Swimming Home

by Mary-Rose MacColl

Florence was a study in repressed emotion, Louisa thought. Her face was set tight, her arms folded around Catherine. Louisa couldn’t say what the other woman’s feelings were, only that she was having trouble keeping them in check. Later Louisa said to her, ‘It was a shame my brother’s wife didn’t listen to you that day, about the storm.’ Louisa saw that tight mouth again before Florence replied, ‘Sad day, Miss. Sad, sad day.’

  The next morning, they took breakfast in the dining room off the kitchen. Louisa could feel the blast of heat when they opened the French windows to the back terrace. She’d slept fitfully and the woken house felt more oppressive not less, despite the bright sun that came in through the windows when she pulled open the drapes. Downstairs, she noticed that the windows in the back wall of the house, built against the hill, were open. They were the only windows that didn’t look at the sea.

  Catherine was in the yard with Florence, who was hanging out the washing. The little girl was running between the sheets and Florence was pretending she couldn’t find her.

  ‘She’s bright, Harry,’ Louisa said. They were still sitting at the table. ‘What will you do about school?’

  ‘She already goes to school,’ Harry said. He didn’t look any worse for the night’s drinking. Perhaps he hadn’t had as much as Louisa thought.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes, here,’ he said. There was a touch of argumentativeness in his tone. Louisa didn’t know why. ‘By rights, she shouldn’t start for another year or two, but she was so keen and the nuns all know her from the hospital. So she started early.’

  Louisa sat forward in her chair. ‘That’s all very well for the basics. But what about if she wants to go on, Harry? Surely they don’t have the subjects she’ll need.’

  ‘The nuns are French, so Catherine’s already learning the language. One of them plays piano and Catherine’s keen to learn. She’ll read with me, write, mathematics, a bit of science. There’s nothing wrong with the school here, Louie.’ He looked at her. ‘And here is where her mother … Here is where she started.’

  ‘Of course,’ Louisa said. ‘I’m just worried about you. If you were at home, I could help with Catherine.’

  He sighed. ‘Louisa, I’m sorry. But the island is the safest place for Catherine.’

  Later, she thought about his use of the word safest. It was an odd word, she thought, and how he reckoned his daughter would be safe on an island surrounded by the sea that had taken his wife, Louisa hardly knew.

  ‘And she’s happy, aren’t you?’ Catherine had run up and jumped into her father’s lap. He smiled and nuzzled his face in her hair.

  ‘I most certainly am,’ Catherine said, in that little adult voice of hers. And then suddenly, as if to confirm she was still a child, she jumped down and dipped her finger into a bowl of cream and put it in her mouth. She watched Louisa as she did this.

  Harry looked at his sister. ‘I suppose I should tell her she’s not to do that,’ he said, ‘but I don’t seem to have the necessary … will, I suppose, to correct her. She’s so very precious.’ He patted his daughter’s head. Again, Louisa thought of Julia, of Harry’s loss. No wonder he clung to his daughter. Catherine was still focused on that creamy finger, sucking the life out of it. After she removed it from her mouth, she smiled widely.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said to Louisa, offering the sticky hand, which Louisa took.

  Catherine led her back inside and out onto the front verandah. ‘You’ll feel better out here, Aunt Louisa. Daddy thinks it keeps the cool air in to have all the windows shut, but Florence says it just makes it hotter.’

  ‘I think I’d have to agree with Florence,’ Louisa said, thankful for the moist breeze that came from the sea, ‘although I don’t know that anything would make it comfortable.’ She regarded the child. ‘You like Florence, don’t you?’

  Catherine nodded. She sat down facing Louisa. ‘I don’t have a mother.’ She sighed, another adult gesture, as if she’d learned this was how she should act.

  ‘I know. That must be very hard.’

  She nodded. ‘You could be my mother.’

  Louisa smiled. ‘No, I can’t be your mother.’ The breeze was delightful over her face.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, for a start, I live in England. And second, I’m your aunt.’

  ‘You could come here and be a nurse and be my mother. Also, I know third comes after second.’ She smiled as if the matter were now settled. ‘And you need to take off some of your undergarments or you’ll simply boil to death.’

