The Science of Appearances

by Jacinta Halloran

  ‘It’s all right,’ Mrs Cameron says. ‘I don’t want to intrude. I just thought you might like this. It’s a beef stew — with mushrooms and cream. I hope you like mushrooms,’ she says to Mary.

  ‘I like their shape.’ Mrs Cameron looks as if she hasn’t heard. ‘And I like picking them, you know, after it rains. Sorting out the mushrooms from the toadstools. Though a girl can get mightily sick of mushrooms on toast.’

  ‘Please ignore her,’ Mary’s mother says, reaching the door. ‘She likes mushrooms well enough.’

  Mrs Cameron holds out the pot and Mary’s mother takes it. ‘It’s very kind of you,’ she says.

  Mary lifts the lid, just a fraction, and breathes in a curious richness. Is this what dinner smells like every night at the Camerons’? ‘It’s lovely. Is it French?’ Mary asks.

  Mrs Cameron laughs. ‘Oh, one tries, you know.’ She looks at Mary’s mother, crinkling her forehead, as if unsure of something. Perhaps she’s waiting for a compliment, Mary thinks, or a word or two in French. Well, she can wait until the cows come home. ‘No hurry back with the casserole dish,’ Mrs Cameron says eventually. ‘I’ve plenty of others. If there’s anything else I can do …’

  Casserole, and a blue that’s so pure it makes her hungry for something vague and out of reach. Mary lingers at the door, hoping the conversation will somehow turn to Robbie, but reluctant to turn it herself while her mother stands behind her. She likes the way the cream coat falls around Mrs Cameron’s knees, almost as if it’s in motion even when still. The more she looks, the softer it seems, until there’s nothing for it but to stroke the pile, first one way and then the other. Almost without her knowing, her hand’s in the air, hovering.

  ‘Mary,’ her mother barks. ‘Come away.’

  Mrs Cameron seems to understand. She leans forward and winks. ‘I bought this coat on my last trip to Melbourne.’ She glances up at Mary’s mother, who stands with cocked elbows, still gripping the pot. ‘Georges, in Collins Street?’

  ‘I’ve seen the advertisements.’

  ‘It’s so wonderfully warm,’ gushes Mrs Cameron, and to Mary, ‘Would you like to touch it?’

  ‘No,’ Mary’s mother says. ‘There’s no need.’

  No need? Mary’s not so sure. Her mother’s knuckled hands are gripping the dish so tightly, they might as well be tied behind her back. She’ll be angry afterwards, and there’ll be a punishment for disobedience, but now’s the time for reward: after the strange, silent emptiness of the past seven days, it’s time to give in to the moment, to do something simply because she wants to. She sinks her hand into the soft, warm pile.

  ~

  Six o’clock, a Monday evening. The surgery door is closed. Judith Mudd sets a cup of tea and a Marie biscuit at Julius Cameron’s elbow. ‘Just one,’ she says. ‘One won’t spoil your dinner.’

  She walks away and he hears her moving about in the waiting room: the squeak of her shoes, the slap of magazines on the table. ‘I’ll be going now, Dr Cameron,’ she calls. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  He listens for her footsteps on the path. A good girl, Judith. A sensible head on her shoulders. By rights she should be at the hospital — in midwifery or scrub — but the truth is he hasn’t encouraged her. He wants to keep her here.

  He stretches his legs under the desk, dunks his biscuit and slurps his tea. The sun has gone, and with it the exigencies of the daylight hours: the punctuated squeak of the surgery door as one patient leaves and another enters, the telephone calls from the hospital. While he’s never truly free of the latter, the clattering procession of the six o’clock dinner trolley through the wards of Kyneton District habitually coincides with a lull in demand for his attention and advice.

  Francis Quinn’s death certificate lies in front of him, incomplete. He didn’t know the man well. Dr Cameron levers his body carefully from the chair and crosses the room, a hand to the ache in his back. From the filing drawers he takes Quinn’s history, a single card. Not enough on which to build a life. A bout of pneumonia some seven years ago, then nothing until that visit in April. The last patient of the day. He remembers a man turned in on himself, and that golden evening light of autumn slanting through the western window, falling directly across his face. Quinn had raised a hand to shade his eyes, and he, Julius, had hurried to pull down the blind and switch on the light. A useful act, however slight. That night he went home and made love to Flora with all the stamina of his youth. There but for the grace of God: an occupational hazard.

