by Joan London
Hadn’t he always done the crying for both of them? What if all the raging in the past few months was a fight for life, hers as well as his?
She paced up and down the deserted platform. Even the moon had gone to bed. Her nerves were racing, the angry blood thumped through her heart. She was back in the heart of existence. It was clear to her now that for the last few years she had been living to one side, living in loss, she had been lost in death. For half of Jim’s childhood.
So once again Edith brought Jim home but this time something had changed. Frances had lost her moral power over them. For as long as Edith could remember Frances had acted as if the fact of Jim’s existence was something to be dealt with, forgiven or corrected, like a fault in Nature. Ever since they had returned from Armenia it was as if Frances expected something wrong to be made right.
He told me it was for tests, to see if Jim was, you know, normal, she said to Edith, looking at the autumn rain trickling down the window. She did not look at Jim.
Not since her mother’s death had she felt as she did when she watched Jim disappear in the teacher’s car. In that moment, as silence fell over the clearing, she realised that already she missed him, his mute, unyielding presence, so constant, so close, as close to her as anyone had ever been. She saw her raw ugly hands clutching each other and knew that her love was too large, it frightened her, she always drove those she loved away.
Why had she let him go? Out of fear, of a man, of the authority he seemed to represent. And from another sort of fear, even deeper, which was authority’s fear too, that something might arise, something different, if the spirit wasn’t tamed. This fear she had called ‘care’. She had called it God.
God was the spirit. Where did that thought come from?
She felt dizzy, as if she were leaving a coastline. Her bruised face throbbed, the dog was whimpering. She let him off the chain.
A man called Len Corliss had bought the old McKay farm on the other side of the Sea House and was trying to make a go of dairying with his wife. One day he had a heart attack in the dairy and died. Frances started going over there to help the young widow with the milking. Lee Corliss turned out to be as keen on farming as Frances was. Together they put in a crop of lucerne, and passed long hours discussing how to improve the herd. Frances spent more and more time working at the Corliss place. She often stayed the night there. She seemed to lose all interest in Edith and Jim.
He started at Correspondence School with a teacher he never saw, a Miss Betts. He spent a lot of time thinking about Miss Betts, admiring her courteous instructions—Something to keep you busy!—and commendations—Ably put! He loved her delicate, joyful exclamation marks. He was sure that she was young, only a few years older than him. In his mind he saw her like Nora Gasparian, black-fringed, sisterly, judicious. Her girlish signature, Letitia Betts, seemed to put them on an equal footing. Was it or wasn’t it an offer of friendship? He aimed at getting her to write just Letitia.
He spread the work books out on the kitchen table each morning. He felt a queer twinge of excitement at the clean page before him, a relish, an appetite, like wanting to run across an empty beach.
He took over Frances’s chores, the chooks and vegetables. He delivered the eggs to the Sea House twice a week. It was the autumn holiday season. The world was suddenly full of beautiful women. Long-legged girls on the tennis courts, soft-faced newlyweds lying back on flowing green slopes. Wherever Jim looked he caught glimpses of women, their gleam and lightness, through shubbery, up stairways, disappearing into the leaf-mould tang of the gardens. They never seemed to see him.
In the great humming kitchen old Mrs Staines asked after Edith, and often a cup of tea was offered, or a slice of fresh cake or warm bread. It didn’t matter that he was shy, he soon saw that in the hierarchy of the kitchen the Clark boy was too lowly to speak. It was enough that they let him sit there at a far corner of the table and observe them. He liked to watch them at their tasks, the cooks and waiters and the maids, and listen to the gossip tossed between them. One of the maids was always prettier than the rest.
Sometimes he left by the hall door, and stood looking up to where the light seemed to swirl at the top of the stairs. Upstairs, Edith had told him, they could feel the building sway in the storms. That was where Gareth Tehoe lived.
One day, he thought, he would go out into the world like other men. Meanwhile he read. He read Scott and Stevenson and Dickens, Ex Libris Francis Clark. He read the tattered magazines Edith found lying around the nursing home, read them from cover to cover, including the serials, beauty hints, Cake of the Week. He pored over Dorothy Dix.
