Gilgamesh

by Joan London

  Natty Crawford himself showed her to her cabin. ‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ he said, in a Cockney accent, ‘how old are you?’

  ‘Twenty,’ said Edith, though in her passport, which he had thumbed through, she was not yet nineteen.

  ‘And the nipper? He won’t be sick? He’s well-behaved?’

  Although he was tanned and well built like a working man, there was something dandified about Natty, with his navy blue gaberdine jacket, his white shoes, finely shaved cheeks and crinkly slicked-back hair.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ he said as Edith put Jim and the Globite suitcase down on the bunk. The cabin was dim, deep down in the ship. The porthole was not far above the water. If she stretched her arms out she could just about touch each wall. ‘If R.T. hadn’t pleaded your case, I would never have let you on board.’ He doesn’t like me, Edith thought. His eyes were hard and unfriendly, without one flicker of gallantry. ‘A ship like this is no place for a woman. Especially if she’s young. Stirs things up.’ He ran his hand through his hair. ‘I’d prefer you to lie low, if you understand my meaning. Probably best if you take your meals in the cabin. Cookie will look after you.’

  The fare was fifteen pounds. There were no other passengers.

  The Touchpole sailed that evening, but Edith was too intimidated to go on deck for a last glimpse of her native shore. She felt queasy as she and Jim fell asleep, and by the time she woke up the next morning to the sway and throb of the ship, she felt very sick indeed.

  Cookie said it was very rare, but he thought it did happen. ‘Young chap signed on once at Southampton and never lived to see Bombay. Threw up day and night like you. Seasickness. No other cause we could see.’ He stood among the nappies strung up across the cabin as Edith tried a spoonful of his soup. He had a glum pugnacious face and smelt of hot fat, but he was the only person she’d seen for days on end. The only one to ask if anyone ever died of this.

  She put the bowl down and laid her head back on her sour pillow. At the end of the bunk, Cookie was tickling Jim. Perhaps she was delirious, but she thought she heard Jim laughing. She’d never heard him laugh before. ‘Come on, guv,’ Cookie said, holding out his arms. ‘We’ll leave your ma in peace.’

  How did this stranger woo shy Jim away from her? Days and nights were one in the dark cabin. Sometimes Jim was with her, sometimes he was not. She only knew it was night when Jim was there asleep.

  She woke once with a start, sensing his absence. It was pitch black outside the porthole. She leaned forward, patting the emptiness at the end of the bunk. Up the corridors and stairs she stumbled, to the galley, which was empty, its surfaces swept clean. On the far side of the galley there was a strip of light beneath a door. She opened it. All around a table sat men in singlets, smoking and slapping down cards. Jim was sitting on Cookie’s knee, licking Cookie’s stumpy finger which was crusted with sugar. He looked peculiarly content, and fatter than she remembered. She opened her mouth to claim him but her throat was too parched to speak. Of course! she thought, it’s all a dream. She fell down in a faint.

  The worst part of her weeks on the bunk were the dreams. She dreamt she and Frances were sliding on the wet lurching deck of the Touchpole, trying to save Ada from drowning. She dreamt she saw her father get on to a train that disappeared with a whoosh into a tunnel underground. She lay shivering and retching, like one accursed, punished for her desertion of them. She knew now this journey could only end in doom. There was nothing to distract her from this darkness, no light of sky, no birds, no sweet air. How foolish she had been ever to think that there was anything more she needed.

  She wondered if she was dying. She made herself get up and rummage in the Globite for Leopold’s letter. She scribbled across the envelope that if she should die on this voyage, she wanted Jim to be put into the care of her cousin Leopold, at the above address.

  After the Cape of Good Hope, Capetown offered three days’ respite. Cookie advised fresh air. Edith was able to dress and feebly wash nappies and hang them out to dry between lifeboats. The sky was blue and raw, like in Australia, only bluer and higher. She stretched out on the deck beneath the nappies and tethered Jim to her with a piece of rope. The glare hurt her eyes. She would have liked to return to the dark cabin but Jim needed to be outside. Cookie invited her and Jim to ride into Capetown but she refused. She knew that once she touched dry land she would never leave it again.

