by Alex Miller
John screwed himself around now, his cap pushing into the fabric of the roof, and he squinted back at the door of the café. Sabiha standing in the light waiting for him to get going, clutching her cardigan around her and watching to see him off. If only she would come home with him to Australia, his life would be perfect. Or near enough to perfect. There would still be the problem of the lack of children. He wanted children too, but, unlike Sabiha, he was relaxed about having them, confident their children would come when they were ready to come. Whenever he thought of their children, which was more often than Sabiha gave him credit for, John imagined them running around the playground of the school he’d been teaching at before he came to Europe. He couldn’t imagine their children going to school in Paris. He had no images in his mind for schools in Paris. He didn’t know what the children of Paris did from day to day. He didn’t know their games, their slang, their secret signs. He had never been inside a school in Paris. He didn’t want his children growing up thinking they were French. France was okay. He didn’t have a problem with France or the French, but he didn’t want his kids missing out on growing up Australian. He wanted his children to be like him. If they grew up in Paris they would not understand their father’s love for Australia. Whenever he tried to explain this to Sabiha she got upset. It had reached a point recently where they couldn’t talk to each other about children without one of them getting upset. For Sabiha it wasn’t just children, it was one child, a daughter. ‘Why not a son as well?’ he asked her. John didn’t care what sex their children were so long as they were healthy, happy Australian kids growing up in the sun, the way he had. He wanted to take them to the farm, and for them to know and love his mother and father and the country where he had grown up. He dreamed of showing them the fishing holes along the river, and the good swimming holes. The places where he and Kathy had swum when they were children. If his children grew up in France they would be strangers to him and to his country, and he couldn’t bear the thought of that.
In her most recent letter his mother had asked him the question which he knew she had been wanting to ask ever since he’d called her that day and yelled down the phone at her, ‘I just got married!’
‘Oh, that’s lovely, darling, that’s really lovely! What’s her name? She must be a treasure to have taken you on. Give her a cuddle from the pair of us.’
Now at last, almost two years on, she had brought herself to ask him the big question: Is there any sign of a little one yet? Your father and I can’t wait to be Granny and Grandad. I don’t think your sister’s ever going to meet a man good enough for her, is she? You know what I mean. So you’re our only hope. How does that make you feel? It’s a stupid question and I shouldn’t ask it. But we do wonder, that’s all. Neither of us is getting any younger. Your father wants to put a deposit on a unit in Moruya, but I’m not keen on the idea. It feels like planning our own funeral to me. We’ve had one of our best years since you left. The trout have come into the creek again and the eelers are coming by every night with their lamps and driving the dogs crazy. I shall hate to leave the old place when the time comes. Your father amazes me. He’s more realistic than I am. You and I always were the dreamers, darling. I hope you’re still dreaming. I know I am. Silly me.
There was something about the tone of his mother’s letter that made John wonder if everything was really going quite as well as she said it was. The idea of his mother and father living out the end of their days in an old people’s unit in Moruya, the farm in the hands of strangers, depressed him.
He engaged first gear and let out the clutch. There was a high-pitched screech and the van moved off with a jolt. He was away. The smell of his cigarette and the warm pastries in the back of the van. He took a last quick look at Sabiha in the doorway, his hand raised.
Chapter Nine
Sabiha shut the back door against the cold and walked across the kitchen to the stove, the smell of the van’s exhaust sharp in her nostrils. She was frozen. The oven was still warm from the morning’s baking and she stood with her back to it, listening to the rattling of the van’s unsteady old motorcycle engine receding down the lane. Then it was gone, suddenly, as John turned into rue des Esclaves. She had a moment to herself. The kitchen was quiet, the tapping of a loose windowpane against the timber frame. She closed her eyes and stood warming herself. Houria was singing in the bathroom. Houria had a big velvety contralto voice. She was singing a French song. Houria never sang the old songs of her people. She did not know the songs of her people as Sabiha knew them. They were not hers. She had not received them from her mother, that mysterious discontented woman who had been Sabiha’s other grandmother. Houria sang for Dom. For the two of them. For the life they had made together in Paris. And sometimes she hummed a tune, not quite breaking into song, but humming to herself.
Sabiha was in the middle of washing up the pile of pastry trays and mixing equipment when Houria came into the kitchen and put the coffee on. Houria’s spiky grey hair was standing on end, still wet from the bath, her plump cheeks rosy, her beautiful dark eyes bright with wellbeing. They had both been up for hours before her bath, baking the biscuits and sweet pastries for John to deliver in the little three-wheeler he had bought last winter, when the cold was keeping a lot of their customers away and the baking business had begun to go downhill. Orders had picked up once they had the van and customers no longer needed to come to the café to collect their pastries.
