by David Brooks
He would work on the cottage – repairing a door, the roof, replacing a window, building a shelf, putting down a path, planting or re-planting a tree – and if the sun were not too strong would have Mary beside him in a crib. Later he would make a kind of nest for her, near wherever he was, so he could watch her playing. When she began to walk she would follow him about as he worked, a patch of light and warmth, a small living fire even on the coldest days. And always, sitting with them or nearby, whether painting in the shed with the door open, or working just inside the cottage, Katherine – until Sunday afternoon, when he would have to leave again and return to his small room and small bed at the school, biting down, trying to close his mind as he left them to the realities of what he was doing.
It continued like this for almost four years. Mary – blonde haired, brown eyed, a throw-back or perhaps a heralding that neither parent could account for – crawled, walked, talked, began to learn to read, began to ask questions. Sometimes on summer holidays and often long past them, it could seem that they were a family truly. Once or twice each year Katherine would bring Mary down to stay with the Edwards, so they could shop in the City, and they would meet Angus if he could find the time to come in, and walk about the harbour and visit the gardens, or look at the ships at the Quay. Once, during a school holiday, friends of the Edwards who were going to Tasmania lent her a cottage and they spend three weeks together by the beach at Watsons Bay.
But those who come to know most about the antinomies of matter and spirit are not always those who have the least trouble with them. It is often almost the opposite. Angus had frequently done battle with the flesh, and had more than once lost. But no battle had been so swift or cruel or decisive – or, as he came to believe, punishing – and nothing had left him so helpless, as the battle over Mary, in which, for all that depended upon it, he could not have claimed to be anything more than an appalled bystander.
He received an urgent telegram at the school, and as it was a light day’s teaching was able immediately to take that and another half-day’s leave, on compassionate grounds which he asked his principal not to require him to explain. When he arrived the fever had not yet broken and Mary was seriously weakened.
It was late October, only a few weeks after her fourth birthday. Summer had been late coming to the mountains, and the Sunday before had been the first day of bright, clear sunshine. He had been promising Mary all spring that as soon as the water was clear and warm enough in the pool below the waterfall, a half mile below the cottage, he would begin to teach her how to swim. At last, it seemed, the right day had come. The water had not been warm enough, by any means, but the sun was strong and would warm her quickly after a short beginning. They had packed a picnic, and he, Katherine and Sarah Randall had taken turns in carrying her down the bush track and the steep cliff path since, left to herself, she was distracted by every stone, stick and beetle, and the fifteen-minute walk could easily become an hour.
They had played by the water and sometimes in it much of the morning and on into the early afternoon. Angus had left for Parramatta at four. Katherine, woken that night by Mary’s crying, had understandably mistaken the onset of the fever for a mild case of sunburn, or else the beginning of a chill. But although she had carefully and quickly treated it accordingly, it had not changed. By morning it had become a fever proper, and the doctor, arriving only in the early evening, had been concerned enough to arrange to come again the next morning, but had been reluctant to make a diagnosis. Katherine had sat up with her daughter all that night, by turns covering her and wiping her down with cool cloths, and in the early morning was so exhausted and distressed that Sarah had telegraphed the school.
The doctor, a few hours later, had hazarded a brain fever. They spoke about moving her to the hospital in Wentworth Falls but, he said, he himself was closer to her here, and the watching, the waiting, would be better done at home. There was little or nothing that the hospital would do that he could not.
They did sit up, two more nights. Katherine, Angus, Sarah, even the doctor himself who, stopping by late after seeing another patient, took over to give them some rest and did not leave until almost two. Shortly before dawn on the Thursday morning Mary had gone into convulsions, terrible to see, and although she had struggled against every stage of the illness so far – as if, as they had all come to believe, she had a particular, stubborn attachment to the world – she no longer had the strength to survive. Perhaps, as the doctor later said, it was merciful that the child was taken when she was, and did not have to suffer more, but neither Angus nor Katherine could see mercy in it at all, only the cruel paradox of the sun, as they covered her face, rising clear and strong on a world suddenly emptied of reason.
Their relationship entered a period of blankness from which it was difficult to recover – all the harder because the directions in which her death sent them were so different. For Katherine it was, for a long time, the end of sense and belief. She could not be induced to move from the cottage. For over a year she would or could not paint, and whatever encouragements or distractions she or others attempted strayed quickly and inevitably into vacuity. She would go for long walks into the bush and be able to give no account of where she had been. The Randalls, who watched over her as best they could, had on several occasions to go searching for her, before realising that, unless somewhere on the way back, she would always be in the same place, at the top of the falls, staring down.