  Louisa laughed. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Sister Ignatius told me. I don’t wear any unders but bloomers.’ She leaned forward. ‘It’s all right for ladies in the heat.’

  ‘Catherine, about what you said before, I wouldn’t be a nurse. I’m a doctor. If I came here, I’d still be a doctor.’ It was important, Louisa thought, that girls understood from an early age that women, too, could be doctors.

  ‘Oh very well,’ the little girl said. ‘But then we’ll have two doctors and who will do the nursing?’

  She spent the day exploring the island with Catherine and Harry. They took the trap down to the town centre, and from there to a church built in memory of lives lost when a ship struck a reef and sank. They went to the Catholic church, too, next to the school Catherine attended. There was a service being held. The Islanders were singing. Their harmonies were beautiful, Louisa thought, and the church was filled with light.

  In the afternoon, they went down to the beach again. Louisa could see what appealed to Harry about his life on the island. Many people stopped to greet them, but it was more than being a big fish in a little pond. He felt at his ease here, Louisa saw. And the island did have a strange charm, she thought.

  That night, Louisa had the dream. Someone was chasing her, chasing her, a pursuer whose face she never saw. She couldn’t run, and she couldn’t scream. And then a child crying—not Catherine, not any child Louisa knew. And then she was awake, and the feeling she had was sadness not fear, tears on her face she couldn’t remember shedding. Her body was wet with sweat.

  Ruth Luxton had told her to give herself time. How much time, Ruth? she’d wanted to ask but hadn’t. Now she could hear water lapping at the beach below. It was the sea at peace, no hint of a pursuer, no crying child, just birds greeting a new day. It was so incongruous with the dream. She lay in bed and waited for the sun and the comfort it would bring.

  After she rose and dressed, she went downstairs. Harry was on his way to the hospital. He asked her to walk Catherine down to the school. The day before, she’d taken Catherine’s advice, removed her corset and camisole, leaving only her brassiere and linen blouse. Today she took off her heavy wool stockings and petticoat, too, but had to wear the wool skirt as she had nothing cooler.

  They walked through town, the heat becoming increasingly oppressive with every minute in the sun. Louisa thought she might die in her skirt and boots, the sun beating through the parasol she carried. She could almost feel the top of her head burning. Catherine was oblivious. She was like a tree, Louise thought, taking her energy from the sun.

  As they walked along the waterfront, Catherine pointed out three children about fifty yards from the shore. ‘They’re the Walton boys,’ she said, ‘from Hammond Island. I don’t like them. They pull my hair.’

  Further out in the water from the Walton boys Louisa saw a woman in a dinghy. She was standing up, brandishing a very large rifle. ‘What’s she got a gun for?’ Louisa said, horrified.

  ‘Sharks,’ Catherine said matter-of-factly. ‘That’s their mother.’

  The schoolhouse was a single room in a little timber cottage with window openings that had no glass and a doorway with no door. Louisa met the nuns who taught Catherine. The one Catherine had mentioned, Sister Ignatius, was one of those wise old owls, with bright eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles and a veil crooked on her head. She seemed pleased that Catherine had her aunt visiting. ‘We worry about the child too,�
�� she said, as if Louisa had expressed anxiety, which she hadn’t. There was another young nun, a Sister Ursula, who’d studied science in Brisbane, Sister Ignatius told Louisa. ‘We’re very proud she’s chosen a vocation.’ She was a dear, the younger nun, Louisa thought.

  After leaving Catherine, Louisa went on to the hospital, where Harry had agreed to meet her. It was a sprawling building, two rooms in front, a built-in verandah down one side and extensions to the rear, on the edge of the peninsula.

  They treated Europeans and natives both, Harry said. ‘On the mainland, they split them, the natives in one place and the whites in another. We don’t do that—and I’m against it. A patient’s a patient, don’t you agree?’ Louisa smiled. He knew she did.

  Louisa met the nurses and then toured the two wards. Harry said the work varied. Pearl divers suffered the bends. Occasionally, there were shark attacks. ‘They’re usually dead before they’re pulled from the water,’ Harry said, ‘but we’ve had a couple of bites you wouldn’t have thought anyone could survive, but then the natives do. They don’t always come to me. They like their own healers. Other than that it’s just run-of-the-mill.’

