VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Victoria University of Wellington
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Copyright © Vincent O’Sullivan 2018
First published 2018
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ISBN 9781776561797 (print)
ISBN 9781776561407 (EPUB)
ISBN 9781776561414 (Kindle)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
National Library of New Zealand.
Published with the assistance of a grant from
Ebook conversion 2018 by meBooks
For Fiona
Some of the people
Ruth (Babcia): b. 1903.
Sarah: b. 1907. Eva’s mother.
Ellen McGovern: b. 1912.
Eva: b. 1927.
Stephen: b. 1925.
Lisa: b. 1947. Stephen and Eva’s daughter.
David: b. 1951. Stephen and Eva’s son.
Esther: b. 1975. David’s daughter.
Fergus: b. 1944.
Milan: b. 1969.
Breslau was a German city close to the Polish border, largely destroyed by the Soviet army towards the end of World War II. The Potsdam conference in 1945 assigned the city to Poland, when it was renamed Wrocław.
ALL THIS BY CHANCE
Contents
1947
1948
1968
1976
1978
1979
2001
2002
2004
1938
1947
When as a youngster David asked his father what was it like then, when they had met, what did she tell him about the train for instance, or before the train, his answers, as his grown-up son would tell him, slipped away as though he were the one being looked for, hunted down. And as the boy grew to the man who demanded more aggressively, Stephen told him how so little of the past was there, could he not see that? It was not a tide that went out and then returned. It became a sea that did not exist. But at the time he had used an image that he thought the boy with his grasping for what was gone might understand. He said you must imagine what it would be like if you took fragments chipped from a mosaic and handed them to someone, and expected him to know what it was, the picture it had been taken from.
‘Or her,’ the boy insisted. ‘Expected her.’
‘And in any case, David, you are asking me to give you what isn’t mine to give.’
The boy understood little of what was said to him, any more than did the man he became and forty years later pestered still, watching as his father’s hands no longer trusted themselves to raise a cup without carefully attending. Yet even then, he would say to the alert but frail man, ‘Love. You shy away from saying that as if it would scald you.’ And the old man would tell him simply, ‘Very likely,’ thinking how those as close as he and David might like to be, pass without comprehension.
In the beach house out on the coast, with the long constant haul of the surf coming up to them, David rose from the chair facing his father, angry as he so easily became, to stand at the big window, his forehead against the pane, fists in his jacket pocket. His father looking past the middle-aged man to the strident green of the hills and the patches of black bush. The strain that would never end between them. It saddened him, as did the silence so often in the room with them, as if a third person who could no more leave than he and his son might walk through the glass into the afternoon’s late glittering light. He did not say, because the truth of it would rile David even more, ‘You want more than any child can ever have. You cannot become your parents. Let alone the parents before them.’
He did not especially care for the successful impetuous man he had fathered. A fact of life that one accepted. He watched him at the window there a few feet in front of him, David’s resenting the room he stood in, perhaps as resentful, his father supposed, of so much that lay beyond it. They said little to each other for several minutes. Then David turned and crossed the room and leaned above the old man to press his lips to his forehead. ‘I know I should let things rest,’ he said.
His father’s hand rose to brush at David’s wrist. He hoped that at least might please him.
When the boy used to insist, ‘But you must remember something when you first arrived,’ his father had laughed and said, ‘It stank. England stank.’ It shocked the boy that he had come out and said so, and thought his father teased him. But that was it all right. How it had first struck him. The old world with its reek of ash.
Unlike the fellow passengers he had nodded to, and the handful he found he could speak to without too much shyness by the journey’s end, he had expected nothing, and so was neither surprised nor disappointed. On the long weeks sailing across there had been so much chatter in the dining room, then in the big lounge with its leather chairs where some passengers played bridge or dominoes or sat and ordered another round from the white-jacketed stewards. Those last few evenings, the talk of places with names like King’s Lynn and Saffron Walden, and jokes about the East End and snatches of songs as someone went and sat at the piano, songs about the Old Kent Road, or following the van, lines that amused or saddened those who stood round the pianist with glasses in their hands, but none of it meaning much to him beyond the strangeness, and his own sense of loneliness, even as they kindly drew him into the sense of fun. The older men offering to buy him a stout, for good luck’s sake. And that curious feeling, the apprehension he had woken with each morning since the hot green encroaching banks of the canal at Panama, and the brightly painted houses and the church where the far wall glittered with cascading gold, where they had gone ashore for six hours and his first proof that there was somewhere else. But now it was ‘the home stretch’ for most of them, or others who called it home even though they had not been there before. Each morning as he woke and lay watching the grey dipping sky through the porthole with its thick brass fitting, he thought, I am further away, further each day, rather than I am closer, closer to whatever it is we are coming to. But that word further carrying no more regret for him than did closer move him to much sense of excitement. From a place that at times he hated, to a place he knew nothing of.
