Coda

by Thea Astley

  What had possessed her then? What? She knew no one in Sydney but Daisy, who had vanished that morning in a flurry of jumpers and scarves to visit old friends in the Blue Mountains, and her own loneliness was underscored inexplicably by the man and the room and the music so that she said, encouraged by the light of the place and the door open behind her, ‘Why not?’ Sophisticated, she thought. Poised, she thought.

  Moving lightly, he pulled out the other chair for her with a desperate florid courtesy, uttering his name. She could not remember it now, sitting in the mall. Benedict? she wondered. Bernard? Yet she told him hers and he repeated the ‘Kathleen’ and asked ‘Irish?’, without waiting for an answer.

  She held the drink he had poured into a tooth mug and they sat looking at each other in the abominable awkwardness of a failed party.

  ‘Well,’ he said, regarding her curiously over the rim of his own glass. ‘Well.’

  Unexpectedly her own laughter was caught in cough and wheeze with the first sip. God, she could still remember the coughing, the fear she would choke in this stranger’s room. But he had helped her recovery with the most tentative of back slaps and somehow, some gauche how, she found herself rattling on as if he had freed words as well, talking of herself, the north. She could barely recall his replies now but she knew he had admitted to being master of a cargo vessel plying between London, the far East and Australia. He came from Suffolk, he told her, and round about his third drink (taken with a desperate compulsion) confessed, an ironic twist to the mouth, to being a bachelor.

  Common ground, something to marvel at, the world’s smallness, came when she dredged up the name of his ship from a recently typed invoice and lading consignment. Daisy, her friend Daisy, she had been anxious to explain, and she both worked for the same shipping company, nothing exciting, simply clerical work, beating typewriters to death.

  This small and innocuous moment of union was suddenly ripped apart by her returned buddy, stuffed with drama and accompanied by the hotel manager fearful of scandal. There had been voluble explanations, cries of protest, everything a shamefaced blur.

  Yet the next evening she allowed him to take her to a show at the old Tivoli. She had never seen vaudeville before and found the crudity of the acts appalling from the moment the curtain rose. It was during a scene where some check-pantsed ocker kept groping suggestively in a bubble bath filled with a naked blonde and an evasive soap cube that she found laughter stopped dead in her throat like a plug. She turned to her companion and saw that he was hugely amused. ‘Not funny,’ she couldn’t refrain from whispering. ‘Not funny at all.’ She winced with her discomfort and he allowed her to suffer only a few more minutes.

  ‘I think we’ve had enough of this,’ he suggested kindly. In the neon glare of George Street he seemed filled with contrition. ‘Sailors are crude animals.’

  After she returned north, beautifully typed and mis-spelled letters arrived at her workplace from ports along the eastern seaboard. ‘Hello,’ he wrote. ‘I keep saying hello to my chief officer. I think I caught it from you. When may I say hello in person? I have discussed this with him and his advice is to proceed.’

  Should I? she had asked Daisy, who had only giggled and said well, any storm in a port!

  They met at Queens Hotel on the waterfront. She remembered his letters better than his face.

  He was drunk, lordly and staggering. Other diners were stunned by his ducal assumptions as he ushered her to a table.

  ‘I have thought of you for three weeks,’ he confessed. ‘I have thought all that time between saying hello and getting drunk.’

  She hardly knew what to say to that. His voice seemed over-loud and diners were regarding them with interest.

  ‘I know I’m far too old for this sort of hi-jinks.’ He belched and apologised with inebriated formality. ‘I know I’m a thousand years older than you. But would you consider marrying me?’

  The food had not even arrived. She was mesmerised by the craziness of his proposition, idiotically tempted by thoughts of escape from the job, the heat, the town.

  ‘But I don’t even know you.’

  His voice rose as he brushed objections away with drunken hands. ‘No one knows anybody. Absolutely no one. In fact the only one I really know, really know …’ He stopped as if he had forgotten already ‘… is the old girl. My ship. She’s the only one I know. After this meal, if it ever comes, I’ll take you to say hello to her. You’ll love her.’