A Lending Library had been set up by the Torville Road Board and each week he caught the bus to Torville and took out his allotted quota, two books. He read Kipling and Rider Haggard and The Secret Agent and more modern novels, Shangri-la, Greenmantle, The Thirty-Nine Steps. There was a set of books glued into uniform board covers, donated from the private library of Alfred F. Barker, an early settler in the area. Jim read all his collection, including Dumas’ Adventures in Czarist Russia, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album by Ivan Turgenev, Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1893). Where Mr Barker had trod, Jim went. Where would old Alfred take him next? He had collected histories of Persia and the Balkans, accounts of missions to Central Asia, of archaeological discoveries in the Near East. Jim read them all with a deep satisfaction that he couldn’t explain.
Edith no longer kept The Epic of Gilgamesh at her bedside, but on the shelf with her father’s books. At last Jim was ready for it, took it down, opened it at the prologue. He who saw the Deep, he read, the country’s foundation.
He saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden
he brought back a tale of before the Deluge.
He came a far road, was weary, found peace, and set
all his labours on a tablet of stone.
He read it over many days, using Leopold’s photo as a bookmark, skipping the repetitions, sounding out the strange names of the gods. Slowly the story took shape, emerging from the formal words and the strange ways of the past. Tiny figures began to strut, grew larger the more he read. Men wept and trembled, at the mercy of their gods and their terrifying dreams.
He began to understand that everything that happened to Gilgamesh was because he had a friend. My friend Enkidu whom I loved so dear, Gilgamesh cries after his death, who with me went through every danger.
When Jim looked at the photo now he saw that Leopold had a book stuffed in his pocket. In the background was a mother, a house, a grey grainy light. The focus point of the picture was the deep glint in his eyes. He knew that Leopold too lived in reading.
Why had he wanted Jim to have this book? Somehow he was becoming Gilgamesh in the myth. As Jim had last seen him, the light on his tanned face, his arm waving from the jeep, driving off into the desert. His face was Gilgamesh’s face.
He wandered through the bush, carrying a stick. His head drummed with thoughts, complicated plots of heroism and rescue, Reds and Nazis. He wanted an accomplice, a lieutenant to be walking beside him. One day he came on Gareth Tehoe, barefoot like him, also trailing a stick, a slight boy, still childishly perfect, with long thin legs and big white teeth and the shine of privilege.
They stopped and looked at one another for a moment. Then wordless, they turned and walked together, like warriors too proud to explain themselves. At the lookout they clashed sticks for a while, soldiers on a rampart. They chucked stones from the top of the boulders, competing for the longest throw. All at once, from some shared impulse they raced each other down through the corridors of the dunes. Jim’s longer legs reached the waves first, though Gareth was faster. At the water’s edge they tried to throw each other in and fell down wrestling in the sand. Until Gareth, laughing, extricated himself and they ran home in separate directions.
For a long time Jim could recall the shock of the body against his, the life of it, its gritty resistance.
When he read about Gilgamesh and Enkidu, he saw that power came and went between them, one was always more or less than the other.
They said at the Sea House that Gareth ran wild when he was home for the holidays. Madge no longer chased after him. From the day Gareth left for boarding school she had become a sort of invalid and rarely left the Tehoes’ rooms. Sometimes in summer Jim spotted her on their balcony, sprawled out unabashed in a sagging bathing suit, bloated with indifference, white, immense.
There was a secret running joke in the kitchen and he came to understand that it was Madge.
Gareth got into trouble for practical jokes. Salt switched for sugar, frogs in beds. Once he’d turned the sprinklers on during a twilight garden party. He always ran away before anyone could catch him. In the kitchen the staff was outraged. Where was the boy’s father? everybody asked. Drinking in the bar, of course.
But at the end of every holiday the Rover was backed out, and Gareth, in cap and blazer like a little English boy, was driven off to school.
