Hard Word

by John Clanchy

  ‘Teddy!’

  - and this line of old people all jumped in the air and fell over one another and clutched at their hearts and things, and Mum had to take Katie up her end of the seat, and even Fowler-call-me-Ian frowned for a second and then he realized where he was – I bet he was a million miles away at the time, making a hundred for Australia or scoring a try on the bell in the Grand Final for St George – and put on this fake smile for Mum, who’s in black, and looks beautiful, and is calm and composed, and doesn’t smile back.

  Fowler-call-me-Ian is actually in charge of the funeral even though Reverend Moysten is doing it, if that makes sense, because Mr Fowler’s the undertaker even if he calls himself a Funeral Director and wears a suit and a moustache and shiny black shoes instead of gumboots.

  When he first comes to the house to arrange the funeral, Katie can’t take her eyes off him because his moustache seems to twitch and move all by itself sometimes, as if it’s got a tiny electric current running through it. He introduces himself to Philip first, of course, and shakes his hand and says he’s Fowler call-me-Ian, but Mum just says:

  ‘Mr Fowler, why don’t we get down to business?’

  And he goes to say something back then, but Mum’s voice must have set off his moustache, so he has to put a hand up to switch off the current first.

  ‘Certainly, Mrs Trent,’ he says.

  And Mum says, ‘Trent-Harcourt actually.’

  And Fowler-call-me-Ian looks at her and goes, ‘Oh.’ And then he opens his briefcase and gets out a pen and a big pad and some forms and says:

  ‘Names, first, then. In this profession, it pays to be exact.’

  And I’m feeling sorry for him already because I know what’s going to happen.

  ‘So …’ he starts, all importantly with his pen going in a big circle to get at his pad which is right next to it and he could have just moved his hand three inches. ‘Let’s start with the deceased.’

  ‘Mother,’ says Philip.

  ‘Mrs Trent, then,’ he says as he writes. ‘Was it Vera, did I hear someone say?’

  ‘Harcourt,’ Mum says. ‘Vera Harcourt, no middle name.’

  And Fowler-call-me-Ian’s looking at Philip and scratching out names at the same time, which is actually quite a hard thing to do. So, he must practise it a lot, I think to myself.

  ‘I call her Mother too,’ Philip tells him.

  ‘I see,’ Fowler-call-me-Ian says, and starts a new page.

  ‘So,’ he says, ‘we have the deceased, Mrs Vera Harcourt … ?’ And he waits this time before he writes anything. But nobody says anything, and so he writes then. ‘And you’re Mr Trent?’ he says to Philip. And Mrs Harcourt is your –’

  ‘Mother-in-law,’ says Philip.

  ‘But you call her Mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see,’ Fowler-call-me-Ian says. ‘We’ll have to be especially careful how we phrase the newspaper notice then, won’t we?’

  And Mum and Philip just look at each other.

  ‘And you’re –?’ he says to Mum.

  ‘Mrs Trent-Harcourt – Miriam,’ Mum says. And Mrs Harcourt is my mother.’

  ‘Now we getting somewhere,’ Fowler-call-me-Ian says. ‘I’ve got it now. And these two charming young ladies …’ he says. And Katie and I do what we always do when someone smarms us like that, and we look around behind us to see who’s just come in the door, and Mum smiles briefly, but her face says Let’s just get this over, shall we? So I act my age, and say:

  ‘I’m Laura, and this is Katie.’

  ‘Charming,’ he says. And writes Laura Trent-Harcourt, and I wait till he’s finished, and then I say, ‘Vassilopoulos, actually.’ And he goes: ‘Pardon?’

  ‘My name. It’s Laura Vassilopoulos, actually.’

  And he does this fake laugh and scratches out my name, and I can see how angry he is by how hard he holds his biro, and the way he scratches at the paper and makes a mess again. ‘I should have asked,’ he said. ‘I just assumed you lived here.’

  ‘I do,’ I say. ‘This is my Mum, and this is Philip, my Dad.’