  After that they ate almost in silence. The other diners stopped watching and occasionally, but only occasionally, she found his fogged eyes regarding her.

  Perhaps he was invigorated by the tropic air, for his step became lighter as they walked to the docks afterwards and he moved with the eagerness, she recognised now, of lover towards lover. There were lascars on night watch. There were short exchanges, friendly, she observed, and his tipsiness evaporated in direct ratio to the shortening of distance between him and the love object.

  On the bridge he opened a door with panache. The cabin was large, functional and gleaming with highly polished wood. There were leather chairs and a giant slab of a desk whose solidity her fingers involuntarily stroked while her lips, unwilled, shaped O’s of approval which he observed, drunk or not. Outside and below, the docks squatted under sky-dark, listening to tides round their massive piles, yarning about the sea.

  ‘You like it, don’t you?’ he said. ‘I can see you like it.’ The absurdity of his eagerness! ‘You can travel back with me.’

  She asked how. Already he was foraging for a drink.

  ‘Here of course. Right here. Large enough for two.’ He smiled as he poured himself a drink. ‘No, I know you don’t want one. Look, it’s quite simple. As master, I do as I like. I’m free to take my wife back with me. Would you like that? Say you would. I would.’

  Baffled, she shook her head, not a denial so much as an admission of puzzlement, whereupon he lumped down into the swivel chair behind the desk to hulk, sipping and watching in a fall of silence heavy as a theatre curtain dropping on the final act. Desolation settled over his shoulders, the glass of Scotch, shutting him off.

  ‘Marry me,’ he suggested again. He took another sip. ‘Please marry me.’

  ‘I still don’t know you. Not even here. Less. Not …’

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘Not even with your real wife.’

  ‘Oh God, she’s a tolerant old lady. Forget that. As I say, no one knows anyone. Ever.’ He hiccupped slightly.

  ‘Let’s talk about this tomorrow, hey?’

  ‘Why tomorrow?’

  ‘Because … oh look, I’m sorry to say this … but you’ll be sober then. You’ll have had a rethink.’

  She edged up from the settee, uncomfortable with possibilities, while courteously, gently, he matched her movement but stood so far apart from her she wondered. Why did he never use her name? Why had he made no move to hold her hand, at least, or begin those wearying overtures of the relief clerk, the traveller in electrical goods, the too presumptuous airforce lieutenant?

  ‘You may kiss me if you want,’ she offered, putting her face up and looking for resolution, curious to see his reaction to such forwardness. There was something skewed about the whole business. Something.

  Keeping good manners on tippy toes, he moved deliberately across the cabin and placed the most diffident of hands upon her upper arms, sliding them (abeam, he might have said) behind her shoulders until she was bracketed and though touched, clasped, felt untouched. There was no response in either of them. It was being alone with aloneness.

  She could smell starch on his shirt and idly that traitor thought recurred: I could reach England this way. I could get out of this town. I could stop beating that typewriter. Ah, shame! His arms enclosed her as impersonally as a printed parenthesis and the touch of his mouth on hers held the papery brush of fleshly indifference. He knew all this too.

  Raising his head he gazed down from under those sadly comic eyebrows and she u
nderstood at once.

  ‘It’s years. I haven’t had a woman in years.’ He was mumbling something, driven to confession perhaps, addressing a point on the cabin’s far wall.

  ‘How … how did you manage?’

  ‘Boys,’ he was not quite explaining. ‘Boys.’

  The quiver of resolved doubt. All explanation surged and then was obliterated by a fatalism she understood—well, she was sure she understood. Boys. Did that matter, did that really matter in whatever coupling they might form, each using the other ever so explicitly, if only she could be offered passage out of her present?

  Of course she decided against it, but when they met the next morning, she early, he late, sobriety and panic made him blunt.

  ‘It’s not on,’ he informed without preamble. ‘I can’t. I was drunk. It’s just not on.’

  She hadn’t even had time to greet him and couldn’t resist asking, ‘What’s not?’

