It could not be denied that Inigo had natural authority. Laurie felt a prick of resentment, aware of Vit still blinking at the taste of his bubbly, unsure what to do with his lengthening arms and legs. Inigo, by contrast – a conservative born – had received from his grandfather the mantle of privilege and wore it without shrinking from the obligation it conferred on him to please himself whatever the consequences. As now, standing among the crowd in his blue shirt, bestowing an occasional smile of recognition.
The blood tie between the cousins was too weak to account for their closeness. Yet there it was: Cora, Inigo and Maris, gravitating towards one another, taking on the task of explaining one another to uncomprehending outsiders, counselling, correcting one another. Comforting.
M. Saliba had ceded his place to another speaker amid a pattering of applause. A woman now, a slight, sparkling creature all in black, was extolling Miranda’s skill with oratorical piquancy. Perhaps it was the heat of the lights, but Miranda’s cheeks were flaming, so that she looked a goddess in her jade velvet, eclipsing even her oeuvre.
‘How’s school?’ Carol asked as the speaker concluded and they were gaily dismissed.
Laurie gave a wry look. ‘Well,’ she began, ‘I’ve been trying to get them interested by talking about the Fibonacci sequence, but –’
‘Fibonacci what?’
‘Sequence. It’s a pattern of numbers that oddly enough describes the development of all sorts of different organisms. The classic example is the whorl of a seashell. It seems to me –’
But Carol’s gaze had gone scouting among the crisscrossed lights and shadows. Laurie stopped. She’d have liked to give Carol her thoughts on this melody of numbers that underlay the order of so many natural forms.
Rosie, seeing Carol, came over and kissed her cheek. Carol flushed.
‘Where’s Tony, dear?’ Rosie asked her, a hand still on her arm.
‘He’s coming, Rosie.’ Carol lifted her glass to her lips.
‘Didn’t he come with you?’
‘No, he was caught up. Don’t worry.’ She coughed daintily. ‘He’ll be here.’
Moving off, Carol brushed Laurie’s shoulder with hers and, her eyes on the next painting, said in a low voice, ‘I didn’t want to say anything in front of Rosie, but Tony’s involved in something big.’
‘Big?’
‘Yes. He’s organising a Reclaim the City squat at South Brisbane. You know all that area where the flood went through, where all the cheap housing was? Well, they’re planning to sell it off to developers –’
‘I heard there was some talk of –’
‘Yes yes, I know. That’s what they say. But the bottom line is, the people who used to live there are just being shoved aside. So what we’re doing is we’re reclaiming the old buildings there –’
‘What, like Jack Mundey and the Green Bans?’
‘Exactly. We’re – well, Tony – is occupying one of the old Burns Philp warehouses near the dry dock, with –’
‘Several red dots already!’ Doug confided, passing by.
Laurie waited until he was out of hearing. ‘When you say “occupying”, do you mean living?’
‘Exactly. He’s –’
Laurie was stirred by a dark, pleasant tremor. ‘You mean he’s not living with you? You’ve separated?’
‘No! God no! This’s just while he gets the movement off the ground. I’d be there too if it weren’t for the boys …’
‘What are you two gossiping about so intently?’ whispered Rosie, coming by with a pleased smile. Not really wanting an answer.
‘Listen to this, Jez,’ said Laurie, folding back the Saturday paper. Her feet were resting on the lower rail of the verandah so that her legs would catch the winter sun. She paused for a slurp of coffee.
‘Carlyle’s work is ardent and, one is tempted to say, artless. But “artless” would be misleading. These are bold, unaffected canvases, but they combine disinhibition – an almost animal flamboyance – with a painterly understanding of the shimmering possibilities of chromatic dissonance. Carlyle’s technique is not so much raw as glancing, and the result is a celebration of surface, reality’s skin, repudiating (this reviewer, for one, is relieved to note) the current lugubrious enthusiasm for art-as-scolding, for opaque and spurious reproof.’
Jerry snorted.
‘Wait. There’s more. Yet these canvases are blandishments of paint, lambent seductions, and one comes away with the disquieting conviction that for all their flights of rapture, the pixilated play of light disguises quicksand.’