  From the street come the sound of children’s voices, the bounce of a ball, the rattling scrape of a stick against a fence. They’ll be off home, hopefully to a wholesome dinner and a comfortable bed. He’s likely to have brought them into this world. A certain involvement: he’s always been aware of that faint paternal tug he feels for those children who’ve taken their first breath — that hungry, tentative, reluctant gasp — in his hands.

  His thoughts stray to the boy, Dominic, and his crazed story of a gunshot to the chest. ‘I don’t know why he told you that,’ Quinn’s wife said later. As he stepped out onto the verandah, trying not to appear too eager to get away, she said through gritted teeth, ‘Dominic saw nothing. I made sure of that.’ Still, it’s not hard to understand how a young mind in extremis might imagine such things. Dominic had been friends with Robert in primary school. He wasn’t sure how their relationship stood now: Robert didn’t divulge much these days. A shy boy, Dominic, but with a spark to him; clever, he recalls. The girl he can’t quite picture. He finds her file just behind her father’s. A footling breech — always tricky — and a fractured clavicle at delivery. Ah yes, he remembers it now. According to his notes the lass was fighting fit an hour later; still, he recalls the crack of that tiny sliver of bone, that moment of blind, sickly panic. The heartsink that dogged him for a week.

  The telephone rings, insistent and ominous in the still, grey room. It’s Flora, asking where he is. ‘We’re having steak. Should I put on the carrots?’ she asks. ‘Or are you off to the hospital?’

  Put them on, he tells her, and decant a bottle of red. He’ll be home in ten minutes.

  One last deed for the working day: why not make it his best? He takes a fortifying gulp from his cup, picks up his pen, and under ‘cause of death’ writes in confident capitals: MYOCARDIAL INFARCTION.

  2

  In the month since his father died, the world’s become a little greyer and further away. At lunchtimes Dom’s the first to fall away from the game, the first to be bowled out now that cricket season’s begun. He stands on the sidelines, kicking his feet in the dust and looking about for Mary. He doesn’t want to be with her — unthinkable to hang around with the girls — but still he searches for her from the corner of his eye, listening for the upswing of her voice carrying across the yard. It makes him feel better to hear her laugh.

  They played cricket in the street, he and his father. He remembers wanting his dad to himself. The ball from his father’s hand curving through the air, intended for his bat alone, his father’s eyes glued to him as he swung like Bradman, his back-lift high, his front leg striding forward: these were the moments he was greedy for. But the Callaghan boys, Martin and Frank — and sometimes Billy Jarvis, too — always milled about, swinging the bat wildly, horsing around in the field, and the game instead became another classroom lesson, and his father again the teacher, organising play.

  ‘No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,’ Mr Welsh reads to them one blustery Friday afternoon. Out in the yard the grit eddies on the asphalt, and the white magnolias, planted for VP Day, take a beating in the wind. As the poem unfolds he thinks of his father. The poet’s wrong. There are some men who are islands.

  ‘And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ Mr Welsh closes the book with a solemn, faraway look, and even Joe McKenna stays quiet. Durin
g the war years, when the bell of Our Lady’s rang out, they’d put down their pencils to pray. Another man down, the bell told them. Another Catholic down. It had rung for his father, too, as they left the church at the end of the funeral Mass, Mary and he flanking his mother, each holding her hand. He’d asked to be one of the six to carry the coffin, but his mother had said he was too young. He’d wanted to be useful — if not in his father’s life then in his death, at least — but as he watched the chosen men from the parish heave the coffin onto their shoulders and steady themselves before the march began, he was relieved not to be of their company. Inside the coffin his father must have rocked from side to side as the coffin-bearers hauled him up. Dom held his breath, anticipating his father’s displeasure, until he remembered that his father was already in heaven, and it was only his undiscerning body that swayed down the aisle and out to the waiting hearse.

  Robbie Cameron’s home for the weekend. ‘Mid-term break,’ he says, at Dom’s front door. Dom’s never heard of such a thing. ‘You want to come over?’ Robbie asks.

