The Science of Appearances

by Jacinta Halloran

  Vacuuming aside, she doesn’t much like cleaning, but she still takes pleasure from the Camerons’ house. As she wanders through the countless rooms, the ceilings soar above her, and the light pours in so that she feels lighter herself. As she dusts and polishes, she imagines keeping house here with Robbie. She’ll not be cleaning then: Robbie wouldn’t want her to. They’ll ask Eunice Moran to work for them, while she and Robbie go to the cinema and have picnics and come back to a light-filled house and lie together in bed while the light fades and their kisses mingle with the darkness. With Robbie here she’d grow to love the darkness, too. In the morning she’d wake to Robbie’s body against hers — he’d roll towards her in his sleep — and the shadows of tree branches would be cast on the walls, and she’d lie and watch them dance in the wind until Robbie awoke.

  Housework instead of homework: how strange that the two words are so alike and yet mean such different things. When Mrs Cameron goes out, Mary tinkers at the piano, humming along to the snippets of tunes she remembers from her lessons of long ago. She’d like to write a song or two herself — a song about Robbie, to start with — but no sooner has she worked out the opening chords than Mrs Cameron’s back, and she has to rush from the piano and pretend she’s been dusting all along.

  ‘How’s Robbie getting on?’ she asks, with a buoyant nonchalance, as if the thought’s just popped into her head.

  Mrs Cameron looks surprised. ‘Very well, thank you, Mary. Have you forgotten that I asked you to wipe those picture frames with a soft cloth? The one in the cleaning cupboard. I showed you last week, remember?’

  When she returns with the cloth, Mary asks, ‘Is he missing his old friends? Does he miss — Dom?’

  ‘I think he’s too busy with all his new friends to miss much around here. And there’s such a lot to do at the school: sport almost every day of the week, and all his study. He’s working hard, you know.’

  Mary laughs. She makes her laugh loud and harsh to startle Mrs Cameron. ‘That doesn’t sound like Robbie,’ she says, laying claim. Why, he as good as kissed her over summer, on one of his visits to Beauchamp Street. She was shelling peas and he’d dipped his hand into the bowl and pulled out a fistful. All her hard work! She smacked at his hand and the peas scattered on the floor. They’d both bent to pick them up, scrabbling on hands and knees, laughing at their gameness, at this new thing between them. Under the table their grasping hands had touched, her palm pressed against his fingers, and he’d banged his head on the tabletop.

  ‘It’s his Leaving Certificate, dear, so things are a lot more serious now.’ Mrs Cameron speaks in the voice she uses on the telephone when people ring the house, asking for Dr Cameron — her ‘patient voice’. ‘He wants to be a doctor, so he’s working towards that. And of course the school is providing the best education possible, and the type of social opportunities that simply aren’t available here.’

  ‘Like what?’ Mary asks.

  ‘Well, he mixes with the girls from Merton Hall,’ Mrs Cameron says. ‘Their sister school, just across the other side of the gardens.’

  Merton Hall sounds gloomy. Mary hopes it is.

  ‘Robbie’s going to act in King Lear with some Merton Hall girls,’ Mrs Cameron continues. ‘And there are dances and picnics, that sort of thing. Lovely girls, from good families. Of course, they’ve all got their eye on him.’

  While Mrs Cameron leaves to read in the garden, Mary drifts into Robbie’s room and lies facedown on his bed. She buries her nose in the pillow and breathes in what she can — the smell of soap mainly, but something of Robbie too. She draws ragged lungfuls of air through the pillowcase, remembering the bounce of his leather satchel against the small of his back as he ran across the schoolyard, and the Saturdays on the oval in summer, when she and Joan would loll about in the shade watching the boys play cricket. Robbie bowled like the devil, the cricket ball rubbed and softened with his spit, a red streak on the thigh of his white trousers.

  She drags herself from the bed and rifles through his chest of drawers. There’s an old cricket vest, probably too small for him now, and the flannelette shirts (one blue, one green) he wears when he’s home for the holidays. She prefers him in the blue. From the top drawer she takes one of his handkerchiefs and tucks it into the cup of her bra. And in Robbie’s parents’ room, from the jar of coins on their dresser, she plucks out the shiniest shilling and slips it into her pocket. Her dust cloth moves along the photo frames, across the beautiful cleft in Robbie’s chin, as if nothing has been disturbed.