But at last, as the new spring commenced, there was a kind of re-awakening. Going over to visit her with some of the first wildflowers, Mrs Randall found her in the shed, at the easel, her mood fixed and purposeful; intent, distracted with what she was doing. And for months thereafter she would be found like this during the days, painting from the first to the last light; and in the evenings, after fixing herself a simple meal or accepting something from her neighbours, sitting up by lamplight with half of the meal cold and pushed away, sketching, working on watercolours, drafts, planning, groping towards another painting, and then another, as though she had at last come to the decision that there was no other sense but this, that the only form or meaning there was was this form, this meaning that she made for and out of herself. As if the death of her daughter had undone the world, and shown her a falseness in the way it had been made, and it was now her job, Mary’s legacy, to put it together again differently. And for these weeks, these months, this year, she was discovering how.
On weekends – though sometimes now there would be three, even four weeks between visits – Angus found it difficult to distract her, and as difficult to know what to say or do when he could. Her own account of things, he began to see, was wordless, far beyond speech, somewhere deep in these painted and burning forest forms, that were and were not the shape of things, whereas he had realised just as clearly, very soon after Mary’s death, that she had been sent far less as inspiration than as taunt, as punishment for their transgression; either that or, since he had seen her burning, her living hell fire, that the child had been punished in their stead, implicated, the weakest suffering for the idiocy of those who might have been thought strong. He had fallen, accordingly, back on the religion of his fathers, seen at last its ultimate, cruel rightness and necessity. He threw himself back into his studies, and into the Church he had virtually turned his back on while the child was alive, renewing his negotiations with its administrators, talking once more to them about a post, they in their own turn beginning to reconsider him, with his new fervour – almost to think his initial waywardness a necessary period of adjustment that might stand him at last in better stead.
It was all and always done for her, for Mary, as if every movement of progression and repentance – the two came to seem inseparable – were made in order to move closer to her, or perhaps to keep her with him. If he were pressed, but there was no one to press him, Angus might have said the same about Katherine, but this was a different Katherine, a Katherine not so much of the flesh, and here the way was harder.
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After almost two years, her strange mania of creation apparently passed. She seemed content, for the moment, to paint only occasionally and instead to be waiting, whether for the next onset of creativity or for him – for some decision, some resolution at last – he could not be entirely sure, although it seemed also that any movement towards her would inevitably be a barrier on his new path. It was for this reason, partly, and partly because that path placed such demands upon his time, that he now went to Mount Apex so infrequently. In her company he felt a pressure to choose, to commit himself to her instead. Whether it was a pressure from her or from within himself hardly mattered. It came as much from the body as from the mind and seemed almost impossible to resist, for the body could sometimes lead the mind, the loosing of seed loosing promises also, undermining what the mind had longed for, was longing for.
He reduced his teaching at the school and would come, when he did come, on a Friday and Saturday, to leave his Sunday free. When the time seemed auspicious, he applied for a Church position already some time vacant, in Penrith, still closer to the mountains than Parramatta. He told himself that, should this eventuate, he would be so much nearer Katherine and that a new beginning might be possible. But it would be months before a final decision was made. If the Moderator was showing particular interest in him, and if he seemed to confirm this after some of those months went by with an invitation to dine with his family, it was not at all clear whether this amounted to a virtual investiture or some further test, and what kind of test that might be.
10
Shadows
(1902–1905)
Claire Curlewis had seen things all her life. Not consistently. The visions came in waves. There would be years, sometimes, between one apparition and another. Later in life she would learn how to master and develop this, as if it were a talent rather than the irritation and embarrassment that it initially seemed. She would eventually find herself able to hear, sometimes actually talk with, the people she saw, and would even come to sense their particular, cold odour in the air, as if some part of a room had opened invisibly onto a deep cellar or cave. She would experience, sometimes upon no greater contact than the glimpse of a laughing face in a concert-hall or of a young man running past her in the street, awful previsions – of a woman in a cream-coloured dress plunging from a cliff near the Three Sisters, or the rictus of a lime-covered face in moonlight – and be able to accept both that it was her fate to see and that there was nothing she could do. If she could sometimes glimpse the future – and it was only sometimes – this did not mean that it was within her abilities to change it. But that was later. In her nineteenth year it seemed quite different. By the time she had arrived at her eighteenth birthday there had been so many occurrences, and so many of them not pleasant, that she had not only ceased to look forward to or be secretly proud of them but had come to see them as a kind of curse – was inclined to be careful where she went or whom she saw, and even to turn her back if ever she caught an early whiff of them. They were not necessarily ghosts. People, she had learned, often carry others about with them quite unaware, and it is not always the case that these others are the dead.
