by Thea Astley
‘Where’s your charity, Sister?’ Donellan demanded.
‘I haven’t time for that,’ Sister Cornelius said sharply. ‘In addition to the nursing we try to run classes. We supervise meals, cleaning, cooking. What would you know about it? In fact,’ she added intemperately, ‘what would the bishop know either?’
Father Donellan wanted to smile. She had a point. He understood both sides. He said, ‘I don’t know which is worse, you know, the pain of the body or the mind. Somehow I think it’s the mind. Do you pray for him?’
‘When I get time,’ Sister Cornelius said abruptly.
The bishop was an aloof man who had once stated that he could not abide any dominance of women in Church matters. That he needed their assistance in running his network of parishes and schools was another matter. Donellan was tempted to repeat the story of the first parish priest in their mainland town, who was so incensed at the arrival of the first nuns come to establish a school he had let them carry all their possessions, including awkward plaster statues of the saints, up from the wharf themselves. He began, ‘I suppose you know about Father O’Mara who–’
Sister Cornelius interrupted with, ‘I know what you’re about to tell me and I am not amused.’
Donellan pushed back his chair and rose. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I can see you have a problem. I’ll write, as I said I would, and the best thing you can do for now is to send the lad back here. I’ll come over myself once a week until we can find a replacement.’
He had watched her go, walking steadily away along the road to the jetty. She was a tall woman, middle-aged he guessed, but with an energy that seemed to brush aside the encumbering quality of those mediaeval white garments, the steaming effect of coif and veil. Even as he watched he saw a group of islanders who had been waiting under the coconut palms come out to greet her, shyly, then with laughter, crowding round her, touching, talking. She bent to pick up one of the children and cuddled it for a moment, her hand caressing the girl’s hair before setting her down. He saw that the sister’s face was transfigured with smiles.
No, he knew, she simply wouldn’t have time. Every swabbed sore was her practical form of prayer. He was ashamed.
And felt shame again now, as he sat in the kitchen on the morning of Cullen’s departure.
The young man had not slept the night before. Long after midnight Donellan heard him rise from his bed in the living-room, heard the screen door squeak back and footsteps plod to and fro along the garden path. Then a rain squall drove him in and finally Donellan got up himself to find the curate sitting beside the open door staring out into darkness.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
There was no reply. He boiled up water for tea and encouraged Cullen to drink some but the young man’s hand shook so fiercely that half the contents of the cup spilled on the matting.
‘It will be all right,’ Donellan comforted stupidly. ‘Everything will be all right.’ He removed the cup from Paddy Cullen’s hands. ‘You’ll be seeing your family in Brisbane soon. How about that, then?’
Silence. Donellan remembered too late the curate had no family. His father had been killed during the war at Milne Bay. His mother had died not long after seeing her boy ordained. Now he had added another vow to those already taken: silence. The darkness stretched and weakened into light as Donellan dozed in his chair. He awoke to find the curate had not moved but was absorbing the new morning with indifference.
Donellan made some kind of breakfast. The curate broke a piece of toast into small pieces, took a few sips at black coffee and uttered his first words in eight hours: ‘Is it time to go?’
Despair was the unforgivable sin.
Cullen reeked of it.
Donellan seized the curate’s small grip stuffed with his few clothes and books. ‘Take these,’ he offered, handing over some tattered novels that had lain unread for years on the priest-house shelves. He glanced at them. The author’s name, Sanford Rim, was prominent among whorls of dust, horses’ hooves and lassos. ‘Someone left them in the boarding house years ago. Look, they’re even signed by the author. Quite a little collector’s item, eh?’
‘I don’t want them,’ Paddy Cullen said. ‘Thank you.’
‘Come on! They might cheer you up. They’re good for a laugh.’
The curate took them without argument and shoved them in the pocket of his alpaca and began the long long endless never-ending walk to the jetty.
Another was leaving as well, the director having begged a last-minute place on the mission launch for boatman Jardine, dismissed at last for affronting that puritan’s moral code. Staff wives had protested. The director could no longer ignore.
