Tirra Lirra by the River

by Jessica Anderson

  Blue and gold were my favourite colours. Madonna blue. Metallic gold. I wrote many short poems about my own—exquisite, of course—reactions to natural phenomena. Some of these were published in the Women’s Page of the Courier. When Grace read them aloud at the breakfast table, I listened for sarcasm, but detected none. Engaged to marry an absent soldier and busy with Dorothy Irey’s babies, Grace had become less severe about my shortcomings. ‘Very artistic,’ was all she said. ‘Refined’ and ‘artistic’ were words often used about me. I frowned when I heard them; I aspired to something of greater intensity.

  My brother was killed in the trenches in France. So was Grace’s soldier, and all four of the boys under the camphor laurel trees. Poor boys. I can say it now. Distance and death have made me generous. Dorothy Rainbow’s husband came back. When the war was over prices rose. My father, a surveyor in the Lands Department, had died when I was six. We needed money. I went to work for Cust the newsagent.

  Cust the newsagent, a tall hovering man like his son, told me twice a week that if it weren’t for my widowed mother he would not keep me on. I washed my hair twice a week and brushed it every morning and night. I made white voile dresses with lace insertions, and drew designs for my own embroideries. Self-conscious now of my lonely walking, I turned into side streets rather than meet anyone I knew. Dorothy Rainbow, busy with house and babies, I never saw, but Grace answered my enquiries by saying with the old anger that of course she was happy.

  ‘Why shouldn’t she be? She has all any reasonable person could want.’

  I no longer thought of Sir Lancelot. The war, and the boys under the camphor laurels, had obliterated him. But perhaps not quite. At intervals all through my life, sometimes at very long intervals, there has flashed on my inner vision the step of a horse, the nod of a plume, and at those times I have been filled for a moment with a strange chaotic grief.

  At the Custs’ shop one day I wept and wept. Why? I can’t remember. But I remember how the skin across my cheekbones was stinging and sore from the pressure of my wet forearms, which were spread on the clammy oilcloth of the Custs’ kitchen table. When my weeping lost momentum I heard in its pauses the vacuous up-and-down march of piano scales played with boredom, and from nearby the sound of Mrs Cust scrubbing her hands at the kitchen sink. To soothe me, she spoke soothingly to her husband about the garden at the new house, and what it was doing to her hands. It must have been when the Custs were just about to move from the rooms over the shop to the big white house on the corner. The scales stopped. Both the Custs were looking at me. The rays of their glances penetrated my hair and made medallions of discomfort on my scalp. Did I hear the word ‘hysteria’, or was it unspoken, but in the air? It is certain that Mrs Cust said to her husband that they must get Nora to make cushions for the new house.

  ‘Though it’s a shame to sit on them, they’re so pretty.’

  I must have thought so too. I abandoned cushion covers for wall hangings, again drawing my own designs. Sometimes I sat over these until two in the morning, and the next day dozed in the stock room of the shop. Not the Custs’ shop now, but a shop in town, where I stood behind the counter in a grey smock and sold art materials. ‘I always knew Nora would end up doing something artistic,’ people said to my mother, and at last I began to panic. I no longer bought embroidery silks or the stuff for dresses. I paid my board to Grace and saved the rest. But this way of escape, so slow, did nothing to quell my panic. Panic would rise without warning in my chest, a bird with wings so strong it seemed they must break the bone.

  I still suffered greatly from the heat, and on hot bright nights I would smear my skin with citronella, take a rug, and go and lie on my back on the lawn. All ugliness and panic were then obliterated. I was amazed and enthralled by the thickness and brilliance of the stars, by the rich darkness of the sky, and the ambiguous peacefulness of the blazing moon. In an aureole of turquoise the moon sailed across the sky, and as I watched, our block of land became a raft and began to move, sailing swiftly and smoothly in one direction while the moon and clouds went off in the other. But by this time my illusions were apt to be broken by impatience or self-consciousness, and soon the magic would pall, or I would hear Grace come down from the house, stamping towards me in indignation and crying that I was to come upstairs this very minute.