Each time he came home he seemed older. Soon he brought friends to stay with him, and they played tennis and surfed and kicked a ball along the beach. Jim could hear Gareth and his friends shouting on the tennis courts. They wore white canvas shoes and called one another by surname.
A letter came from an English lawyer, acting on behalf of the late Mrs Irina Stubbs, who had perished in her house in July, 1944, in one of the V-1 raids on London. Two hundred pounds were to come to Mrs Ada Clark, née Stubbs, as her share of the estate. In the event of Mrs Clark’s death, her daughters were the beneficiaries.
The delay in settlement was due to the demands on legal resources after the war, the lawyer said.
July ’44. Edith remembered hearing about the V-l raids sitting in Miss Anoosh’s room in Syria. Did Irina ever read the letter she had written to her, asking for news of Leopold? She would never now know if Irina knew that Leopold had died. For a moment Edith saw Irina as she was when she said goodbye, standing in her dressing gown in the dim hall, her brown eyes brimming with foreboding. Saw the shaky writing on the envelope Irina thrust at her: The gods love those who are brave. Did old Vassily and Mr Osipov die with her in the house?
She hoped Irina did not have to live with Leopold’s death.
‘If this is just our share, I wonder where the rest went,’ Frances said.
‘You mean, Leopold’s share?’
‘Wouldn’t a man make a will if he was going off to war? We could write to the lawyer. He might be able to give you the official story on what happened to Leopold.’
‘We could,’ Edith said vaguely, knowing this was a letter she could never write. It would be read as a relative’s greedy, veiled enquiry. And for her it would be like querying Leopold himself.
Edith offered to give Frances half of the fifty pounds that Irina had given her in London, but Frances refused. She and Lee Corliss had decided to pool their resources. Lee sold the McKay place and they put in an offer on a dairy farm out of Albany. A real farm, Frances said. They had plans for crops and a piggery. She was going to fulfil her father’s dream.
Then something happened. The deal was off. Frances came home and could not speak of it, the words made her choke. Her grief filled the house. She stumbled through the rooms, knocking furniture. She stood immoveable in the kitchen, staring into space. She set off across the clearing and collapsed, folded up as if she had been stabbed. Tears washed her face in torrents. Rain set in and the air in the house seemed sodden with misery. One night Edith woke. She felt she was suffocating in Frances’s grief.
She stood at Frances’s door and whispered: ‘Can’t you sleep?’ Frances groaned. Edith went over to her bed.
‘Is it Lee?’ Frances had not gone to the Corliss place for over a week. Nor had Lee visited Frances.
‘It’s been very wet,’ Edith said. But they both knew that a bit of rain wouldn’t stop a woman like Lee.
Then Frances started talking in the darkness in a rapid desperate whisper, more personal than she had ever been. ‘We fell out. It was over nothing really, a visitor she had. I thought she ignored me. I said some silly things. I was sort of possessive, which is silly with friends. I’m not good with people. I’m only fit to live by myself.’
Edith stoked up the stove in the kitchen and warmed some milk. She stood by the bedroom window and watched Frances as she drank it. She was surprised at how she felt, calm and wise, deadly sure. ‘It’s nearly dawn,’ she said. ‘When it’s light, go to her.’
They left without ceremony, driving out of the clearing in Lee’s truck, Frances so intent on talking she forgot to look back. Edith made sandwiches and she and Jim sat on the verandah steps, munching dreamily in the sun. Then Edith brought out the little work table from her mother’s room and set it up on the verandah. From that night they ate every meal there, unless it was very cold or wet or the flies were bad. They read while they ate, or stared out across the clearing. They didn’t speak of why they did this: they fell back into their old wordless companionship. They felt a great relief, an unfolding.
At last they each had their own room. Edith now slept in the big bed. Jim set up some planks as a table under the window in his room off the kitchen. He laid out his books. For his four-teenth birthday Edith had given him a globe of the world, the span of his hands, set on a curved brass axis. He spent hours studying it. The way he sat, his black bushy head bent over his books in the lamplight, reminded Edith of her father.
