Stillwater Creek

by Alison Booth

  The light was on in Miss Neville’s bedroom although it was shielded by the drawn curtains. Cherry moved stealthily up the path and lifted the back doormat. There was no key. Damn it, Miss Neville was still angry, or worse, had forgotten about her and she began to feel anxious. Hoping not to intercept an insect, she ran a hand over the rough concrete surface. Eventually, just as her anxiety was turning to despair, she found the key under the doorsill. She fumbled for the keyhole and turned the lock. The door opened easily. She stepped inside and then crept up the stairs.

  Wearing pale blue pyjamas, Miss Neville was propped up in bed and deeply absorbed in a book. Her glasses lay on the bedside table and the book was only a few inches away from her eyes. Oblivious to Cherry’s silent ascent, she turned a page while Cherry stood there watching. Not wanting to frighten her, Cherry descended half a flight of stairs. Here she burst into song and stepped more noisily on the treads. Then she bounced into the room and there was Miss Neville smiling and holding out her arms.

  Later Cherry decided that this was the time to tell Miss Neville about the photographs she’d found in Bill’s office. There should be no secrets between them. She looked at the dear face resting on the pillow next to her. Surely Miss Neville would know what to do. So practical, she always had a solution for everything. Good no-nonsense advice, that’s what was required. Miss Neville opened her eyes. Cherry braced herself for a description of what she’d seen in Bill’s office. Struggling to sit up, she at once began to feel nauseated. She gulped and took a deep breath before saying, ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’

  Miss Neville turned away, as if annoyed. ‘It’s about Ilona, isn’t it?’ Her voice was sharp.

  ‘No, it’s about Bill.’

  Miss Neville looked at her again. ‘Bill doesn’t matter,’ she said gently.

  ‘But he does.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t matter. We won’t let him hurt us. Just forget about Bill.’

  ‘He’s dangerous,’ Cherry said.

  ‘Listen, Cherry. No one cares about women like us. They don’t believe we exist, most of them. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.’

  ‘But what if Bill found out about us? He could blackmail us. Or me.’ Cherry attempted a smile before telling Miss Neville about Mr Ryan the maths teacher, thrown out of Burford High because he was a poofter corrupting the morals of children. ‘That’s what they’d say about you,’ she concluded.

  Miss Neville considered this. ‘Of course we have to be careful,’ she said. ‘But Bill hasn’t got the imagination to blackmail you. Anyway, why on earth would he want to? You’re a great little barmaid in his pub, so why spoil that happy arrangement?’

  ‘But what if I found out something bad about him and had to tell someone?’

  ‘Like what?’

  Now was her opportunity. Taking a deep breath, she opened her mouth to begin. But it was impossible to unburden herself yet to Miss Neville, she just couldn’t do it this soon. Tomorrow she’d do it, or the day after. She said lamely, ‘We mustn’t do anything to jeopardise your job.’ Her voice sounded weak. She was weak.

  Miss Neville laughed. ‘We’re not. Don’t fret. No one knows about us, but one day I’ll apply for a transfer to Sydney and then we’ll be together. That is, if you’re willing to leave your old man first. No point my being sent somewhere else with you stuck here.’

  This was the first time Miss Neville had been so explicit about where their relationship was heading. If Cherry hadn’t felt so worried about Bill she might have seized on these words that were more a declaration than a statement. ‘We’ve got to be together,’ she said, but she couldn’t walk out on Bill yet. He was too dangerous to be left alone. Suppressing a sigh, she knew that she wanted nothing more than to spend all night lying next to Miss Neville in this soft bed, with arms entwined around each other, and the only sound the distant thud of the surf breaking onto the beach.

  She left the house by the back gate as usual. Once in the lane, she stopped briefly to listen. She thought she heard footsteps but was mistaken. It was only the silky sound of leaves rustling in the breeze, so she hurried on. Most of the houses were now in darkness, except for the Cadwalladers, where there was still a light shining in one of the rooms, and the Burtons, who had all their lights blazing. Through their uncurtained back window she could make out the figure of Mrs Burton pacing to and fro, clutching a bawling baby to her chest.

  There were no lights on in the hotel. Quietly she opened her bedroom door a few inches and stepped in. The stocking was on the floor exactly where she left it. She undressed and slipped between the sheets.

  Although it was well after midnight, George Cadwallader knew he had to get out of the house to clear his head. Eileen was already in bed but he couldn’t bear the thought of joining her yet. Instead he went onto the back verandah and peered up at the almost full moon. It wasn’t a good night for stargazing but it would be lovely out on the river. He would take his dinghy out of the boathouse and row up the lagoon, away from all the houses, away from all his cares. There he would cast out the anchor, or simply drift with the currents, while contemplating the stars.

  It hadn’t been much of an evening. Over tea, Jim and Andy had quarrelled about some silly thing and Eileen had taken the younger boy’s side without first finding out the facts. Afterwards George had sought out Jim, who was sitting at the bottom of the yard, and sat down next to him on the grass.

  ‘She hates me,’ Jim had said.

  ‘No she doesn’t. She loves you. She loves both of you.’

