Coda

by Thea Astley

  ‘Roast lamb!’ Kathleen had cried. ‘Mint sauce!’ And she laughed again. ‘It was ninety in the shade.’

  She was unable to stifle her giggles. ‘Scarlet cummerbunds on those poor natives. Surrogate butlers!’

  Ronald left her laughing over a gin and tonic and went to check the children. Only the week before, at an informal gathering in the home of one of the assistant secretaries, she had given a spirited version of ‘I never forget I’m a lady’ on an instrument untuned by salt air and which had only ever shivered beneath easier Schumann. The men had loved it. It was the wives.

  She could be left friendless, Ronald worried, sweating over his father’s incomplete accounts in the store by the Matanikau River. She would have no back-up. In the islands you needed back-up. He could barely cope with the forest of paper work bequeathed by his father. The Gilbertese native clerk was hopeless but, Ronald decided, hunting excuse, the old man never had the worry of wife and kids. Well, except for him.

  He began shelving important work at the store, reporting in late, locking up early and taking the afternoon off. He spent more time with his son, driving out on the island’s main road as far as Visale. The small boy was fascinated by the canoes, especially the great oceangoing ones made of bent planks held together by the toughest of thwarts and a resin gum. The sterns curved gracefully high.

  ‘Like the bow of a gondola,’ his father explained.

  ‘What’s a gondola?’

  Ronald told him, and in an old encyclopaedia on the mouldering bookshelves up at the house, found pictures of Venetian gondoliers languidly idling by their craft. The boy couldn’t look at them enough. Yet the big black war canoes frightened him with their bows raised, challenging the terrifying swan neck of the stern. The pearl inlay dazzled. In the smaller craft shark heads were carved, whose pearl teeth could rip approaching enemies. There were nightmares for a while and Kathleen, who lost a lot of sleep from the fruit of this bonding, sat up beside the sweaty tossing kid, damping his forehead down every now and then with a wrung-out flannel, murmuring him back to sleep.

  Ronald sat up half the night reading.

  Where had all the courting gone? The tenderness?

  Daisy’s blackened eyes at least showed interest!

  She was too realistic to mourn for long that lost, slender, diffident young man with the quirky humour, who had become over the years a tensed sales clerk with the distant crazed eyes of a visionary unable to satisfy his yearnings.

  ‘I was the eaten one,’ she would say unfairly, ‘during those lost weeks without him.’

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ Brian (he was called Brian then) had asked, had pestered that year for those three missing weeks in the shadowy house on Lengakiki Ridge outside the town of the east wind. The house held only shadows now of the fierce old man who had died before their arrival. Cupboards were still crammed with shirts and moleskins developing mildew, clothing Ronald was too sentimental to throw out. They had been in this rebuilt town for six months when her husband had taken his first mad decision.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ the small boy nagged.

  Kathleen was beyond grief with the demands of young children, and besides was at last sorting and discarding the useless belongings of her father-in-law.

  ‘He’s been eaten, darling,’ she had answered abstractedly, coping with rotting stock, checking the store between times and placating dissatisfied customers. She had argued with him before he had pursued his daft whim, setting out the imponderables. He was sullen about it.

  ‘It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  He told her Mount Makarakombou was two thousand four hundred and forty-seven metres high. Don’t forget the seven. Or eight thousand and twenty-six feet. Approximately. Don’t forget the six.

  ‘Why there?’ she had asked mildly.

  ‘Because it bloody is,’ Ronald had replied testily. He eyed the hurt on her face. ‘It’s late payback. Historic payback. My grand-uncle was murdered near Tetere at the end of the century, just for wanting to climb Tatuve. He was with a group of gold fossickers, poor sods.’

  ‘You’ve picked the wrong mountain,’ she said. She couldn’t resist smiling.

  ‘This one’s higher.’

  It had become popular to find bits of abandoned war wreckage clinging to jungle trees like metal rag; to hunt for wing-flaps and engine mountings; to check out identity discs and the decaying detritus of the Pacific war.

  ‘It’s not really that either, is it?’

