by Gregory Day
Leonie knew better than to suggest that I, given my Catholic education and my love of reading, could contribute a little more than I was to this Literary & Debating Society. But when Lascelles informed us one Sunday that they had a man coming over from Melbourne to give a talk on underwater archaeology, with particular reference to Greece and the Mediterranean, she really had to bite her tongue. I felt the question hanging in the air, as Lascelles spoke of how interesting the talk would be. Apparently they had discovered ships from the Bronze Age under the sea near Crete, he said. And, more recently of course, there were important discoveries being made about ships that went down during the war, some of which there’d been no record of until now. Of course he knew better by then than to push for my attendance but I could feel nevertheless that that was what he hoped for. Which even then, even that late in the day, made my hackles rise. Because the implication was that I should attend. Would I or wouldn’t I come along, he seemed to be asking. Definitely not, was my silent answer. I think of that incident now as a relapse of sorts but even so I am overwhelmed by my own weakness. We have to work at being human, don’t we?
Why, in the end, couldn’t I have gone? I could have broached the subject with this visiting expert, perhaps I could have even initiated some investigation into the whereabouts of certain soldiers lost on the HMS Imperial when it was sunk by its own navy on 29 May 1941.
Alas, even then, with my new sociability, and with all I had got off my chest to Leonie and then to Lascelles, I could not face exposing my story to such a public arena. Leave me alone, I wanted to cry out, all over again. Just leave me alone.
It was still a raw nerve that had been touched, an underwater nerve that I’ll never entirely be rid of I’m sure. And as I went walking out to the jetty on my own that night I remember sighing deeply at the truth that no matter how far out you go, no matter how many miles from the scenes of your distress, even if you settle at the other end of the earth, the ghosts that trouble you will always be there. Like the moon and stars in the sky.
As it turns out the visit from the marine archaeologist was cancelled due to his plane not being able to take off from Essendon in high winds. It was never rescheduled. But it was not long after that when, perhaps needing to further shore up my defences, or better put, needing to quarry the last vestiges of bitterness from my trembling soul, I proposed to Leonie and she accepted my hand in marriage.
XXXVI
When I had been in Maria’s house for over a week and the man from Chicagee still hadn’t shown, late one afternoon I climbed up the stairs at the back of the kitchen to take a nap. Through the open window of my room the sea breeze had a soothing quality about it, a light feathering of the skin that seemed to penetrate deep into me. I recalled the same sensation from Iraklio before the brollies. I slept easy.
When I woke the breeze had dropped and it felt like it was getting on to evening. I got a little shock as I stood looking at myself in the mirror that hung over the bed. Once again I looked different. Had my eyes become less green in the last few months? It certainly seemed that way. There were the faintest flecks now, of the brown like Mum’s. Perhaps this was hazel, I wondered.
On my way downstairs I could hear Zoe and the kitten playing in the yard. Athina was bent over in the open door of Maria’s oven. She straightened up as she heard me, turned, her cheeks flushed from the heat. Smiling apologetically, she raised her palms upwards in a gesture of no luck. Well, at least not yet.
‘And the white lambs?’ I asked, a little in jest.
She laughed, showing the gap again between her teeth. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘It will all come tomorrow.’
Wandering down past the sleeping dogs, I made my way back onto the beach. I stood marvelling at the cats on the sand again as I slowly stripped off and left my clothes in a pile.
Out past the dumpers I floated on my back, feeling the currents on my skin, smelling the salt, listening again to the underwater in my ears. I looked straight up at the sky: it was pale, pale as a candle with the day’s tapering off. I closed my eyes.
I drifted, past the jagged curtain of blood falling amongst the oleanders in the lane above the Kavroulakis villa, past the jolting of the monk’s body as slugs from Spenser’s revolver threw him back and back again into that bed on the third terrace. Where was the revolver? I wondered briefly. Amongst my clothes. Was it safe? Abruptly, I tipped myself upright in the sea, looked back at the beach, scanned for the pile, found it, and remembered. My dog tags I’d hidden there, the revolver was in the room, with my kit. I scanned the buildings now until I recognised the one. The tall one, Maria’s, its front wall half whitewashed, with lilacs blooming beside my open window on the upper story.
It was too late now. Too late to do anything. And so I thought fondly of the little girl, Zoe, and the kitten, the one without the name, the gap in Athina’s teeth . . .
I leant back, floating again, reassured. Went through that gap in her teeth and saw the mirror image of my old eyes, my mother’s eyes. Just because the damage has occurred do we have to make it our only caper? Can we not believe again, for the first time in fact, that what has happened can be redeemed?
I was an ordinary man, cut adrift in the weight of life, but I could feel my buoyancy as I floated there, my body light on the water at last. I was in no need of a boat, not yet, and I had the first glimmers of understanding of what my fighting would be all about. An island should not be stolen, nor could it ever float away. And I? I would do things my own way. I would not be transformed into breathless myth, not like Pendlebury, not like Vern.
