by John Clanchy
‘Goodnight sweetheart,’ someone sings from a long way off. ‘Sleep will banish sorrow, Goodnight sweetheart …’
Vera’s Story
All the unhappiness in my life, I realize, came from the fact that I was once granted the thing I wanted most of all. It’s a common story.
I lived in Bathurst until I was twenty-one. Emily and I had promised each other that we would leave at eighteen and go to the City and enlist. When the time came, we were desperate to leave, but then I couldn’t go – and Emily wouldn’t go without me. My mother died early. There were two children younger than me, and my father never remarried. How strange they should all die before me. In the end I only escaped when my younger sister turned fourteen and was able to leave school. By then, though, the War was over, and all the young men had come flooding back to the town and the farms around. Emily was happier to wait then because she was the prettiest and flirtiest girl in the town and she was always out at picnics and horse rides and parties and dances and bush balls. But the young men – while they were only too happy to flirt along as well – they were really looking to settle, and Emily always made it clear that that couldn’t include her. Or me. We were going to Sydney together, she told everyone, and we were both going to marry millionaires and travel the world and never come back. By then her father was ill and depressive and never left the house, and Emily lived away from her family most of the time, with friends in the town, but mainly with us, with me. Waiting, till I was free.
We lived in a big house out on the way to the Showgrounds, and we were a bit cut off from the town itself. Emily and her family came to live on the same road when she was four. I remember the day she moved in. I went down the road to watch the men unloading the truck – their furniture was big and dark and heavy and so different from ours, and the men unloading it sweated and swore whenever they hit their hands and knuckles against the gateposts. Fucking mausoleum, I heard one man say. And this girl with golden curls and snot on one cheek stood in the centre of the garden and sucked a finger, and gazed through the wooden pickets of the fence at me. When she’d finished looking long enough, she took her finger from her mouth and said, ‘You fish to play?’ And she spoke in such a funny way, it frightened me for a moment because I understood it, and I didn’t. My father said they were from Europe and were running away from someone. Emily’s real name was Emilia, he said, and her mother was English but her father was Austrian or Italian or something. He was a doctor, but not many people went to him because they said he was Jewish and a bit eccentric, and they were used to Dr Connolly who was Australian and had a surgery in the main street and didn’t work from the front room of a house that was dark – dark curtains and wood – and smelt of something sharp and stale at the same time like naphthalene or mothballs.
From the day she arrived, Emily and I were only separated three times in the rest of our lives, the first time for two days that I thought would never end, and the last time forever.
For two days when we were six we hid from each other, too frightened and ashamed to look one another in the eye. The man who was building a pergola on the front of our house persuaded us to let him inside one afternoon when Emily and I were playing by ourselves and there was no one else at home, and he pulled at our clothes and twisted our arms and Emily screamed, ‘No, I don’t want to’ – and I’ll never forget the scream she made, ‘Never, Never’ – and she must have frightened the man and he loosened his grip for a moment and she broke away and ran from the house, but she didn’t go for help, just escaped, and left me with the man. And I didn’t tell her later what had happened, but she knew I was forced to suck the man’s pipe in his trousers, and he said if I ever told anyone, he’d come back and break my arm. I said Emily had stolen my doll, the one with the broken arm, and Mother said, ‘Don’t play with her then, if she’s a little Jewish thief,’ but Emily didn’t really steal it at all. I buried it at the bottom of the garden under the fig-tree, so the man couldn’t come back and find it and break its other arm or make her suck his dirty, smelly pipe again, and I didn’t dig it up until a year later and, when I did, it was wet and rotten and worms were eating the cotton of it, and I filled it in again and put a cross of twigs because it was dead. For two days Emily and I hid from one another. On the third, she came and looked through the pickets of our fence this time and said, ‘You fish to play?’ and I nodded and said yes, and we forgot all about the other two girls and the man, and it was like we were meeting for the first time but were better friends than ever because we had a secret that we both knew but never mentioned for the rest of our lives.
