by Gregory Day
I look out through the desk window on the thatch of groundcovers she has created, the spurge and the cudweed, the wort and spinach, the bushy blackwoods waving gently in the wind along the southern perimeter, the little birds that have discovered us here over the years since the war due to the unexpected resurrection of the local plants they prefer. It occurs to me that these local restorations are Leonie’s own version of this very text, the tiny plants the grammatical units in her own living statement on the nature of life, loss and recovery.
And so I recall the most important conversation of all we had with Lascelles on those field trips in search of the old flora. It was Leonie that teased it out of him, the confession of what a wrench it had been to be dragged as a teenager from the mainland to help his father run the PO out here. How at sea he felt about both his mother’s disappearance and his father’s grief. For, as it turns out, she had not died at all, Mrs Lascelles. She had shot through with another man, without explanation, and without so much as a goodbye to her gifted and extremely sensitive teenage son.
They had arrived on King in ’37, the fragile father and son, and like some common species of periwinkle Lascelles had gone straight into his shell. The relocation was a much needed fresh start for the father but, initially at least, not the son. He had been a popular member of a chess club back in Sandringham, he was a keen scout, he had a small but loyal group of like-minded friends who he now felt in exile from. So straightaway he associated the island with the winds of disorientation, and yearned to leave, but he also felt dreadfully beholden, and so was devastated at the ill-timing of the war when it came. If he had been a little older, or even had a little more gumption, been a bit more capable of a larrikin’s lie about his age, he could have escaped from his plight into a uniform. But no, he was who he was: intelligent, scrupulous, reflective, full of integrity, anxious, and paralysed by the double dislocation he’d endured, first from his mother and then from the world that he knew.
We were sitting in the field under the pines by the small lagoon at Pearshape as he spoke of this. I picked at the cheese and peanuts of our picnic, drank a beer, and said not a word. Not a word about the mother I had lost, not a word about the duty I’d felt to my own dad. Not a word about the damage that had been done, the things we had in common.
Later on that night, after the Velocette had whined its way up the hill to cross the island back to Currie, Leonie said to me when we were getting ready for bed:
‘You know, Wes, I’d never realised. Not until today. He sympathises so much with what you blokes went through because of what he was going through himself. His thing about the war has nothing really to do with the fact that he just missed out.’
The potency of Leonie’s words hung in the bedroom long after we turned off the light. We lay there the two of us, hand in hand, listening to the frogs, the wind and sea, and thinking I’m sure the same thoughts. That none of us have eyes in the back of our heads or a clear view into our own being. And that this was the deep unsolvable knot, the true labyrinth, not so much a tangible thing but a feeling thing, a thinking thing, a darkness interweaving with the light.
Lascelles and Leonie and I were just different facets of the same refracting shard. It was only I that was the returned soldier, only I that could command the official sympathy and the national applause, but we were all in the same situation. We were islands of the same archipelago, adrift in a sea of unknowing.
*
The following Sunday after the one by the lagoon at Pearshape, Lascelles’ father had taken ill and was admitted to the hospital. Needless to say, Lascelles didn’t make it out to us that week but by the next Sunday when he did come I’d already made up my mind.
We had a normal enough day out at Sea Elephant, gathering bait from the mudflats there and enjoying each other’s company. But when we made it back to the house and were sitting in the dining room with cups of tea and scones I began casually enough.
I was sitting up at the kitchen table, the newspaper spread in front of me. Lascelles was on the couch with his pipe and a book. Leonie was standing, with her hair cut newly short, by the window as if in anticipation, as if she already knew, as if she could already read the situation, staring out onto her garden and the sea.
‘You know,’ I said. ‘There’s an article here in the paper, about whether or not cats can swim. I saw cats on a beach once. Lots of them. Back in ’42.’
There was a pause, outside not a breath of wind.
‘Yairs, I was on the south coast of Crete. In a village I didn’t know the name of. I was alone. I’d had an awful time and was waiting for a boat to get me off and back to my unit in Egypt.’
