vaguely irritated her, not so much for its fumbling over-reach, as for the echo in it of Tony’s voice. As if she had access to his thoughts.

  What was Carol saying? Essence? What was the question? Something in her rebelled. Against its high tone. Its scorn for cows.

  Carol kicked Laurie encouragingly. ‘Come on.’

  Laurie didn’t react. Carol might admire Tony, and borrow his phrases, but she was completely ignorant of the fundamental facts of his life. Of the things that Laurie knew. She was old, old with the knowledge of them.

  ‘Ignorance is bliss,’ she muttered.

  There was a story her father told about when he was a boy. ‘The farmhouse had a verandah on three sides,’ he’d begin, ‘looking across the yard to the canefields. If you spotted a hen coming out of the cane too often, it was a fair bet there’d be a clutch of eggs in there. Anyway, this day, there’s Dad on his horse, standing in his stirrups, tossing eggs from his saddlebag up to Mum, and she’s leaning over the verandah railing, laughing, catching them with her free hand and stowing ’em in her apron – she’s got the hem of it gathered up in the other hand to make a bag, see. And she’s laughing like a girl.’ He’d chuckle himself at this point. ‘She was slim as a reed then. And there she was, laughing like a giddy girl.’

  It made Laurie smile too. She thought about telling Carol, but she would try to make a lesson out of it, so Laurie kept her mouth shut. She didn’t want it interfered with.

  Something about it she loved. The fragility of eggs? The recklessness of tossing them? Or was it simply that the two of them – one now dead and the other old – were once young, and once so completely and gaily absorbed in their little game that, for its duration, they had annulled the future and all its sorrow?

  But Carol had been speaking. Laurie left her thoughts to attend to the words in her ear.

  ‘Do you always think in clichés?’ was what Carol had said.

  For a moment Laurie was puzzled. Then she remembered and was silent. Ignorance is bliss, she’d said, meaning something by it, but knowing even as she said it that she was destroying the moment of intimacy between them, much as a boy might idly crush a small bird’s egg.

  Carol adapted well to the privations of the River House, which, thanks to Nan and Grandfather Whittaker’s legacy, had been reduced to its remoteness, a lack of privacy and the inconvenience of a downstairs shower and toilet. She was charmed by the old wood stove, which they used on the cold nights and sometimes even in the mornings, when a white wall of mist, storeys high, rose from the river just feet from the house. In Tony’s presence she was subdued, but there was such a crowd of them in the little house that her silence was unnoticed.

  Tony was rather silent himself. A uni student now, he belonged to a separate race, communicating with the rest of the family sparingly. ‘Groundsel,’ he’d sometimes call from the yard, jangling the car keys, and be gone for hours at a time. When they heard the growl of the car returning, a pinkness would slowly colour Carol’s cheeks. Sometimes he did the wr
enching and hefting while Doug coddled the pump, and he and Doug spent one tense morning breathing acrid fumes as they softened bitumen over a fire – Doug commanding everyone to stand clear – and smeared it over the patches of rust and moss where the tank had leaked.

  On those days when Tony came with the rest of the family to Broody Heads, he’d leave them to themselves, preferring his own company. Mostly he’d paddle his Malibu far out beyond the breakers, becoming one of the anonymous seal-shapes that gathered where the rollers formed as they rounded the point. Sometimes he’d just disappear. Once he was seen far down the beach, walking hand-in-hand with a girl they did not know.

  It was apparent to Laurie that, despite the dark fuzz and intermittent outbreaks that coarsened his skin, her brother was attractive to girls. The contours of his face and his black-lashed eyes made him seem indeterminately exotic. ‘Where’s he from?’ people asked on the quiet. From the look of him he could have come from the Balkans, or further east, in the ethnic impenetrability of Soviet provinces south-east of the Caucasus. He had dark, shaggy hair and a sharp nose with winged nostrils. His chin was pointed. A discernible line crossed diagonally from in front of the cheekbone’s prominence to behind the mound of the jaw muscle. The angle saved it from being a line of sorrow. It became, instead, faintly barbaric, suggesting savage determination.

