The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  In those Primitif days, Laurie tried conscientiously to become a smoker. Smoking was a way of occupying the long intervals of aloneness. And beyond that – beyond, also, its elegance and ritual – smoking had more subtle attractions that Laurie, initiate to sensuality, was now alive to. It was homage, she dimly felt, to appetite, a delicate debauch. But the burning sensation at the back of the throat, the foul aftertaste and the sheer scandal of wilfully filling her lungs with acrid smoke made her falter. And at last resign herself to failure.

  Sometimes Tony came to the Primitif, sometimes not. Sometimes someone passed around a homemade cigarette with a twisted end that smelt sweetish, like chaff burning. It was, Laurie learnt, a joint. A reefer. If it came her way, she’d accept it with private, middle-class misgivings about germs, and puff on it once or twice to little effect. Once, however, she found that her head grew light, and at the same time everyone else became very small and distant – not simply everyone else in the room, but everyone the whole world over – leaving her vastly, irredeemably, alone.

  The word ‘hip’ was also passed around. Laurie gathered it meant ‘knowledgeable’, though of what was never made clear.

  Now and again Carol came. She sat with Laurie, looking about, her long hair shining in the candlelight.

  But mostly Laurie’s memory of those Primitif days was of the aching gulf between herself and Dale. Of his remoteness, just over there, sitting at the piano. Of the pain in her back from sitting so long on a stool. Of loneliness.

  It was their habit, when at last they left, to find a shadowy place to kiss. Clearly Dale had earlier given thought to where to go, for on each occasion he would lead her to a better, more private spot, and there they would move into an embrace and all conversation would cease.

  At home Laurie would mention, casually, ‘Dale says …’ or ‘For instance, Dale …’ The reward was saying his name aloud or, better still, hearing it said by others. She was cunning, leading with a mild criticism – ‘Of course, Dale’s no good at small talk …’ – in the hope of provoking a comment from her mother. But Rosie’s usual response was ‘Hmmm,’ followed by a maddening non sequitur. ‘In the holidays,’ she would say, ‘we must make it a project to …’ or ‘The capacity for surprise shouldn’t be underestimated.’

  This time she said, ‘Laurie, don’t set your heart on being a CSIRO biologist.’

  They were washing up, and Rosie paused after delivering her side-blow to fish a handful of knives and forks out of the sink and dump them on the rack.

  Laurie poked her glasses back on her nose. ‘Why not?’ Her throat was hollow. Her voice came out of a hole.

  Rosie mentioned strings and bows. Laurie persisted.

  ‘The CSIRO doesn’t employ married women,’ said Rosie.

  Miranda, who’d been mooning about and getting in the way, woke up. ‘Since when?’ she gasped.

  ‘Since it became an issue. Not as full-time staff, anyway.’

  ‘I wouldn’t tell them then,’ Laurie replied. Who’d mentioned marriage anyhow? At the word, her thoughts went homing back to Dale.

  Rosie gave her an unreadable look in reply. ‘I’m talking about eventually. Eventually you’re likely to get married. And if you were working at the CSIRO you’d have to leave.’

  ‘Why on earth?’

  Rosie shrugged. ‘It’s policy. Have you thought about teaching? You could combine your biology with teaching.’

  ‘Female teachers get sacked when they get married too,’ Tony informed them. He’d been clashing pots and pans in the cupboard. Now he kneed the door shut with satisfaction. ‘They sack ’em at the end of the year and re-employ them at the beginning of the next. That way they don’t have to give them holiday pay.’

  Miranda stopped turning her head from speaker to speaker in astonishment and flung down her tea towel. ‘I can’t believe that!’ She spun to the door and back. ‘That’s totally unfair! What have they got against women?’

  ‘Don’t shout, Miranda,’ said her mother. ‘It’s the way of things. Men provide. Meanwhile, regardless of your indignation, there’s drying-up to be done.’ Laurie would have joined in with a joke against her sister, but her mind was elsewhere. Rosie gave Miranda an encouraging nod and returned to her point. ‘What makes teaching a better prospect is that girls’ schools do employ married women. That’s why I’m suggesting it. Keep your options open.’

  Rosie ran water into the sink, wiped it clean and polished it with a tea towel. ‘We all,’ she said, giving the tea towel a flap and hanging it out to dry, ‘need to cut our coat according to our cloth.’

