by David Brooks
And she? For this, of course, is from his point of view, and we work only with what we know. What he does not know – what she has never told him, has not told anyone, even Ellen. The Revocation. The Expulsion. A cold day on Charlottenstrasse, returning to find her bags open on the street where the derelicts had been going over them and taking what they wanted. And Gertrude Wemmer, distraught, for a moment at the window. The public shame that they – Gertrude’s parents, returning a month early, unannounced – had put them through, and that ultimate rejection, Gertrude weak and pathetic where she had seemed so strong, that has become, in the years since, the fulcrum, the pit at the centre, the stone. The humiliation. The rage, against Gertrude, against herself, so that she will still, in dreams, beat her and beat her, and wake with it all boiling within her, spilling out into the day, whether she remembers the dreams or not.
V
The War
The War was the worst time, as if the conflict were a thing within as well as without. The ghosts seemed to riot inside her. She hated the war. She hated the thought of him going. She hated him not going. Despite the truth of it – despite the fact that in the first days, when so many they knew were doing likewise, and braced by the thought that a sequence of long absences might change, might help the relationship, he had tried to join up. But he was thirty-eight, wore glasses: they would take him, but not for active service; a senior enlistment officer asked him to reconsider, suggested they might use him in more productive ways. They took note of his profession, recorded other details, said they would write to him. Nothing came. He was for a while as embarrassed and angry as he was relieved: even Paul Benjamin had gone from the office, as a radar officer, to Broome. And then, two months later, a letter arrived from a different section entirely, asking him to become part of a unit designing fortifications.
He worked in Sydney, Wollongong, then, as the war progressed and the Japanese moved further southward, Port Hedland, where he caught up with Paul, then Darwin, Townsville, Lae, Rabaul, Port Moresby. So the absences happened after all, but did not help. As each tour approached Margaret would support him strongly, help him prepare, then, in the hours before departure, turn on him in a kind of blind rage – as if it was he who had deliberately planned the tour, he who had asked to be sent away, he who had imposed the worry, the isolation, the gap upon her. Sometimes, absurdly, she seemed almost to blame him for the war itself, because people had caused it who were like him, in some way or another that he could not influence or control. Calm it in the last minutes as he was sometimes able to, the rage would seem to simmer within her while he was gone, and after the first welcome home, the brief celebration, would erupt again like a returning cyclone. His stretches in Sydney alternated between periods of tense calm and an extreme irritability that mounted inexorably toward new eruptions. He tried to build inner defences, but failed so often that he began to think some weakness in himself was contributing. Over and again he would vow to ride out the next storm without responding, since response itself seemed a cue or trigger, but again and again he would be goaded into a careless reply, a reaction that would almost inevitably become an overreaction precisely because he had stifled it so long. Don’t react. Don’t ever react. And don’t relax. Don’t ever even think that things cannot get worse. When things can get no worse, they will.
There were mornings when he left the house early and stealthily to avoid waking her, evenings when he dreaded returning to the house. There were times when, leaving it, he swore to himself never to come back. But he always did, because not returning seemed harder, bleaker after all. He would back down, return with gifts, mollify – accept over and again blame and responsibility he did not feel, because to leave, to start again, was a waste beyond thinking. And because, too, there were moments when she held him so tightly that any hardness in him evaporated; because, although he so often bore the brunt of it, to the point where he felt exhausted and abused, there was in her some wildness that he needed, some rawness, some nakedness of the mind and emotions not yet made numb, that could still be appalled by what it should have been appalled by, when so many others about him, he sometimes amongst them, were accepting the unthinkable.
Things, in any case, did eventually change. There was an easing, a calming of sorts, as much in him as in her, or perhaps in her because it had come about at last in him, in the realisation that he could take responsibility only for himself, and in the taking it. The hell could still suddenly erupt, or abyss open, and he’d be as always astonished and appalled at the rapidity with which he would find himself falling into it, but there was also this broad, flat place, this plateau. And increasingly, as if it were a gift she had given him, to acknowledge, to compensate, there was Cliftons.
VI
Cliftons
They had gone there first with a friend, John Robertson, to lend him some emotional support while he looked over the place, in the last year of the fighting. It was a fisherman’s shack, on an isolated bend of the Hawkesbury River. No one knew why it was called Cliftons. No one could remember anyone there of that name. Two rooms, a kitchen, a lean-to laundry and wash house, a small deck at the front to sit on while you looked out over the river– it seemed too modest to have a name at all. John’s brother Alan had squatted there during the last of the Depression, unable to find work after leaving school. At first it had just been a stop-gap, but he had taken to the river like a mystical calling, getting to know the tides, the shoals, the mudflats and oyster-beds, the vegetation, learning the kinds and habits of fishes, the comings and goings of birds. His family had tried to lure him out but nothing had budged him until the war. Just before leaving, afraid that the place might not be still vacant for him when he returned, he had gone to the local council and found the owner and made the only offer he could. The old man had emphysema, was in a home, and had no one to leave the place to. He asked Alan to name fifteen kinds of bird about the place, and stopped him after nine. To Alan’s surprise – and with help from John and his parents – he had been able to buy the shack for the proverbial song. And then, just as the war was winding down, he had been killed on Bougainville.