One day in early summer, when Edith was at work and Jim was sitting at his desk, he heard a faint creak on the back step and the dog’s pattering feet.
On the verandah Gareth was bent over the dog, expertly massaging its ears.
Jim stood at the door. ‘How come he didn’t bark?’ The dog’s eyes were closed, in a trance.
‘Dogs like me.’ That was the most that Gareth had ever said to him.
Gareth straightened up, looking around him. He seemed to have no message or purpose for his visit. Was he curious about Jim’s place, as Jim was about his? Jim made a gesture for Gareth to come inside and offered him water. He stood watching Gareth. The whole kitchen seemed alight. Gareth Tehoe was drinking from his cup! Gareth Tehoe, thirteen now, less sunny, more private, was drinking water in his kitchen, modestly looking at the floor. He was barefoot, in shorts, like Jim. He must have slipped away from his friends.
Jim took him to his desk, showed him his globe, his books, the pile of old Correspondence envelopes on which he drew maps and jotted down thoughts. Gareth reached out one finger and gently spun the globe. He wasn’t a reader, Jim could see that at once, he didn’t even pick up Gilgamesh.
‘D’you want to go away?’ Jim asked.
He nodded.
‘Where to?’
Gareth traced his finger across two oceans and stopped on the west coast of North America.
‘California? Why there?’
Gareth shrugged. ‘S’where my uncle lives.’
In the greenish light flickering through the vines at the window the tan on his face and hands and limbs was almost luminous. His eyes shone, thoughtful. How did he see Jim’s desk? As something poor and makeshift, or as Jim saw it, a whole terrain, as familiar as the hot, still land outside?
Each time they met was a sort of test, Jim thought.
But Gareth turned away, smiled at Jim from the doorway and left. He never stayed in one place for long. He slipped out of Jim’s world as easily as he had come in, stopping only to pat the dog. Jim watched the dog creep after him, half-way across the yellow grass.
Edith was aware of a restlessness in her body, a nervous energy. She ran when she had no need to, she pushed wheelchairs at breakneck speed. She would break off suddenly and wheel some startled old patient up the driveway, for a breath of fresh air, she’d say. But it was Edith who was finding it difficult to breathe.
What had happened to her? Images came to her in unexpected moments, of caresses, blunt male hands, solid forearms, the rasp of
a cheekbone. She pulled sheets smooth beneath skeletal forms and thought of bodies in their glory, in abandon. They were attached to no figure that she knew of, now or in the past. They seemed sent to taunt her.
A man called Lawrence Ford came to sit with his old aunt, who was dying. Emmeline Ford was Edith’s patient, and she was fond of her. On what she knew was to be Emmeline’s last day she gave up all her other tasks to nurse her. She told Jim it was likely she wouldn’t be home that night.
She liked the way the man was with his aunt, neither falsely jolly nor po-faced, not afraid to hold her hand or sponge her lips. He didn’t try to make nervous conversation as some relatives did, but attended fully to Emmeline’s quiet labour. Hours passed. The rest of the hospital slept. ‘She’s tough,’ he said. ‘She and I used to fight. She belted the living daylights out of me once.’ His eyes glittered at Edith. ‘I deserved it.’ A chumminess had grown between them over the past few days.
Edith knew he watched her as she went about her tasks. She found she was performing with an extra flourish, in spite of herself. She caught his eyes on her, warm with something like amusement. There was talk of him in the kitchen. He was a farmer on the other side of Busselton. The Fords had always been in the area. Emmeline was his last surviving relative. He’d served in New Guinea during the War, and his wife had cleared off to Perth to be a good-time girl. She ran away with a Yankee sailor. He was bitter, they said, and a drinker.
He was a large man, tall and heavy-set, with narrow brown eyes and floppy straight hair which looked as if he cut it himself. It fell like a friar’s around his long full cheeks. He wore an out-sized duffle coat, and walked slightly pigeon-toed, which gave a shambling impression, like a bear. His broad brown hand, surprisingly long-nailed, wrapped his aunt’s hand like a paw.