  According to our cloth … The cloth being measured out by that revered institution, that devotee of life’s verities, the CSIRO. Here guilty of injustice. Rail against it as she might, there it stood. For the first time, Laurie contemplated a swerve in the plotted course of her life, a concession to the imperfections of reality. And was surprised to find herself facing it with equanimity.

  She’d grown, that was the truth of it. Fresh preoccupations had taken hold. She’d cracked the old shell open and, a little raw, perhaps – oh, very tender – she’d crawled out and left an unregretted cast behind.

  The tongs Laurie was drying went snap snap snap at the air. Her mother took them from her and put them in a drawer.

  Laurie stood empty-handed. ‘But I don’t want to be a teacher,’ she said.

  iv

  Towards October, Dale and Laurie saw less of each other. The exams that had seemed to Laurie no more than a formality at her schooling’s distant end now became a biblical reckoning. Dale was absent from the house for a week at a time and his phone calls were brief. They no longer went to the Primitif. Friday nights and Saturday afternoons became just hours in a timetable, to be allotted, in Laurie’s case, to French or Maths I as her schedule ordained.

  She sat at her desk until late at night, bent over her books, pulling off her glasses to rub her sore eyes, standing and pressing her fingers into the small of her back to relieve the ache there, pacing about, reciting the atomic number of elements in the periodic table. Only occasionally taking a snapshot of Dale out of her drawer. Studying it. Putting it away. There was something bracing about the self-denial of it all, about the late nights, the buzzing head, the rigour of hard facts.

  Laurie thought of Dale, similarly occupied, and she saw their parallel bondage to systems beyond their control as a kind of rarefied comradeship. At the same time, she couldn’t help but feel piqued. Dale’s passion for her was clearly not so powerful as to over-ride his pragmatism. ‘Meal tickets’, he had said, disdainful of degrees in bourgeois universities, and Tony had agreed. Yet now his head was down. While Laurie listened for the phone and Tony dreamed up iconoclasms for next year’s Architecture Revue, Dale was cloistered, out of reach. How did he reconcile the two sides of this schism in his soul? Where, in this scheme of things, did she fit?

  And then, after the exams, it was Christmas. Dale was called back to provincial Warwick by his father to pack Christmas hampers at Cavours’ Soft Drink and Cordial Factory. In the new year he was needed to help with the installation of new plant. (‘And your mother?’ Laurie asked. ‘My mother? Oh, she took off before I was five. When she didn’t come back the story was she’d died. Could have been true.’)

  Dale and Laurie kept in touch – by phone while Laurie was still in Brisbane, and then, when the family had gone to the River House, by mail. Laurie pestered her father to let her take the car over to Teebah on the pretext of buying supplies so that she could check for letters at the post office. In the end he yielded, though he worried about the rough road and the steep bank on the other side.

  ‘That’s not Wiley Street out there, don’t forget,’ he said. ‘And be careful not to scrape the exhaust as you drive off the ferry. Take it at a bit of an angle.’ As she left, he shouted, ‘And watch the tide! If you leave it too long the tide’ll be so low …’ He ran after the car. ‘You hear me, Laurie? Head back before three!’

  After
the first time, fetching the mail and picking up supplies became accepted as her job.

  There’d usually be two or three letters, sometimes four, waiting for her – brief, almost terse lines written in thin, black architectural lettering, like annotation on a blueprint, a summary of Dale’s day or a wry mention of an incident at work, sometimes including no endearment at all, but sometimes ending with a delicate reference to the sweetness of their time together, and how it filled his dreams.

  v

  1963

  Laurie was pacing the corridors, breaking into a run, searching for the lecture theatre where the posted timetable told her she should be.

  When at last she’d joined the hundreds in the desks that swept up to a dizzy altitude above a dwarfed speaker, it was hard to keep her mind on what was said. Here she was in a new wing of the extended campus, planted with young eucalypts and smelling of fresh concrete. Architecture, on the other hand, was somewhere lofty in the monumental sandstone original. There, strangers were eyed curiously.

  This was what she had longed for. University. In Laurie’s mind that sandstone edifice, reposing under blue skies atop a paddock of shorn summer grass, stood less for learning than for the liberty to love. Its cloisters, she’d dreamed, would be the backdrop to a meeting of bodies as well as minds. No more would she and Dale be cramped by suburban proprieties. They would have the space to reach out, breathe free, live true.