We rented a flat together in Sydney, and Emily got a job straightaway as an insurance clerk, and I got work in time as a secretary at the Town Hall. And it wasn’t really so different from Bathurst only much more exciting with dance halls and cinemas and boat parties on the Harbour and lots of young men with money but unable to settle after the War, and Americans from the ships, and Air Force officers, and Emily, of course, was the favourite of them all. It wasn’t just that she was pretty – there were lots of pretty girls in Sydney – it was more her style. She was always so alive and dramatic and laughing, and other people, like me, just loved being with her. And she dressed in the brightest colours, and had silks and nylons – mostly from the Americans – when everyone else was in dull colours or shop uniforms or cotton at best. I think she must have gone with half the eligible men in Sydney in those years, but she never stuck with anyone. She was always restless underneath, looking for something different, something she couldn’t seem to find here. There were one or two men she became serious with, always older men, and some weekends she’d ask me if I shouldn’t visit Bathurst and see my family, and I knew then she wanted the flat to herself so the men could stay – but only for a while. Then she was free and partying again, and the years passed this way. And I was happy enough, no one had really caught my eye. Emily always took me along wherever she went, and she had so many cast-offs I was never short of someone for a film or a concert or a ball.
And then we were nearly thirty, and I was the one who was starting to get restless then because all the other girls we knew were married and had children, and if Emily and I went out in big groups now, all the girls who came with us were twenty or twenty-one and had just moved to the City themselves, and I realized then we’d been here eight years, and that made me even more restless and unsatisfied than ever.
‘Well, find someone,’ Emily said. ‘If that’s what you really want. I’ll help you.’
‘Two,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to find two.’
Because we’d also sworn as children we’d marry together. Leave together, marry together, bring up our families together – that had been our promise to each other. But Emily wasn’t sure any longer.
‘You’re a keeper, Vere,’ she’d say. ‘I’m a spender.’
But someone did come along and, surprisingly – after all the strangers we’d met – it was someone we knew. I was at work one morning and a man whose face I felt immediately I should know, put his head round the door of my office and said, ‘Aloe Vera. I heard you were here.’ And I looked at him – smiling, chirpy face, tanned, fair hair, neither brown nor blond, and a pleasant, cheeky country grin.
‘Bill Harcourt,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
Assistant Town Clerk,’ he said. ‘Started yesterday.’
Bill was from Orange, the next city to Bathurst, and Emily and I had known him from some of the bush dances when we were eighteen and he’d just been demobbed. At that time, I’d thought Emily was keen on him, but when I asked her, she’d just said, ‘Oh, Bill, he’s sweet, but he’ll never leave here.’ And we’d forgotten him.
‘Soon as I heard you were working here too,’ he said, ‘I came right down. And here I am.’
We had lunch that day and, since he knew no one else in Sydney, we got into the habit, and occasionally we went for drinks after work because he had only a boarding house to go back to. And then he asked me to a f
ilm, and again, and it began to get serious. He came to the flat, and Emily was delighted to see him again, and I realized how much I liked him as I watched him laugh and joke with Emily and leap up to pour her drinks while I cooked in the kitchen, and between rushing back and forwards not to feel left out, I spoilt the meal, and we had to go out to a club in the end and eat there. And after that, though he was always asking me to take him home, I made excuses not to and said Emily was going steady with someone, which wasn’t true. And Emily, on the other side, was just as insistent. What was happening with Bill, she wanted to know. Why didn’t he come around? Wasn’t I keen on him after all? And I said he was working hard and busy. But one night I couldn’t avoid it, and he came to a party at our flat that Emily was giving for a boyfriend of her own, and Bill spent half the night dancing and talking with her. And seeing them together so much, and the way others looked at them, I found I wanted Bill for myself more than anything else I’d ever wanted, and afterwards I told Emily.
‘Are you sure?’ Emily said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And if you take him from me, I’ll hate you forever.’