Then through the stillness of the fog in these last two days when they had taken on trust the announcements over the loudspeaker that the coast was out there, the Lizard if only they might see it, and Land’s End, as it might be told to a man whose sight had failed. And into the greyness of the estuary, the fall of flattening light on water the same colour as the air. The shape of England there in cranes and the spread of wharf sheds and the first small figures of men working heavy ropes, and the flung uncoiling thud of the loops hurled out from the ship, and the call of voices from the crew to the men running and placing them across the bollards at the wharf’s edge. The ship’s slow swing across the narrowing strip of churning water. But it was not this first swift taking-in of what the other side came down to after six weeks of sailing towards it, this mesh of what seemed already descending dark, although it could not be that, not yet; nor the men’s high voices calling above the engines’ thrum that most struck him, nor the toy scale everything seemed to take on from where he stood on the deck, and London disappearing off into haze. ‘There’s no end to it,’ the quietly spoken Cornishman who had shared his cabin for those long waiting weeks had remarked that morning. Not size nor the meagre light nor the strange voices that so came home to him, the n
arrow streets with their identical houses almost right up to underneath the ship.
‘It stinks,’ he had said, to a stout woman with tears in her eyes who stood beside him and moved away when he spoke. He meant not even the soft odour of rot coming up to him as the ship drew in, the debris and flotsam on the scud of water beneath them. He realised his words were more a question than a definition. It was not decay nor squalor that came in on him, but something not yet defined. A soft nudging wind now carried a drift of rain across the deck. Stephen drew the collar of his gabardine coat closer against his throat. Ah, that was it, he thought. It was the heaviness of ash pungent with rain. The smell clawed the back of his throat. He feared that he might retch at the clogging press of it, so close it seemed as if a cloth drenched with it were held against his face. And the realisation surprising him, almost as if a physical shove thrust in on him what was so obvious, and yet had not occurred to him until now. He had come to a city where war still trailed in the air. That was what he smelled.
He was glad to leave the ship, and the bonhomie he had never felt at ease with. He carried his one suitcase and followed directions a steward who was also a Londoner had given him when they talked together a few nights before. These were written for him on the folded square of ship’s stationery he carried in his pocket. The streets, the buses, the Tube stations he might look out for. To walk on land again, even that felt strange. The lights from shops and the big streets tipped into a brightness that was like something on a stage rather than for real, although he had never seen a stage if it came to that, except as they sometimes came up when they were part of a story at the pictures. Yet that is what so much was like, looking out from the bus window. As everyone on the ship had said, London was like nothing else. It was the centre. It was where whatever happened was bound to be new to you. That is what Will the Cornishman had warned him of. Just let things happen, he had said, just keep a sharp eye.
He had waited with other people at a bus stop, watching for the number written on his piece of paper to arrive. He saw the lights stretch out like ribbons and jog across the river, and the first buildings that he thought he recognised from photos he had seen. From the lids of cake tins even. Or ones like them anyway, because London was like itself, over and over again. And what struck him most, the buildings that were only partly there, the snapped walls and broken angles and piled brick, and the smell of ash that must be there, although he knew that might just be in his mind. You see dead broken buildings, great burned-out chunks, you imagine ash. It came in on him that this is what winning must look like. To make it like this and make it worse for someone else until they stop, and so you’ve won.
He changed buses twice. People were helpful if you asked them, although not easy to understand. And in a hurry. You expected that. The way you expected the sky to be glowing right across, because London was the capital, even its sky. It cheered you up, Will had said, you knew a city was safe if its sky reflected like that. He looked forward to the sky as much as anything, going back after years away. London at night, he said again. Although he didn’t mind the stars, once he was down back home. Don’t get him wrong.
Stephen rubbed at the window with his sleeve. The rain began again, but lightly. It was more a veil trailing across the traffic than what you would call rain. But the wetness on things shone. The branches of trees slicked and shining with it. And the brightness of the buses slipping past. All so good to look at. The circles of mist around the street lights, softening them. Then the road the bus was on became a bridge, and a long train slid beneath, the rails running between rows of houses banked on either side.
The conductor touched his shoulder. ‘It’s a long walk back,’ he said, ‘if you don’t get off here, lad.’ It was the street he had asked for nearly half an hour back. The short jolly man’s hand in the bag he wore across his shoulder, stirring its coins as he called out stops and joked with passengers. ‘Keep your curls dry,’ he said, as Stephen stepped down with his suitcase into the sad attempt at rain. Then a quick moment of regret, which was hard to explain, as he watched the bus move off into the night, the lights from the shops smearing streaks along its sides.