Jardine was already ahead of them, jaunty, untouched by disgrace. He was leaving behind three half-caste kids as well. Or was it more? He’d lost count. He gave the priests a vile wink from a still blackened eye. ‘Nice day for it,’ he commented. ‘Travelling.’ There was no one there to see him depart. He wasn’t sorry to go, even after all these years. There were plenty of jobs going along the coast for a man of his skills. He smirked as he moved away from the priests and stepped on board. The boat shuddered under him. No one answered his asides. He slouched into the small cabin, settled himself with his luggage and began smoking.
On the jetty Father Donellan was telling Paddy Cullen to keep in touch, drop a line. All the platitudes. The curate had passed well beyond heeding/hearing under the cloud-choked sky. Father Donellan took his hand. It was limp and cold, frail as a shell. ‘Cheer up, lad,’ he said, too heartily, shaking the hand, then patting the young man’s shoulder. ‘Cheer up now. Even if you don’t owe it to yourself, you owe it to God.’
‘God!’ the young man whispered. He turned away and stepped onto the launch. The helmsman sent the Avila out in a wide throbbing curve while Donellan stood there watching it draw farther and farther away. He could see Paddy Cullen still standing rod-straight and bleak in the stern. He waved but there was no response and the launch rocked into distance until it was a toy and Donellan, still straining, saw the ant figure in the stern clamber onto the rail and project itself like an arrow over the side and begin swimming.
Or not begin.
Life no different here from them old days, eh?
But things changin over on mainland all right. Normie he tell them bout everythin, bout the cars, bout soldiers from America, bout school. He say school bit like bein on Doebin, white bullies all the same. Still, he get ideas then. He see things done different. Maybe, he say, things get different for us, eh Manny?
Some things change. Grandma Rosie she dead now, three years back. Jericho he gone down to reserve at Woorabinda but Billy stay on here. Sometime he went mainland like me to work on them sugar farms too. Got real money then. The boss here glad to see him go. But he always come back. Troublemaker, new boss call him. Like Normie. Real troublemaker.
Stay clear, Manny, Normie tell him. You got wife an kids. You gotta keep an eye out for dadda an that Billy, now Jericho gone. Dadda gettin old.
Like me, he tell him.
You had your trouble, Manny, he say. Don’t want no more.
These days, this place got funny feelin. Bama jibayararri. People frighten, eh? An they angry.
I THINK I’VE BEEN BORN BEFORE MY TIME
I think I’ve been born before my time.
I don’t fit.
I mouth off.
This narrow-minded town!
After the island—pretty phrase that. I repeat it: after the island. After the island we settled, Mother, Claire and I, more or less comfortably in yet another boarding house Mother was invited to manage, a hostel of sorts with half a dozen boarders. Claire and I returned to boarding school, ‘to be finished’ as they quaintly put it in those days. Well, yes!
We hardly met the cast until a year later, though I can say Mr Morrow, whom I remembered from the island, moved out virtually the day Mother moved in. I thought she’d terrified him. I was wrong.
I am twelve years’
wiser. Events are so bland and yet remain so muddled. If I say Thomas and I yawn in each other’s face, you’ll know we’re married, my husband’s brief lust long sated, mine merely awakened.
‘Whatever you like,’ he is fond of saying, fussily dabbing traces of breakfast from his mouth. ‘Do whatever you like. Take a lover. But I must remind you, ’cushla, I have a position to maintain in this town.’
What town?
At the height of the Pacific war he is trying to persuade me, for a variety of reasons, most of which I suspect but don’t care about, to take our daughter south and rent a house in Brisbane. He fusses about our safety. I shy away from the thought of unfamiliar landscapes. Besides, this one is peopled with exotics from the New World, gleaming boys in tight uniforms and easy accents that, despite their fluidity, also fit like gloves. I should be ashamed, thinking this way. I’m not. I meet them at hospital socials, at the dinner parties of town worthies determined on giving our newcomer rescuers a good time before they are sent off to be slaughtered in the Coral Sea. I also meet them at bus-stops.