  ‘Marriage. The whole thing. I simply can’t. Not fair to either. No tears, please. Can’t stand tears.’

  ‘Why tears? Tears for what?’

  He stared down at her through a long wry line of boys while his mouth twisted with self-disgust, or disgust for the world.

  ‘Well, you never know. It’s scenes. Can’t bear bloody scenes.’

  Sweating and horribly sober now in noontide, he was urging her into the dining room of the hotel to meet his luncheon guests. Their name was ominous. Captain Storm. Mrs Storm. Kathleen found she was fighting back giggles rather than tears as Captain Storm explained that there were others called Gale and Southerly. They were resoundingly jolly, and she suspected that the two beautifully clad, perfectly vowelled strangers had been preselected as a judging panel, unaware that a decision had already been made. Removed from the need for impeccability, she decided to be truly herself and stitch outrage all over the table.

  Roars, but roars of laughter over every idiosyncratic piece of whimsy she fed them about the deep north.

  ‘You’re a good scout, old thing,’ he commented afterwards in the cab taking her back to the nasty boarding house across the river. ‘Don’t take it too hard, there’s a good girl.’

  ‘Take what too hard?’

  For a moment he looked offended. ‘The marriage thing. I did think … oh well, on reflection I couldn’t handle it. Knew I couldn’t. Liquor talking. Leopards not changing and all that. Not fair to you. Not fair at all.’

  She said, momentarily spiteful for his dragging it on and on, ‘You must write marvellous telegrams.’

  But he missed it.

  As she prepared to get out of the cab she wondered should she offer the most sisterly of kisses, in return for the siccative quality of his conversation, or merely shake hands. She did neither. She leaned back through the cab window, not caring whether the driver heard or not.

  ‘The difference,’ she said, ‘between animals and humans is bizarre, don’t you think? Humans who are supposed to be rational think of their genitals and their genital needs incessantly while animals, supposed to be irrational, give them no thought at all. Think about it.’

  Anyway, she decided, her back turned, herself walking smartly away, the cabbie wouldn’t know what the hell genitals were. He’d have ten other words for them.

  Later there were letters attempting self-vindication—for what? for what?—and Kathleen, remembering that now, saw phrases that flashed out of the paper … one as young and lovely, yes lovely … deserves better … unable to cope.

  A pity, she found herself muttering into the slime of the now cold cappuccino. I might have enjoyed rocking to Europe as the captain’s lady, shades of the old Somerset Maugham, in that cabin all spit and polish like an exclusive club. Blackballed, she thought.

  Where are you now? she asked the torpid air of the mall fifty years on. Where?

  She raised her cup, jerked it in the smallest of toasts to a vanished—was wooer the word?—something—and said aloud, ‘Here’s to you, Benjamin!’, not knowing she had got the name wrong.

  Anyway, it had made it easier to accept Ronald.

  Who had notions, fantasies, more like it, he could not sustain in postwar Brisbane, that exhausted town just emerging from the blackout and the rationing, its streets still pocked with urine-stinking bomb shelters, still emotionally reverberating with memories of vanished Yank troops. War brides packed the departing ships.

  Ronald’s father returned to the Solomons to rebuild his trading store in Naghoniara, the place of the east wind, not on that ravaged site of so many memories in Tulagi. He was a goer, a mover. He established a branch store in Townsville and told his son, ‘I want you there, lad. In any case it’s your wife’s home town.’ (How could he know she had longed for escape?) ‘You handle the mainland end and I’ll cope with the rest. You know how it’s done.’

  Mr Hackendorf senior was still fearsome at sixty-five. His bullying moustaches and red-faced bluster made the two of them feel like school children, especially Ronald, who was ridden by a sentimental flaw that prevented his ever rebuffing parental demands; for he loved the old man who had brought him up single-handed from the time he was five.

  ‘Where was your mother?’ Kathleen asked.

  ‘She ran off with a diplomat,’ Ronald said. ‘What a laugh!’

  Back again! She could have wept!