  It is true that this block of land is as flat as a raft. Now that I have moved my head I can no longer see mountains, valleys, and a castle. What I see now is a stone lying on grass that is rather a subtle and gentle colour, a greenish-blond. Many cars are passing in the road. People are coming home from work.

  I have sat too long in this hard-backed chair, and as I rise I make the theatrical grimaces of pain with which I used to amuse my friends at number six. On this mantelshelf there was once a photograph of my brother, a boy wearing a thick hairy uniform, thick puttees, thick boots, and an Anzac hat. And another of my father, the fair young photographed face that is my sole recollection of him. But both are gone; the only photograph here now is of mild Tom Chiddy, the widower Grace married when he was fifty-five and she thirty-two. They moved into this house so that Grace could look after my mother, who had broken her hip. But by that time I was married myself, and living in Sydney.

  Long before I left, Sydney had stood proxy for Camelot, a substitution forced upon me by what little common sense I had. In fact, all my early fevers seemed to have passed, and in those days I did not know that such infections can enter the blood, or that a tertiary stage is possible.

  As I pull down the blinds, and draw the curtains together, I address my friends at number six.

  ‘This is one room I shall never use.’

  I hear their replies. ‘What of it?’ says Liza. ‘There are other rooms.’

  And Hilda agrees. ‘Of course! What luck that the place is so big.’

  I pick up my jacket and hat. ‘What is mere space?’ I say as I walk to the door.

  ‘Space?’ This time it is Fred. He is excited. He turns on a heel, waves an arm. ‘I will tell you. Space is a boon, a property, a positive benefit.’

  ‘You see?’ say Hilda and Liza.

  ‘Maybe.’ I am in the hall; I shut the door. ‘But,’ I say as I walk down the hall, ‘I am no longer used to space.’

  The front bedroom, where Jack Cust has put my things, used to be my mother’s room, but it is a spare room now, and to my relief is as neat and negative as a hotel bedroom. I take the flask of brandy from my bag and drink a nip from the screw cap.

  In the bathroom I find hot water and sewerage. Sewerage! Never again shall I hide behind a tree or turn in my tracks as the nightcart approaches. Lying in a hot bath, I remember how all the girls went on about the nightman. ‘Never let the nightman see your face.’ Did we perhaps believe he had the evil eye? One night I hid behind a tree and watched him pass, a thin man, with bowyangs round his trouser legs, who jogged along with the can on one shoulder and the opposite arm held out from his side.

  I doze in the bath, but not for long, because the water is still warm when I get out. Yet suddenly I am cold, trembling, and afraid. Is it because I have eaten nothing all day except a little of that peculiar food on the train? I put on a warm gown and go to the kitchen.

  I am repelled by the red linoleum, its mottled areas and visceral shine. But on the table, under a plastic dome, I find a plate of sandwiches.

  ‘And look—parsley.’

  I am speaking to Liza, who always ate the parsley. Beside the plate is a note.

  Have made up bed in spare bedroom. Strawberries and icecream in fridge. Milk ditto. B. Cust.

  The kettle is full, the tea things set out beside the stove, and I find a loaf of bread in the crock. And when I open the refrigerator, and bend to look in, I see a blue-walled interior as comforting as a little lighted house. Strawberries, honey, butter, six eggs, a plate of bacon. How very nice of B. Cust.

  Food and hot tea lift my spirits. Somewhere in this house, I say to myself, I shall make my domain. In whatever
circumstances I have found myself, I have always managed to devise a little area, camp or covert, that was not too ugly. At times it was a whole room, but at others it may have been only a corner with a handsome chair, or a table and a vase of flowers. Once, it was a bed, a window, and a lemon tree. But always, I have managed to devise it somehow, and no doubt I shall do it again.

  I am awakened the next morning by the sound of someone unlocking the front door. Then I hear a voice raised in that female signal of search or warning. ‘Oooh-oooh.’ On a descending note.

  Before I can gather my wits to reply, I hear her footsteps in the hall. And her voice.

  ‘It’s all right, Mrs Porteous. It’s only me. Mrs Cust.’

  My spectacles are not on my bedside table. As I start patting the blankets to find them, she arrives at my open door.