For the first time I’ve noticed how similar my husband’s accent is to that of the American troops, and wonder if this synonymous charm is being exercised as easily on probationer nurses.
‘Of course it is,’ Tinker, my best friend, tells me. ‘He can’t help himself. Two can play at that game. Why don’t you?’
I nod, pretending indifference, wise with nearly a dozen years of wedlock to counterbalance the flippant and preposterous urges that overtake me when I saunter through wolf-whistles and chiacks along Flinders Street. I don’t look my age. I am twenty-nine going on three hundred. But the actual digits ahead of me huddle in a warning of mortality.
Forget it!
I am ready but I don’t know for what. And I am weary of a Celtic charm that is shaken like spice over any dish within gulping reach. We bore each other rancid. That is the very word. It amazes me to see the empurplement of rage that washes over Thomas’s neck and face. You’re too plausible, I once told him. Too ready with soft and easy excuses. You—I had searched for a killer word or phrase that might explain or resolve the situation, especially for me, and heard myself protesting—rot my will.
Back on the island he had said to me, softly, gently, just as my fingers were picking out the last notes of a Debussy prelude on that rotting boarding-house piano, Let me tell you about Madame de Montespan. (‘Let me tell you about Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina.’ I was doomed. My seduction was complete.) There I was, a virginal slender thing who had once glimpsed the hairy bag inside his bag of a bathing-costume as he sprawled immodestly on the beach at Shippers Vale. (Veux-tu te baigner, Leonie? Veux-tu nager, petite?) Petite had shut her eyes against the horror of his gaping groin and splashed delicately in the tide below the casuarinas. But then his dapper Irish face erased the memory of his private parts and his voice vibrated with poetry.
I never knew anyone to know so much verse.
Let me say now it was an oral seduction. That voice! That accent! (That blarney I would have said had I been older.)
And that charm, no matter where he showers it, still hasn’t diminished even towards me. It’s like a bad habit. It’s simply that watching its dissemination from such suffocating quarters, I suffer from constipation of the soul.
Walking through the troop-crowded streets of our town, uphill, downhill, is my attempt to arrest the creeping grittiness that is attacking me from the head down. Smile, nudge, whistle. Those signals act like antitoxins.
Thomas and I do all the dutiful things. We both love our daughter. We both bore her. Annette is a tremblingly intelligent seven-year-old. Thomas and I attend canteen dances, fundraising dinner parties. We meet only officer class, gloriously laundered men with manners that could give Thomas a run for his money. I want a bit of rough. Isn’t that natural after all these years of phoney courtliness?
Last week when he was called away to Brisbane (airforce transport provided, glossy WACs!), I was invited to another fundraising dance held by the wives of town burghers. It was a scrubby affair. There was a makeshift band playing Glen Miller numbers but nobody was really in the mood. We danced, we drank, we decorously flirted.
Late in the evening a curly boy whose hair was so blond it was almost white cut in on me while dancing. My elderly banker partner disappeared.
‘I’ve been watching you,’ curlylocks said.
What is the reply to that? I smiled.
‘All night.’ The prod!
‘Oh yes.’
‘You’re a pretty girl. Why don’t you make more of yourself? You’ve got the basics. Great bones. Great body. You need tarting up.’
‘Do I?’ I was tempted to say, You’re pretty rude! and wriggle from his too close hold. Back there was the safety of the bank manager and town councillor and their wives.
‘If you want a good time,’ he suggested in my ear. His eyes were an electric green, his skin fresh and pink. There was a feral quality in his unblinking stare.
‘I’m having a good time.’
‘Not my sort of good time. Let me take you home.’
‘Certainly not,’ I said, all fake uppity outrage. The dance ended then and he didn’t bother seeing me back to my table.
Over coffee afterwards at the banker’s home, a low shrub-hidden sea-gazing colonial in Belgian Gardens, I mentioned the young man but touched only the perimeters of our conversation.