And that was it. Emily stopped asking about Bill and was always out, and so I could bring Bill home to the flat after all. And his interest in Emily stopped also, at exactly the same time, without my ever having to ask him. And I was so overjoyed and relieved at this, and so desperate to have him, that I never stopped to wonder about it then.
And two months after the party, Bill proposed, and I said yes, because I loved him but also because I began to understand that Emily would have chances all her life, simply because she was a spender, but for someone like me, they were running out. And in the end I wanted what everyone wanted – a marriage, home, family. Everyone but Emily, that is.
‘But Em,’ I told her. ‘I can’t marry till you do.’
Because we’d sworn this as well.
But she just laughed and said that was one promise we were old enough to leave behind now.
And then it happened. Emily met someone – I only saw him twice – and I wondered later whether she’d seen him much more often herself. Dreyfus was his name, Charles Dreyfus. He was French, from Algeria, but he’d worked in Paris with the Resistance during the War. He was handsome, older than Emily by ten years at least, iron-grey hair – so mysterious, so charming. He lived in Israel now. He’d fought for its independence after the War, and he was in Sydney making links with the military here, the intelligence community.
‘A spy,’ I said to Emily. ‘A real secret agent.’
‘I think so,’ said Emily. ‘There’s almost nothing he can tell me about himself. I know he’s a colonel, and that’s about all.’
And she was besotted, I could see. At last.
So, in the end, we didn’t marry together. She didn’t even come to my wedding. She packed herself instead, and left with Colonel Dreyfus. ‘Keep them all,’ she said, flinging dresses and scarves and jewellery and shoes and nylons onto her bed. ‘Keep it all, Vere,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t carry half of it anyway.’
‘But Em,’ I said. ‘You know nothing about him.’
‘No. Isn’t that wonderful?’ she said.
And was gone – for nearly six years. Cards came from Kuala Lumpur, then Jerusalem, then letters, one a week at least. They’d taken a flat in a new apartment block just outside the old city, and in the mornings from the window she could see the sun glinting on the Dome of the Rock. She was happy, she wrote, as she’d never felt happy before, though Charles was often away for weeks at a time – once for nearly two months – on State business, and it frustrated and worried her that she could never know where he was, or whether he was safe. But then he’d return, and the sun burnt through the paper of her letters again. But after two years, her letters dribbled to a trickle then almost dried up altogether, then became one or two a year, and they never answered any of the questions I asked in mine to her and were strangely lacking in detail, of herself, of Charles, of any of the troubles of Israel that we read about in the papers, and underneath what little she did say, I began to feel her dark unhappiness. There was little I could do but write and ask her to tell me what was happening. Brian had been born by then – after three years of trying without result – and Miriam came close after. And, of course, I’d stopped work and begun to be happy and unhappy in my own way in the suburbs.
And then out of the blue a card came from Emily, saying she was coming back, to face the music. And it came from Malaysia, not Israel, and she arrived almost at the same time as the card. And I’d never been so pleased to see anyone in my life, and I determined to do anything I could not to lose her again.
‘And Charles?’ I said.
‘He’s not with me,’ she said, and so I left that for the moment.
‘When I saw the card from Malaysia –’ I said.
And then she told me her story. How one day, feeling lonely and trapped in the flat with Charles away, she’d travelled by bus to a famous market on the other side of the old city, a place she’d never been before and which Charles had warned her was dangerous. And walking there in the street, she’d seen Charles with a woman on his arm – an Israeli. She followed them – and that, she laughed, was when she realized that if Charles was a spy, a secret agent, then he was a very poor one because he never looked around once in the three streets they walked. She tracked them to an apartment block, not very different from the one she lived in with Charles, and when they’d gone in, she spoke to the concierge. ‘That man,’ she said, ‘he looked like someone I used to know, a Mr Dreyfus.’ ‘That’s right,’ the concierge said, ‘he lives on the third floor. He’s very nice, very charming.’ ‘But the woman with him?’ Emily said. ‘I don’t think I recognized her.’ ‘Mrs Dreyfus,’ the woman hissed, ‘a gold-plated bitch, if ever there was one. No wonder he looks elsewhere,’ the woman said. Emily packed again, and left then for the only other place she knew outside Sydney – Kuala Lumpur where she and Charles had stayed for three days on their way to Israel. She’d been living there for the last three years.