John and his elderly parents were devastated. They had heard of Alan’s death two months earlier, and in the strange way that death can sometimes precipitate, the shack, which they had barely thought about before, had now become a fixation. The parents would not set foot in it, and yet all of Alan’s belongings were there and they felt they would not have done right by him until someone went to get them and do something about the place itself. Neither they nor John had a car. They had never visited Alan while he was there. They scarcely knew where Cliftons was. When John told Daniel and Margaret about it, it was Margaret herself who suggested that they all go together, take a picnic, make a kind of adventure of it.
They had not reckoned on the cliff path or the road to Malcolm’s Ridge. Alan had never told them – or perhaps John had simply failed to register – that the shack, though reached fairly easily by water, was virtually inaccessible by land. After a half hour’s drive from the nearest serviced road along a disused track so rutted that it threatened repeatedly to break their axle they found they still had a twenty-minute descent on foot down a steep hillside that at two or three places had them seriously thinking of turning back. Once they reached the place, however, and although John himself had very mixed feelings about it and could not see that he would ever want to return, Daniel and Margaret were charmed. John told them, jokingly, that they could have it – that they could take it, it was theirs – and it became almost instantly a serious proposition. They paid off the small mortgage; reimbursed, with generous interest, the deposit John and his parents had paid – and the shack at Cliftons was theirs so easily that it seemed destined, a matter of fate.
No one had been there since Alan had left it three years before. The shack was almost derelict, barely liveable, but there was nothing, Daniel insisted to Margaret, that could not be fixed with a little ingenuity and some weekends of hard work. Acc
ording to the title, they owned not only the shack, its dilapidated jetty and the part of the steep incline they had made their way down, but also some hundred and twenty yards of the bank to the west, a stretch which included, at a higher point than the shack itself, enough near-level ground to build a far larger dwelling if they ever wished to. Complicated as it would be to erect anything in a place so isolated, Daniel had seen immediately the chance to build the high, open, light- and air-filled house he had always wanted.
Perhaps it was knowing and seeing this that had led Margaret to agree so readily. He had a sense, even at the time, that it was a kind of gift, a permission, though of what sort and to what end remained a vagueness. She, in any case, never visited it as often as he, even in the early stages. Despite her initial enthusiasm, she was never quite comfortable there. The shack was not large enough for two, she said, and there was a presence there that she had not noticed at first, but that soon made her uncomfortable, as if Alan’s spirit had come back to it, somehow, or the ghost of the old fisherman, or someone who had lived there even before him. There were times, she agreed, when the difficulty in reaching it and the discomfort while there, were more than compensated by the calm, the broad river view, the soft sunshine on the verandah, the possums that, when they ate out there on summer evenings, would come to the verandah rail to take food from their hands – but all in all she preferred to wait until the larger house was built.
Time passed. With a rhythm that seemed to reflect a rhythm in the marriage itself, there were years when the new building seemed imminent, years when it was indefinitely postponed, at worst as an irrelevance, at best as an impractical dream. It proved harder than he had anticipated to get building materials in the area, let alone someone to take them to the site; after five years, for all his grander visions and although the plans had been drawn up very early, nothing had been done but the clearing of a few of the smaller trees and the making of a better path. He had shored up the shack itself, however, to the point where he could work readily and be sometimes so comfortable there that he was loathe to return to the city. He had put in steps at the steepest places on the cliff path. He built, from old cedar off-cuts, a sheltered lock-up for the car at the top. He repaired the jetty and bought a small boat with an outboard motor to replace the rotting dinghy they had found half-submerged on the day they had first come with John. And there were books, a drafting-table, a record player, a tea-chest to keep dry provisions safe from the bush-mice. With good management he could go up once each month, to read, relax, work on projects of his own, make repairs and alterations and refinements to the existing building. He taught himself to fish, and to cook what he caught. In pursuit of new and better places to cast his line he got to know the river, began to explore its banks, the bush about him, discovered the prawn birds, the bower birds, their collecting of different shapes of blue.
