The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  The discussion veered off onto dispossession and its consequences, about which there was broad, if uneasy, agreement. And that led on somehow to epistemology, where the conversational ice noticeably thinned.

  ‘Myth, knowledge …’ Tony had a slight frown, a hardening of the diagonal line that crossed his face from nose to jawbone. ‘Knowledge is a social construct. Ipso facto, when it comes to truth, there’s parity from one culture to another.’ Jerry kissed the air in demurral. ‘Another hand? Jerry, your deal.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Laurie, skating away from truth parity as she gathered up her hand, ‘if the stockyards were built on an old ceremonial site. A bora ring.’ She stared at her cards. Would it be possible to go misère with this hand?

  ‘Six clubs,’ bid Tony.

  Carol nodded. ‘That would explain the atmospherics,’ she said confidently. ‘S-i-x … hmm. No. Maybe seven hearts. You’ve sensed the spirit of the place, Laurie. The genius loci.’

  ‘Well,’ said Laurie, ‘I was thinking of it the other way around, really. I pass. It’s the sort of place that anyone would – would –’ But she’d lost her thread, for she thought she’d heard Vit stirring. A loud wail from the verandah removed any doubt. ‘That’s him,’ she said, pushing back her chair and laying her cards face down on the table. ‘Sorry, people.’

  Vit was standing in his cot in the dark, sobbing. ‘Mummum,’ he said when she picked him up. His hands were as cold as ice.

  Laurie took him to the bed, propped up a pillow and leant back. She felt each breast for fullness, lifted her jumper and tucked it under her chin, then scooped a breast out of her bra. Vit nuzzled in eagerly to her warmth. He was all but weaned now, but he still liked to suck for comfort at bedtime, or when he’d had a bad dream. She took his foot in her hand to warm it, for he had kicked his sock off, and his toes curled around her finger.

  If there had been no war, Jerry’s parents would not have brought him to Australia. If they hadn’t brought him to Australia, she and he would never have met. If they hadn’t met …

  The lights across the river were smeared by the old glass of the windows. Laurie gazed at them and felt that thirst at the heart which alloyed her contentment whenever the soft little mouth tugged at her nipple. In the kitchen the voices continued, but in an undertone, considerate of Vit. They seemed drowsy, Laurie thought. From the heat of the stove. Then something changed. The murmurs became a clipped exchange; one voice and then another swelled for a syllable or two and as quickly dropped to a whisper again.

  Vit’s sucking slowed. His mouth fell away from Laurie’s nipple and his breath came evenly. Laurie replaced his sock, laid him on his stomach and tucked him in his cot.

  ‘You seem to think,’ Jerry was saying to Carol when Laurie returned, ‘that wilfully believing something improbable is a sign of a bold imagination.’

  Laurie closed her eyes. Jerry, Jerry, she thought, have you forgotten that we are guests here?

  ‘No-o,’ responded Carol slowly, ‘but I do think that there are other ways of comprehending the world.’

  The cards had been forgotten. Maybe if she made a cup of tea …

  ‘Mmm? What sort of ways are you thinking of?’

  ‘Cup of tea? Anyone …?’

  ‘The wisdom of countless generations who knew how to listen, how to read subtle clues –’

  ‘Astrology.’

  ‘As one example, yes.’ Carol turned to Laurie. ‘Jerry and I are in deep dispute. He’s got me pegged as a brainless hippie.’ She gave a throaty little laugh. ‘We need your cool head, Laurie, to make us see reason.’

  Laurie did not feel cool. ‘What about Tony’s cool head?’ she asked, edging past Jerry’s chair to the counter, lifting the jug, waving it helplessly about – Tony had got up and was in the way of the tap – putting it down again.

  ‘Tony? Oh, he’s a hot head. Everyone knows that.’ Carol laughed again and blew Tony a sidelong kiss.

  Laurie edged back.

  ‘We’re talking about astrology,’ Jerry said, following her progress behind him and pulling her chair out for her. His courting attentiveness had become this – small courtesies. Habitual, no doubt, but also, perhaps, sentimental.

  ‘Astrology? Why are we talking about astrology?’

  ‘We were talking about Vit,’ said Carol. ‘When he was born. We got onto star signs, as an example of’ – she swept her arm in a wide gesture – ‘the whole universe of suppressed knowledge out there!’

