by David Brooks
When her father returned, just two weeks after Christmas, there were three brief days of official happiness and reunion before she turned him into a block of stone. If indeed it was she who did it and not something else, leaving her only to finish the job for the protection of them all. For he, the man she turned to stone, was not really her father at all. She had seen it the moment he entered. A man who looked like him, spoke like him, but whose soul had turned to a sick, grey clay. He was already stone-coloured – grey-boned, grey-haired – and so much thinner, so much more hungry than before. Even her mother had said it, had seen it, a kind of walking dead. Though it was too late, perhaps, for her mother to escape.
It was a face-off, irreconcilable, a recognition so deep and intuitive that Margaret knew at once there was nothing else to be done, that any attempt to understand, any accommodating it, might well ruin them all entirely. Destiny cannot be fought and she knew not to try to renounce it, but from then on, and although she knew that she and her father would always be inextricable, she would keep her own fate, the conducting of it, as far from him as possible. He on his own part knew almost as much: he could not stop Margaret, and although he went through the motions he would never really try. It was something that neither of them would ever be able to explain to anyone; something they could barely explain to themselves. As if each of them contained something other than their normal selves, was occupied somehow, and these things that were occupying them were doing battle, and they couldn’t do much other than look on, and behave as these things forced them to.
‘You must hear Margaret sing,’ everyone had said – or had it been just her mother? ‘You must, really: it is something remarkable. The teachers all say that she has a great gift …’ Yet as if she feared exactly that, she had hung back, feigning an uncharacteristic shyness (Oh please let me still try to have my father, another day at least), giving in only when, on the third evening, while the others were in the kitchen finishing the washing-up, he had looked at her, flushed and a little maudlin as he was with wine, as if this were all about to overwhelm him, and she had caught, for an instant, the wild, uncomprehending eyes of someone drowning. Better then to beat and beat and beat him into strength than to allow that. Better then to show him a mirror, so that he would recoil and fight, instinctively (‘What does not kill us makes us strong,’ he had said, only that evening: it had been he who had done it).
‘Shall I sing for you now, father, while they’re not in here?’ But softly. ‘I’m ready now.’ Only softly hadn’t been possible, and they soon came to the door. (Better still, for in the face of all four he would have had no choice but to straighten, and stiffen, and be the Reverend man. You have to be, she was trying to tell him. The lies have happened and there can now be no admitting. We are all part of it, and depend. I know the secret and have worked it all out. We are all trembling on the edge and you who have looked over cannot let us down. You must hold on. I am trying to save you. And had meant to show him – for Mary too had tried to get him to hear her, deeper and stronger, singing within the song. But had not anticipated how many other voices were ready to use her, waiting to crowd in (it was one of the first times; she couldn’t have known): William Prendergast, James Watson, Barry Dorne, Alex Sturman, Joe Tryde (those bodies I sprinkled the lime on, the smell and the sound of them, stirring, reaching up with the white dust on their limbs, motionless and begging, dead and still living, like the dark singing, the stench, like the godless lime singing, each one its own stifled story). And he had turned white and stared at her, not seeing, so that when the song – was it the song? or just the awful, awful power that it drew upon? – finished there was only a stunned, dead silence. And then an old voice, eventually, out of somewhere, the Reverend, speaking with the ghost of authority, exhausted, an automaton: it had been so much excitement, after so long, (but they understood, they understood … ). And yes, a gift: she had a great gift (Beauty being such a thing as it is, on a circle with Horror, so that the two, at their greatest extremities, meet and overlay one another, interpenetrate: even the lime-covered limbs were moonlit branches fallen before one on a forest path or laid carefully beside it, showing the way). He was so proud of her, of them all, how they had hung on, how they had kept things together, the Home Fires … And had no choice but to treat her henceforth like the demon she was, with love but a mask of isinglass, gloves of asbestos, who could destroy him anytime, but wouldn’t, since she too was a fragile thing to carry such weight, and needed still the forms of love, that might testify to the real and unspeakable love underneath, that would issue from his own mouth like lime. (She was only fifteen, but not far from the point – on the very edge of it – when she could have told him, as he himself would eventually realise, that there are times when everything that comes from the body, no matter from mouth nose eyes cunt anus pores of the skin, burned so fiercely it cauterised, preparing it like a burnt-wood flute, for whatever sounds it was its fate to utter (so much of the time alone in this place, no one but the wind to listen and that stifling and almost dead so often and the song and everything within it going out like spores invisible to the naked eye or ear …
12
The Pit and the Moonlight
(2000 [1919])
It comes to that, just that. No ending, no real explanation. A moment almost impossible to contain or make sense of. As if Margaret and Angus had each found that a membrane which had been holding back a flood was too thin to do so any longer, or perhaps that it was so close to rupturing that one more step would make it do so. For they do pause – surely they do – and in that pause there seems to be the realisation that a gap, a chasm has somehow appeared and that they are standing on the opposite edges of it. A gap, or chasm, or something else. We don’t know what we dealing with, so much of the time. Step off the track, attempt to challenge the current, and we still don’t know what we are dealing with.