XXXVII
We didn’t want a lot of fuss on the day, nor could we have mustered it. But she was, of course, in a lot of people’s minds, a pride of the island, and thus it seemed only right to allow them to pay their respects.
So we arranged to have a little service in the church in Currie, with Don Lawson the priest flown over from Smithton in Tassie to officiate. But as the day approached a couple of questions loomed large. Firstly, whether or not Nat Fermoy would be invited. Leonie hadn’t even mentioned this issue until I brought it up when things were getting close and we were driving across the island to speak to the church secretary, Eveline Aspinall, about the proceedings. Leonie’s reaction was firm and instant. She would continue to take him food and wash his clothes but her father would not be there on the day.
Uncle True, however, was not such a clear-cut issue. Since Leonie’s retrieval of the memory of what her father had done to her, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to go see True. It was not that she resented the fact that he’d held this information close to his chest all these years, leaving her in that house and in danger as a child, it was more that she didn’t want to embarrass him. But she wanted him at the wedding, she said, in fact she wanted him to give her away.
We agreed that I would go and see him. I turned up at the old house at Yellow Rock one Tuesday morning with the weather beating a harry from the south pole, the wind and swell absolutely castigating the spits and beaches. The house was battened fast, a round-shouldered timber creature with its head down, and when I knocked on the door I had to hold onto the jamb so as not to be blown over. I half expected no one to answer, such was the noise in the sky and the corresponding shut-away feeling the old Fermoy shack had about it.
But sure enough the door did open and there stood True, in a faded flannelette shirt and workpants, his white hair sticking out at all angles, with an empty kitchen pot in his hand. Without saying hello he gestured me in quickly out of the wind and shut the door behind us.
The shack was sealed tight and immediately the volume of the world was reduced to just the quiet hum of a fridge.
We greeted each other now that it was safe enough to do so and True ushered me into the large westerly room where once I had watched him nod off into his toddy after a long day’s gurrying. I found the room as shining and spick as it had always been, its old sheoak ti
mbers glowing brown and the kitchen still tightly organised as a ship’s. Once again the contrast of this houseproudness with the dishevelled state of True himself was startling.
It seemed that despite the hour – roughly ten o’clock in the morning – he had already availed himself of a claret or two. I couldn’t remember him ever drinking anything but rum but the evidence was plain now, the drinker’s disciplines had disassembled, the half-finished bottle of plonk was on the table.
We sat down and he offered me one. ‘Would you take a drink, Wesley?’ he said. ‘We can toast your courage.’
His mouth curled in amusement, his eyes laden with the layers of the joke.
‘I will have a splash, True,’ I replied. ‘But not if you persist with being a smartarse about it.’
The old bloke smiled broadly and got up to fetch me a glass. As he shuffled back across the glowing boards, polishing the glass with a tea towel, he said: ‘Aw but seriously. I’ve no trouble with ya pinchin’ my niece. I only wished I saw the two of you more often.’
He poured the glass with the steady hand of mid morning.
‘Yair, well, we don’t get over this side too often, True. Need a bloody suit of armour to live over here.’
He told me that that’s what his brother Nat always reckoned.
I sipped at the claret and, as True started to speak at length about the art of living on the west side, I wondered how on earth I was gonna broach the subject. Not so much of the wedding but of what came before.
I listened as he rambled on about what he’d learnt from Harry Grave, a hunter who lived further up the west coast when he was a boy. Eventually, when a gap appeared in his talk, I skirted round the main issue of why it was me sitting at the table and not his niece, and just invited him straight out.
‘She wants you to give her away,’ I told him. ‘At our wedding. Her father won’t be there.’
True brought his fingers to his lips. He toyed with them there for a good while. He took another sip of the claret. Then he grimaced like he had a stitch and shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t do it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Just . . . couldn’t.’
I took a breath. I waited. Slowly I began to hear the roar of the wind outside above the hum of the fridge.
‘Well actually, True,’ I said at last, ‘There’s no one else. She wants it to be you. And she’s done enough time fending for herself on this island. I reckon she needs an elbow to lean on as she comes down the aisle. What do you think her mother would say?’
I don’t know what got into me. I just blurted that question out as if it wasn’t my body the words were coming from. I was as shocked as he was.
Perhaps his hackles did rise for a second at this interloper telling him what’s what about poor beautiful Alma Burrows who’d birthed the child and died in the very room we sat. But immediately they went down again. He gave me a strange look, a sizing look, he was taking fresh stock of me and I saw in his face the notion arrive that a soldier like me must have done some pretty terrible things while I was away, some ruthless things a long, long way from home, some things that couldn’t have been avoided and that needed being done.