  Afterwards, they shared lunch in Harry’s office. It was Louisa who brought up the future. She’d decided to be open about her purpose. ‘Harry, the truth is I came here to convince you to come home,’ she said.

  He shook his head. ‘I won’t come back to England. I’m happy here, Louie. So is Catherine. And it was the last place we …’ He didn’t finish. ‘But I did want to talk to you. There’s something I really need to tell you.’ He breathed in, out, regarded her carefully. ‘At the hospital here, we need nurses,’ he said finally, ‘and I agree Catherine needs her family. She needs a woman in her life, actually. I thought you could …’

  ‘You thought I could what?’ Louisa said.

  ‘You could come here and take up one of the nursing positions. With your training you’d be ideal.’

  ‘You thought I could just give up medical practice and come here?’ She tried to keep her voice level but failed. She expected this kind of attitude from Alexander but never Harry, who’d always respected her vocation. ‘You weren’t thinking I’d just up and leave my practice?’ So this was where Catherine had got the idea.

  ‘Well, I was, actually. She’s just a baby.’ He swallowed hard and blinked, perhaps to stop the threat of tears, but Louisa found it hard to sympathise. The hide of her brother, thinking she would give up everything. Really! Louisa was a doctor, same as he was. She couldn’t just give it away. How dare he expect her to?

  Louisa left the island two weeks later. Harry had made it clear he would not come home to England under any circumstances, and Louisa made it clear she had no intention of uprooting and moving to Australia. She’d done the right thing, she told herself. She’d visited her brother. She’d asked him to come home. He hadn’t agreed. Still, Louisa had felt awful leaving the little girl. After she departed the island, she could still smell Catherine’s hair in her clothes, and it brought tears to her eyes. On the ship home, she often found herself crying. Ruth Luxton would surely have approved. She was always one for expressing strong emotion. But not Louisa. She’d stand out on the deck alone and the tears would come unbidden. This won’t do me any good at all, Louisa thought. Still, the tears would come.

  And there things had stood. Louisa wrote at Christmas every year, and for Catherine’s birthday in August. She had clothes made for her niece. She had to estimate Catherine’s size because Harry never responded when she wrote and asked. She had a dressmaker run them up: a blue-and-white gingham dress with a red sash, just like the one Catherine had worn the first time they met, and a pretty hair ribbon to match; another year, a green silk dress, although Louisa had no idea where Catherine would wear it; gloves and shoes, skirts, blouses, socks and stockings. Louisa would keep them for a week or so, looking at them each day, and then send them, always with a little message. She never heard back from Catherine, and from Harry she just had the most general news, nothing about the clothes, and nothing about his daughter.

  Louisa thought of Catherine often, it was true. She’d experience that familiar aching in her chest, not really for Catherine, she knew. For another child, a child who never was.

  5

  SHE COULD HEAR THEIR CRIES NOW, LIKE GULLS IN THE evening. Swim-mer, Swim-mer, Swim-mer. The sun was shining on her face and it made her feel she might be warm again even though it carried so little warmth. The bank didn’t seem to come any closer. She wasn’t tired. She wasn’t even cold now. She was beyond cold. As the cries grew louder in her ears and she started to make out people on the bank, she had an inexplicable desire to turn around and swim back to the other side. She didn’t want to return to dry land, to London. She just wanted to swim away.

  Always plan success, her father sometimes said. Had he known? she wondered. Had he known his days were numbered? Had he been given some warning, some inkling that this might happen, that he might leave her without a home, without him? It had been Sister Ursula who’d told her. Sister Ursula had come to the house with Roy Macklin, the police officer, that Sunday morning. Her father had left two days before, to travel to Cairns with the harbourmaster’s wife, who’d become ill during her confinement. But then Sister Ursula and Sergeant Macklin were at the front door. They were so sorry, they kept saying. Sister Ursula stayed through the morning but Catherine didn’t want her there, in the house. She liked Sister Ursula, but she wanted to be small again and climb into Florence’s lap and have Florence rub her shoulders and sing a song. She felt very frightened and alone.