Sabiha kept her head down when Houria came in, scrubbing at the hard pastry residues on the trays in silence, going at it as if the job needed all her strength and concentration, burnishing corners that had retained their oven stains for years. Houria dried a couple of trays for her then poured their coffee. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘That can wait. Come and have your coffee.’ She carried the two bowls of coffee through the bead curtain into the dining room.
Sabiha straightened up and stood a moment at the sink, her hands at rest in the water, as if she might not follow Houria. Then she snatched up a tea towel and wiped her hands and went out through the curtain. John had set the big iron gas fire going an hour ago and the small dining room was cosy. They sat at their usual table, the sleet rattling against the window, beads of ice melting as they slid down the glass. Early risers hurrying by along the narrow street, heads bent against the weather.
Sabiha held the bowl of steaming coffee close to her lips with both hands, her elbows on the table. She was looking at the people going by on the street and feeling guilty about John out there in the terrible weather delivering the day’s orders, making an effort to be cheerful with their customers and hating every minute of it. She was regretting having been quite so grim with him in the middle of the night. She longed for them to be close and loving. She felt Houria’s gaze on her and turned from the window. ‘We were awake half the night arguing about the same old thing,’ she said, answering Houria’s unasked question. ‘It’s not interesting.’ She drank her coffee.
She had asked John that day in Chartres, holding his hand in hers, a girl then filled with astonishment and apprehension, What will we do? It was she who had foreseen this. She should have persisted that day. She should have stood her ground and insisted they make a real decision about their lives, instead of meekly accepting John’s and Houria’s reassurances that everything was sure to work out for the best. John must have known even then that he had no intention of staying in France for the rest of his life. Of course he knew! She blamed herself however. And these days she did stand her ground. Too firmly perhaps. Too inflexibly. She knew at times she was unfair to him. It was always he who had to give way in the end. She knew herself to be a changed woman, and was not always happy with the way she was these days. She had understood that strength and determination were needed from her if their marriage was to endure. She was wishing now that she had been more loving and gentle with him this morning before sending him off into the fierce weather in that ridiculous little van of his.
Houria said, ‘If Dom had asked
me to go to Australia with him I would have gone.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Just like that.’ She laughed. ‘What an adventure that would have been.’
‘I’d never see my father again if I went to Australia. Or you.’
Houria shrugged. ‘We have to live the lives we choose.’
‘My life is here.’
‘And John’s?’ Houria asked gently. ‘Is his life here, darling?’
‘John’s life is with me.’
Houria looked at Sabiha steadily. ‘You’ve changed,’ she said, kindly but a little sad.
Sabiha caught the sadness in her aunt’s tone. ‘We’ve all changed, I suppose,’ she said. ‘It’s what happens, isn’t it?’ She looked out the window again. Old Arnoul Fort’s light had come on upstairs, his shadow passing back and forth across the red curtain. His wife had been bedridden for years and he spent his time caring for her, their drapery shop neglected and dirty, the stock old and their custom fallen away. Sabiha sighed, aware suddenly of the sadness of all lives. She turned and reached across the table and took Houria’s hands in her own.
Houria lifted Sabiha’s hands to her lips and kissed her fingers. ‘If you two settled down in Australia in your own home you’d probably have your little girl before you knew it.’
‘This is my home,’ Sabiha said. She withdrew her hands. Houria’s words made her feel tight and resistant.
‘Well, you can’t live in that little room up there forever, can you?’ Houria said reasonably. ‘That’s all I meant. It’s not fair to either of you. How would you manage if a child came along right now? The three of you in that tiny space? There’s no room for a child. And I can’t let you have my room. It’s still Dom’s room.’ She grinned. ‘Hey! I’d come to visit you in Australia. You could meet me at the airport. Imagine it! Me arriving at the airport and you being there to meet me! It would be so exciting. You’d be a local. You could show me everything.’
But Sabiha was only half listening to Houria now. Why didn’t her child come? What was blocking it? Was it really that there was no room for it here at Chez Dom? She couldn’t believe that. She didn’t want to believe it. They’d had all the tests and the doctors had told them they were both perfectly healthy. John’s sperm count had been a little low on one of the results, but they said not to worry about it, it was temporary and probably due to his anxiety. John said he wasn’t anxious. But they said you can’t always tell when you’re anxious. They offered more tests but she was sick of it. She had begun to feel as if her body no longer belonged to her. And every time they had sex they were both thinking about what day of the month it was and what her temperature was. John hated it as much as she did but he had been willing to go on with it for her sake. It was she who had called a halt.
She often recalled with wonder and sadness the night she and John made love for the first time. She believed at the time that she had conceived that night. She was certain her little girl had begun the mysterious journey of her life. She had lain awake beside John until dawn, unable to sleep for excitement, knowing her body had welcomed his seed, imagining the conception of new life taking place deep inside her. She had her own secret view of all this. She lay down with John that night a girl and rose from their bed in the morning a woman. In the morning she rejoiced that she was no longer a virgin girl. The first, and the greatest, disappointment of her new life in Paris was to discover two weeks later that she was not pregnant. Nothing had happened. Nothing had changed. She wept for a week and was inconsolable. The seed of her child still waited, distant, untouched, silent within her. John had not reached it. Their love had not been enough. Something was missing. Something vital and real but hidden from them. It drove her crazy trying to think what it was.