Miranda’s next exhibition, called Animalcula, veered off from the beatitudes of her first. Her canvases became restless. Densely inhabited.
Carlyle has moved to some other dominion since she burst on the scene with her exuberant semi-abstracts in Skid. Not so much inchoate as elemental, these moiré canvases pay homage to unseen lives. One is never sure whether one is peering into the ocean that encloses a creature, or whether the creature encloses the ocean …
vi
Laurie was uncertain what her project was. Evidently it wasn’t teaching. She gathered up her specimens, bedding them down in cotton wool in a box. Earlier she’d set them up as stimulus materials, thinking to infect the class with her own infatuation. But the girls were languid, witless, mulish, and she entered the staffroom with a dull head and burning feet. Her mug was on the draining board. Was her project children? Bioluminescence? Was it love?
They all looked up as Laurie entered. There was a moment’s pause. Through the tall window the sky had a dirty yellow tinge.
‘That wasn’t your brother, was it, Laurie, in the paper?’ Deirdre Fletcher asked. ‘Anthony Morgan?’
Even now, after – what? – six months here, walking into the odour of other people’s lunches made her feel an interloper. Not quite one of them. It was obvious she’d interrupted something, that Deirdre’s question was meant to settle a point.
‘Yes,’ Laurie answered, spooning out coffee, filling her mug at the urn, ‘that’s him.’ Milk. ‘That is he,’ she added, in a mildly ironic nod to Deirdre’s position as English subject mistress.
‘Someone said it was, but the name –’
‘He’s my half-brother. He’s decided to use his father’s name. Biological father, that is. His name was Morgan.’ She found herself a place at the table.
Nicole Crawford indicated Laurie with upturned palms. ‘Didn’t I say!’
‘What’s his point, Laurie?’ Penny Charleton asked. She was picking the tomato from her salad roll and placing it carefully on a wrapper.
‘I knew Tony way back, at uni. In the mad sixties,’ Nicole explained to no one in particular.
‘Are you really as old as that, Nicole?’ piped up Roma Williams from across the room. ‘I would never have guessed. You look fourteen.’ She rolled her eyes.
‘What’s he trying to achieve?’ persisted Penny, wiping her fingers on a tissue.
Laurie sipped at her coffee to buy time. She felt forced onto the back foot, obliged to present a case that wasn’t her own, to people whose interest was idle at best and at worst malicious.
‘It’s a social experiment. His point is to demonstrate other ways of living in society. Come up with social arrangements that will reduce people’s isolation. Alienation.’
Thunder rumbled distantly and all heads turned to the window.
‘Urban commune,’ Penny said, still with her eyes on the dust-hazed distance.
‘Yes, urban commune.’
‘But,’ Penny said, returning her focus to the room, ‘he’s plainly not getting his message across if he’s got to have people like you to explain it.’
‘Some people get it,’ said Nicole, with a little shimmy that squared her shoulders.
‘But,’ said Penny, sticking to her theme, ‘why defy the authorities? If he did things legally and didn’t turn it into a slum –’
‘It was a slum already,’ rejoined Laurie.
‘That’s right,’ Ni
cole affirmed. ‘It was.’
‘What about the drugs? LSD and so on?
‘Oh –’
‘And he’s squatting –’
‘No, no. At least, not entirely. He’s bought a couple of derelict warehouses –’
‘Not just him,’ Nicole gently amended. ‘It’s a principled organisation –’
‘Oh, come on, you lot!’ groaned Roma. ‘No more politics! I want to enjoy my break!’ She had shed her shoes, rucked up her skirt and hung her legs over the arm of her chair, quite unabashed by the exposure of her dimpled thighs.
‘So these warehouses –’
Roma made a megaphone of her hands. ‘Did anyone,’ she called, ‘see that new comedy series –’
‘Shh, Roma.’ A frown came and passed on Nicole’s forehead. ‘I want to hear what Laurie’s saying.’