  ‘Knowledge?’ said Jerry.

  ‘Suppressed?’ said Laurie.

  Tony, who’d been feeding banksia cones into the stove, pulled his chair out impatiently.

  ‘What Carol’s talking about is the dominance of the Western paradigm. Suppressing all others.’

  ‘We’re talking politics now?’ Jerry’s eyebrows made the inquiry also.

  ‘Everything is political,’ said Carol. ‘Ultimately.’ Her voice was muffled by her jumper, which she was in the act of removing. She was sitting closest to the stove, which was now roaring, flames licking out of the front of the firebox, and her face was flushed.

  ‘I thought we were talking about cosmology.’

  ‘We were. We are,’ Tony said, still with an edge of impatience, as if he’d like to be done with it. ‘Your version of cosmology is based on astrophysics. It’s really just another system of belief.’

  Jerry and Laurie looked at him.

  ‘Not belief –’ Laurie began.

  ‘No-o,’ said Jerry carefully, ‘it’s a matter of saying, “If this, then that –”’

  ‘But –’ said Carol.

  ‘That’s right!’ interrupted Laurie, growing loud. ‘What about predicting eclipses and comets and so on? The truth of the pudding’s in the eating, if you know what I mean –’

  Tony cut her short. ‘That’s astronomy. You and other orthodox scientists make certain unconscious assumptions –’

  ‘Oh?’ said Jerry. ‘Can you be specific?’

  ‘What I’m saying is there are many ways of understanding the cosmos, not just the prevailing one.’

  ‘You mean astrology?’ Laurie broke in. ‘You can understand the cosmos by means of astrology?’

  Tony shrugged.

  ‘Whatever happened to the Enlightenment?’ Jerry muttered, shuffling the cards, fanning them, dividing them, fitting them together.

  ‘As one example,’ said Carol. ‘There are countless others. By disparaging what to you are heretical paradigms, you can remain secure in your belief system. It’s quite quaint, really, the faith you’ve got in your theories. Don’t you ever – doesn’t it ever occur to you to doubt them?’

  ‘Doubt what? If you mean this or that theory, of course. That’s the scientific method. In a nutshell. But if you mean –’

  ‘I mean the whole scientistic enterprise.’

  Jerry sighed. Then he slapped the cards on the table and heaved to his feet. He strode over to the door and opened it wide, letting in a gush of cold night air. It tingled on Laurie’s cheeks. Outside was darkness.

  ‘Look,’ he ordered.

  ‘What are we supposed to look at?’ Carol asked, reluctant to leave the warmth.

  Jerry strode back in and gripped her slender arm. Laurie saw his fingers close around the smooth, rose flesh and her heart went stony. He pulled Carol to her feet and dragged her to the stairs. She put up a half-hearted resistance, feigning impatience, but Laurie could see she was caught up despite herself, drawn in by the theatricality of it all.

  Still holding Carol’s arm, Jerry indicated the darkness with a small toss of his head. In the starry sky, the clouds were as great as continents.

  ‘What do you see?’ he demanded.

  Laurie was watching keenly, regretting her background position, which gave her a narrower view of the sky, but unwilling to get up and follow them. To insert herself between them. Carol sighed.

  ‘Well, if you’re trying to get me to demonstrate my ignorance about astronomy, you’ve made your poi
nt. But that’s the Big Dipper, I do believe.’

  ‘Look again.’

  She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Do you see something moving?’

  She paused, staring up. She looked beautiful, with her head thrown back and her throat as pale as the throat of an animal sniffing the night air.

  Tony got up and stood with them, and Laurie followed.

  Among the throngs of stars spangling the sky, one faint star was moving, one tiny speck of light, travelling steadily through the darkness, sometimes lost in cloud and starry thickets, tracing a course across the black vasts.

  ‘Sputnik,’ she said, almost sulkily.

  ‘Sputnik,’ he agreed, conclusively, as if there was nothing more to say.

  The trance of the night held them until they began to feel cold.