  ‘I did knock,’ she says.

  ‘I can’t find my spectacles,’ I say stupidly.

  She approaches the bed. ‘Were you using them last night?’

  ‘I think so. Yes, I was. I was reading.’

  ‘They aren’t on your bedside table.’

  ‘I know they’re not. Whatever is the time?’

  ‘Look, here they are on the floor. And your book too. Good thing they didn’t break.’

  I put them on and look at my watch. ‘Goodness. Eleven o’clock.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I thought I had better come in. I came up a while ago, but you didn’t answer my knock, so I ran home and got the spare key. I’ll leave it with you. You’d better keep it now. And I brought your gloves. You left them in Jack’s car.’

  She is a tallish brown-skinned woman with thin active-looking legs and grey bouncy hair cut short. She wears a printed cotton dress and an orlon cardigan with knife-edged creases down the sleeves. ‘The Brisbane climate is a cardigan climate,’ I used to tell them at number six. With an anxious but timid tilt of her head, she asks how I am this morning. I refuse to indulge my exhaustion and reply in a lively manner that I am very well indeed.

  ‘Are you?’ she says.

  ‘You sound as if you don’t believe me, Mrs Cust.’

  ‘Of course I do.’ But she still sounds doubtful. ‘Please call me Betty,’ she says then.

  ‘So that’s what the B stands for? I will call you Betty if you call me Nora.’

  ‘All right—Nora.’ She presses on against the tide of her own timidity. ‘I was a good friend of Grace’s, so I’m used to coming in and out of this house. I hope you didn’t mind me just barging in.’

  ‘Not at all. I’m very glad you woke me. Imagine sleeping like that! I wonder if I took two pills instead of one. I think I have a lot to thank you for. This bed, the flowers, the sandwiches.’

  My vivacity is irritating even to myself, but I don’t seem to be able to stop it. ‘Lovely sandwiches. I didn’t leave a crumb. I even ate the parsley. And what wonderful strawberries.’

  ‘Local strawberries.’ By her abruptness she tries to avert my gratitude. She puts my gloves on the dressing table. ‘Aren’t these gloves soft?’

  ‘A very good friend gave them to me last Christmas.’ I am speaking of Fred, who gave us all a pair—Hilda, Liza and me. For Belle he bought a chain collar with a name tag. I see Belle in the cage, immobile now, her paws drawn neatly beneath her, no longer quivering, but expressionless, withdrawn, refusing to look at me. She is still wearing the chain collar, which disrupts her grey ruff. Flooded by useless grief, I hold my left wrist in my right hand. ‘Whose idea was it to meet the train?’ I ask.

  ‘Ours.’

  ‘I thought so. Peter told me to get a taxi.’

  ‘That’s what he told us, that you’d get a taxi. But I bet he knew perfectly well,’ she says in amiable disparagement, ‘that we wouldn’t let you. Good heavens, Jack’s glad to have something to do, now he’s retired.’

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘it was very good of you both.’

  ‘That’s all right. I don’t suppose you remember me, do you, Nora?’

  ‘I don’t think …’

  ‘No, well, I was little when you were big. I was Betty Flitcroft.’

  ‘Flitcroft.’ I look at the ceiling and fall again into my geneological trance. ‘There were some Flitcrofts in Ivanhoe Road.’

  ‘That was us.’

  ‘I went to school with Else Flitcroft. You must be Else’s younger sister.’

  ‘Fourteen years younger. Else died last year in Perth. Nora, do you remember the wall hanging you made for mother?’

  I move one shoulder in apology. ‘I made so many.’

  ‘I know. “One of Nora Roche’s embroideries”, we say round here. Else used to have ours, but it’s mine now. One of these days I’ll bring it over to show you.’

  I feel an interior cringing from this threatened confrontation. When I made those wall hangings I thought they were marvellous, so it follows that they will be sad bungles. ‘That will be lovely,’ I say.

  ‘You must have been terribly artistic,’ she says. ‘So was Grace of course, in another way. She had to let the front garden go, it got too much for her, but she had the back just lovely. It’s not much now, of course.’