  ‘Why does she pick on me all the time then?’

  George had weighed his words carefully before replying. ‘You’re older so she expects more of you.’ But he suspected it was more than that; he suspected it was because Jim took after his father. Not in intellect, of course, but in character. Having two of them in the one family was too much for Eileen. They looked similar and they had similar temperaments. Slow to anger, logical and steadfast. Qualities that he used to think were good until he’d learnt that Eileen thought otherwise.

  ‘She’s very proud of you,’ George had added, extemporising. While she didn’t seem proud of Jim now, she would be proud of him in the future. She would be proud of him when he’d won a scholarship, as he was almost certain to do, and ended up achieving all those things that George had never accomplished and that Andy, good boy though he was, lacked the ability to attain.

  ‘We’re both really proud of you,’ George had added. He would have liked to give Jim a big hug but he’d thought he was probably a bit too old for that. So he had contented himself with patting him on the shoulder.

  Now, looking up at the stars, he sighed. So much space and beauty up there, and yet down here the four of them were living in disharmony. He couldn’t understand Eileen sometimes. She had her priorities wrong, no doubt about it.

  He went inside to get a torch from the laundry cupboard. The house was silent except for the relentless ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway. The little book about the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere, tucked snugly into one of his pockets, bumped reassuringly against his left hip as he walked down the backyard to the lane. The trouble with Eileen was that she just didn’t realise that Jim was going to do remarkable things with his life. She needed to have more faith in him, and the boy needed to know now that his mother was proud of him; before it was too late.

  Just as he was about to open the back gate, he chanced to see Cherry coming along the lane. He stopped quite still. The last thing he wanted, when he was out for a bit of peace, was to bump into someone he knew. People thought he was a convivial man but that was just part of the job, and anyway it derived more from a willingness to listen rather than from any tendency to gossip. Sometimes he wanted a break from it all, that endless bonhomie with his customers, day in, day out.

  In the dark shadow cast by a gum tree, he waited until Cherry had passed by, turning up the hill towards the hotel. Only then did he continue on his way. Perh
aps she’d been watching out for the pair of boo-book owls that were nesting in a hollow of one of the gum trees; only the other day he’d heard Ilona telling her about them. It comforted him to think that others might need to spend some time on their own at night. This sighting certainly wasn’t something to mention to Eileen though; she had a poor enough opinion of barmaids already.

  He made his way along the lane that curved around to join the road down to the lagoon. On the narrow bridge he stood for a while listening to the water lapping against the piers. He wasn’t conscious of hearing the breakers beating on the beach, a sound that was so much a part of his life that it was only noticed in its absence, on those rare occasions when he had to go away from the coast. Over the bridge, he turned along the track leading to the boathouse. The moon was so bright it could almost be sunlight were it not for the fact that everything had been robbed of colour. Even his own ruddy hands looked pale and washed out. He switched on the torch anyway; there was no sense in colliding unnecessarily with a kangaroo.

  After launching the dinghy, he rowed up the lagoon perhaps half a mile south of Jingera. There he shipped the oars and let the current almost imperceptibly take him back towards the settlement, only occasionally using an oar to guide the craft.

  His favourite star was Alpha Gruis, the brightest star in the constellation of Grus. The whooping crane, it was such a lovely translation. He could gaze at that constellation for hours and never grow tired of it. It had been charted on the first Dutch expedition to the East Indies and he liked to think of the sailors on that voyage, seeing stars they’d never seen before, seeing oceans they’d never seen before; what a journey that must have been. The technical details of Alpha Gruis were well known to him: its spectral type and its astrometry; its mass, and its radius, and also its luminosity. But the star meant more to him than a mass of statistics. It meant peace and the insignificance of his own worries, the insignificance of his own imperfections. It meant harmony too, in some way that he couldn’t define, and that he’d never attempted to explain to anyone, not even to Eileen in those early days when he’d held such high hopes for their marriage.

  He knew better than to tell anyone of things that really mattered. It wasn’t just Eileen who’d taught him not to reveal himself. It was also those other earlier collisions when he’d been growing up, those times when he’d exposed his dreams, only to have them shattered by the artillery of that army of realists, his family. That he lacked the academic ability to become an astronomer he’d never doubted, although he hadn’t been given the chance to prove this. By his fourteenth birthday, he’d been apprenticed to a butcher, and soon after realised that there was artistry in meat. He’d also learnt to keep dreams to himself. Secrets and dreams were always safe with George, whether they were his own or anyone else’s.

  Tonight Alpha Gruis was not as brilliant as usual, it was true; that was because of the brightness of the moon. Yet the vast dome of the sky was soothing; he felt comforted by the sense of his own insignificance in the boundless order of things. After about an hour, having drifted back almost to his starting point, he rowed into shore and dragged the dinghy into the boathouse.

  On returning home, he undressed in the bathroom and put on the pyjamas that Eileen had left out. He tiptoed into the bedroom and climbed into the double bed. Eileen woke up enough to mumble something about his werewolf-like habits before lapsing back into a sound slumber. Snuggling up to her would have to wait until next Saturday night, although he would have liked nothing better than to hold her in his arms before drifting into sleep.