  ‘I’m not looking for plane parts, if that’s what you think. I’m settling a score.’ He looked embarrassed. ‘I’m looking for the new Jerusalem, actually.’

  ‘I hope,’ she had said, scrubbing diligently at an imagined spot on the table, ‘that you find it. I thought …’

  ‘You thought what?’

  ‘Mendana’s cross, perhaps. Wasn’t it planted in the hills behind Point Cruz? It’s a lot closer. You could look for that.’

  ‘My … new … Jerusalem,’ he said, offensively spacing each word, ‘is an abstraction. Oh God, what’s the use of talking about it.’

  There she went trailing her concern for eighteen days into and out of the unhelpful Secretariat, past the Guadalcanal Club, the stores on Mendana Avenue. Officials were irritated and difficult to see, except for the spurious interest of a junior administrative officer who tried to kiss her worry into temporary oblivion. Ronald had left no neat bundle of clothes on the beach. The store runabout that he had taken had been found three days after he left, washed up in a steamy cove near Inakona.

  ‘Eaten’ had worried Brian until his mother explained it had been a joke, dismissing the possibilities of the unknown tempers of man bush in regions untouched by waites. Unfortunately she compounded his distress by telling jokes about missionaries in cooking-pots. She had always been one for the flip remark, the quick crack! He had screamers of nightmares again for the three weeks before Ronald finally staggered out onto a beach track east of the town. The jungle behind him gave back a huge vegetable yawn. He had lost a great deal of weight and appeared to have difficulty in organising his thoughts. Despite being subjected to intense questioning by the secretary for protectorate affairs, and reprimanded for the trouble he had caused the search parties, he refused to utter one word about where exactly he had been or what had happened.

  The island had become for him a bright stamp whose colours had run.

  He lost interest in the store. He sat for hours on his veranda looking over the water to Savo Island.

  Kathleen hated remembering those days: the gossip at the Club, the quickly dropped eyes and stifled conversations. What was there to do? Eventually an eager Sydney man, who had rolled in like any carpetbagger to suck up chances, persuaded him to sell up both stores, this and the one on the mainland.

  What was left but Brisbane?

  What was actuality? What fiction?

  The pictures came in savagely illuminated splats.

  ‘Regard me,’ the junior administrative officer (seconds in Middle English, Oxbridge purr) said between kisses during those troubled weeks, ‘as your shrift-father.’ Her soggy cheeks were trying to resist his insistent mouth. Any moment the haus girl …!

  Hierarchy had withdrawn its interest; there was no actual offence except idiocy all round. The family left within that month on the Tulagi, Kathleen carrying with her sharp pictures of the Joy Biscuit Company building and the Kwong Chow Hotel, but none of the careful suppers of island wives. None of the right places.

  Ronald found a paper-shuffling job with a government authority in Brisbane and the ennui, she had to admit, resumed.

  Where, Kathleen asked herself in the windless summers, had vitality fled? There were moments of rapport, brief, barely remembered, when her husband stood by the piano they had bought secondhand from a neighbour, and she played ‘Waita Poi’ or ‘Mandalay’ (both versions) or the more robust of the sea shanties, while he sang in a voice now thinning with age. Wo
rds and sounds became paradigms for a lost era: ‘In the harbour, in the islands, in the Spanish seas,’ he carolled in his fine light baritone, ‘are the tiny white houses and the orange trees’, while the kids cringed with embarrassment as they grew older and her eyes dared not catch his, for fear of uncovering a moist repining beyond bearing.

  The long sea-fronting stretch of Mendana Avenue kept dragging its ribbon across her eyes as well, in that hot timber house in the sweltering back streets of Ascot. The mendacity of memory! Ah, the glamour that attached itself, now she was distanced, to those sharky waters round Savo Island, to the junk stores in Chinatown and the studied luncheons in diplomatic gardens drowning in frangipani. And ah, those tersely accented husbands, the younger of whom stunned the natives when they took their own versions of rowing shells to the lagoon, sculling up and down (Pull, pull together, et cetera, et cetera!) to the sombre-eyed interest of beer-guzzling Melanesians, who could have told them a thing or two about canoes predating Boat Day on the Thames!