Laurie took her cue reluctantly. Privately she disapproved of Nicole’s practice of making chums of some of the girls – her control-by-coterie – but felt a pulse of gratitude now. ‘Well, all I was going to say was he’s drawn up some blueprints – they’re quite visionary, really. He’s imagined such beautiful details!’
‘What? A model village? Like the ones those nineteenth-century philanthropists built? There was one – whatsisname?’ Deirdre closed one eye to help herself remember, and the talk veered off onto William Morris, and wallpaper, and whether butter is better than honey for burns.
‘But the squatting?’ persisted Penny.
Roma yawned loudly, blinked and dabbed her eyes.
‘Well, they’ve expanded into a neighbouring building, yes. But it’s empty. Derelict. The owners live in Melbourne, or somewhere –’
How stuffy it was in this room! Laurie considered the window, which she knew from experience was hard to budge, wondering if there was any point in trying to worry it up a bit higher. In the distance, lightning flickered silently.
‘But if everyone did that, just moved into anywhere that took their fancy –’
‘It’s a fair point,’ said Deirdre.
‘No, it’s not!’ Nicole cried. ‘He’s not doing it for his own benefit! He –’
But the bell was ringing, and everyone had stopped listening. Chairs were pushed back. The women rose, sighing and brushing the crumbs from their skirts.
‘There’s going to be a storm,’ someone said.
Laurie rinsed her coffee mug. Arguments were still churning in her mind. ‘You may not agree with my brother’s methods,’ she said, ‘but his aims are pure.’
‘His aims are pure,’ repeated Penny, with a slight increase in the emphasis on aims. ‘But what are his motives?’
‘I don’t think Tony could be accused of ulterior motives,’ Laurie replied stiffly.
Ulterior motives. Dit-dah-dit-dit dah-dit.
The rhythm of the syllables stayed in her head for the rest of the afternoon and set the lessons to its tune.
CHAPTER 12
Deltaic strand
i
1985
Cora sat on the edge of the pool and rubbed the lump just below her knee. Her eyes were screwed up against the light bouncing off the water and perhaps the ache in her leg.
‘Couple more laps?’ suggested Laurie. Her daughter slid dutifully into the water.
Laurie stood with Cora’s towel over her folded arms, watching the little flurry of splashes recede to the far end of the pool.
It was easy to pick her among the others grimly ploughing the lanes. She had a good, easy style – even now, when she was tired – each arm arcing in turn to slice the water ahead with a barely perceptible body-roll for breath, confident that water, as well as air, was her element. Confident that she was watched.
She reached the end and, with a flash of something that could have been a grin or water-thrown light, back-flipped for the return lap. She was at home in the limelight – here, with an audience of one and a few onlookers, or up on a stage, adapting herself (long bones, wrist joint, spine) to the cello’s exacting disposition. The insect angles of her bow arm, the masculine spread of her knees, feet planted, head dipped, eyes downcast. It was her ability to perfectly occupy a passion, to fill it to its edges, that drew your eyes to her.
Her stroke had slowed. She touched home with a horsey blow and a toss of her dripping locks. With a squirm and a hop she was out and stood gleaming, shedding water at the pool’s edge, reaching for her towel. It was only when she padded haltingly off, towel-wrapped, to the dressing-room, leaving a trail of uneven puddles on the concrete, that you saw she was lame; that her infatuations came with a cost.
‘Fifty-four laps, Mum!’ sang the retreating figure, not turning her head. She raised both arms, beating the air with splayed fingers to semaphore the sum.
Cora it was who had introduced Dennis, a scruffy mongrel of disarming sociability, and, later, when she was twelve – after sketches of rampant steeds had littered the house for a year – a four-year-old bay with a pretty face and an evil temper.
Laurie jingled her keys and surveyed the rows of parked cars giving off heat waves in the afternoon sun. There, abandoned by the shade she’d parked it in, was hers. Jerry always gave in to Cora first, Laurie was thinking. He’d read those dreams in his daughter’s shining face – of hooves pounding through the wash of the waves and the sand flying … Laurie opened the door to a blast of heat and trapped aldehydes. She hastily wound the windows down. In fact Monty had been agisted at acreage on Brisbane’s western outskirts, and weekends were spent trying to lure him with apples until he was within reach of a bridle.