Leonie remained motionless by the window. It was as if she, like the ocean outside, was holding her breath. On the couch Lascelles didn’t dare look up, or puff on his pipe, or even move.
XXXIV
She came with a younger woman, and a small girl, also a tortoiseshell kitten. The girl played with the kitten on the floor while Maria and her daughter-in-law, Athina, a blonde woman of about thirty with a large gap between the two front teeth of her smile, sat down at the table to say that the son could not be found. Athina had better English than Maria and she said the word had been put out and that I should wait with them until the following day when she was sure her husband would come. She told me with a fond smirk that this husband of hers could not sit still, he had been in America she said, before the war, in Chicago. She pronounced it Chicagee. He had made money yes, but he could not sit still.
‘So he will come tomorrow,’ Athina said, and then, in a lowered voice, ‘his English is good and he knows what to do.’
I was shown upstairs to a small room with a painted stone floor, a divan, a mirror on the wall above a single rush chair, and a painted blue window with a view of the sea. Maria set a pottery jug of water on a low table beside the bed alongside a wooden cup. She unlatched the window, pushed it out and the sound of the sea flooded in. Then she smiled graciously and left.
Only a few minutes later I heard voices and Athina and the girl came up the stairs to tell me where I could wash. The kitten ran in between their legs where they stood in the doorway and flipped itself onto the divan. Athina laughed and the girl, Zoe, threw herself after the kitten and swept it into her thin arms.
‘Efharisto,’ I said. ‘Does it have a name?’
But Zoe was too shy to answer. She stood up from the divan with the kitten writhing in her arms and went to stand behind her mother’s skirts.
‘The cat has no name yet,’ Athina explained, laughing. ‘Maybe tomorrow. If my husband comes, we will name her.’
I nodded. Athina told me what the washing arrangements were and that the washtub was behind her mother-in-law’s kitchen downstairs. We stood in silence for a brief, awkward moment.
‘Athina,’ I said. ‘Is it safe for me here to wash in the sea? To swim, is there any danger?’
‘Danger?’ She clicked her tongue knowingly. ‘Italians, no. Not yet,’ she said. ‘They are only near . . . up there.’ She tossed her head back, towards the massif. ‘But Germans will come.’
‘Yes. I see,’ I replied, thinking she’d misunderstood the question.
‘But danger from the sea?’ she went on. ‘Yes, so it is best for you to swim today.’
‘It is?’
‘Yes. Tomorrow there will be white lambs.’
‘White lambs?’
‘Ne. On the water. The wind is coming.’
‘Uh, I see. Thank you, Athina. Efharisto, Zoe.’
The little girl dug deep into her mother’s folds and the kitten squirmed. Laughing again, Athina prised herself free of the two of them and said goodbye with the smiling gap in her teeth. I was left in the room alone.
*
On the grey sand there were many cats, some patting at the waves with their paws, some just slinking about in the salt hiss. Others went runnin
g along the beach with smiles on their faces, like I’d never seen cats run before, they were more like dogs in fact, and had an air of perfect ease and happiness about them.
There was no one else on the beach bar the cats and an old fella laying out nets down near the moorings. Even so, I felt conspicuous as I unwrapped the cummerbund of my costume and stripped off to my underwear. If nothing else my dog tags were a dead giveaway and for the first time in over two years I pulled them free of my neck and over my head, and quickly tucked them away amongst the pile of clothes.
The ashen sand was like coarse dark screenings once you were on it. The waves were small but dumping and hard to negotiate. It took me a while but eventually I got out beyond them where the milky water went slack.
I stood with water shoulder high and looked back on the village: just a sparse gathering of buildings with what looked like a small quarry on a hill behind, surrounded by sun-bleached grass and bare rock, purple thistleheads, and eventually the sage-green groves leading back up to the towering slopes. I could see no sign of the walls of the gorge however, and realised that I wasn’t even sure whether this village I’d struck upon was Arvi at all. It wouldn’t matter, as long as Maria’s son could do something for me.