Ever since she was a little girl, Sabiha had believed the state of womanhood and the state of motherhood composed the same order of being. To be a woman was to be a mother. She could not now rid herself of this belief. She would not try to rid herself of it. What would she replace it with? It went deep. It was the bedrock of her being. Her sense of her worth, the meaning of her life, these sheltered within it. Without this belief her existence would be pointless. Until she became a mother, as a woman she was only marking time. Waiting for reality to begin. The past two years had been more difficult for her than either John or Houria understood. There was loneliness for her in knowing this. It was a loneliness she shared silently with her yet-to-be-conceived child, the dependable companion of her secret interior life.
Chapter Ten
Sabiha had been closer to her grandmother than she had been to her own mother, and had not doubted it when her grandmother whispered to her as she lay dying, ‘I will always be with you.’ These last words meant a great deal to Sabiha. They embodied a promise that she considered sacred, a promise that when she finally needed to call on her grandmother, her grandmother would be there to provide her with the strength to meet the great challenges of her life. Sabiha was not alone, but felt herself to be accompanied through life by her grandmother and her unborn daughter. Her own promise to herself was that one day she would place her baby daughter in the arms of her beloved father.
Sabiha would never accept a life without her child. She and Houria were different. The old simplicity between them was gone. She still loved Houria, more than she could ever say, but things had changed for them. Her life was no longer as straightforward as it had been before she was married to John.
To sit with her father and her little daughter in the courtyard under the pomegranate tree, the three of them together, this was the beautiful dream Sabiha carried with her everywhere. It was her comforter. She was sure the day would come when it would become a reality. Without hope of this dream coming true, her life would be too sad to bear. To take this dream from her would be to take everything from her. John did not realise how cruel it was of him to insist she go to Australia with him, for if she went to Australia she would have to give up her dream. It was difficult for her to explain the importance of this to him. She had tried several times, but whenever she spoke of it, it sounded as if she was speaking of a small and childishly selfish thing compared to the big facts of their reality.
Sabiha noticed that the rain and wind had eased and the people on the street no longer looked as if they were being blown along. The light had come on downstairs in the back of old Arnoul Fort’s shop. He would be making coffee and toast for his wife.
Houria said, ‘Do you still love him?’
Sabiha came out of her reverie and for a second thought Houria was referring to her father. ‘My father?’
‘John, for God’s sake,’ Houria said.
‘Of course I still love him! You know I do. That’s not fair.’
‘John’s a good man. He’s done everything he can to make you happy. He worships you. You’ll never find another one like him.’ Houria was impatient with the conversation now and didn’t want to take it any further. She pushed her chair back and collected their empty coffee bowls and got up. She stood a moment looking down at Sabiha. ‘I’d better get on with things,’ she said, then turned and walked across the dining room and went through the bead curtain into the kitchen.
It was true what Houria said. Sabiha did not disagree with any of it. There would never be another man for her but John. But there were also things Houria could not understand. For some reason Houria’s question—Do you still love him?—made Sabiha think of the day John took her up the Eiffel Tower. It was in the early days, when they were going out almost every Sunday to see the famous sights of Paris. He was so confident that day. So busy, so eager to be the one in charge of the excursion. It was only later that she realised he had in those days been trying to see everything before they went to Australia. He bought the wrong tickets and they were only admitted to the first stage of the tower. She had laughed at his dismay, and had hugged him and said the view was wonderful anyway and they would come back and go right to the very top the next time. ‘Don’t worry. The Eiffel Tower will still be here,’ she had said. ‘Th
ey’re not going to pull it down just yet.’ But they had never returned.
Later, when Houria had gone across the road to Arnoul Fort’s and Sabiha was alone in the house, she ran a bath. She dropped her clothes on the bathroom floor and lay back in the steaming water. She found herself thinking about the day she and John went back to Chartres. The morning was fine when the train left Paris, John carrying their picnic in his old rucksack, just as he had the first time. They were both in good spirits and looking forward to seeing Chartres again. When they got out of the train the weather had turned grey and cold, and as they walked up the hill towards the cathedral from the railway station it began to rain. Chartres was a cold, unwelcoming place that day, with scarcely anyone on the streets; it was not the Chartres of their memories. Later, to cheer themselves up, she suggested they walk down to the river to look for ‘their’ willow tree. They found the tree had recently been cut down. She remembered now her shock at the sight of the white stump of the tree glistening in the rain. It was surely a portent of something terrible.