  Fowler-call-me-Ian looks at Mum then, and says:

  ‘I see.’ When he doesn’t. Then he says to me while he’s still looking at Mum, And your name’s Vassilopoulos?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And this takes the first three and a half hours, and we’ve already had six cups of tea, and Katie keeps pouring more and more for Fowler-call-me-Ian, and standing right next to him, and it really puts him off because every time he lifts his cup her face is right beside his and she’s peering into his cup because she wants to see how he drinks but still manages to keep his moustache dry, and in the end he gets so jittery, he doesn’t. And has to go to the bathroom. And Mum says to Katie to sit and stop pouring him tea or we’ll never get rid of him.

  When he gets back, he says he’s sorry but he’s got to talk practicalities and he knows Mum and Philip will appreciate him being businesslike and up-front at such a time and it has to be done, and would we like to see pictures of plots, and we can have a plaque beam or a family estate or even vaults, anything’s possible, it’s just a question of preference and price, but he should let us know that the cemetery’s offering a special for only this month on triple level plots – normally, he explains, a plot is only two levels, but sometimes they will dig deeper – and I’m thinking for a moment he is talking about Hamlet after all, because Miss Temple is always going on about Shakespeare’s plots working on at least two different levels – but then I realize he means you can fit three people in the one grave. ‘That’s,’ he says to Mum, ‘if you’d like to be buried on top of Mum –’

  ‘Mother,’ Mum says.

  ‘Just for this month,’ he says, ‘the cemetery’s offering a third off.’

  ‘The length?’ Philip says.

  And Mum turns to him, and I think he’s put his foot in it again, but Fowler-call-me-Ian looks and sounds so shocked when he says:

  ‘No, no, Mr Trent. Off the price …’

  - that Mum and Philip burst into laughter, and Mr Fowler looks from one to the other and shakes his head at Katie and me as though he thinks they’ve both finally cracked and have become hysterical over poor Grandma Vera when it’s him all the time, and Mum and Philip start holding hands then, and Mum puts the back of Philip’s hand up to her mouth and kisses it, and she’s forgotten all about Yogi and the barbecue, and I don’t mind seeing her doing that, but Fowler-call-me-Ian’s lip is going now, and Katie can’t take her eyes off it but her hand’s reaching for the tea-pot anyway, but Mum sees her and gets to it first.

  ‘It’s a good offer … Mr Fowler,’ Mum says, removing the tea-pot from the table altogether.

  ‘You’d be in there together with Mother,’ he says.

  And Mum just shudders and says, ‘True, but, you see, it’s all irrelevant. We’re set on cremation – for her and for us.’

  And it’s Katie’s and my turn to look at each other then because nobody’s asked us so far about getting burned.

  ‘Now is there anything else?’ Mum asks him. ‘Because I’m tired now,’ she says, ‘and you must have such a lot to arrange. Perhaps we could do anything else we need to by phone?’

  And he goes through his checklist then and says, ‘Let’s see. Forms, Funeral Agreement – I’ll have to get a signature for that, if you’ll be so kind before I go – Reverend Moysten to officiate, music okay, flowers okay, order of service agreed … No, no, that’s fine, that’s fine,’ he says. All we need now is the wording for the newspapers.’ Which shouldn’t take long, he thinks, but of course it takes about another hour deciding between Dearly Beloved Mother of Miriam and Beloved Mother of Miriam and just plain Mother of Miriam – and how the tone of the first two is usual, and he’d prefer one of them – and whether Vassilopoulos will just confuse people. Till Mum’s ready to scream at him and do a Grandma Vera and order him out of the house and tell him she’ll bury Grandma Vera herself.

  But at the service
she’s the calmest person there, and I think she’s sad and all that but she’s really like me, she’s said goodbye to Grandma Vera a long time ago and this is now doing the last thing she can for her, and doing it as decently and as honestly as she can but not being a fake about it. This is something I admire about Mum, that she looks at things honestly and won’t kid herself, or us. Which doesn’t mean she doesn’t get upset just the same as the rest of us, or that she doesn’t tell white lies to protect people, especially Katie and me. But it means she doesn’t spare herself or turn her face away from things when they hurt. Like when I say to her the night before the funeral:

  ‘Well, there’s one good thing about Grandma Vera, and that is she died at home like you always wanted.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mum says, but she doesn’t say it like she’s really convinced.