From where I stood in the water I could still see snow high up on the top of the massif and now at the sight of it I became suddenly stupefied by how Andreas had invented his version of John Pendlebury in an attempt to capitalise on my disillusion. I shuddered, chilled to the bone by how elaborate human subterfuge could be. Then my thoughts jerked, not from the memory of the shots ringing out in the monastery, but from Simmo, whose hacked-at carcass would no doubt be shredded now by the vultures. I’d slaughtered beasts on Corangamite from the age of twelve, sheep and chooks and rabbits, skinks and fish even earlier than that, and went most days to school with dried blood between my fingers. But none of them had been a friend like him. From the sea in front of the village that freezing mill at the top of the island felt about as far away as the moon. But also so close.
I turned away from the land with a grimace and, lying on my back to float on the water, looked up to see, like a broken wafer of ice, the daylight moon propped on the air in the silence of the sky.
I closed my eyes, heard the metallic sparks of the underwater, the fire in the sea, as the currents edged above my ears. I had thoughts of the layout of the ship. Rivets, tight metal corridors, hard steps and mountings. The spaces of its going down. And down it went, again, for the millionth time since May, away and forever . . .
*
The next day rose windless, despite Athina’s prediction of white lambs. I awoke to an empty house but to talking in the lane below. I knew that in all likelihood I would be the subject of the discussion, the stranger who’d come from the battle in search of a kaiki. All it would take would be one treasonous bastard to get on the end of such chat and I’d be stuffed. Inexplicably though, I felt no tension at the thought. I lay back on my pillows, sipping at the water Athina had left by my cot, staring through the window at the perfect sky. Before long I had drifted back to sleep, dreaming of Sarah Murtagh with a gap in her teeth, swimming in the Libyan sea.
When I woke later and went downstairs I found that in the place of Athina’s ‘white lambs’ the outside of the house was being whitewashed for Easter. Old Maria and a paper-thin younger man, another of her sons, were hard at it in the lane. At the sight of me the widow dropped what she was doing and once again ushered me back inside, urging me to sit again at the table and calling in a bright shriek for Athina as she hurried back towards the kitchen.
Soon an omelette was brought, more bread, an orange juice, and Athina was sitting opposite me, explaining how she’d still not heard from her husband.
‘But we will protect you,’ she said. ‘We will protect you . . . and one day soon he will come.’
One day soon . . .
Was it just her English or was I a chance to be stuck in this village for weeks? The Maori in the bathtub came to mind, how he’d been happily holed up and how the same fate may now be awaiting me. At least in my case I knew, however, that the man from Chicagee wasn’t that far away. I had seen him, hadn’t I, with my own eyes, deep in conversation near that hovel when I first descended to the coast? And anyway, if it came to it, there were boats down along the beach at the moorings, there’d be comings and goings. I wasn’t high and dry in a fastness of the hills.
Athina left me alone and I polished off the omelette and bread. Then sipped at the juice. What would be my plan? How long would I wait for the man from Chicagee to show up? One day? A week? These were the thoughts in my head as, for the first time in months, I took out my army diary and began to write a few things down.
Out in the lane, I could hear the whitewash being slopped on as I scribbled away. No matter what happened, this was going to be a different Easter to the last one we’d had up at Vevi. From the kitchen Athina reappeared, put down a coffee and took away my empty plate. I wrote:
It’s a part of me now, the constant change. Those classical yarns they made us learn by rote at school, which V took upon himself back on the lake, have finally been digested. Perhaps after all it’s just my fate to quietly understand, not to wear my knowledge like a crown. I live not in peace but in my own skin.
XXXV
Over a long southern winter of Sundays I told Lascelles the whole story. Not, as I said to him, the story you will read elsewhere, in books like that bloke Noonan’s, not the story about the two and a half years I spent half-wild with fearlessness, making life hell for the Germans from the strongholds in the hills, driving them mad in tandem with the SOE and the andartes networks. Not that story, nor about how we were finally picked up in early ’45, semi-mythical figures by then, in an RN sub off the south coast at Lendas; how we were slapped on the back, fed cocoa and sandwiches, and then eventually pardoned back in Alex for all our primitive excesses, our all-it-takes methods of subterfuge and survival. No, not that story of derring-do, but what came before.