  ‘And your point is?’ said Carol finally, moving inside. ‘A bit of space junk with a poor dead dog …’

  ii

  Though Laurie and Jerry spent only a year in the Annerley bunker, their time there was memorable for two things. The first was their dreamy convalescence after the accident on Grey Street bridge, which had the quality, in memory, of Beethoven’s ‘Song of Thanksgiving’.

  The second was the conceiving of Cora, which occurred towards the end of their stay there, one wintry night after Jerry had ventured out on a fruitless quest for a prophylactic. Vit, now fifteen months old, lay sound asleep in his cot, the south-westerly was rattling the louvres, and they felt the animal closeness of shared body warmth beneath the blankets. It was fairly safe, they told themselves, at this time of month.

  Six weeks later they stood in the cramped bedsit, turning first one way and then another, pointing at corners where a bassinet might go. It was impossible. They used the carefully mothballed legacy from Nan and Grandfather Whittaker to put a down payment on a cottage at Hill End, and within a month they’d packed their things and left.

  Gradually, in the weeks that followed, Laurie also conceived an idea. It grew within her, much (she thought whimsic ally) as her baby was growing. At first she was giddy with it, as if she’d just stepped out onto a cloud. Then she became practical. She made some inquiries, enrolled herself with a music teacher and one day came home with a second-hand cello, a full-bellied thing with a rich tone and honey-coloured wood.

  So it was that Cora spent her gestation snug-up against the cello’s bony tremor as her mother sawed away inexpertly at its strings. She slept her primeval sleep to it, and slowly, as the months passed, she woke to it too.

  In later years, Laurie asked herself why she gave the cello up. There were obvious reasons: two small children – with their midnight habits, their gumming of shoulders, their puke and drool, their incessant need for mashed pumpkin and nappy changes – and the filthy, arduous business of ripping up lino, sugar-soaping peeling walls, sanding, painting, and haunting second-hand shops for chattels with character. In snatched moments, Laurie would pull out her cello. But she struggled to draw music from it. For all her efforts she was never able to overcome her awkwardness, to loosen her deformed left hand, cramping on the strings.

  There was another thing that worked against it – her love of small things that express themselves in light. When she could, she’d drag the children along to the library, where she’d comb the shelves for works on fireflies or marine phosphorescence – books, unpublished theses – reading what she could over Cora’s small head and glancing at Vit’s picture book in response to his urgent stage whispers for her to look. Music and bioluminescence both occupied the same region within her, and they jostled for attention. Each, she came to understand, gratified the same urge to pay small things close attention and hold an evanescence in an ear or eye.

  She could no longer leave the children with Rosie, because Rosie now had baby Maris to deal with. Miranda, baffled, proud and weepy with fatigue, had returned to the parental home bearing in her arms a deep-red infant that cried sparingly and was slow to smile. Within a year she’d become a solemn creature with her grandmother’s sandy hair and fair complexion, and kittenish features that no one could source. The studio that Doug had built for Miranda in the back yard, now her flat as well as her workroom, was no place for a baby, so Maris slept, ate and learnt to walk in the main house, and lifted her arms to Rosie or Doug when she fell.

  Then there was Dossie.

  Dossie sat in a corner chair, a bundle of bird-bones, chirping brightly when spoken to, and then subsiding into a dim, unreachable reverie. At mealtimes Rosie tucked a bib under Maris’s chin and a napkin under Dossie’s. Afterwards she wiped clean two sets of hands – a pair of small starfish and two bunches of twigs.

  When Dossie died, Laurie felt an abstract sadness. They were all in the house at the time, summoned to say goodbye. Dossie had been installed in Laurie’s old room, the curtains, drawn to give her privacy, trapping the sickly sweet smell of the old woman’s decline.

  The morning she died there’d been a panicky struggle to the commode next to her bed, Rosie and Laurie helping, and with her nightie rucked up she’d folded heavily forward in a faint. Then, as they did their best to lift her dead weight, she raised her head and spoke in a clear voice:

  ‘I’d like to sit up in my chair.’

  And there they arranged her, supported by pillows and with a mohair rug over her knees.

  The house was full of people, but none of them noticed the moment, somewhere around ten o’clock, when Dossie’s clawed hands eased in her lap and her chin sank lower on her chest.