  ‘Look, Jim, palm trees! Flying fish, dolphins!’ They had crossed the Gulf of Guinea and it was smoother sailing now. There was a tracery of tropical coastline and, at night, new constellations of stars. Jim walked on deck with her, holding her hand. During all the weeks she had languished in the cabin, Jim had learnt to walk and clap his hands and say ‘Ta’ and ‘Bye-bye’. When someone waved a finger in front of him, he swayed in time like a cockatoo. Cookie had cut his hair off and fed him man-sized meals. He even looked a little like a miniature pudgy Cookie. He no longer screamed. Wherever he went there was laughter. Edith, pitifully weak and thin, was ignored.

  Jim had his first birthday as they approached the Canary Islands. Cookie iced a cake. Edith offered to help, but could not find her way around the galley.

  ‘Didn’t they teach you nowt in Or-stralia?’ Cookie elbowed her out of the way. Natty Crawford sang Happy Birthday over the ship’s PA. Jim was returned to her later in the cabin, smelling of tobacco and brandy. He seemed like a little stranger, remote, rough, a man’s boy. When she tried to make him go to bed his temples throbbed with anger at her, at her female fussiness and fears.

  Once she woke to see Cookie lit by moonlight in the cabin, his head among the nappies. His hand was at his crotch, moving rhythmically up and down. Who would come for her if she called out? She lay still, closed her eyes. She heard him sigh beneath his breath, and the click of the door. He hadn’t been looking at her but at the other end of the bunk, at Jim.

  For the rest of the journey she kept her door locked. When Cookie came to take Jim with him to the galley, she said that she would keep him with her now. Cookie turned without a word. He didn’t bring food to them any more, but there were only two days left. She went into the galley at night and foraged for cheese and bread and powdered milk.

  In Southampton all the crew were busy, rushing to go ashore. Men stood aside for them in the narrow corridors as they made their way up the ship. Edith’s silk stockings gathered round her ankles, her skirt dipped beneath her coat. Even her head had lost weight, Madge’s hat sank down below her ears. Natty Crawford shook her hand at the top of the gangway and pinched Jim’s cheek. Edith lifted up Jim and descended into England’s damp grey air. She felt herself picked white and hollow as a bone. Not forgiven, but beyond retribution now. Jim waved bye-bye over her shoulder, but nobody was looking any more.

  What Edith hadn’t expected, had never taken into account, was that Irina would be beautiful. Neither her parents nor Leopold had ever said that she was. Her father always gave a little snort at any mention of Irina, as if to say he had her measure. In the photograph of Fat Leopold she had been a background figure, dark, matronly, sharp-faced. Now her hair was silver, swept into a turret at the crown of her head. She was fullchested as a dove, and walked with her head held high and her shoulders back. Her skin was velvety and pale and crinkly like the back of an old rose petal. No older woman’s skin in Nunderup had ever looked like that. Her alert brown eyes were almost triangular over her high cheekbones. She still spoke English with a faint accent, and her manner wasn’t English, she was far too intimate and dramatic.

  Irina had thrown her arms around Edith in the hall and hugged and kissed her as she had never been hugged and kissed, even as a child. Edith, she said, as if she were setting the name alive. Tenderly she had held Jim and helped Edith remove her damp coat. She uncrowned her of the velour hat, its proud brim sadly drooping from the showers of an English spring. ‘Now let me have a look at you,’ she said. ‘Edith, Edith, what has happened to you?’

  ‘Aunt Irina,
where is Leopold?’

  Irina clutched the soft folds of her neck. ‘My darling, Leopold is not here.’

  Jim sat next to Edith beside the fire, holding his own cup, draining it of milk. After their bath he was soft and fragrant like an open flower, his hair brushed back from his temples, a good little mother’s boy again. They had floated for hours in Irina’s great porcelain tub while outside across the rooftops the dim northern twilight turned to night. Their clothes looked like rags in a pile on the floor, stiff with sea salt. In their bare feet they stole across the polished boards and little jewel-coloured rugs of Irina’s floors. Irina’s eyes were very bright as she studied them.

  ‘Did you know, Edith, I left behind a little brother in Russia?’

  ‘Yes, 1 think Mumma mentioned it.’

  ‘His name was Dmitri. That means Jim in English. Did your mother tell you that?’