  They go straight to the electric train set, set up on a table in Robbie’s room. A Hornby Silver Jubilee A4 locomotive, five-pole skew-wound motor, bull-nosed and sleek. The weight of the engine in Dom’s hand seems more real than anything else. The goods carriages — Fyffes bananas, Cadbury chocolate — gleaming yellow and violet-blue, and the painted sausages on the Palethorpes car are so pink and fat that his mouth begins to water. Some of the set has been sent from England, where Robbie’s grandparents live. The rest has been bought by his father. Dom lays and re-lays the track, and the click of those pieces locking together, solid and sure, helps him breathe a little easier. He and Robbie place bridges and tunnels and signals, and the greyness lifts and the sun comes out in Robbie’s bedroom; a world within itself, a green English county of hedgerows and sheep and red-roofed houses, every piece a bloody wonder.

  ~

  After school, Mary and her best friend, Joan Corrigan, walk to Joan’s house on Clowes Street.

  ‘Joanie!’ Mrs Corrigan calls out, as they come in through the kitchen. ‘And Mary, too!’ She kisses them both, and winds her finger through one of Joan’s rag curls, as if Joan were a doll she was playing with. A plate of star-shaped biscuits filled with jam is set out on the table. ‘There’s coconut ice, too,’ Mrs Corrigan says, pouring tea.

  Joan’s an only child. Something happened after she was born, something dramatic, Mary knows, and Joan will never have a brother or sister. Mrs Corrigan doesn’t seem to mind, or if she does, she doesn’t let on.

  ‘How’s your mother?’ Mrs Corrigan asks. Mary chews her biscuit, eyes to the floor. It’s a question without an answer, at least to her mind, though perhaps Dom would have a stab at it. Still, she’s learned that it’s all right to stay mute because very soon Mrs Corrigan will say something like, ‘Such a terrible shock, poor woman. Still, she’s lucky to have you and your brother.’ That’s what they all say.

  Joan’s bedroom is bigger and prettier than Mary’s. There they escape to sit on Joan’s bed, amid a happily growing clutter of empty teacups and plates, Mary’s drawings, Joan’s books. The window’s open and the lace curtains waft and billow. Their talk drifts to boys. Joan asks about Dom. ‘Does he ever mention me?’

  ‘Dom?’ Mary looks at Joan anew, sees her blush. ‘You like Dom?’

  Joan grabs Mary’s wrist. ‘Don’t you dare say anything to him.’

  Mary considers this. Where does a girl’s loyalty lie? ‘Do you want to kiss him?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe one day.’

  Mary stares at Joan’s new breasts, tiny buds that pout a little more each week. ‘Why don’t you kiss me now?’ she asks. ‘For practise.’

  ‘You’re loony.’

  She takes Joan’s hand. ‘Come on,’ she wheedles. ‘We can both practise.’ She thinks of Robbie in his garden, gazing at the sky. ‘Here, I’ll start.’ She makes her lips soften against Joan’s and closes her eyes. Joan pushes her away.

  From Joan’s house she walks home along Powlett and Donnithorne to avoid the Hennessys’ dog. She can’t understand how Dominic can watch, unafraid, every afternoon as the dog springs from the verandah and races towards him, its teeth bared. She hasn’t passed the Hennessys’ all year, not since that time when the dog took the hem of her dress in its teeth. It was the week before her father died, and it seems now that the two things are intertwined, so that often when she thinks of her father the dog also comes to mind, snarling and snapping, circling her as she screams. Dominic had yelled and slapped the dog’s back, and it soon slunk away. ‘It’s because you’re so scared of it,’ he said after she’d stopped crying. ‘Dogs can smell fear.’ The edge of her dress, newly ironed that morning, had been crushed in the dog’s mouth. Now, as she enters the house, she remembers how the saliva had oozed from between the dog’s teeth and seeped into the cloth. ‘Stop snivelling, Mary,’ her mother had said, inspecting the hemline for holes.