It was not clear what it was, at first, with this dark, electrically powerful man whom her father had invited to supper. His intense, flashing eyes, until his nervousness abated, had held them all at bay, and the strength of his voice which carried so much conviction in its tone alone that one forgot, sometimes, the words themselves. To her mother privately her father had called him brilliant, this Angus Anderson, but also erratic, unpredictable. She could understand why. He would thunder out, like a brumby from a gully – or rather his voice would, over the dinner table and into the air above where the conversation happened. But then, in the few quiet or interrupted moments when her father had gone on too long about Church politics or the soup, or was carving the roast, Angus Anderson would retreat inside himself and seem to carry on some other, more troubled conversation there, his black glance momentarily losing its focus, cast somewhere down to the right where at first there was nothing but now – faintly, and out of the line of his sight, so that he could not himself have been aware of it – Claire could see the child: a pale, beautiful girl of five or six with the reddish-blonde hair of some other person, but with wide, piercing eyes like his. Not that she saw her consistently, but glimpsed rather, and in the watch for her to his one side or the other, about his shoulders, in the shadowed space between him and the sideboard, became distracted herself and somewhat disoriented in the imagined scent of his neck, its mixture of sweat and citrus and some other, more animal, more sexual thing, and in the imagined conversation with this child (was it invitation on the latter’s part? pride in this man? possessiveness?) concerning the cut of his hair or the smoothness of his shirtfront which they felt, there, together, with their fingertips, or the cut of his suitcoat about his strong shoulders and forearms – all in such a way as shocked her, when she returned to herself, to find the table still between them and the conversation unabated. For the child was now there again beside him, and staring at her with an expression both compelling and complicitous, a look of knowledge and relation – much as she might later have thought that she had mis-read this, and that it might not have been about her at all – that must have been very like that with which she herself farewelled Angus Anderson an hour later, creating in him the inexplicable impression that they had once known each other, he and this striking, silent elder daughter of the Moderator, in a time that he could not remember, his nagging failure to do so placing him irrationally, illogically in her debt, and she, far more quickly and securely than might otherwise have happened, in his mind. So much so that when, some weeks later, the Moderator made his unexpected, though perhaps not entirely incomprehensible suggestion, it was almost as if he might have been thinking of his own daughter.
It was not clear if rumour had anything to do with it. It never was – even when, some years later, Angus himself was in a position to examine such Church records as might have remained. Innuendo, raised eyebrows, certain shiftings in one’s voice or seat, or turnings of the head, do not find their way into the minutes of appointment committees, but can nonetheless influence their decisions profoundly. For although apparently strongly backed by the Moderator himself, Angus was not appointed to Penrith, and in a puzzled conversation with his sponsor shortly thereafter was led to believe firstly that non-appointment in this instance might have been a blessing in disguise, since, owing to the persistent ill health of an incumbent elsewhere, a far more suitable and advantageous position – the Church, whatever else it was, being after all also a career like any other – was on the horizon, and secondly that, if the Church had had some slight hesitation towards him in this first instance, it might not have had so – as in this case he did not in fact think that it had, but he was remembering other cases – toward a married man.
When, therefore, some weeks later, Angus found himself once more at her father’s table, it perhaps should not have surprised him to find himself now seated beside rather than opposite Claire Curlewis, or that a late caller on Easter business, and some matters elsewhere in the house requiring the attention of Mrs Curlewis and the Moderator himself, left them unchaperoned and to their own devices more often, that evening, than either might normally have expected.
She was far less silent than before. Indeed he would not have thought her the same person, pressing him as she did for details of his background and his circumstances, and responding readily with details of her own. Although it did surprise him – surprise and excite, greatly but, as he hoped, imperceptibly – when their hands touched briefly and hotly under the table and her own came later, at times when she could be most confident that it would escape the notice of any other, to rest fleetingly on the edge of the seat of his chair, beside his thigh.
***
He had not ceased entirely to go to the mountains, but it felt to him that for some time he and Katherine had lived increasingly separate lives. When h
e visited now it was often for one day only, coming up on the late morning train and leaving again in the early evening. When other circumstances – the weather, or the trains themselves, or something that needed doing in the cottage – dictated that he stay, he would sleep in a separate room. Rather than continue as lovers they had become like old friends. As much as he would still sometimes feel a pressure from her (or perhaps it was from within himself), they shared a kind of intimate reserve, as if loving more openly might be too painful, a thing that once so damaged could never truly be resurrected, and the best they could offer one another now – and it was not inconsiderable – was a place, a relationship where their past and its sadness, although now rarely mentioned, would at least not be overlooked, would be recognised.
It was for these reasons, then, and some others, that he felt he should tell her about Claire before things had gone any further, and went up specifically to do so.
He had not imagined that it would be easy, but perhaps the real problem was that he had not imagined it sufficiently at all, or the abrupt, attendant discovery that his feelings concerning the state of their relationship were not Katherine’s own. Far from the quiet, perhaps resigned understanding he had anticipated, there was shock, betrayal, anger, and an explosion of things, grief far from the least amongst them, that for so long had gone unsaid. As if, in her mind, they had been married after all, and the lull in their relations was but a thing, a period, that marriages endure.