  Edith shook her head. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He was called up for the army and he couldn’t stand it. He walked off into the snow.’ Irina lit a thin black cigarette. ‘Are you married, Edith?’

  ‘No,’ said Edith. After the Touchpole she was beyond telling lies. Besides she knew would never get away with lies before these shrewd eyes. Why was everything so familiar? She had a sense of coming home, so strong that she was surprised to feel a prickling behind her eyes. ‘But I will be, when I find Aram Sinanien.’ This was to avoid the next question, the biological question, which Irina, with her un-Anglo-Saxon directness, would not hesitate to ask.

  ‘Leopold’s driver? The Armenian?’ Irina’s eyes darted to Jim for a moment. ‘Oh Edith!’

  ‘I’m going to Armenia. I hoped Leopold would help me find him.’

  ‘Leopold has gone to the Middle East.’ Irina’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘For the government. Even I don’t know where he is.’

  Edith kept on eating. For tea there was poppyseed cake sliced into black-edged scrolls. It tasted female and delicate after Cookie’s fare. She and Jim picked at every last crumb on the table.

  ‘Darling, you are not going anywhere,’ Irina said, ‘until we’ve put some meat on those bones.’

  She put them to bed in Leopold’s room, under a great white feather quilt. Jim wet the bed in the early hours of the morning. He had drunk so much milk that Pushkin, Irina’s cat, woke them by mewing, outraged at his empty saucer.

  Irina still lived in the top storey of the house that Ernest Stubbs had left her. She had survived by renting the rooms on the ground floor. Irina’s boarders were old men now, bent and silver-haired. Russians! The passionate, soulful people in Ada’s stories of her past. Sometimes old Vassily beckoned to Edith as she passed by his door. He had a sweet for Jim. His room was crammed with books and newspapers stacked up on the floor. Sometimes from the upstairs window she saw Mr Osipov in his black coat and beret, bent over his walking stick, creep his way past the hedges in the grey English light. ‘Off to the Russian Officers’ Club,’ said Irina. ‘You should have heard the gossip about us once.’ She sighed. ‘We’re way past scandal now.’

  It hadn’t been a luxurious living, especially with a son to educate, as Irina was quick to point out. But she was frugal and diligent and managed to live with style. In the mornings she lay in bed with Pushkin and drank tea and attended to letters. She wrote a long weekly letter to Leopold, though she had received only one note from him. The mail seemed to take a long time. The letters were sent to and from an address in London. ‘It is hush-hush,’ Irina said with a finger across her lips. ‘It is because he has the gift for languages. That’s why they came to see him here.’

  In the afternoons she set off in her long grey coat and fox-fur stole, and little mauve netted hat speared at an angle into her silver turret, to play cards with friends. Sometimes she came home lit by a small deadly smile, a spray of violets pinned to her coat, and something nice for tea, macaroons, or a bit of fish.

  ‘I have a feeling, Edith, that you would be quick at cards,’ she mused. ‘You know, there are worse ways to make a little extra when you’re on your own with a child.’

  Some afternoons Irina’s lady friends came to tea. Edith and Jim were presented to Madame Sofia Rustikova, Madame Olga Porter, Madame Anya Nikoleyvna Black, to be kissed and exclaimed over and admired. The samovar bubbled on the table. Steam coiled from their cups about their sharp, proud old faces. Soon they were talking Russian. The voices rose to a hubbub as Edith led Jim out.

  ‘Questions, questions.’ Irina rolled her eyes at Edith in the kitchen as she set out the cake. ‘I’ve told them you are going to join your husband in France.’

  I am going to join my husband. Edith said this over to herself. The very word ‘husband’ warmed her. From now on this is what she would say if she were asked. She felt grateful to Irina, and proud of her, the most youthful and beautiful of the women around the table.

  ‘It would be better if you don’t mention Armenia,’ Irina said in a low voice.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They will become upset. They are always upset if somebody talks of going to the so-called Soviet Republic. There will be talk.’

  ‘I don’t care. I’m used to talk.’

  ‘Listen, Edith, nobody goes where you are talking of going. And most certainly, nobody comes back.’

  Everything was as her mother had said it was, the visitors, laughter, smoke. In these rooms Ada and Irina had kept house together and Ada had helped with baby Leopold. After she and Frank were married they’d lived here for a while before they came to Australia. Frances was born here.