  But here the glamour both enlarged and diminished, as Ronald developed a capacity for silence and lived out the remainder of his days between office and home, both mind and house crammed with South Seas trophies. The crudely carved wooden masks, drums, phalli that his father had collected gave dubious colour to their cul-de-sac purgatory, gave the kids and their school friends the giggles. At weekends Ronald would sit on his wide veranda and stare dismally through a screen of broad leaves, uncomfortable on bamboo, reliving the lotus days of colonialism. He and Kathleen seemed to meet only for the briefest of times. She had begun evening classes; dispiritedly, when he came home from his penitential job, he warmed up the dinner she had left for him (the children were five-day boarders now at schools outside town) and picked at the food without tasting it. If he had only the juice, he would have cried.

  His son had surprised him one day during the September holidays as he limped out from the specialist’s rooms on Wickham Terrace which he had been visiting for the last few months. Brian was about to be burdened with a special knowledge.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked his dad, this tired old man who was still middle-yeared and too young to be so exhausted. In the unrelenting light his father looked sixty, seventy. The September heat was at its most vicious in the four o’clock sun. It was four by all, by every one of the clocks. His father’s face was a muddy yellow, too dried out even to sweat. The boy’s own shirt was stained across the shoulders and under the armpits with that fresh lively stink of teenage exertion that held legends of cricket and football and swimming, and now of striding, vim-filled despite weather, along the Terrace, arrogantly hoisting a book-satchel. ‘What is it?’

  His father had swayed on the footpath, caught under the clouting sun and said, ‘Don’t tell your mother, will you? She’ll only worry.’

  Gravely the boy promised no.

  ‘It’s cancer, son. Not long now, I imagine.’

  Three months after that, after his father had finally been forced to retire from the drab job he hated anyway, and with mother guessing at the worst, he had accompanied him to the specialist’s rooms whose air was thick with all the stirred dust of a confessional. Tributes to the avernal hung like fog. Sadly he watched his dad rise at the nurse’s summons, the too bright red lips of announcement—Doctor’s ready for you now!—dropping the article as was done only for God. And he had seen his father stumble, the old man totter a bit, as he limped, a bone cartoon of himself, to the surgery door.

  Hadn’t mother noticed, for God’s sake?

  Of course she had. There was a conspiracy of silence, neither wanting to distress the other.

  Minutes. Minutes.

  The other patients, waiting behind tattered copies of Woman’s Day, Newsweek and Time, were becoming edgy: all those failed novenas, rosaries, stations of the cross.

  The doctor’s face floated like a balloon round the surgery door and a hand summoned him into the sanctum, where he saw Dad, the old man, lying neatly on the examination table, his eyes closed, peacefully asleep.

  The boy stood staring. The doctor appeared lost for words.

  ‘I don’t know how to say this.’ He hesitated.

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Perhaps I should ring your mother.’

  ‘Mother? Why? What’s up?’

  The specialist went back to his desk and sat heavily. He would feel safer ex cathedra. ‘Well, um, look. It’s remarkable, really. Quite remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ He picked up a pen and began tapping, fiddling. ‘I examined your father as usual,’—the boy could not take his eyes off the sheet-covered figure on the bench—‘and when I’d finished he asked me what the … er … prognosis, the … um … situation was. As it were. Do you understand?’

  Brian nodded.

  ‘I had to tell him, I’m afraid, that the cancer was incredibly advanced since his last visit a month ago and that there would be no remissions. You were aware he had cancer, weren’t you?’ Brian was beyond nodding.‘Then … and this is what …’ The specialist rubbed one hand across his forehead, seeking answers. ‘He looked up at me, you see. He was still lying there. And then he said, “Right!” and closed his eyes and died.’

  It was some monstrous joke.

  The silence in the room swelled and added its weight to the soundlessness of the sheeted figure, the stillness of wasted body beneath that sheet.

  ‘Oh geez!’ he cried. ‘Just like that!’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Look, ask my attendant to ring your mother and see if she can come in. No. Wait. I’ll do it.’