  ‘I haven’t seen it. I haven’t even looked at the back rooms yet.’

  ‘Jack said how tired you were. I’ll tell you what, you stay there, and let me bring you breakfast on a tray.’

  But against my own weariness I pit my need for independence, on which I made such a declaration to my nephew. I make myself look shocked.

  ‘Certainly not! You must think me a wretched, slothful old woman. I’ll be up and about in less than ten minutes.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she says, ‘if you prefer. But look, Jack and I are going shopping this morning, so say you make out a list and we’ll get you anything you need. Unless you feel like coming with us? We could drive you around and show you how the old place has changed. Not too many of the old families here now, Nora. And the price of a building block! Honestly! And down by the river, all those modern houses. And to think that once upon a time nobody would build there because in eighteen-ninety-something it flooded.’

  ‘Only the Partridges,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, old Mrs Partridge is still there. Ninety-five. Think of it! Olive flew back to see her last year, but she only stayed a week, and none of us saw her. Not to talk to, that is. You used to see her in London, Grace said.’

  ‘I did when I first went over.’ I am thinking of Olive in the abortionist’s waiting room, saying through her teeth that she would rather be anywhere than there. I remember my own curt answer, and I sigh, and say to Betty Cust, ‘But later on we lost touch. I don’t think I will come with you to the shops, thank you, Betty. But I should certainly be glad of some provisions.’

  ‘Good. Then say I come back for your list in twenty minutes.’ She picks up my book, turns a few pages, puts it down. ‘Do you like Olive Partridge’s books?’

  ‘Very much. Especially the later ones.’

  ‘Those are the ones I can’t read. They make me depressed.’

  ‘They make me jealous.’

  She gives me that askance look, followed by an uncertain laugh.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ she says as she goes.

  And indeed, why should she believe it, I crossly ask myself, when it isn’t true? The possibility that I have re-entered a milieu in which I shall be compelled to explain my every facetious remark, in which I shall not find even one person to whom I can say anything I please, fills me with boredom.

  “ ‘I was only joking”,’ Fred once said, ‘are the four saddest words in the world.’

  So I am irritated with Betty Cust for her lack of perspicacity, and angry with myself for my irritation, because she is so kind. To escape the bonds such kindness imposes, physical independence seems more necessary than ever. But it is amazingly hard to get up. Did I in fact take two pills instead of one? Almost asleep again, I hear, or imagine I hear, a noise like a tennis ball striking a racquet, and suddenly I see myself at the window of Olive’s
flat in Cadogan Square. They are playing tennis in the square. The trees are in full leaf, and of the players I see only moving patches of lacy white through the green. But how distinctly I hear the percussion of balls against catgut. Even as I force myself awake I fancy I can hear it still, fading away into the vast blue Queensland sky outside.

  I force myself out of bed, but find that even to walk to the bathroom I must support myself with a hand against the wall. Behind my ribs there is a strange coldness, heavy, like earth or clay. I no longer want tea. From the bathroom I go straight back to bed. I turn the blanket up high, take a pen and paper from my handbag, and begin my shopping list. But I have not got very far before Betty Cust comes back.

  ‘Oh,’ she says at once, ‘you do look sick. I knew you were sick.’

  ‘Reaction to the journey.’ But suddenly, I have a pain across my chest. ‘Unless it’s a heart attack,’ I say unwillingly.

  ‘I’ll get a doctor.’

  ‘I don’t really think it’s a heart attack.’

  ‘Neither do I. But there’s a funny sort of flu going around this year. It might be that. So I’ll get a doctor.’

  ‘Are you retired too?’

  ‘Retired?’

  ‘You said Jack is glad to have something to do because he’s retired.’

  ‘Nora, don’t you want me to get a doctor?’

  The fact is, I want her to get one without admitting I need one. ‘I feel such a nuisance,’ I say feebly.

  ‘Don’t say that, Nora. Your phone’s not connected yet. I’ll run down home and ring him from there.’

  She probably can run, too, on those long thin legs. I see her in caricature, bounding so high along the street that her thick grey hair is lifting and falling. It is impossible not to like her. In only a few minutes she is back.