by Gregory Day
Eventually, after polishing off a sherry with his father, we were ushered keenly by the younger Lascelles down a hallway towards his den at the back of the house, which was positively stuffed with papers and books and whatnot, all to do with the war. I had just expected a quick cup of tea and a chat, I hadn’t expected to be exposed to all that and felt immediately as if I’d walked into some kind of trap. Leonie however quietly pinched me before I could even develop a scowl. Of course Lascelles’ purpose was not to trap me in his lair but merely to demonstrate how urgent he felt the need for the building of the Memorial Reading Room was. Well, I could certainly see what he meant. You could hardly move in that little den of his, and on the way home Leonie and I spoke of our astonishment at the dedication of his mission.
‘If it was me,’ I remember saying, ‘I’d collect Phantom comics and be done with it. The info’d be about as trustworthy, and a hell of a lot cheaper.’
Leonie laughed. ‘That’s all very well,’ she said, ‘but what if old Ken doesn’t agree?’
The joke had a bit of extra bite coming from her, who’d only recently begun to throw off the shackles of her own widowed father.
*
Contrary to what some people think, Leonie and I had made our decision to move from Wait-a-While even before things were taken out of our hands by it burning down. But up it went the old place, with my few remaining possessions, my furniture and clothes, my dad’s tobacco case, Vern’s copy of Epictetus, and all bar one of the packages I’d written to Leonie. That last one, the one I’d written but never had to send – not until Lascelles passed on and we buried him at Wait-a-While – was still in the pocket of my overcoat, hanging on a hook in the bicycle shed near the hut, where Brian Robinson used to keep his hay.
It was a hole rusted through the old kero tin flue that officially set the place on fire but I often wonder if that old hut of hessian and newsprint actually made its own mind up after all. It was almost as if the joists and bush-jambs of Wait-a-While had overheard us discussing the move and had taken it as either an insult or with humble acceptance of the end of the road. Well, I could at least say the hut had been my second skin and confidante, until Leonie moved in and it came to personify an isolation I was learning to outgrow.
To be honest though, I’ve never entirely outgrown that isolation, and nor has she. The solitude that descends upon a person when they are divided from their mother at birth is a condition that, in both of our lives, and for different reasons, has managed to prevail. It would be true to say that in the first months of her shacking up with me at Wait-a-While we had some difficulty being together. And not just because old Nat was thunderstruck that she’d gone. If, in fact, it was the case that the old hut was eavesdropping on our new arrangement then it might have come to the conclusion we were being a bit gruff with each other as we moved about the house. A bit short. Insensitive, perhaps. Though really, it wasn’t like that. Quite the opposite. After spending our whole lives apart we found our way of coming together mainly through silence. By quietly looking each other in the eye, and knowing all that had gone before. We still had things to tell, of course, but this time we could say them not with pen and ink, or buttery shortbread and kindling, but by the fire we shared outside the hut at night, sitting on the brow of the hill under the stars, with our pent-up feelings set free and the violence of the sea well below us.
After we’d moved down the hill, Lascelles took to visiting us more often, mainly on Sundays. He was experiencing a great mixture of emotions now that his memorial idea had finally become concrete. On the one hand, he was more inspired than ever by actually having the building in existence, but, on the other, he had to face the daily feeling of deflation at the obvious lack of interest in the reading room on behalf of the island SS.
I for one found it considerably easier to be with Lascelles now the building was out of the way. I’d hear the high note of his Velocette coming down the hill of a Sunday and actually be happy that he was on his way. Leonie and I would have a ploughman’s lunch prepared, or a casserole in winter, and then the three of us would go fishing together on the jetty, or we’d drive up to Sea Elephant and walk leisurely out over the mudflats to the river mouth. We enjoyed many easy Sundays staying out right into the dusk, looking for remains of the old hunter’s shacks from way back in the 1800s, chatting about local affairs, Leonie’s growing interest in the plants unique to King, books we were reading, and inevitably too about the war. Or should I say, Lascelles would talk about the war. He still got barely a word out of me on the subject, though I remember us talking at length one windy day at the Blowhole about the fall of Singapore, a subject I knew nothing whatsoever about, having been incommunicado on the Cretan massifs at the time that it happened, and incurious since I’d returned. Leonie seemed to know a bit about it though and Lascelles lent me an article on the subject, which in fact I read with great interest. But if he ever dared to take things further, to probe into the enigmas of my own war, I always gave him short shrift. I still felt raw enough about it all that what I had written in the pages to Leonie could only be entrusted on the true proviso of love. And even though Lascelles was becoming my most trusted male companion on the island I would not, at that time, have gone so far as to describe what ran between us as love.
*
We had not yet put the phone on here at Naracoopa in those days so, despite the increasing use of cars on the island, communication could be difficult. One Sunday I was holed up in bed with a bad cold when we heard the Velocette whining down the hill. There’d been no easy way of letting Lascelles know that I’d come down with something the night before and not to come out on his weekly visit. So on he came, with a bag of peaches and nectarines from his father’s garden, only to find me out of action. After a cup of tea and a brief discussion, he and Leonie decided to make up a picnic and go off on their own in search of fish.