  The boy went over to his father. The specialist had left the face uncovered, gaunt and in need of a shave.

  ‘Dad?’ he whispered hopefully. ‘Dad?’

  But the eyes were closed against him and tears came. He found himself kneeling on the floor beside the bench, his forehead pressed against his father’s uninterested hand, simply saying the monosyllable over and over until eventually the nurse came in from the other room and led him away.

  He didn’t know what to do. He had crashed head-on into mortality. To wait here for mother? To wait and go with the ambulance? Where? The specialist wasn’t much help with his continuing whisper of ‘there, son!’ and after a while he slipped out of the waiting room, caught a tram back to Ascot and sat on the veranda in his father’s old cane lounger, waiting for mother.

  She had trudged up the steps an hour later, Shamrock trailing, hauling shopping bags.

  ‘You should have told me,’ Kathleen accused, ‘that you knew. Before. You should have said.’

  ‘You should have told me,’ the boy said. His lips were set stubbornly against the cruelty of the world. Shamrock sobbed in her bedroom for the poor old withdrawn prickly codger, despite everything, despite the arguments, the taciturnity. Despite it all, she sobbed and sobbed.

  The boy wasn’t prepared for his mother’s dry-eyed grief.

  ‘Wouldn’t you know!’ this old girl said aloud in the heat of the mid-day mall. ‘Wouldn’t you just know!’

  Daisy could have been sitting there, for all she knew. Kathleen kept noddling through those last days before Ronald died, the horrible secret of his illness huddled within, unable to turn to the children, lost between voyages in her own port. She drank the last of her coffee angrily, one-swig Kath, and shook her head to free it from all that unhappy stuff. There was a busker under the shopfront just nearby, strumming guitar and singing mournfully about the inland. Can’t sing like my boy, she thought. Not a patch on him.

  Just briefly she wondered what Brain would think if he knew she’d come back. But she didn’t want him to know, didn’t want to push herself in where she wasn’t wanted. Anyway, she couldn’t find him even if. He was somewhere around, up in the hills.

  The busker was packing up his guitar and moving off now. She felt sorry for him. ‘No talent,’ she muttered to herself, ‘poor kid.’ He was moving across to the people at the next table, his cap held ready, hoping for a handout. ‘Got to give the poor coot so
mething,’ she told Daisy, fumbling in her handbag for loose change. ‘Daisy, you should have heard Brain in his palmy days.’

  She blinked and Daisy vanished. But she went on, talking to air.

  There was no doubt: Brian’s voice was better than his father’s. As the kids grew beyond the stage of scowling shame while father insisted on running through his repertoire of ballads, Kathleen was delighted when occasionally the boy joined them at the piano and sent rich true notes soaring about the living room. He was playing the lead in a school production of The Gondoliers and needed the practice. Although he was only fourteen his voice had changed without noticeable cracking and had the mature tenor assurance of a man.

  The year before she had sat with Ronald at a school concert watching their son as he sang a bracket of Irish songs for Saint Patrick’s day. Up there on stage, spotlighted, with his still unfuzzed face, he looked younger than he was, but when his voice, ripe and full and strong, lofted ‘Macushla’ and ‘Mother Machree’ to the soaring roof of the hired theatre, that stunning opposition of school shirt and matinee idol voice had the crowd cheering and pulping their palms. God has been good to him, the Brothers said in the foyer at interval. He has a great gift.

  ‘You heard what Brother said,’ Kathleen repeated many times later, absorbed in savouring the words. ‘A great gift. Your father and I are very proud.’

  ‘I’ve made the second fifteen,’ Brian said. He could think of nothing else.

  ‘Nothing else,’ she had complained to Daisy. ‘The one thing he could do really well and never worked at. Oh it was a pleasant enough … hobby, I suppose. But he sang to please himself. “That’s what it’s for, Mum,” he used to say. “There’s more to life than that.”’

  She could hear him now, taking a pair of sparkling eyes to the delight of parents driven down the old Sandgate Road for school play night, encored to a reprise, sotto voce, and feel still the tears of pride that made her look away and squeeze Ronald’s fevered hand.