  From the kitchen window Mary watches her mother taking clothes down from the line in the backyard, and feels the familiar empty fluttering in the deep, lonely place between her chest and her stomach. Is it her fault? If she were braver, like Dominic, would her mother be more pleased? Her collarbone aches, as it sometimes does when the weather’s about to change, or when, for no good reason, things turn sour and cold around her. She rubs at the place where it was broken at birth, rubs with the tip of her pointer finger, not too softly and not too hard, the way she’s learned to, until the familiar ache is massaged away.

  ~

  On the first day of spring, almost four months after his father’s death, there’s a letter in the box when Dominic gets home from school. The envelope is addressed in bright blue ink, with fancy flourishes around the capitals. He carries it through the silent house and out into the garden, where his mother kneels at the edge of the vegetable plot, planting pumpkin seeds. He holds it out. ‘It’s for you. I don’t think it’s a bill.’

  She tilts her head, examining the envelope. ‘A sympathy letter, do you think?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Let me wash the dirt off first,’ she says. She goes to the laundry tub and returns to the garden, wiping her hands on her apron. Her cheeks are warmed by the afternoon sun, and a strand of her hair, streaked with red and gold, strays at her forehead. For the first time he has a sense of his mother’s claim to beauty. Not the glamour of, say, Mrs Cameron, or the magazine type of woman the girls at school drool over, but something about the shape of her face, the breadth of her forehead, he now sees, hints at an angular prettiness that might still be coaxed from her. A new dress, a trip to the beauty parlour to set her hair in the latest wave and clean the last of the dirt from under her fingernails: if only he had the power to give her this. For a while he’d expected to wake one morning and find her hair had whitened overnight. People often spoke of such things happening after a terrible shock. But his mother’s hair has resisted any trace of grey with such healthy conviction that it no longer worries him.

  His after-school hunger gets the better of him and he leaves his mother reading on the verandah. In the kitchen he makes tea and cuts two slices of bread from the morning loaf.

  His mother comes and sits at the table beside him as he eats. ‘We have to vacate this house,’ she says. ‘They want it back.’ She pulls the letter from her apron pocket and spreads it out on the table and he sees, upside down, the Ascension College crest. ‘I’d hoped they might turn a blind eye and let us stay on. And they have, of course, until now.’

  His hunger is gone. ‘Can I read it?’ he asks.

  She pushes the letter towards him. ‘Where’s your sister?’

  ‘At Joan’s house, I think.’

  His mother sighs. ‘Why is she never here?’

  He doesn’t answer. Instead he bends his head to the page. A new teacher has recently been employed
to replace your late husband on a permanent basis. He will be relocating to Kyneton from Bendigo, so we now must respectfully ask you to vacate the house by the end of the year.

  They don’t pay rent. The house came with his father’s employment. ‘We could ask them to reconsider. We could explain —’

  ‘I won’t beg, Dominic. They know our situation and they’ve made their decision.’ She runs a hand through her hair. ‘We’ll manage. There’ll be houses around here for reasonable rent. Smaller places, but that’s all right. We can still have a garden.’ She stands and unties her apron. ‘I’ll go to Dalgety’s now and see what they have.’

  ‘You don’t need to go today. We have three months.’

  ‘I can’t wait, now that they’ve asked for it back. I can’t bear the thought of their charity one day more than I have to.’

  He drinks his tea while she busies herself in her room. Soon she emerges in her coat and hat. ‘You don’t want a cup of tea before you go?’ he asks. He wants to detain her, to save her the pain of not finding what she wants, or worse still, of finding it and knowing it’s out of their reach.

  ‘Not if I want to get there before closing.’ She slips her handbag into the crook of her arm. ‘We’ll manage,’ she says again. He understands that she doesn’t yet know how, but that it has to be said so she can begin to believe it’s possible.

  ~

  The things a girl has to hide! The swell of her breasts, tight under her singlet; the hair that sprouts in new places; the monthly bleeding — that, above all. She’s grown a full three inches since her father died. Or two and a half, at least. The pencil mark’s still there, beside the kitchen doorway, made by her father at first term’s end. She’d stood in her socked feet and he’d marked the wall above her head. ‘You’ll be as tall as me, soon,’ he’d said. The pencil shook in his hand and he’d held his left under his right to steady it.

  ‘Why are you shaking?’ she asked.