  By the stipulations of her parents’ will, it was Ada’s house too. And if the house were sold, a share of the proceeds was to go to Ada and any children she might have. Ada used to tell her daughters this would be their dowry. At one time Frank was all for writing to Irina and insisting she sell the house. He said their only chance to get the farm working was to have a little capital. But Ada would not let him, she said the house was Irina’s living.

  ‘Irina would survive,’ said Frank with a snort. ‘She does very nicely. A lot better than we do. Madame Irina could survive anywhere.’

  These were the rooms in which Ada had lived and slept for the English part of her life. They were high above the greentipped chestnut trees, faced by a row of houses identical to theirs. She’d been protected here behind the hedges and the lace curtains. The light was pearly, orderly like the world of a book. Was this what Ada kept her hat on for, to return to? The girl Ada would never have dreamt that one day she would wander round a lonely clearing in an old green hat and broken-down lambskin slippers. Perhaps Edith had made the journey for her.

  Irina was very fond of Ada. ‘Ar-da was a sensitive soul. She had dusha, your mother, you know, soul. When Ernest died we became very close. How she used to make me laugh! She was very gentle but every now and then she would be taken over by a sort of wildness.’ She gave Edith a speculative look.

  Every teatime Irina had a new reason to dissuade Edith from making her journey. ‘Your mother made a journey too and she never came back. To make a life in a new country is very hard. Believe me, I know what I am saying, Edith. I myself left Petersburg in 1910.

  ‘Her letters from Australia were so funny, but I read between the lines. It was a terrible life for a woman like her, terrible. Her letters became shorter and shorter. I knew that she was going under.’

  Why had Ada ‘gone under’? Was it so terrible in Australia? What had Leopold told his mother? Edith felt the colonial’s suspicion of being patronised. She thought of the violence of its weather, the savage brightness of the air. Here everything seemed muted, stilled. Cabs and buses passed silently beneath the windows. People passed each other in the street without greeting. It made Jim seem noisy. His footsteps clattered on the wooden boards as he chased the cat. He shrieked as Pushkin spat at him. He tugged at Edith’s hand, impatient to go out.

  ‘He is a creature of the wilds,’ Irina said. ‘But then Leopold was a little old man from the day he wa
s born.’

  Edith, looking down at Jim, suddenly remembered that Ada had lost her baby son.

  ‘Think of your mother, Edith,’ Irina said with a theatrical sigh each teatime. ‘All she has been through. How she must worry about you.’

  Edith wrote a short letter to Frances and Ada. She said she hoped they were both well and that she thought often of them. Irina was being very kind. Jim could walk now and said many words. She said they were going to Armenia and she would write from there.

  When Jim sat quiet beside Edith, bathed and happy because it was teatime, Irina liked to sit back and survey him. ‘You know, Edith, he reminds me of Leopold.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘His spirit is similar. He is devoted to you, as Leopold was to me. But be warned. One day he will leave you. He will hardly say goodbye.’

  ‘Stay here with me, Edith,’ she said. ‘I know what it is to bring up a son alone. We will send him to a good English school. He’s a clever little boy, like Leopold, I can tell. We’ll make him into a real English gentleman.’

  ‘Leopold said he led a Russian life with you. He said that he never felt English.’

  ‘Yes, it is true, the English never let you feel one of them.’

  ‘Not even Uncle Ernest?’

  Irina crossed her legs, lingered in a smile, aware that she was still beautiful in the firelight. ‘Your Uncle Ernest was infatuated with me. As your father was with your mother. And infatuation has no respect for nationality, isn’t that so, Edith?’

  There was refuge in Leopold’s room. The bed was high and wide, and she imagined that the dip in the middle had been pressed out by his warm portly bulk. In the wardrobe, like his effigy, hung a large crestfallen dinner suit above a splayed pair of brogues. Edith pressed her nose into the suit, but could not smell the sweaty, faintly sweet smell of him. Only mothballs, the smell of his mother’s meticulous housekeeping. There were no school photographs or trophies or Boys’ Annuals, no traces of Fat Leopold. On the desk was a blotter and pen-holder and a globe of the world. Otherwise all the surfaces of the room were bare.