  ‘You’ll always have that to live with,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, but still sounds subdued.

  ‘Won’t you?’

  ‘But I’d already made the decision to send her away,’ she says. ‘I’ll always have that to live with as well.’

  At the service, to me she just looks beautiful and calm and everything, and she says all the prayers as loudly as anyone even though I don’t think she believes in Christianity but more Buddhism if anything. But she does it, I’m sure, for Grandma Vera, to see everything’s done properly right to the end, and she sings all the hymns and looks after Katie when Katie’s upset about Teddy, and smiles at me to make sure I’m all right. And it’s only right at the end that I think she actually gets upset herself, after the coffin disappears and everything, and the last part of the service is where we sing something for Grandma Vera that’s not a hymn at all but something more personal, and Mum and I look at each other while we’re singing and she’s got tears in her eyes but she’s not weeping or anything, just singing the most sweetly in the whole chapel:

  Goodnight, sweetheart

  Sleep will banish sorrow.

  Goodnight, sweetheart

  Till we meet tomorrow …

  Miriam

  Laura and I have started swimming again. We go three mornings a week before school.

  ‘But should you?’ says Philip. Who’s absorbed nothing, or forgotten everything from the time of Katie’s birth, when I swam right up until the last month.

  ‘Of course I should, darling,’ I tell him. ‘It’s recommended. Dr Lazenby says it’s healthy. It’s exercise, remember?’

  ‘Yes but –’

  ‘Don’t forget,’ I say, patting my stomach, ‘whoever’s in here is swimming as well.’

  I’m three months now, and clearly showing, just as I did – so early – with Laura and Katie. I’m already into smocks and loose-fitting slacks, but I’ve never felt freer, physically stronger.

  ‘You can’t just prescribe your own rules,’ says Philip, who thinks I should be lying down, and resting, a lot more. Except, that is, when I am lying down with him.

  ‘You haven’t even got a gynaecologist yet,’ he complains. The lawyer in Philip always believes in going to a specialist. ‘You’ve got to get Lazenby to refer you,’ he said, as soon as we discovered the tests were positive. ‘Whoever the top man is.’

  ‘Yes, darling,’ I say. Having no intention.

  ‘And you’ve got to stop taking so many students.’

  ‘Yes, darling,’ I say. Practising my English.

  At the college where I taught there was a crèche, and strict rules about the children of students not being allowed in the classrooms. But here, in Mother’s flat, I set my own rules. We have three children in here with us today: Sorathy’s daughter who’s sitting on the floor playing with blocks alongside her mother’s chair and, over in the corner, two others fast asleep in their baskets.

  A lot of my classes are no more than twos and threes, or individual tutoring for foreign business executives or consular officials who have been posted here and need to upgrade their English quickly. In fact I feared two or three at a time might be the limit for a private dwelling, but Philip has been wonderful negotiating with neighbours, getting the approvals through the council, so that I’m able to take a class twice a week of up to fourteen.

  It’s always the same class.

  The same fourteen.

  ‘Though why you bother,’ Philip says, ‘when you never make a red cent out of them.’

  ‘It’s co-operative education,’ I tell him. ‘I learn as much as I teach.’

  And in fact I can’t imagine a time when we won’t be learning together. Especially now that they virtually run the curriculum, choose the topics, the order of class – and I merely teach to whatever they decide. Though today – especially today – I’m the one who’s the nervous student.

  ‘Today,’ Njala says, ‘we talk about birth.’

  ‘Drills first, then,’ I say, striving for some control. ‘Verbs, tenses. Past, present, future – let’s just run through the conjugations.’