It was a nothingish kind of day, cloudy, with a light September wind, and as she described it to me later, the words just started coming out of her mouth before she really knew what was happening.
They were on the northern side of the jetty, with the usual three or four cormorants perched alongside, and that lightest of southerlies behind them. Councillor Island was in view, as well as the beach, its white streak running all the way up to the high hummocks of Cowper Point in the distance. They had always been tender with each other, Leonie and Lascelles, going right back to when I first arrived, and, as she said, it can get very pleasant and deep-feeling out on that jetty on a calm day when there’s no fish biting.
Lascelles was describing to her a rare visitor who’d turned up at the reading room a couple of days previous. When the man, who Lascelles had never seen before, expressed surprise at the extent of the collection of books and documents assembled there, Lascelles had taken it upon himself to expound his theory about the benefits of time spent in meditation, with books and writing materials, for those who’ve experienced the traumas of war. At this the man slumped heavily down into one of the chairs provided, muttering something about hailing from a long way away, from Queensland, from right up the top above Cairns. And what brings you to King Island? Lascelles had asked. But the man did not answer. He had gone beyond answering. Instead he sat motionless, with a blank face, until quietly he began to cry.
As Lascelles said to Leonie, he didn’t know where to look, it was so unexpected for a grown man to do such a thing. But there they were, the tears slipping freely down the man’s face and him not even reaching for his handkerchief as they did so.
Lascelles tried to comfort the man and eventually left the room to make him a cuppa from the urn. But by the time he came back the man was gone. Must have just slipped out the side door, Lascelles said, otherwise I would have seen him go out through the foyer from the kitchen.
On the jetty there were no bites on the ends of their lines, the water was a calm blue skin, but in the telling of this strange encounter Leonie
could sense that Lascelles had become quite het up. He had such a sincere and caring soul, Lascelles, but also of course that racing mind. He began to speculate as to how he could locate the crying man from Queensland, how he could help him, and whether or not Leonie had any idea who he might be or what boat he came in on. She could see his distress, he was shaking his head and going over all the possibilities of who the man was. Before long she felt that, in his agitation, Lascelles too might even begin to cry.
And so it was that, by way of helping him, she told Lascelles a story of her own. The story of the glowing coals. When she told me about it later she said it was just an instinctual thing, ostensibly to steady Lascelles’ ship, to break his fixation on the crying man who, she had suddenly presumed, represented to Lascelles the grief he felt for his own dead mother.
You see. We were all motherless, all three of us, right through those growing days of our friendship.
But it was more than that too, Wes, she said. It was the jetty, you know, the calm sea, the slow waves with the kelp beneath. I’ve always loved Naracoopa since I was a girl and now, finally, I was here. Living here, you know. With you. I felt safe, maybe for the first time, happy and safe. And with that feeling the time had come to tell it.
*
Amongst the anguish of her girlhood, the dark rooms of her father’s house, his bullish paddocks, the estrangement between him and her Uncle True, there had been one day that she had blacked out, one day that was worse than all the rest. Her father could be perfectly kind to her, in keeping with the absence in their lives, but at other times it was all well beyond his control. He had locked her up, yes; beaten her, yes, even as an adult; and now she interrupted Lascelles to tell him this, as they sat with their rods alongside the cormorants of the jetty.
‘But the worst,’ she said, in an almost-whisper that would have been barely audible if the sea had not been so tranquil, ‘was when he went and saw the fortune teller down at Grassy.’
She took a deep breath as it came back to her. After all those years. ‘For a time he used to hear horses every night,’ she told him, ‘and I’d hear him yelling them away in his dreams. I knew they were horses because he’d call out and sometimes I was so terrified that I would even go into his room and light the lamp to wake him, and he would talk breathlessly about them. “They’re coming round the lagoon,” he’d say, “coming over the hill. They’re thundering for us,” he’d say, quite out of breath, “thundering.”
‘It was around that time we had a visit on the island from a fella calling himself Genghis, who had advertised in the paper before he arrived, calling himself a faith healer and a fortune teller. From time to time we’d get these kind of visitors on King, no different really from a visit from a barber from Tassie or the dentist with his foot-operated drill. Anyway, without my knowing, Dad went off on the pony and trap to see this Genghis down at Grassy, where he’d set himself up with a small sign and a table outside the bar there.
‘Then one day, not long after, I’d got it into my mind to head off to school – which I didn’t always do but this day, for some reason, I wanted to – and Dad wouldn’t let me. He’d been up early and had a raging fire going in the kitchen. It wasn’t even that cold. I remember I was dressing for school when he came into my bedroom and told me I wasn’t to go. I asked why not and he said he had a very important job for me. I asked him what it was and he said he’d tell me soon enough, and then went back out into the kitchen.
‘I was miserable as it was and so I crawled back into my bed and got under the blankets. I was lying there, contemplating jumping out the window, when he called my name. It was too late. I didn’t move. So he came in and silently, without a word, lifted me up out of the bed in his arms. He carried me to the kitchen where I saw he’d cleared away the table and chairs from their usual position on the floor and in their place he’d shovelled hot coals from the stove, laying them out on a spot on the wooden floor. I remember seeing the soot-handled shovel standing beside.