When he was finally able to believe his luck that I was actually talking, Lascelles was enormously respectful. But the sad thing is I never told him how grateful I was to him. For that day years before, back in the hotel, when he proposed his theory about my aching tooth. He had loosened the bitterness in me but how could I suggest that he himself had ignored his own pain in order to lessen the likes of my own?
Yes, as it turns out that was harder for me to say than anything else in the end, though I do like to think that he understood that by filling him in I was also expressing my gratitude.
Even so, I would have liked to be able to actually return the favour, to actually say the words while he was alive, rather than to rely on interpretation and implication.
Leonie of course didn’t necessarily need to hear it all again. She was glad nevertheless that I had made the decision and on the Sunday I told him about the snipping of Spenser’s moustache in the cave above Tzermiado I remember her saying to Lascelles that it was just a shame it wasn’t all still in writing, so he could place it in his archive as a kind of number one ticketholder of the stories that he stored there. When she said this a little light came on in my mind. But I said nothing at the time, and what with one thing and another it’s taken me till now, with Lascelles six foot under on Wait-a-While, to get it all down on paper at last.
*
Like old Nat Fermoy and Patsy Ballyhoura, who bunkered down amongst the westerlies at Yellow Rock without so much as a promissory note for the land, it never seemed to worry anyone on King when Leonie and I shacked up without a wedding certificate. By the 1950s, with a new wind blowing, people in Currie or Grassy were even referring occasionally to Leonie as my wife, so glad were they that she had finally escaped from her father’s perpetual storm cloud. They sensed, partly it has to be said from gossip and innuendo, how much effort that would have taken, and perhaps they reasoned that a coupling such as ours demanded mor
e than the usual commitment, official, ceremonious, or otherwise.
It has done me no harm on the island to be hitched to its favourite child. My early identity as the flinty recluse began gradually to change into something with the glowing hint of salvation about it. Like the next-day light on the western spits after a genuine dune-lashing storm. There was a view that somehow I had saved Leonie from Nat but also there was a decided feeling, I think, that she had saved me. People became cheerier when I bumped into them and, as if by reflection, I became a little more agreeable to them too. And as the years rolled by the chances of any off-the-cuff remark to do with the war lessened, and therefore, from my point of view, so did the social risk of blowing my top.
At about the time I started relating my story to Lascelles, Leonie and I had taken to getting out a bit more, going to the odd footy match, and now and then to see a special visitor spruik in town. It was a benefit I didn’t see coming, but with my saying my piece, Lascelles’d got a new purposefulness about him with respect to the memorial, an extra relish that finally seemed to be bearing some fruit. I don’t know if they ever knew that he financed the completion of the reading room with his own money but, whatever the case, people on the island, some of the SS included, suddenly seemed to take a bit of an interest in his collection, and at some point around that time he even had a letter from the national president of the RSL, who’d heard about his work, and seemed more than impressed. A few years later Lascelles was invited as a kind of advisor to the national shrine in Canberra when they were reorganising the archive of family documents to do with the war and I ribbed the hell out of him about it. Leonie and I were both very happy for him though, and he knew that, I think, despite the jibes.
It was during those years that Lascelles became somewhat of a celebrity on the island, insofar as his name occasionally popped up in the pages of the mainland or Tasmanian press, either as a correspondent or as someone whose opinion was worth quoting on the subject of military history or commemoration. He had also become the popular mainstay of the island Literary & Debating Society, who began conducting their meetings from the Memorial Reading Room. Very occasionally Leonie and I would venture over to attend one of these gatherings. One I remember was to do with the writings of George Bernard Shaw, a subject which caused some earnest debate between the Presbyterians and the Catholics; and another talk was on the Hungarian Revolution. This Hungarian meeting was noteworthy, being spiced up by the attendance of a solo Yugoslavian sailor, who was moored in Currie harbour at the time and who, despite his pretty rough English, walked up and over the hill to contribute plenty of interesting information to the debate. Not all of it was anti-communist either, so that was one of the more controversial evenings held by the society.