  In that northern coastal town sprawled under its guardian rock their marriage stumbled from the unknown to the boringly too-well-known in a rented timber house on Stanton Hill. Through louvres watching the louvred sea or helping out at the trading store, until the birth of their son put an end to that. Kathleen saw her husband shrink among the stacks of cookers, gas-run refrigerators, sacks of flour and seed, the endless shelving of canned fruits and meat (Dak pork in natural juice, Dak devilled ham, Dak pâté de foie), the coolers and jugs, the automatic oil water heaters, the copra dryers, generators and low watt-consumption ceiling fans with high air displacement.

  ‘Like some unnatural poem,’ she had commented, reading a consignment list aloud on an evening full of moths. Ronald refused to smile.

  Was it she who strained the relationship, with her uncivil clutch at truth or truth’s flippant side? In a decade when women were supposed to have no opinion at all, she had plenty that she voiced, unabashed, despite the judgemental eyes of other town wives (but then she had been ‘blooded’ by the captain of the Fort Caribee!), not boisterously, mark you, but assuredly.

  Add laughter. That’s what many found hard to forgive, that plundering effect of mirth.

  The truth was she missed Daisy, Daisy now married and moved to Charco where her no-hoper husband ran a supply truck between there and Reeftown and, if she read accurately between the lines of Daisy’s scribbled letters, kept her regularly pregnant and beat her up.

  Whoops a Daisy!

  When Shamrock was born two years after Brian she felt even more trapped, as the heat shrank the four of them in that sluggish town beside the sluggish river. The store and the demands of the store became an Aztec god exacting her husband’s heart. Drudgery plundered hers. So it was with relief she heard Ronald announce, not long after his son’s sixth birthday, that his father wanted him back in Honiara to take over the business there.

  ‘He’s getting on,’ he explained, conciliating, as they sat on their veranda after tea watching lights bud on the lower slopes and sea waters turn grey along with the night-dark hills of their own island. The mosquitoes gave them no peace. ‘He’s ill, poor bugger. He needs me. I can easily get someone to take over this end.’

  She could not repress the delight in her voice.

  ‘At last. We’ll be going, too, won’t we? Me and the kids?’

  ‘You’ve always been nagging for a change. Here’s your chance.’

  She could see him now, as she sat in the mall, see him chasing his never-satisfied dream of blue water. Poor Ronald. He was to die twice, in a way.

  Before the Burns Philp Line motor vessel, Tulagi, even reached that reborn town (which once bore the s
ame name) in the path of the east wind, old Mr Hackendorf, trader and island hand, had been laid to rest. His house on Lengakiki Ridge stood gasping in its own garden jungle of croton and hibiscus, which flowered riotously day after day, leaves and bloom almost blotting out a gaspingly beautiful view of the sea, Savo Island and the humped backs of the Floridas.

  The European population was a small, closed strata-ridden group of a few hundred mainly government functionaries, among whom the social pecking order was maintained to an exotic degree. Kathleen, overcome by an even more savage heat and by views, wondered whether she would survive. The beauty was crushing.

  Hospitality was extended in carefully graded courtesy. The power group had to close ranks, Ronald kept explaining, against the indigenes, who could get above themselves. After all, the settlers had endured the troubles caused by Marching Rule and a splinter Christian group known as Holy Mama, dissidents who threatened the carefully woven colonial fabric of governor and governed. Whenever Kathleen asked about them, the response was heated, indignant or dismissive but rarely detailed, and her amusement at the name of the breakaway religious sect brought cool stares of disapproval.

  ‘But the name!’ she protested to Ronald. ‘It’s wonderful! I could join a group with a name like that!’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said coldly. ‘And please, don’t say things like that in public. People will think you’re crazy.’

  What people?

  There were luncheons and dinners to welcome the new chaps.

  One splendid affair was at the still thatched-roofed Government House on the shores of Ironbottom Sound.

  ‘You laugh too damn much,’ Ronald had complained petulantly afterwards in the house on the ridge. The rooms trembled with the native drums his father had been collecting for years. Harmonics pulsated from skins.