  But what she hadn’t grasped was the scale of the place. The torrents of students pouring out of lectures. The endless corridors, doors leading off to rooms dedicated to labours she had no knowledge of. She could usually be sure of finding Carol, though, queuing for coffee in the refec. They stuck to each other like two stray atoms, anxious to become a molecule in all the formlessness.

  Dale, lips firm with purpose, led her to places he knew – empty lecture theatres, prac rooms, out-of-the-way corners, storerooms. They’d fall to kissing while their feet were still shuffling for space among equipment and supplies; but just as the rest of the world ceased to exist, voices would sound along the corridor. Coming their way.

  At about seven-thirty each night, the phone rang.

  ‘That’ll be the Monitor,’ Miranda would say, meaning Dale, whether in allusion to the lizard, or to the elect among pupils who did the teacher’s bidding, or, more obscurely, to the spirit of surveillance, Laurie was unwilling to ask. Like Tony, Miranda seemed to feel the need to invent a nickname for Dale, as if by that means to dig him out.

  At the ring, Laurie would leave the dinner table and, turning her back to the rest of the family, put her ear to the receiver. ‘Hello,’ she’d say softly. Then she’d hear the coins clank down into the box on the other end of the line.

  ‘Don’t let your dinner go cold,’ came Rosie’s weary call.

  Dale boarded with his aunt, who ran a motel in an outlying suburb on the south side. For the sake of privacy, Dale used the phone booth on the street outside. Laurie could hear him taking a pull on his pipe as they talked, or shifting his position so that his voice, at first contained by the walls of the booth, took on a larger amplitude, as if he was looking out at the street, and she could picture the cars passing, and the occasional bus. On her end, the TV jammered in the background, and her breath was humid against the mouthpiece.

  ‘Hmm? What’d you say?’ they’d murmur in unison. ‘No, I meant …’ And sigh, and fall richly, yearningly, silent. They dreamed, voluptuously, of finding an unoccupied room in the motel, but were daunted by the difficulties – stealing a key, dodging the aunt on her rounds, leaving no trace, beating the giddy slide of time.

  vi

  June

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Rosie muttered, arrested with dinner plates midway between dining room and kitchen by the image on the TV screen.

  Tony and Laurie appeared from the wings, Tony from his room on the verandah, Laurie from the private byways of her thoughts, which she’d been following for some time while her biochemistry textbook lay open on her desk, her eyes on the ellipse of light that came and went on the page as she twisted her glasses under the lamp.

  It was a moment or two before Laurie could take in what she saw, and when she did, she shut her eyes and turned her head away. The urgent commentary did not spare her.

  ‘… gasoline, flames shooting skyward and dirty, billowing smoke. You can hear the sirens now … set himself alight at a downtown Saigon intersection, the latest and most shocking protest against the government of Ngo Dinh Diem, widely condemned as corrupt … This is a desperate …’

  The image remained on the retinas of Laurie’s closed eyes. An unsteady, black-and-white image, elongated because viewed from the side, of a car with its hood open, people in robes standing back, fire and filthy smoke. And something quite unthinkable.

  Someone sitting quietly in the street, burning.

  Miranda passed into the room, on her way from somewhere to somewhere else. She’d grown distant, as if she dealt with her unpredictability, even to herself, by dropping her old lustiness, abandoning her ambitions, scattering her focus.

  Then she crept back in.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ she whispered. Her voice rose. ‘Mum!’ she screamed. ‘What’s he doing?’

  One evening Laurie and Dale found themselves down past the bus depot among the shadowy, shuttered warehouses of the deserted Roma Street markets. The place smelt faintly of rot, of cabbages and over-ripe oranges. Trains thundered past on the nearby line. And under a deep galvanised-iron overhang, pressed up against the great, rough-hewn timbers of a loading bay, Dale’s hands worked in under Laurie’s clothes and found her flesh. At the same time he was unzipping his fly, and the erection that until now had always been an unacknowledged ridge against her, baffled by his clothing and hers, was candidly, dismayingly, exposed to the grimy air.

  She took hold of it awkwardly, uncertain of how firm her grip should be but moved to something like pity by the velvet softness of the skin over the tough, sinewy shaft. Almost immediately something warm and sticky filled her hand.