Then, when Cora was thirteen, the fall. Weeks in hospital with pins in her tibia. Leaving her with a limp and returning her to the cello. ‘She likes big things between her legs,’ Miranda observed coarsely.
Laurie backed the car out and drove it through the ranks to the entrance, handling the steering wheel gingerly. Poor Cora! Monty had had nothing but disdain for her blandishments. A vicious bite to the biceps muscle of her bow arm put an end to her efforts to win his heart. It was a love that would never be requited. Laurie’s smile was grim, remembering. Monty grew white-eyed and shaggy at the far end of his paddock, until he was sold at last at a peppercorn price to a horse dealer of the old school.
Cora wept. Then she retrieved her cello from its corner, limped over to her music stand, pressed open the page of her Bach suites and, with a swipe at her nose with the back of her hand, began to play. Her fingers took their shape, her arm was poised. On the delicate swell of the biceps muscle, which flexed and eased with the long, slow strokes of the bow, were two raised, puckered arcs, forming a broken circle. They had the brutal symmetry of a cattle brand.
The fact was, Laurie had been preoccupied then, when Cora had her fall, with Arachnocampa flava. Glow-worms. And increasingly – face the truth of it – with Mick Goddard. It was he who knew of a place, up near the Queen Mary Falls, and led a small expedition of naturalists there. He who …
Because it was best to view the glow-worms in the dark, they were to have stayed overnight. Sleeping bags. Roughing it. They’d been up there, following wallaby trails, when Cora, suspecting, perhaps, something Laurie had not quite allowed herself to think, tipped herself off Monty’s insurgent back and brought Laurie racing – hair-pinning the Subaru down the range, flogging it over the darkening undulations of the Fassifern Valley, at last riding the clutch through the stop-starts of Brisbane’s suburban streets – home.
Weeks at Cora’s bedside, while Cora, her face a mask of ecstasy, scratched beneath her plaster with a knitting needle. Reading her Jane Eyre. Sharing grapes. Eating remorse.
ii
May
The phone was ringing.
‘Laurie? I’m in a bit of a sticky position. You might not know this, but I’ve sunk all Nan’s money into Cosme and now the Expo heavies are stalking us. Ted Smythe’s put money into it too, and some of his relations are getting snakey, and –’
‘Hold on a minute, Tony. I’m not following this …’
&nbs
p; ‘Okay. You’ve heard about the court case?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘And the appeal? The thing is the legal fees look like being pretty steep, and –’
‘I thought it was pro bono!’
‘It was. But things have got to a point now where … There are debts. There’s been a lot of unforeseen expenses.’ His tone was dry. ‘It wasn’t a matter of choice.’ There was a release of steam in Laurie’s ear. ‘The thing is, I’m wondering if you can help me out. I thought maybe the Teachers’ Credit Union … I’d pay you back, of course, as soon as –’
‘How much do you need?’
He was huffing again. ‘It’s … hard to say. Fifteen thousand. Maybe twenty.’
‘Tony! We haven’t got that kind of money! Not to spare!’
‘Right.’
‘Look, I’d help you if I could, Tone, but where –’
‘I thought maybe the Teachers’ Credit Union –’
‘But I’d have to put up some security. We’d have to – what? – borrow against the house?’
Tony was silent.
‘That’s a risky thing to do. I’m not happy –’
‘Yep.’
‘I wish I could help you, but –’
‘It doesn’t matter. Forget it.’
‘What about Carol’s father? Hasn’t he got plenty stashed away? He always gave me the impression –’
‘Forget it.’
‘Doesn’t he own a block of apartments in Hamilton? Shares? He’d scarcely notice –’
‘No.’
‘– and I’m sure he’d – Wouldn’t he want to keep the father of his grandchildren out of trouble? Maybe you could –’
‘Laurie, give it a moment’s thought. Do you really see me going cap-in-hand to him? That self-satisfied old reactionary? Forget it. I’ll think of something.’
The River House Page 29