It was almost eight years before the new house was begun. When at last they started it, however, Daniel was surprised at how quickly it was built. The road was graded and the steep descent to the shack itself was eased by railings and sets of stone steps. Margaret began to come again, now that the place was more commodious, and they would lend the new house to friends who in their own turn invited others. The design – an inspired one, it was said – excited people: it worked in a way that many of them had not seen before, and Daniel was asked to design others. A place of glass and light, north-facing, readily opened to the air, at the edge of the level space he had initially chosen, so that on the river side the land fell away quickly beneath it and the wide verandah looked out from just below the canopy of the smaller trees, the house was also a place of birds. Lowries, currawongs, king parrots, kookaburras, when people were there, would sit on the branches of the nearest trees waiting to be fed on the verandah rail. Sometimes a butcher bird would come, and every November the koels, migrant cuckoos from Sumatra, that people on the river called the prawn birds. At first, tricked by the light – a design fault, easily enough corrected – thinking that the mirrored forest was the real one, birds would sometimes fly directly into the glass of the wide windows. Once, when they went out on the river, they left the doors open and a bower bird, cruelly lured by a glimpse of blue, wandered in and was unable to get out, and knocked down books, crockery, a lamp and a vase, and beat itself half to death in its attempts to escape. They learned, and adjusted. Once a lyre-bird, the shyest of forest creatures, strayed onto the verandah and, seeing its reflection in the windows, performed a long dance to the image of itself, never realising that Daniel was watching.
Once, too – it was another three years later, a month before he turned fifty-six – something else happened, a different coming-to-terms. He did not tell Margaret. It was so much the kind of thing she had always suggested about the place that he feared she would not come again if she knew of it. Later, in his long, silent conversations under the Clovelly pines, he came to speak of it as the night he almost died someone else’s death.
Successful as the design of the new house was, and close as it came to the realisation of a dream, he had never fully relinquished the shack. There were times when the new house was too large, or too cold, or when his mood did not suit it, and he would choose instead the closeness and the comfort of the other’s shabbiness, the mice, the smell of the unpainted wood, the warmth of the ancient Welcome Dover. And of course there were other reasons.
The other side of solitude is loneliness. Sometimes he would come up for the one only to find it was the other that he sought. On one such weekend in mid-summer, he had been drinking, slowly and steadily since the early evening, at first with a book he had taken out onto the verandah to read in the late sunlight and then simply sitting there, staring out at the sunset over the river. The end of a bottle of wine from the evening before, and then a new bottle, accompanied by a box of biscuits and a lump of cheese. Surprised by the end of the second bottle, not wanting yet to take himself to bed, his mind no longer focussed enough to work or to read, and aware that there was nothing to drink in the big house – that he had not yet brought down the fresh case of wine from the car – he decided to take the old path, steeper but shorter, up to the road, and was coming back down with a new bottle in his hand, negotiating carefully the difficult slope in the dark – picking out his path by the pale driftwood he had once set out there for the purpose, gleaming like old bones in the moonlight – when something clubbed him from behind. Losing consciousness, he went sprawling onto the narrow ledge half-way down, only prevented from tumbling far further by the stump of a paper-bark he had felled years earlier to clear the descent.
He found himself looking at the night sky. How long he had been unconscious he couldn’t tell. The moon was still high and the air still warm, but he had a sense that some long time had passed. As he lay there, a large owl left a branch almost directly above him and drifted soundlessly down the slope toward the shack. Grasping the tree-stump, pulling himself to his knees, he remembered the blow and felt, tentatively, the back of his head. There was no sharp pain to indicate quite where the blow had fallen, but a great deal of moisture he took to be blood. With no one about, and no way of telling in the dark what might have hit him, he felt carefully for the wine-bottle – found it, miraculously intact, a few inches from the base of the paperbark – then made his way down the path. His right hand and the back of his shirt, when at last he could see them, were covered in blood. Stripping himself to the waist, he washed carefully at the basin, and then, trying to staunch the wound, was surprised to find that he could not locate it. It seemed that the blood that he had just washed away was all that there had been, and since there was nothing in the shack by means of which he might examine the back of his head, he laid a towel over his pillow, lest the cut open again during the night, and went to sleep.
The next morning, using the mirrors in the new house, he searched again for a wound but could find nothing, not even a bruise. Suspecting then the blood of some animal, owl- or fox-kill, he went up to the ledge where he
had fallen but could find nothing there either: no sign of blood, nor of anything that might have hit him, no sign of recent disturbance other than his own – only the striking softness of the grass where he had lain, like a patch of native lawn, that he had never noticed before. Were it not for the blood-covered shirt still lying in the shack, he might have doubted that anything had happened at all.
What had it been? A visitation? A stroke? He had been a little drunk, true, but surely not enough to have blacked out.
Had anyone ever known, ever asked him in the years that followed – had he ever told someone – he might have said that from this time on, or from some time near it, and albeit at some times far more than others, his mind had been a different place, susceptible to voices so strange, so ancient sometimes, that he could not begin to translate.