  Dale groaned despairingly.

  vii

  1964

  ‘Did you see Tony?’ Carol asked one day early in the new term. They were juggling their books and coffees as they scanned the crowded refec for a couple of spare seats. ‘He’s handing out leaflets with that Clive Hennessey. In the quadrangle. Here, have a read.’ She handed Laurie a crumpled foolscap sheet, filled back and front with cramped roneoed type.

  ‘Who’s Clive Hennessey?’

  ‘He’s in the Politics Department. I’ve got him as a tutor. He’s in the Fourth International. He’s a Trotskyist.’

  ‘Trotskyist?’ Laurie spotted a couple of seats nearby and wove through the crowd towards them.

  ‘A kind of Marxist.’ They hooked the chairs out with their feet and sat down, unloading their coffees and books on the sticky laminex tabletop. Laurie smoothed out the leaflet beside her cup.

  ANOTHER COUP, ANOTHER DICTATOR! WHY DOES THE US OPPOSE FREE ELECTIONS IN SOUTH VIETNAM?

  it began.

  Carol was reading it sideways. ‘He’s big on class analysis …’ she murmured. ‘Clive Hennessey …’

  Laurie skimmed the piece as she drank her coffee. The prose was as dense as the type. There was something about French colonialism and the battle of Dien Bien Phu, World War II, the Geneva Accords … National Liberation Front … Australian ‘advisers’, mentioned in scathing quotation marks. The Fourteenth Parallel …

  The opening question was answered at the bottom of page 2:

  IN DULLES’S WORDS – ‘BECAUSE HO CHI MINH WOULD WIN’

  Laurie caught sight of Tony on her way to the Biology building. He was with a small group of students, handing out leaflets and by snatches raising his chin to address the passing crowd. The sun beat down in the quadrangle and most of the activists were keeping to the shade of the colonnade, darting out occasionally to accost a student taking a shortcut across the browned-off grass. There was an air about them – of
collective purpose, and also, attractively, of transgression.

  Tony, as light-footed as an Indian in moccasins, was holding forth about the infamy of the United States and some students had begun to drift over to listen. Laurie drifted with them.

  ‘Go back to Russia!’ shouted someone from a safe distance.

  ‘Something wrong with your knee, cobber?’ a wit retorted. ‘Jerking like that?’

  ‘Just shows how much you know, mate!’ called Tony, stabbing a finger over other heads at the distant heckler. ‘The Kremlin’s no friend of the revolution!’

  ‘Carm off it!’ This from another quarter. ‘It’s no secret that Moscow’s behind the Viet Cong. You lot, too, probably!’

  Tony’s teeth flashed in a pitying grin. ‘Hear that?’ he asked of the crowd, and gestured broadly. ‘That’s the level of debate you can expect here. Excuse me, mate, but who’s your authority? The National Civic Council? Bob Santamaria?’

  ‘The Reader’s Digest!’ someone yelled, and sniggered.

  ‘Ever heard of the KGB? Well, it was the KGB put the ice pick in Trotsky’s head, so don’t try to tell me –’

  ‘Get a haircut!’ jeered another, making a megaphone of his hands as he passed. Laurie saw him smirk, pleased with himself, and move through with a swagger to his shoulders.

  ‘Don’t try –’ Tony halted. There was a brief flurry and a making of way among the radicals as a short, balding man came forward with a sad inclination of his head. He stood before the crowd and gazed at the ground.

  ‘Comrades,’ he said, and lifted his eyes. A stir passed through the crowd. Clive Hennessey. Laurie glanced around her in surprise. They meant him, this middle-aged fellow with the diffident manner and soft jowls.

  ‘No – sorry, sorry –’ People had to strain to listen. ‘I say “comrades” because I am suggesting you ask yourself where, objectively, you stand when you come to consider the contradictions inherent in this society – contradictions of which this war in Vietnam is just one manifestation. Historically, the intelligentsia have had a special relationship to the working class. The universities are part of the superstructure of capitalism, and their function is – now I’m going to use a Gramscian phrase – their function is to manufacture consent. Hmmm? You follow? Because – sorry –’ and indeed his expression was sorrowful, ‘I can’t take you right through the full analysis here, but I’m asking you to consider this critical fact: It is not possible to have socialism in one country. The forces of national liberation in Vietnam will not succeed while the US and its representatives, such as Australia, remain in the grip of the imperatives that drive the military-industrial complex. You follow me?’