  ‘Have you ever looked at a painting or a picture in a book and felt like you belonged inside it?’ Mary asks Dominic that night, as they’re lying side by side in their beds.

  ‘No.’ His bedsprings creak and she can just make out the white of his face as he turns towards her. ‘What do you mean?’

  Mary thinks for a moment. It’s not just the light in the Camerons’ house that she loves. It’s the things that live there too — exotic things from faraway places, not hidden by glass or taking stiff pride of place on the mantelpiece, but scattered casually so that she comes across them everywhere. In the sitting room there are patchwork cushions of shiny leather from Morocco, and a heavy green glass bowl from Venice on the side table. The everyday crockery is painted with yellow ears of wheat and rimmed in stripes of orange and olive-green. ‘Clarice Cliff,’ Mrs Cameron told her. ‘A wedding gift. So much more interesting than Royal Doulton flowers, don’t you think?’ She wasn’t sure which flowers Mrs Cameron meant.

  But it’s the three paintings Mary loves most of all. They are small, each about as big as a page in an exercise book. She likes to stand close and look past the thick wooden frames, into the canvas, as if, like Alice in Wonderland in her overgrown form, she were spying through a window into a magical world beyond. There’s a still life of flowers — pink full-blown roses, orange and yellow poppies — cut short and crammed willy-nilly into a cream-coloured jug. It reminds her of the roses Mrs Cameron brought to their house after her father died, and how she’d drawn them every day, as they swelled and dropped petals onto the floor and withered to brown, until her mother told her to throw them away.

  The other two paintings are landscapes. One is of a river lined by gums, which Mrs Cameron says is just out of Melbourne. ‘Heidelberg School, you know, the Impressionists?’ Mary doesn’t know, but she understands anyway: the dabs and dots of paint create the shapes of things without the need for an outline. How clever it is. The other painting is of little fishing boats bumping against a wooden dock. What she likes best about it is the golden light striking the ochre walls of the houses behind the dock. She knows the walls are ochre because she has a Derwent pencil the exact same colour. ‘Is this of Melbourne too?’ she asked once.

  ‘Goodness, no,’ said Mrs Cameron. ‘Look at the tiles on those roofs. And the water comes right up to the houses. It’s somewhere in Europe. Probably down south.’

  Mary looked at the red and blue boats, the lapping water, the distant lavender hills, and felt such a longing that she thought she might cry.

  ‘Never mind,’ Mary says now, from her bed. Dom won’t understand, and she doesn’t feel like explaining. ‘How’s school?’ she asks instead. ‘How’s Mr Welsh?’

  He tells her about trigonometry: the laws of sines, cosines and tangents; the orange booklet they use to look up measurements. ‘It’s just page after page of values to the third decimal place.’

  ‘It sounds awful,’ she says.

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s interesting, once you understand the rules.’

  ‘And Mr Welsh?’

  ‘The other day he asked me if you were still drawing. I said I didn’t think so.’

  ‘I haven’t for a while. Not since —’ She sits up in bed, suddenly stricken. ‘Not since last year. Why not? What’s happened to me?’

  ‘Calm down. I don’t know. You’ve probably grown out of it.’

>   ‘That’s not true.’ She throws back the blankets and switches on the light.

  Dominic puts his face to the pillow. ‘Bloody hell! Whaddya doing? Turn it off.’

  She hunts through the junk at the bottom of the wardrobe and pulls out the sketchbook Mr Welsh gave her. Only two pages drawn upon. She turns to him, face grave. ‘You want to know why I haven’t been drawing? Because when you spend your days cleaning up after other people, you forget what it’s like to do things just for yourself.’ She hugs the sketchbook to her chest. How meagre her life has become, so pitiful that she can’t help a few tears, a sorry sob or two.

  Dominic climbs out of bed and sits next to her. ‘Don’t cry, Mares.’ He’s so close that she can feel the blanket-warmth of his body. He smells of bike grease and woodsmoke, and the musty odour of the henhouse — exactly how he’s always smelled — and it comforts her to know that some things haven’t changed. ‘It’s just till I finish school. Then it’ll be your turn.’