  ‘Don’t wake her,’ Rosie said when Laurie went to offer Dossie a sip of tea, but at the sight of Laurie’s face she understood, and she moved without delay to Doug. Maris, who was testing the eccentric motion of the traymobile, looked up from her work and stared.

  Laurie’s mind fastened on the unneeded cup of tea. What to do with it seemed an insurmountable problem. Someone – Jerry – relieved her of it, and she was able to sit on the floor next to the chair and take her grandmother’s papery, still-warm hand in her own.

  Doug surprised her by briefly sobbing. He spent the rest of the day reaching out an arm to draw someone close – a wife, a daughter, a grandchild. Later he tidied his sorrow away, put it at the back of a drawer behind his socks, Laurie imagined, where it could be found if he needed to refer to it again. In the days that followed, Laurie’s heart was wrung by the way his reading glasses caught the light as he went through the papers, frowning, sorting them into piles, throwing most of them away.

  ‘I remember the story you told about Dossie and the eggs,’ she said.

  Doug looked at her over his glasses, then went back to his work, laughing silently.

  Perhaps she’d missed the point. Perhaps what mattered most was something else. Not possibility, not fragility, not the stopping of time. Perhaps what mattered most was the knowingness of Dossie’s hand, reaching out to pluck an egg from its airy arc, as if it knew, without computing them, the precise equations of projectile motion. And the man’s hand knew them too.

  Nineteen seventy-one was a year for babies, not only Maris and Cora but also Inigo, Tony and Carol’s firstborn son. It held the children together, this arbitrary link of year-of-birth, against the centrifugal pull of their personalities.

  At a Roger Woodward recital Laurie caught sight of Ursula. She was wearing boots, long earrings and a stylish cape in Robin Hood brown. The urchin haircut showed a shapely cranium. She was with a man. Laurie had to look again. It was definitely Ur.

  She found her at the interval. The men were introduced, they discussed the Chopin piece, inquired what each was doing now. Ursula was just back from Edinburgh, where she’d been studying neurobiology. She was looking for a place.

  ‘We must catch up,’ they promised, gripping each other’s hands. Thinking they should. Knowing they wouldn’t.

  iii

  January 1974

  The people coming up off the beach were looking back over their shoulders as Laurie and Jerry, encumbered with bags, towels and tw
o small children, trudged up the path through the dunes that led to the Broody Heads surf. Every few steps they stopped and waited. Vit was on his hands and knees, pushing his Christmas digger through the sand behind them, taking his time.

  There were more people lined up on the low frontal dunes, looking out to sea.

  ‘What’s up?’ Jerry asked them.

  ‘Someone’s in trouble,’ they said.

  It was very hot and still. The sunshine was dazzling and the sky intensely blue, and the needles of the she-oaks hung unmoving.

  The coastal road came right through to Broody Heads now, and they’d followed it – longing, because of the heat, for a dip in the sea – straight here, without crossing to the River House first.

  It had been touch-and-go whether they’d come at all. Jerry had been reluctant. On Christmas Day the old frontier town of Darwin, hardy veteran of war, had fallen to a chance configuration on the weather map. Even the untrained eye might have read doom in that vortex, had there been some way to divine its erratic course.

  Far to the north and twenty degrees west though it was that Tracy wrought her devastation, the cyclone’s aftershock was still sending people in south-eastern Queensland to their radios for the latest weather bulletin, to be reassured that, collectively, they had the measure of the natural world. At the Weather Bureau, everyone was roused and fidgety, some drifting restlessly from station to station, some compulsively checking the telex machine, others poring over the calculations on their desks. Plotting the development of lows in the Coral Sea.

  On the other hand, he’d already arranged his leave. And Laurie was very keen to go.

  ‘We need the break,’ she’d argued. ‘When are we going to get a chance again? And we need to check the house. No one’s been near it since the Reconciliation Holiday. How long ago was that? Three years? More?’

  And so they’d come in the January heat. It was a slow trip in heavy traffic, and the children were fretful. The engine was in danger of overheating; the vinyl upholstery stuck to their thighs; the road ahead was an endless dazzle of sun on metal, a migrainous disturbance of vision. Every window was wound right down to catch the gush of hot air on their faces. Early in the long, stop-start journey, they began to dream of the moment when they would leave the stifling car and enter the spritz and fizz of the Pacific Ocean.