  They groan, but in fact they enjoy this. They work together in chorus at first, then go individually round the class, their voices cueing-in exactly, one on the other, so the impression is one of many voices but a single continuous chant. And this room is perfect, the sun streaming through Mother’s double windows and flooding the room with its morning warmth and light.

  ‘I am pregnant,’ Njala almost sings, and her voice is still ringing as Yuriko says:

  ‘You are pregnant.’

  Then Shamila: ‘She is pregnant.’

  Then Maria, who must stand to clown: ‘He is pregnant.’

  They fall about.

  The top man, Philip keeps saying, but in fact I have no intention. I will simply leave it and, when the time is right, re-introduce him to the fourteen midwives I have in mind instead.

  ‘We are pregnant …’ they chant in perfect chorus.

  At the coffee break, they roam through Mother’s flat, inspecting it, marvelling again at its compactness, the clever design of the big open space where we sit, the neatness of the functional rooms – toilet, bathroom, laundry. Only one cupboard is out of bounds, one I’ve locked in Mother’s bedroom where I’ve stored a few of her things I didn’t know what to do with, small personal things like her rings, bits and pieces of other jewellery that I have no interest in but which, one day, will go to Laura and Katie, or their children, odd keepsakes, her albums, marriage documents, Dad’s death certificate – and two long bundles of letters that I couldn’t remember ever seeing before, even when we moved her here to this flat. Some of the letters are very old, while others look recent, very new, and at the time I wondered about this. I couldn’t recall Mother ever receiving any letters while she was with us, only a few cards at Christmas and on her birthday. On the back of the letters, there’s simply a name E. Dreyfus. Twice I was on the point of throwing them out, but in the end I bundled them together and put them away in the dark at the back of the cupboard, with her other bits and pieces. One day, I thought. Not now.

  During our break I ask Sorathy about the progress of her appeal.

  ‘Six weeks,’ she says. ‘My case will be result. That’s what the lawyer tell me anyway.’

  Sorathy is so much freer now, free even to attend classes here in my home. With Philip’s help, the court is re-assessing her case, and has lifted some of the restrictions on her.

  ‘We’ll all be there to support you,’ I say. ‘The day it’s announced.’

  ‘It will be hard,’ she says. ‘Especially for My Huoy.’

  ‘What will, Sorathy?’

  We both look at the girl. She is still sitting on the floor in the same place she’d plumped herself down when they first came in. She is building a wall of coloured blocks with the utmost concentration.

  ‘She will not be used,’ Sorathy says.

  ‘To living in Australia, you mean? Outside the wire …?’

  The coffee break drifts on and on, and I do nothing to halt it. In the end, it is Maria who claps her hands and directs us back to our seats. I take my coffee w
ith me, but no matter how frequently I sip at it, my mouth remains dry. I can’t remember a time when I felt more nervous.

  ‘It is time for our story,’ Maria says.

  And I take my seat in front of them. How much … I think as I look at them and they settle themselves and turn their faces towards me, we have learned together, these women and me. My voice is high, and it cracks as I say:

  ‘My name is Miriam – but you all know that already.’

  They laugh, and nod and smile for me to go on. The sun is at my back, but it is shining on their faces, as I start again.

  ‘My name is Miriam,’ I say, ‘and this is my story …’

  Acknowledgments

  I gratefully acknowledge my debt to a number of sources and individuals: to the original creators of the popular song/lullaby ‘Goodnight sweetheart/ Sleep will banish sorrow …’; to Samuel Chavkin, Storm Over Chile: The Junta Under Siege (Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, 1982), for background details to ‘Maria’s Story’; to various colleagues at the Australian National University for medical, linguistic and cultural advice and information – though the (often distorting) fictional ends to which that advice and information have been put remain entirely my own responsibility; to Mark Henshaw for his peerless critical eye and his ongoing creative companionship; to my editor, Judith Lukin-Amundsen, for her professionalism and her calm persistence in the face of authorial wilfulness; and, above all, to Brigid Ballard without whose constant support and encouragement in personally difficult days this book would never have been attempted, let alone written. I can only hope that the book represents a modest repayment of part of these debts.