  She wondered now if she could just keep swimming, head out to the North Sea, down and across the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, eventually the Arafura Sea, then the green of Saibai or New Guinea and from there to Thursday Island. The Torres Strait could be treacherous, she knew. So many ships had been wrecked and so many lives lost. The Islander families were mostly fishermen or divers, and most had lost someone to the sea. But the sea could be kind too. Catherine and Michael had swum wherever they’d wanted to. The Islanders called Catherine Waapi, fish. Michael was Bid, dolphin. The sea would protect them, Catherine believed.

  One day at school in London, one of the other girls, Darcy, had said that Mercedes Gleitze was going to swim across the English Channel. Darcy had read about it in the paper. Catherine had said she, Catherine, might swim the Channel too. She didn’t know why she’d said it. She had no idea whether she could actually swim across the Channel but she wanted them to know she could swim. Darcy had told her she was a liar, that she couldn’t possibly swim the English Channel. She couldn’t even swim the Thames. Of course I could, Catherine had said. She’d seen the Thames. She’d thought it would be easy. But she soon realised it wouldn’t be easy. The Thames was a tidal river. The sea could rush in and out. There were many boats. It might be more treacherous than she’d realised.

  If you could swim the English Channel, she thought now, surely you could swim to Australia, for it would only be more distance. You could sleep while swimming on your back, she thought, as she turned over onto her back.

  The Arafura Sea was warm year round, so different from this oily, cold river. In the Torres Strait, the islands to the north and west were rock, originally part of the mountain range that divided the east of Australia from the interior, her father had told her, tracing the line in the atlas from the mainland north, north, north and off the tip of Australia’s most northern point. He believed the islands had once been a land bridge between Australia and Papua New Guinea. ‘Boigu and Saibai—where I go for the clinics—are only a few miles from New Guinea,’ he said. His finger ran over the island they’d visited the day her mother drowned, but he didn’t say anything about it. ‘If you look at the map,’ he said, ‘you can see where the bridge was. A giant might still use it.’ He smiled, stepping from island to island with his fingers.

  On the island, she would never have worried about getting cold. They’d dry themselves in the sun after they
swam. They’d sit on the sand for a while and then dive back into the sea. It only ever felt soothing. Oh, that feeling of the breeze on your skin giving you just a hint of a chill on those hot, hot days and then, when you’d heated up, the plunge into the cool water. At home, she’d have dived off the end of the jetty. Michael always swam with her, every afternoon after school. When they were older, they’d set out swimming while Harry paddled in a canoe with Florence. They’d meet up on one of the nearby islands and cook fish for lunch. ‘You must put those days in the past, darling,’ Louisa had said. ‘You have to move on.’ Catherine had tried. She really had. But it was all so different and new.

  And Michael? Catherine thought suddenly. What was Michael doing without her? She imagined his life going on, the life they’d shared, whereas her own life had completely changed. It seemed unfair.

  She looked towards the bank. ‘I’m swimming,’ she said out loud. ‘I’m swimming the Thames.’

  She was wearing the woollen swimming suit she’d bought at Peter Robinson with Nellie. It had short sleeves that dragged through the water and a skirt over leggings. There were much better suits, sleeveless without a skirt, but Nellie said they were racy. On the island, Catherine had swum in a boy’s costume, thin straps on her shoulders and bare legs. But you couldn’t do that in London, Nellie said. You have to wear a woman’s suit, she said, and at your age it needs to cover you. It took effort to get on and Catherine didn’t have an opportunity to swim in it before she took to the river. It weighed her down now, and chafed under her arms and around her neck. She was wearing a rubber cap that made the water roar in her ears. Oh, Daddy, she said to herself now. Why did you have to leave?

  Those mothers who felt sorry for Catherine, the ones who said it was so sad to be without a mother, she’d never understood them, not really, not until her father was gone. And then Catherine knew what they were talking about. ‘Learning to swim,’ her father had said once, ‘is like learning how to breathe again. It’s that simple, and that complicated.’