‘“What are you doing, Da, you’ll burn the house down,” I cried. I thought rightly that he’d gone balmy, and was wriggling to get free. But he just strode straight over to the glowing coals and, without so much as a word, began to lay me down upon them.
‘I screamed, and screamed again, but he held me there, my own father, held me fast, forcing me down onto them on my back, saying it was the only way, the way to make things right, and that I was a good girl and would I just do this last thing for him, to cure us all as Genghis said, or some such thing . . .
‘I screamed and screamed, from the pain and the heat but more the terror of it all, the madness, the look in his face as he did what the faith healer had instructed.
‘I must have fainted then because the next I knew I was in the washhouse, with Uncle True beside me, swabbing my back and legs.
‘“It’s all right, girlie,” he said, “I’ve got you now, just in the nick of time. It’s all right, girlie.”
‘As it turns out, I was lucky. True just happened to have come over that morning, and he’d just arrived, only seconds before I went out. He could hardly imagine the scene he found as he burst through the back door but, as he said, all my screaming had saved me because he was only planning to get a roll of eight-gauge from the shed. He and Nat weren’t talking by then and he’d never even planned to come up to the house till he heard my cries.’
Leonie fell silent on the jetty. Lascelles turned to look at her, as she pulled her beanie close round her ears and stared out towards Councillor Island. Eventually she confessed that until that moment she’d blacked the whole thing out. In sympathy he said he could well understand why. For how, after all, do we speak the unspeakable, even to ourselves?
It was Leonie who started crying then, but gently, her tears rolling slowly like the sea below. Uncle True had never told a soul about what had happened and that, of course, was a terrible secret he chose to carry. For months, nearly a year afterward, she had chosen not to have anything to do with him and stayed well clear of the old Fermoy house, despite him having saved her. And when she finally did start turning up back at Yellow Rock, the fact that he’d never reported Nat and had left her living with him alone never even entered her conscious mind. It was just her life, she said, her motherless family, the world of those two womanless brothers on her grandfather’s island.
I knew as soon as they returned from the jetty that day that something had passed between them. But I didn’t know what. I was feeling a little better for the rest I’d had and volunteered to cook us some eggs for tea. We ate them with lemon whiskey and beans and we laughed and played cards and ate chocolate until well past midnight. He was actually a great mimic Lascelles and when he was relaxed could really be quite funny.
I had not been privy to what had passed between the two of them on the jetty but nevertheless, as we farewelled Lascelles at the gate, I felt that something had deepened, that he had, from that moment on, become an indispensable stitch in the fabric of our destiny.
XXX
That night in the olives trees above Arvi I dreamt of a stagnant pool covered with algae. My father stood beside it, like a sentry, as if he was somehow in charge of it. Amongst the algae, on the thick slimy surface of the pool, Andreas’ body lay floating. Slowly, with encouragement from a stick my father held in his hand, it began to turn over in the water until finally I was looking at the monk’s face. His mouth was slack but his eyes, even in death, seemed to peer straight into me.
I woke from this dream just on first light, with a bad feeling, my new-found fullness gone, and, from under the branches where I lay, the silhouette of the high walls of the gorge in the distance below stood like an enormous stone vice against a wheat-sheaf sky. Still quite exhausted, I sank immediately back into sleep and when I woke again it must have been quite late. I felt refreshed, as I had the day before, and resolved to get on my way.
After an hour or two I was below the tre
eline and could no longer see the sea. But I could smell the salt strongly now, and felt the sharp contrast of energies the world takes on at its shorelines. In a field by the roadside I sighted an old chair standing alone, its stuffing spilt. Then I saw people for the first time since leaving the monastery: a family, grandmother and children included, tilling bushy rows of wind-stunted beans. I was tempted to acknowledge their presence with a nod or a wave, as much out of politeness as any attempt to maintain my disguise, but when they just stared at me I found it unnerving and thought better of it. I set my eyes back on the track and walked on.
A mile or so further and the road grew sandy, it ran level and parallel with the shore in a westerly direction to what I presumed would be the village of Arvi, which I’d decided, from the scraps of information about the south coast that I’d picked up along the way, was the place where I would be most likely to find a boat. I wondered, really for the first time since leaving Agio Dormiton, how it all would work for me there. How would I set about making the right connection to get me onto a boat? I felt little anxiety about the outcome, as if it was myself who had died with those shots from Spenser’s revolver, as if I was wandering the coast like some unassailable ghost.
Eventually I emerged out of shrubbery right up against the beach, and walked for a time listening to the regular dump of the waves against foreign-looking ash-coloured sand. Out over the water, the sky too had an ashen tint, the horizon towards Africa seemed dirty and sullied, and I guessed why. Something to do with the combinations of wind and war.
My first impulse was to scan the water for boats, but I saw nothing. My eyes fell back to the deserted road and I continued. After another mile or two, and just as I was feeling that the south coast was almost devoid of human activity, I found myself standing in front of a small taverna.