He walked back twenty yards. He saw a clock that confirmed it was not quite six o’clock. It felt as though it might be ten. He knew the number of the shop he was looking for, in fact he had known it before the ship pulled out weeks ago on a blustery morning and the dome of the post office at the top of College Hill and a church spire that must have been Ponsonby Road, the last things he recognised before the city fell away, and the departed coast thinned out. There was the number now on a strip of glass above the doorway to the shop. So this was where he was meant to be, where Mr Lewis in his blue bow tie, his black Homburg hat, had promised him he would arrive at, as they talked in Shortland Street months before. Mr Lewis with his great eyebrows, like a joke someone wore to a party, his passion that his students get things not simply right but exactly right, because lives depend on that, never forget, on measurement, on precision, on following exactly what they had learned. Pharmacy is not a trade, gentlemen, it is a calling. There are people, Mr Lewis assured his evening class in the wooden annexe in Symonds Street, people who will come into the premises you hope one day to work in, who will never afford a doctor. They will trust you to listen carefully. Listen with patience and courtesy but most of all with skill. As he also would tell them while they looked back with incredulity, there is nothing to fear in examinations, it was the privilege of knowledge to be tested, that even potassium, say, to take an element at random, was a wonder in itself, as was every other word he instructed them on. He was easy to make fun of, with his accent that was like a comedian’s waiting to make them laugh, and the finicky care of his dress, the thick black-framed glasses above a nose that could have come with the exaggerated eyebrows from the Joke Emporium in Karangahape Road. Mr Lewis who had no notion of the kindly mockery when at the end of one term his class gave him a large Cuban cigar as a present, for he never went to the cinema, nor knew how his dignity, which meant much to him, teetered on the edge of ridicule. But Stephen liked him, and Mr Lewis liked him back. Without assuming more closeness than was proper between teacher and pupil they would at times talk a little after class, and the pupil sometimes helped to tidy the room where a dozen other young men, and one middle-aged woman, two evenings a week, learned the privileged mysteries of the ancient craft of pharmacy, as he so insisted they call it. ‘Chemist’ was a misnomer they were wise to avoid. At least Stephen and Miss Clifford understood. Theirs would be an ageless gift, to make the world a better place.
‘So, London?’ Mr Lewis said. ‘So soon as next month?’
Stephen told him, ‘I fight with my father every time I see him. Better to get out of it altogether.’
‘The war’s hardly over. It won’t be beer and skittles.’
‘I have to go somewhere. I don’t know anywhere else.’ Even to himself, as he said it, the curious sadness of what his life must sound like putting it like that, the thinness of it, which was not what he meant. He meant a place to learn about other things.
Mr Lewis stood silent a moment, as though surprised that he might be confided in. He tapped at his glasses. Then ‘Away is sometimes the best,’ he said. He wrote a name and address on a piece of paper, an old and good friend he said from when he was his best pupil’s own age. Before that, even. A friend to whom he would write. ‘It is always good to have a contact,’ Mr Lewis said. ‘It is an easy place to get lost.’ And Stephen knew without it needing to be explained that the man in front of him, with the kind of tie you saw no one wear except in photographs of Winston Churchill, with a face people sometimes smiled at, was the kindest person he had met. They shook hands and Mr Lewis did an unexpected thing. He put his other hand on Stephen’s arm and drew him towards him, so slightly that their shoulders barely touched, and he then turned and walked up the hill, each of them too embarrassed to have known what to say. The number he had written for him there in front of Stephe
n now. In gold, on glass that was black like tar. And swirly, dragony, so old-fashioned it must have been up there a hundred years.
This then was where he was meant to be. In the window in front of him there was a huge glass bottle, almost the size of a man, full of lime-coloured liquid. The stopper was as big as a head. The door Stephen opened was divided into squares of orange-tinted glass, and along one wall of the space he entered were shelves cluttered with an array of differently shaped cardboard boxes. Below them were rows of wooden drawers, with handwritten cards set in metal slots, and brass clasps to slide them in and out. The names on the cards were abbreviated Latin words. The mysteries of the craft, Mr Lewis had liked calling them, the words he insisted to his students they must become as familiar with as with their own names.
A man seated behind the counter looked up as he entered, a wire running from above the door tripping off a tinny ringing. As he moved, a dot of reflected light slid across his balding head. He stood, both hands pressing on the counter as though to help him rise. He wore a white smock and a plain dark tie, and gave the impression of formal tidiness, although within those few seconds Stephen took in how the shop could do with a thorough tidying up. Then as the man walked towards him, he saw that he was not as old as he had supposed, although his face was hatched with deep lines, as though a fine net pulled back against the skin. There was a name for that condition, Stephen thought, I should remember that. He would look it up.
‘Mr Golson?’ Stephen asked.
The man looked at him without speaking, and nodded to his suitcase, meaning him to set it down. Then after what seemed a long time, he said, ‘You must be the boy.’
‘What boy’s that?’ An edge of truculence in Stephen’s voice, which embarrassed him. But he disliked the man saying that to him.
The man surprised him then by laughing, shaking his head as if to say, We’re off to a bad start here then, aren’t we just? ‘I don’t know what I expected. What kind of native old Nat had sent me.’ And noticing his visitor seemed more disconcerted still, he rubbed the back of his neck, as if pondering where he might go from here. ‘So,’ he said. A finger tapped at the bridge of his spectacles. He was a man who fidgeted. The light continued to slip across his moist baldness at each move. ‘So this is what they look like out there, is it? If they grow up eating decent food?’ He continued to laugh, a curious almost soundless opening of his mouth, a slight tilting back of his head.
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