But clearly, as a story, or part of a story, it is unsatisfactory. I felt this as I wrote it and came to that point. Of all the different characters old Mrs Darling left me with, of all the unfinished stories, this – these – were the most unfinished. Like the Slaves of Michelangelo still emerging from the stone, struggling to be free of it, as if to acknowledge the force of it; or Leonardo’s Adoration, those faces emerging from dark formlessness, in wonder, or turned away as if to say the main event is elsewhere. I don’t mean that her stories were great art, of course not – although believe me, there was art in them – but only that great art can sometimes help us with the rest. And so I left it, went back to it – have left it, and gone back to it – several times. And on each occasion the same thing. I can add to it, change it, remove parts of it – how easy, for example, with my own children in mind, to resort to Margaret’s adolescence, the grip of that flood – but all the explanations I try are only castings, speculations; and this chasm, this face-off, remains stubbornly as it was, repelling me, warding me off. Go back into it, try as I might to suture it to something else, a consequence, it’s as if there is a force-field around it, something that will not let me enter.
Dita says that it’s maybe just an inevitability of what I’ve been trying to do, to take all the fragments, the unfinished stories, the shreds of evidence, and to fill in the gaps between them. The gap-filling isn’t false necessarily, but it is so much guess-work, so much speculation. And perhaps she is right, perhaps at some point in every story – particularly in a longer story, a novel, for that was for a long time what I thought I was trying to make all this into – there’s a place where it confesses to the existence of all the other stories that have been held back in order for that story to emerge. It may be like a patch in a wall where the plaster has been mended – something you could tap upon and tell that mending has gone on – or it may be something more precarious, more dangerous, where the story itself thins to almost invisibility over a chasm, or where a marsh appears, or shoal, where things very nearly sink or fall apart, a version of something I learned early enough as a journalist: th
at everything connects to everything else and that no story can exist if one doesn’t learn to wrench it free, but also the converse, that if a story comes to you too cleanly and seamlessly you have to start tapping the plaster.
It was, in any case, the old lady’s story, not mine. I may come to some kind of edge or barrier as I write it, but I am writing down something she told me. And maybe she had reached a point when all that she had been telling me was almost overwhelmed by, had had to fight back, all that it had come from, all that it had had to suppress in order to get said in the first place. I remember the night – the heat, the beer, the lemon tree, the darkness outside – and I remember the story to this point, but how this point came about, and how it issued, are now beyond me. Perhaps we had drunk a little too much, or perhaps she had just reached one of her own points, where choosing what fork in some road of her memory she should follow next proved too hard, or she was ambushed by something she realised she should not tell, or where something she was telling triggered a memory of something else that stopped her in her tracks. Or maybe it was just me, interrupting, as I did sometimes, not having been listening clearly enough, or urged by some pressure in my own mind.
And what could have been in each of their minds – Angus’, Margaret’s – to bring them there? Clearly each of those dark, lime-encrusted figures in the moonlit pit would have had their own story – Willy Prendergast, Jim Watson, Baz Dorne, Alex Sturman, Joe Tryde, and how many others, sixteen-, eighteen-, twenty-year-olds from Bathurst, Esperance, Taylor’s Flat (and that older man, was it my imagination that she mentioned him?) – but (this said with some bitter irony) those stories have been told so often, or stories of their kind, that we could probably reconstruct them for ourselves. Maybe that’s what she thought too, and passed them by. That is History, after all, or people in the throes of it, and perhaps these stories, her stories, were about something else. Maybe that is it: maybe that was the clash, or part of it, the abyss that opened – Angus looking at his daughter Margaret, listening to her, realising that she had worked out who he was, that she had heard, while he was away, about some of the things that he had accepted, about some of the things that he had compromised, some of the things he had been trying to hide. His betrayals, his hypocrisy, his emptiness. How all the words were just that, emptinesses, fabrications. As they had been for so long, even while he said them over the lime pit, over so many of those he had said them to while living, who had so much needed them to be full and solid. Was it that? Turning into stone, after all, can be a kind of strengthening, of rescue, for oneself as well as for the one turned. The statue might not be preferable to the corruptible flesh, but if lime has already entered it …
Or was it something else entirely? A kind of ventriloquy. Not Margaret speaking at all, but Val Darling, through her, and not to Angus but to someone else. Perhaps all her stories, or many of them – some indefinable part – had been a kind of wild singing, to someone else. Her stories of Margaret’s possession, especially.
Such pressure on Margaret, such pressure.
In 1997, just two months before Val Darling died, I was in Hong Kong covering the handover for the paper’s weekend magazine. I still don’t know whether the job was intended as a reward or a punishment but to make it feel more like the former I took Dita with me and we made a side-trip to Shanghai, as a kind of acclimatisation before the main event. We took a cruise on the Huangpu, down to where it meets the Yangtze. A huge harbour, mile after mile of it, on a cruise ship – hardly more than a camouflaged ferry – the decks of which were barely above the waterline, and the toilets awash, a thin film from them in every corridor, though we would probably have tolerated a lot more for the experience of the river itself. Especially the confluence, and that phenomenal wall of water, the two rivers hitting one another so hard, and the Yangtze so huge and unanswerable that the Huangpu cannot enter it, but rushes for a time alongside it, so that one sees the grey of the Huangpu and the yellow of the Yangtze like two lanes of a thunderous oceanway, as far as the eye can follow. While we watched I saw two boats trying to cross the rip of it, rearing, when they hit the Yangtze water, as I have seen surf lifeboats do when they meet a wave head-on, looking like they’re about to tip backward or be swamped and torn asunder.