  Before the holiday was over, Tony left and hitched a ride back to Brisbane. ‘To leave more space in the car,’ he said. It was true that the trip up had been cramped, Miranda being crammed among the luggage in the back with nothing but a pillow for padding and Carol wedged between Laurie and Tony on the back seat so that their bones ground together with every swerve and judder.

  After Tony left, Carol’s silences became longer and deeper. Never a keen surfer, now she was apathetic about making the crossing to Broody Heads, and when there she preferred to amble along the shoreline – beachcombing? daydreaming? – while the others swam. ‘It’s too cold,’ she said, and brushed her hair from her face. She leant close to Laurie to confide, ‘It’s the curse.’ Laurie, who’d been privately irritated by Carol’s wan indifference to everything, felt a pang of remorse. She would atone by bringing Carol a morning cup of tea in bed – and was buoyed by the contemplation of her own thoughtfulness. By nightfall, though, the impulse had passed, and it was only out of a sense of loyalty to her earlier resolve that next day she rose early, filled the jug, scratched the sandfly bites on her arm as it boiled, and in due course set a mug of tea on the windowsill near Carol’s sleeping head.

  A strong south-easter brought scudding rain on the morning they left. They had to run to collect the towels from the line and wait for breaks between the squalls to carry the luggage down and load the car. The bush was loud with wind and rain. The river had turned grey. Doug settled himself in his seat and rubbed the inside of the windscreen with his fist.

  ‘We’re going to have to look to those stumps next time,’ he said in an aside to Rosie. ‘The ant caps are rusting out.’

  As the car bumped across the yard to the track, Laurie turned to the rain-streaked car window for a last look at the River House, standing closed against the weather and the coming emptiness. Carol looked back too. Rosie was giving instructions to Miranda to rearrange the gear in the back in accordance with Doug’s instructions, and Doug was reaching out of his window to pick leaves off the windscreen, where they’d been caught in the wipers and were arcing squealingly back and forth.

  ‘You three comfy back there?’ Rosie asked.

  ‘Yes thank you, Mrs Carlyle,’ said Carol, looking back over her shoulder so that her voice was almost lost. The trees on either side stepped in to cut off the view of the house. Nothing but bush then, obscured by rain, and the long road home.

  v

  Ursula rose up on her toes and for a moment hung there. Her head was thrown back, her left arm beseeching the blue while her right arm, angled back at shoulder height, slowly gathered power behind her. Laurie, watching from the sidelines, paused in her thoughts.

  There was a sharp, ringing report, and then from the other end a theatrical groan.

  ‘Ace!’

  ‘Bindi-eyes!’ Scott Warburton loudly lamented, hobbling over to the fence for support and examining the sole of his foot.

  ‘Why’d you take your shoes off, then?’ Ursula called. She was at the other end of the court, gathering up stray balls. Her skimpy bodice gaped, showing a raddled chest bedewed with perspiration.

  ‘Lace broke,’ Scott muttered, his voice muffled by the intensity of his focus on his foot.

  ‘That’s it!’ called Carol as she carefully descended the rickety umpire’s chair. ‘Game, set and match!’

  Someone brought hot buttered pikelets and tall, sweating jugs of iced barley water. Jasmine lavished perfume on the deepening afternoon.

  ‘What time was the bus, did you say?’ Ursula asked, looking along the empty street.

  Laurie followed her look wistfully. ‘I thought one would’ve come along by now,’ she said. ‘I don’t really know. It’s Sunday.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They stood in silence. The street was in shadow. Only roofs and treetops caught the sun. Laurie bounced her racquet against the ball of her hand, testing the cat-gut acoustic. Ursula swished at a ragweed.

  With two falling notes a distant magpie signalled its retreat to a high tree.

  Ursula cocked her head at Laurie. ‘How far do you reckon it is to –’

  Laurie anticipated her. ‘Wouldn’t be more than two, three miles to mine, a bit more to yours.’

  The racquets stilled.

  ‘We could walk it.’