It was respect I saw in those old rheumy eyes, and for once it was of some use to me. He got the picture. I wouldn’t be sitting in his kitchen speaking on behalf of his dead sister-in-law unless I meant business.
*
The day of the wedding itself was unusually picturesque. A day for real estate salesmen and postcard makers. Even the west coast was blithe and royal blue, the water rolling gently up to paddocks that looked like the fairways of a links golf course. If you didn’t know better you would have thought the whole place had its best duds on for the occasion.
Lascelles was my best man but his main and rather daunting job was to make sure True got to the church in one piece. ‘I don’t care if you forget the ring,’ I told him. ‘Just so long as her uncle’s waiting for her on the steps when she arrives.’
Rose Robinson was the maid of honour, the eldest the island had ever known. Certainly the first one to use a stick. But despite her grey curls she seemed as sweetly innocent as any of them that day. She cried all the way through the service too and people told me later she was bawling even when Leonie and her first arrived at the church in the back of Bill Murray’s convertible.
I stood alone at the head of the aisle with only Don Lawson, the priest, for company. He was a good bloke, Don. We talked about how smooth his flight was in from Smithton, and he told me how the pilot had said the weather was that calm he could have landed on the church spire. ‘A great day to get married anyway, Wesley. The gods are shining on you today.’
I’ll always remember that comment from Don Lawson, the way he used the plural gods like that, and with him meant to be officiating as a monotheist priest and all.
We weren’t too long chatting at the top of the aisle before I heard the whine of Lascelles’ Velocette outside and heard the sound of him and True talking as they stepped up into the porch of the church. They sounded like they were getting on fine. I was safe. Any minute now she would clap eyes on her troubled old uncle and the two of them would be walking arm in arm towards me. I had never given any thought to marriage or a wedding day but as I stood there with Don Lawson arranging his vestments beside me I felt that such a ceremony had its role to play. Well, maybe not for everyone but at least in our case.
She came down the aisle that day, and dressed in white, her hair cut short and her eyes with that wise old smirk about them. We kissed in public, would you believe, and when the service was over we went as arranged to the pub for a meal in the dining room. No speeches allowed. Our stipulation. To save any awkwardness.
As for a honeymoon, well, we thought briefly about Melbourne but didn’t bother, though I’d say we’ve had the longest one ever here at Naracoopa. We’ve waged our wars all right, achieved some moments of peace, and we travel on knowing full well that the world will also travel on, far beyond us, and that like the Bass Strait weather it will have no influence or regard to any children of ours. Problems hover above us for a time but like the lenticular the next moment we look up and they have gone.
I leave the breakfast table of a morning and know that this is right. That we have more than enough living to reflect upon. And Leonie, in her garden slicker the colour of the red heath, and her worn-out gloves, with plant samples trailing from her pockets, takes her cup and plate to the sink as I go, and calls after me, only half in jest: ‘It can never be true as the original, you know, never as true as the pages you wrote in my cuddle-ink.’
I take the path to the bungalow. Pen in hand. She may indeed be right but I console myself that neither Lascelles, nor any of the future visitors to his Memorial Reading Room, where today I will deposit this manuscript into the safe hands of the archive, will ever be any the wiser.
Author Note
Although the research that has gone into this novel has been extensive, it is a work of the imagination and should not be read as history. Some scenarios triggered by factual ingredients have been rearranged or relocated. The depiction of the legendary John Pendlebury in this novel, although once again based on research, should nonetheless be read only as my invention.
I am grateful to Sue Fisher and the committee at the King Island Museum & Archive, to Costas Mamalakis in Heraklion, to Alex Craig at Picador, to Jo Butler, Emma Rafferty, Deonie Fiford, Antony Beevor and Peter Thompson. Thanks also to Mary Andriotakis for bearing witness on behalf of her family, and to Nick Andriotakis for his ongoing and practical help. The loyal friendship and intellectual support of Simon McLean, Patrick Mangan, Antoinette Hanna and Ian Chater has been crucial to the completion of this book.
About Gregory Day
Gregory Day’s debut novel, The Patron Saint of Eels, won the prestigious Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 2006
. He has published two subsequent novels, Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds and The Grand Hotel, which make up the highly acclaimed Mangowak trilogy. Gregory’s short story The Neighbour’s Beans won the Elizabeth Jolley Prize in 2011. He lives on the southwest coast of Victoria, Australia.
Also by Gregory Day
The Black Tower: Songs from the Poetry of W.B. Yeats
Trace (with photographs by Robert Ashton)
The Patron Saint of Eels
The Flash Road: Scenes from the Building of the Great Ocean Road
Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds
The Grand Hotel
Visitors (engravings by Jiri Tibor Novak)
First published 2015 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000
Copyright © Gregory Day 2015