‘But your letters?’ I said.
‘Isn’t pride a terrible thing?’ Emily said. ‘They weren’t written from Israel at all, only posted there.’
‘But how?’
‘I know a lot of men in Malaysia,’ she said. ‘Some in the airlines …’
‘But what have you been doing?’ I said. ‘How have you been able to live?’
‘Oh,’ said Emily, ‘I fill in the time. I do a lot of this …’ And she raised her glass, which was already nearly empty again. ‘And I know a lot of rich men. There are so many Chinese millionaires in KL,’ she said. And they’re very generous. And –’ she laughed, ‘I don’t know anything about their real lives. And that suits me fine.’
‘But Em –’
‘And I don’t want to discuss it any more. Now I’m home. And I’m an aunt, to two lovely children. That Miriam,’ she said, ‘and those eyes – where on earth did she get those eyes?’
‘My grandmother, I think,’ I said. ‘There were always stories – though she was a redhead, I think. Or strawberry – you can’t tell from old photos.’
‘That girl,’ Emily said, ‘will be something. She will make something of herself. Won’t you, darling? Come to Auntie Em –’ And Emily stayed then, not with us – the house was too small even if she’d wanted to stay – but in an apartment by the water, and was more than an aunt. She had money to burn, it seemed, and she spent. ‘Small change is for age,’ she said. She showered the children with presents, hired sitters and took Bill and me out to the theatre and the racecourse and places I hadn’t been for seven years. And I was happy again. But Emily wasn’t. She kept looking for the old life, but it had moved on, or settled, and the people in the bars were suddenly fifteen years younger than her, and though older men still flocked around her, she was quickly frozen out by the wives all of them now had, and who were women just as tough as she was. And tougher. And I could see she was starting to get restless ag
ain, and casting about.
We had a small car now and occasionally in the summer, we’d pack it and head for the South Coast for the weekend and hire a shack so the children could get out of the heat and dust of Sydney. And Emily who loved the sea – its roughness and freedom – always came with us. By this time Emily and I had grown very close again, and I was desperate for her to find something and be more settled at heart. And, deep down, I was terrified that if she didn’t, she’d leave me again.
And then, out of the blue, there comes that day …
We are at the coast, we’ve all swum, and Emily and Bill have headed back to the shack to start the lunch while I’ve offered to stay on for another half-hour paddling in the shallows with the children. Miriam, as always, is unrestrainable, playing the tomboy, splashing water at Brian, kicking it in his face.
‘Don’t –’ he says.
‘C’mon,’ she cries. ‘I’ll race you to the pier and back.’
‘I don’t want to,’ he says.
‘Because I’ll beat you.’
‘It’s too hot.’
‘Well, cool off, then,’ she says and kicks again. ‘If you’re such a sook.’ Brian takes the full wash of water in his face this time, and begins to cry.
‘That’s enough,’ I say. ‘If you can’t behave, we’ll have to go back.’
‘Well, Brian won’t even play,’ she says. And kicks at him a third time.
‘That’s it, pack your things,’ I say as I wipe the salt from Brian’s cheeks. ‘And Miriam, you can carry your brother’s towel and things as well.’
‘Why should I?’ she says. ‘If they’re his.’
Miriam – I know even at this early stage – will suffer in her life.
The shack is on a small rise – above the beach but hidden from it – and you approach it up a sandy, overgrown path from the back. Brian grumbles all the way up about the heat, his burning feet. Miriam sings to herself, seeming not to notice.