  ‘Let’s.’

  Ursula set a smart pace, which suited Laurie, with her longer stride. First they discussed the game, and then – the words huffed out of them by the next hill – the deficiencies of the court.

  ‘It’s the jasmine on the (puff) back fence,’ said Laurie, thinking how lovely the scene had been, with the afternoon shadows falling across the court and the low sun glorifying the tennis whites that moved against them. ‘Throws shade in that corner. Grass won’t grow. Only (puff) –’

  ‘Bindi- (puff) eyes?’

  ‘(Puff) bindi-eyes.’

  They discussed reaction times, and the parasympathetic nervous system, and the upside-down image that falls on the retina, while the virginal scent of a rondeletia wafted to them from someone’s garden and made them think of other springs, when they were younger, and a single star came out in a beryl sky.

  Then they fell to talking about thoughts, and how they rose in the brain.

  The police found Miranda emerging dazed and blinking out of the gloom of the Carlton Theatrette and into the dirty, bustling, afternoon light of the city street. She could give no good account of what she was doing there, or why she’d been watching hours of continental films. Had someone accompanied her there? Had she been alone? Where had she got the money?

  ‘I just walked in,’ she said, laughing winningly. ‘No one stopped me.’

  ‘She’s lost her way,’ the teacher said. ‘She’s becoming wayward.’

  ‘You can expect all sorts of changes as she approaches puberty,’ said Dr Fearnley. ‘It may be advisable –’ He stopped.

  ‘Yes?’ said Rosie.

  ‘Remind me to have a chat to you some time. These things have a way of catching us unprepared.’

  Rosie frowned. ‘I dislike circumlocution, Robert. Speak plainly.’

  He coughed. ‘I was just going to suggest that it may be advisable to have her fitted with a cap.’

  ‘A cap?’

  ‘Cervical cap. Contraception.’

  Rosie breathed out slowly. ‘Robert. She’s barely thirteen.’

  Miranda submitted to her parents’ counselling. She seemed compliant.

  ‘Why don’t you get back into your drawing? You used to enjoy it so much. Would you like us to enrol you in art classes? We could get you some decent materials. An easel …’

  ‘You don’
t have to worry,’ she assured them. ‘I’m okay.’

  But then she took a rail motor to Toogoolawah and was given a bed for the night by the widow of the Presbyterian minister, who, as she was locking up the School of Arts hall after a piano lesson, had noticed a child in a school uniform dawdling with no apparent destination along the wide, quiet street.

  There were occasional rages, too. A saucepan flung at the door. An easel upended.

  ‘It’s damage to the prefrontal cortex,’ Laurie informed her mother, who was putting the groceries away. Rosie started.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘The prefrontal cortex. That’s what Ursula says. Damage to that part of the brain makes people impulsive. They don’t think things through.’

  ‘And how does Ursula know this?’

  ‘She’s a brain. She reads up on stuff.’

  Rosie returned to her task. She spoke into the cupboard, where she was stowing packets of this and that, so her voice was muffled.

  ‘I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to discuss Miranda’s problems with your friends, Laurie.’

  Laurie felt chastened. That conversation about Miranda was the first time she’d really talked to Ursula for ages. These days she saw so little of her. It was a shame, because Ursula was interesting. She spoke good sense.

  Ursula’s name had been shortened by her intimates to Ur. Laurie and Carol had a standing joke about this, which they recalled to each other with an extended arm and a small flourish of the hand.

  ‘Hey! Hey!’ one of them would say, and strike a formal pose. ‘So-and-so, may I introduce you to … Ur …’ and they’d fall about in helpless giggles, which Ursula bore with wry good humour.

  But there’d been scant opportunity to introduce Ursula to anyone recently, or torment her with affectionate silliness. The trouble was that Ursula went to State High so it was only at tennis that their paths crossed. There was a sturdy independence about Ursula. She was indifferent to fashion, treated boys as friends or rivals and had her hair cropped rakishly short for swimming. Her only adornment was small gold earrings, which – so Laurie and Carol agreed – she’d probably been born with.