‘Gatecrasher,’ the bank manager pronounced. He was a tall eaten-away fellow who kept a mistress in a northern coastal township and was consequently righteous and conversationally puritanic. ‘Never seen him before. He was with a group who came in late, a bunch of LACs from the base who made things unpleasant for the doorman. Forget it, my dear, if he offended you, because he’s definitely not our class.’
‘What is our class?’
‘What? What’s that? I don’t understand you.’
I didn’t understand either.
*
Pestering phone calls followed. How had he discovered me? I flirted with disaster. The voice at the end of the wire was so persistent. Thomas was still away.
I take tea with Tinker, my repository, my confessional for marital plaint. Once-hidden wishes flutter out unguarded. Tinker is a tall unrestrained young woman who works in a government office. We were at school together for that last year. She is a splendid violinist who went straight to the second violins in the Brisbane Symphony Orchestra where she had a brief but passionate affair with a cellist. He was a married man. Gossip. Scandal. Horror. Tinker was removed. Brisbane was like that. She returned north and married one of several applicants rather as if she were buying a handbag. The lucky groom is now somewhere in New Guinea fighting fever, leeches and Japanese. She is philosophical about his absence but after Brisbane has learnt caution and takes her pleasure where she can, as discreetly as this small town allows.
I am painting toe- and finger-nails magenta. (There’s a message in that! I read somewhere that whores in the later Roman Republic dressed in purple!) Tinker watches as I wave and wriggle digits to dry the lacquer. From her mantel radio a soprano is whooping her way through a Strauss waltz and achieving a terrible climax.
Tinker says, ‘But you don’t even know this fellow. You know nothing about him.’
‘I don’t know anything about Thomas. Or rather, I know too much, I suppose.’
‘At least you know he’s not criminal, violent.’
‘Who said anything about criminal? You’re very careful all of a sudden. Very picky.’
‘You suggested he had a feral look. I think “magnetically feral” were the exact words. Did he give you a name when he rang?’
He had given a name.
‘But can you check? The draft’s pulling in all sorts now. It could be any name, for Heaven’s sake.’
‘Oh God! Do you want me to go out to the barracks and get a list of all serving men? Of course it’s all right.’
‘And where does this charmer plan taking you?’
Tinker makes a face and slumps back in her chair.
‘Not even toasted sandwiches at the River Rose! At least he certainly won’t be involved in any courting expenses.’
‘You’re talking like a whore, Tinker.’
I grin, to soften those words.
‘And how will you get there?’ she asks, ignoring me. ‘Walk? Hitch? Swim along the coast?’
I tell her not to be like that. He has a motorbike. I will ride pillion.
‘You’re out of your mind,’ Tinker says flatly. ‘Don’t go.’
Well, I have a week to think about it. Why a week? Where’s the urgency? More to the point, his urgency? I go over and over that scatter-brusque invitation to meet behind the post office (why behind?), to hitch my leg across his pillion and throb off for a joyride out of the war-darkened town. Against the foolhardiness of this ragtag invitation my mind hollers grudges fermented by the latest communication from Thomas. A bad line. His voice tinny and divested of charm over eight hundred miles of wire. ‘Not for another week, mavourneen. I’m trying to tee up a lift.’ The phone goes dead.
Tais-toi, tais-toi. On n’aime qu’une fois.
In flattening heat the afternoon of the tryst—that word is a scoffer—I trudge to Tinker’s house, catching her at her palm-infested front gate as she is emptied out of an American jeep. The officer, who waves nonchalantly, is a mass of badge and braid. She glares at me.
‘Come in. You did not see that. Not.’
I repeat those nostalgic and corrupting words of Laforgue.
‘What’s it mean?’ Tinker asks rudely, stripping to her underwear and vanishing into the shower.
‘“Silence,”’ I call through the shower curtains. Tinker’s neck is blackened with lovebites. ‘“Be silent! You love only once.”’
‘Bullshit!’ Tinker yells. She steps naked from the shower. Her thighs are bruised as well. Thumbprints? ‘Don’t go.’ She slams the bathroom door in my face.