  Mary wipes her eyes on the corner of her sheet. ‘Why do we have to take turns, Dom? Why can’t we both be happy at the same time?’

  4

  Joan’s mother visits them in Beauchamp Street. ‘Maureen Kennedy’s going into hospital in Bendigo,’ she announces in the hallway before taking off her coat. ‘A big operation. She’ll be out of action for months.’

  Mary’s mother puts on the face she wears at Mass. Probably a tumour, Mary thinks, like Eunice Moran’s grandfather had sprouted on the side of his head. Or it could be women’s troubles of a serious sort. She remembers the book in Joan’s room, the drawing of the pink, bulb-shaped uterus, and imagines Mrs Kennedy’s uterus swelling up inside her like a glistening balloon, ready to burst.

  ‘Father Clancy will be looking for a new cleaner,’ Mrs Corrigan says. ‘Maybe Mary could take it on.’

  Mary stands against the wall with her hands behind her back so that she can pick at the flaking paint without her mother seeing. ‘I don’t want to clean the presbytery. I’m cleaning at the Camerons’ and here. I’d like to do something different for a change.’

  ‘You’ll take the work where you can get it, Mary, and be grateful,’ says her mother. ‘Besides, cleaning at home doesn’t count.’ She takes Mrs Corrigan into the sitting room.

  While Mary makes tea, the two women talk, their voices softened by the sound of the boiling kettle. Joan’s mother often laughs, and Mary imagines Mrs Corrigan’s big bosom, plumped up in her corset and trembling like jelly, as if the bosom is in on the joke as well. When she enters with the tea tray, the women have returned to the topic of Mary’s employment. She hears her mother say, ‘I don’t know that Father Clancy would consider Mary suitable.’

  ‘I’m sure Father would be happy to have her.’ Mrs Corrigan sees Mary at the door and beckons her over. Mary drops the tray to the table so that the cups quiver in their saucers. Her mother lays out her hands to steady them. ‘Here, come and sit by me,’ Mrs Corrigan says. Mary perches on the corner of the chair and Mrs Corrigan snakes her arm around Mary’s waist. ‘She’s a good girl, our Mary. Aren’t you, pet?’

  Mrs Corrigan’s body is warm and doughy-soft, and her skin smells, as always, of the Coty Airspun face powder she’s worn since the war ended. Mary’s often smelled that powder in its round box, taken it from the dresser in Mrs Corrigan’s bedroom and breathed in so deep it’s made her sneeze. Sometimes she’s dabbed a little on her nose just to feel how fine it is: so fine that when she blows it from her palm it dances in the air. She can see the individual specks of powder on Mrs Corrigan’s face and, through the powder, each tiny little hole in her skin into which the powder has settled, like dust into a crack. Closeness means warmth and the opportunity for detailed inspection, even though a woman’s face (at least the ones she knows) always looks nicer from further away. She wishes Mrs Corrigan would run a finger through her hair, the way she does with Joan, taking a strand and curling it on her finger, round and round. The thought of it makes her sleepy. She wants to meow like a kitten. Meow. Pat me to sleep.

  ‘Mary,’ her mother says, ‘come here and pour the tea.’

  Mrs Cameron pays Mary on Fridays. Her mother allows her to keep a shilling, sometimes two, but on the weeks she’s able to dip her hand into the jar on the Camerons’ dresser — so magical, always replenished — she hands her mother the envelope still sealed. ‘You don’t want to take something out this week?’ her mother asks.

  ‘There’s nothing I want to buy,’ she says airily. ‘You can have it all.’ How she likes the sound of it. To take nothing, to want nothing, is to be superior — her mother knows it too — yet how can her mother object to such a generous, selfless act?

  The jangle of the Cameron coins in her pocket (some days she takes a shilling plus a sixpence or two) sets her to arguing, not so much with herself but with an imaginary audience that needs some convincing of the harmlessness of her theft. What if I found a shilling on the street that Dr Cameron had dropped? Wouldn’t that be the same thing? she might reason, or If I lived in a house like that and had an enormous jar of coins, I’d be standing at my front gate and giving them away to everyone who passed. There’s a certain circularity to the dispersal of money, a certain arbitrariness to wealth with which she soon learns to be comfortable. One day I’ll be married to Robbie and we’ll share it all, she tells herself. Who’ll care about a few old shillings then? A handful of pilfered coins, never missed, and yet what freedom they buy her. Better in her hands than the Camerons’. As she pays for an ice cream at Hayes’ on a Friday afternoon, she has a crazy, wicked thought: maybe Dr Cameron steals the coins from his dead patients’ pockets. She runs her tongue full circle around the cone, closing her eyes as the creamy coldness slides down her throat. Some of the coins at the bottom of the jar might well have belonged to her father.