  Ilona stared hard at the book. Perhaps she should get up and turn on the ceiling light rather than rely on the rather feeble glow of the lamp. The lines of print were starting to look like rows of tiny black ants marching across the page. She blinked and the ants turned into words. If she were not trying to delay the moment when those breakers of fear started rolling in, she would go to bed. Each night she tried to divert the tidal wave by reading anything she could lay her hands on; novels mostly, from the local library. Although the library collection was small, it would take her years to work through it for she read English so slowly. Yet always she would learn; always she would struggle to improve herself and that way, would control her fear.

  Reading some more, she halted at the word peregrination; she had no idea what it meant. If only she had more energy she would look it up. Her vocabulary was expanding rapidly although she had to be wary of using a long word when a short one would do. Her grammar was possibly impeccable. Those many hours of studying had certainly brought dividends but she suspected her speech was still slightly too formal. In the future she would endeavour to use colloquialisms. When people talked, she listened out for them and stored them away in readiness for the day when she would have enough confidence to employ them. Although despairing of her own accent, she found the local accent far worse, for it was so different from the way that English was spoken in Bradford. Here it was not always easy to understand what people said. Their vowels were different and if she imitated them, they thought she was making fun of them; taking the piss, or making them look a right galah.

  After a while she got out of her chair and tiptoed into Zidra’s room. The girl was sleeping on her side with her hair partly concealing her face. The top sheet and blanket had been thrown back, and lay twisted together at the bottom of the bed.

  Ilona watched the rise and fall of her daughter’s thin chest, clad in white fabric patterned with blue roses. Here in Australia Zidra would be safe, she reflected, safe from the aftermath of the savagery delivered and received by her generation. Not to mention the Red Menace that everyone talked about, although she suspected no one really knew what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. Only a few years ago the Russians were generally regarded as saviours but not in her Latvia. Now they were the enemy and all those former allies were hurling propaganda at one another as if they’d never fought on the same side to defeat the Nazis. She sighed, though not loudly enough to disturb Zidra. If the politicians were to be believed, the biggest peril facing the civilised world was communism. That was what the Prime Minister, Mr Menzies, said and that was what people thought. Propaganda or the truth, there was no way of telling, not until it was all in the past.

  Kissing Zidra’s forehead, Ilona smelt the sweet scent of clean skin. She knew she would do anything to protect her daughter, anything. She had to; she was the only survivor. She hadn’t died when all those others in the camp had died. She hadn’t died when Oleksii had died.

  Suddenly she found she could scarcely breathe, her throat felt so constricted. A black wave of despair began to wash over her, and might have engulfed her had she not focused on Zidra. Her daughter was her reason to live. Without her, the guilt at surviving would be impossible to bear. Shutting her eyes, she crouched next to the bedside for some minutes, listening to the distant pounding of the breakers and the quicker rhythm of Zidra’s breathing. Everything was going to be fine. She had endured that moment, she would get through all such moments. After smoothing a strand of hair away from Zidra’s nose, she untangled the top sheet and pulled it gently over her.

  Later she made a cup of tea and took it onto the side verandah. The old cane chair felt slightly clammy with the salty air. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, it became possible to distinguish the glimmer of the lagoon and the dark shape of bushland separating the estuary from the beach. Beyond, the crests of the breakers were silvery in the moonlight. She stared up at the stars, so numerous that they formed a great white band they called the Milky Way. It was a soothing sight but not quite soothing enough. Why she’d unburdened herself to Cherry that afternoon she couldn’t understand. Perhaps it was because of Cherry’s kindness in offering to do those alterations for her; perhaps it was because Cherry had laughed so much at the story of the beach rescue. But another possibility was that meeting Peter Vincent had reawakened some of those old memories she’d spent years forgetting. War and the legacy of war. So many lives lost or blighted. Ev
en in a town as remote as Jingera, the war memorial was covered with the names of locals who’d lost their lives in the last one and in the one before.

  So when Cherry had asked about her past, all that stuff about her mother sewing for her and her life in Bradford and their decision to emigrate came pouring out, but nothing about the war. She might think of it but she would never talk of it. And she would avoid seeing Peter Vincent again. He unsettled her.

  Cherry had seemed genuinely interested in her story but when she’d touched her tattoo, and such a gentle touch it had been, Ilona had felt as if she might break down altogether and she couldn’t have that. Rebuilding her life had been a battle that she was winning, she knew it, but she had to keep control. For Zidra’s sake as well as her own.

  Long after she had finished her tea, she continued to sit on the verandah. In the distance the breakers rolled in, an endless thud, thud, thud on the shore. An unexpected pleasure of living here was this feeling of closeness to nature, closer than she’d ever felt anywhere before. A large bird flew into the tall eucalyptus tree at the bottom of their yard, one of the pair of owls that lived there. It began to call, a strange boo-book sound that had startled her when she had first heard it, but which was now reassuring. Several doors up the Burtons’ baby started bawling again and then abruptly stopped.