It comes to mind now as I think of Angus and Margaret. Some thing, or things, rushing through them, currents that will not mix, taking up their lives and their psyches like match-sticks. The War, art. But even these things are matchsticks, in their way.
But there is more to come. Her strangest story. There is Daniel.
Part 4
13
The Other Side of the World
(1924–1927)
On the last day of his life Daniel Freeman, having been sitting for almost an hour in his usual place under the pine trees on the broad strip of grass between the pavement and the beach, got up and walked to the edge of the sea, where he stood a moment, looking at a dark shape far out in the water that may have been a basking shark or a body or an old piece of carpet. On turning to walk back he found that he had left no footprints in the sand. It occurred to him – surprised at his own lack of alarm – that this might be a sign, although whether that he was about to die or that he had died already he could not tell. He thought of his wife and of Jennifer, and then, with an indescribable fondness – a wide forgiveness, of which he himself was a part – of the manifold ironies and complications of love. It was a moment of great calm, astonishing release. If it had been possible, he would have had them both share in it with him, for he knew now that they would, but it was not possible; for now there were only these seagulls about his feet, staring at him, as if expecting something to fall from his hands.
That is one way of beginning: another might be to say that, one morning, after a night of his wife’s raging, when it seemed as if the fury might have passed, the brooding heaviness that had built for days like a storm in high summer might have gone from the air between them, he woke, before her, in the early light, and saw a shadow in her face and body that he had never seen before – issuing from within like a part of her, not something laid upon her by the light – and he had found himself, very consciously, trying to wake her so gently that he would not also wake this other, that they might somehow leave it there, this dark beast, and it would not come with them, that they could steal away, together, from that place.
Another might be to start at the beginning proper, if ever there were or is such a place, or at least at a time far earlier than either of the above. ‘Almost a week after receiving his degree in Architecture from the University of Sydney,’ such an account might commence, ‘Daniel Freeman was called in to his father’s study and asked to close the door behind him.
‘Clearly his father – the closest thing, until his near-bankruptcy a year or two earlier, that Sydney had had to a construction tycoon – had heard about Hazel Parish, although in retrospect it would seem extraordinary how subtly and obliquely, for such an unsubtle man, he now dealt with the matter. He reverted to Daniel’s graduation, and reiterated his great pride in it – said again how proud his mother, dead thirteen years now, would have been of him. There was a promising future for architects in Sydney, he told him, as he so often had before, but not while those architects remained provincial, not while all they really knew was what they saw around them, the untutored efforts of ex-convicts or the leaden hashes of poor buggers who had come here in the first place because they weren’t good enough to make it elsewhere. The world did not begin and end with the Great Hall of the university, or the Knapsack Bridge, or the zig-zag viaducts. He had thought long and hard about this, and finally determined that, as a slightly delayed and perhaps unexpected graduation present, he wished to give Daniel a round-the-world trip. If he had not mentioned it earlier it was because he had not yet had the money in place – even now it would be difficult – but after consulting with his accountants and some others in the last week he had realised how it might be done. There were friends in Chicago and Lond
on, a strong connection in Brussels, even some possibilities in Paris and Rome. With these and the contacts Daniel’s professors could provide for him – Debbs, especially, should have some useful connections – he might well be able to work for some time in an overseas firm before returning, to strengthen his credentials. A ship was sailing very shortly to San Francisco, and offering tickets at an attractive rate. An eastbound passage was not the usual way, but perhaps that was the very thing. If he was agreeable, and nothing occurred to prevent him – was there anything to prevent him? – he could start within the fortnight.
And so it was. Nothing occurred to prevent him. Although Joe Parish’s young widow – young for Joe Parish; she was twelve years older than Daniel – was never mentioned, Daniel was not surprised when, having tried twice to see her only to find her curtains drawn and no answer at her door, he was told by a mutual acquaintance, as if merely in passing, that she had gone away quite unexpectedly to visit friends in Bathurst, and would not be back for the foreseeable future. He could have tried harder, but somehow the thought of San Francisco, London, Paris, Rome, had started to leach the effort from him.
The trip was done backwards in more ways than one. Departing in late summer, Daniel crossed the Pacific at the hottest, least comfortable time of year, interspersing Stendhal, Thackeray and The Stones of Venice with the desultory observation of flying fish, porpoises and the occasional pod of whales, or islands, so hot, much of the time, that the weeks would become in memory a kind of sensual blur, not unlike the delirium of a fever and not helped greatly by his introduction to gin-and-tonic at the nightly gathering of single men in their circle of deckchairs outside the lounge on the middle deck.