  That evening she makes shepherd’s pie for tea. The kitchen’s warmed by the heat of the stove, and the smell of meat and onions brings Dominic to the table. When they’re seated, their mother says, ‘Mary, I spoke to Miss Doherty, Father Clancy’s housekeeper, today. She’s happy for you to start on trial.’

  ‘Start what?’ Mary asks. She reaches for the Worcestershire sauce just as Dominic reaches for the chutney. Their arms cross and for a moment form a perfect X, hers on top, the bony knob of her elbow resting against the hollow of his.

  ‘Cleaning the presbytery,’ Mary’s mother says. ‘You remember, Joan’s mother mentioned it last week.’

  Dominic’s already eating, head down. ‘Oh, that,’ Mary says. ‘I said I didn’t want to.’

  ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ her mother says. ‘I’d have thought you’d see it as a privilege.’

  Mary digs at the potato crust with her fork. She’s boiled and mashed the potatoes for the pie, and knows the slight distaste of the cook for the meal already sampled. ‘You know I don’t like cleaning. I’d rather do something else.’

  ‘What else? You’re not exactly inundated with offers.’

  ‘Could she work in a shop?’ asks Dom. ‘What about a dress shop, Mares?’

  Mary brightens. ‘That’d be all right. I might get dresses for free.’

  ‘No one in this town has the money to be giving anything away,’ their mother says flatly. ‘And the shop owners aren’t hiring, not while rationing’s still in place.’ She frowns at Dom. ‘Stop shovelling your food, Dominic.’

  Mary thinks of Mr Welsh. ‘I could help out at the school, with the little kids, you know. Read to them and teach them songs on the piano.’

  Her mother sighs. ‘It sounds nice, Mary. But no one’s offering you money to do that.’

  ‘Then why don’t you clean for Father Clancy, if it’s such a privilege?’

  Dominic stops chewing, and Mary knows from the look on his face that she’s said something truly transgressive. Reason’s on her side, surely it is. She digs in her heels. ‘You’re not working, and I’m alrea
dy at the Camerons’. Why can’t we share it out?’

  Her mother leaves the table and goes to stand at the sink, her back to both of them. Dominic catches Mary’s eye. He lifts his hand and swiftly slices it across his neck. Their mother fills a glass with water, and the slow trickle from the tap grows loud and distorted, bouncing off the kitchen walls, tapping against Mary’s eardrums. She hunches over, puts her hands to her ears. Once, she and Dom had discovered a cave, on a Sunday outing to Hanging Rock with their father. She’d hesitated at the mouth, afraid of the dark and the dank, mossy smell, but her father held her hand and told her it was a special place where Aborigines had once lived. Inside, Dom had yelled to make an echo, and she did too, but still she’d been frightened by what she couldn’t see, and by the sound of trickling water from some mysterious underground stream — an unrelenting, melancholy drip of water against stone.

  ‘Go to your room, Mary,’ her mother says quietly. She doesn’t turn around.

  Mary pushes her plate across the table, clanking it against Dom’s. ‘Here, you have it,’ she says to him. Everything is wrong, twisted, stacked against her like some awful bad dream. ‘It’s not fair. I’m being punished and it’s not my fault.’

  Her mother turns quickly. ‘Whose fault is it, then? Are you saying it’s mine?’ She sighs. ‘Do you think this house runs itself? And what work is there for a woman my age, now the war’s over and all the men are home?’ She again takes her place at the table and begins to eat. Mary watches the deliberate movement of her jaw, up and down, up and down, and the dipping of her chin as she swallows, as if eating’s become an act of suffering, along with everything else. From the corner of Mary’s vision she examines her mother’s face. Lines and shadows, hollows: this is all she sees. ‘Do I still have to go to my room?’ she asks.