The Accidental Soldier
Page 24
Leaving his cart on the protected side of the building, he unlocks the front door. The interior is dark and icy, smelling of mice and wet straw. He brushes dust and last season’s wood shavings from the kitchen table, which has the solidity of a butcher’s block. He notes the spread of damp down the walls where the canvas has leaked. In places the clay is deeply cut and runnelled. Yet he’s confident of beating out the winter gloom. He imagines the sun beaming in through his newly purchased glass; his little oven radiating warmth. It’s a reverie he’s loath to break, but knows that Victor has probably heard the squeak of his cart and poked his nose out to investigate. It would be unneighbourly to keep him waiting.
Harry doubles back to his gate, then slips along the side path beside a bed of hoary cabbages.
Victor is there at the back door. ‘So the swallow returns!’ he says. ‘And before his time.’
‘Yes, out of season.’
Apart from great fleshy hands, Victor is lean and wiry with an austere hairless skull. His small eyes seem to sink deeper each year, as if his intelligence is being slowly grown over by bone. He brings Harry inside and hunts a pair of cats from his bed so that he has somewhere to sit. He pours him a fortified wine. ‘At last you have come to settle down with us,’ he smiles. ‘No more running about the country. When will your wife come? She is well? They have given her something for her blood?’
Harry has kept very little from Victor. The old man knows about her breathlessness and periodic fainting, that recently she confessed to having turned sixty. He knows, too, why she is locked up. Yet he has misconceptions about the itinerant life, and chooses, perhaps ironically, to conceive of Harry as a philandering rogue finally tripped up by love. In this light the Australian’s desertion is excusable. What red-blooded man wouldn’t jump the fence for a good woman?
Victor says he’s come at an opportune time. Sunday will be an occasion. The church has been unlocked and cleaned. A priest is on his way.
‘A christening,’ Harry guesses.
‘Two,’ says Victor.
Harry knows the family. He has picked their apples. They will expect him to attend. It is less an obligation than a mark of his acceptance.
‘You have mail,’ Victor announces, going to the chest beside his bed. He produces a thick brown-paper parcel, six by eight inches, addressed in English to Mr H G Lambert c/o Vanangot. He explains that he hasn’t been to town since early December, but doubts there is anything else. Harry recognises Maggie’s handwriting. Victor hovers, hoping his visitor will open the parcel in his presence. Harry has never owned to expecting money from Australia, but Victor has a nose for such things. He is disappointed to see the parcel slipped away for later. Feigning indifference, he airs his views about developments in the nearby market town: a war between Titans of the cattle trade, new saleyards, money from outside flowing like water. He has no interest in Paris, nor in world events, except in that he hates the Boches and wants them whipped. By and large, the nations are as good or as bad as the individuals he’s known. Australia is a paradise second only to France.
In the afternoon he helps Harry unload his cart and pack everything away in the cottage. He and several others are interested in the Australian’s purchases. They are fascinated by the German-made oven and want to know whether it is a battle souvenir. Harry assures them it isn’t. They inspect his crockery, noting the chips and cracked glazes. They see that his uncut linen is new but that his blankets are British army issue and old. He doesn’t look like a man coming into money. And he stubbornly refuses to read his letter. Finally they crowd around as he digs and weeds a little strip of earth by the front door. They squat beside him as he plants his tulips, which they regard as a soft-headed extravagance. But as a foreigner he’s forgiven such foibles. ‘For his bride,’ they murmur, almost as if he’s not there.
Not until dusk does he manage to shake them off. He treads the high road up past the church. The doors are pinned open, and he glimpses a pair of old women adding fastidious touches to the silver and brass. Their voices are muffled by the stone walls, finally escaping soft and feather-like into the mist. Adjoining the church is a lightly forested paddock visible through a break in the hedge. Someone has cut and gathered timber into several big wigwams supported by skeletal trees. A tethered bull, stumpy and undersized by Australian standards, grazes nearby. He’s intrigued by the terrible burden of its great balls dangling in the grass, and by the tuft of ropy hair like a Roman fringe between its horns. It hasn’t the look of a serious animal.
He opens his mail and finds a batch of conveyancing documents. There are also letters and keepsake cards that he wrote to his parents as a boarder in Melbourne, and several photos – a studio portrait of the Samuel Lamberts, another of the McArdles, an unprofessional shot of Maggie sitting casually with Harry on the morning of her wedding day. He notices that she has excluded all the less personable Lamberts – most pointedly her mother. Nor is there a likeness of Lew Broughton. He marvels at how astutely she has sorted through his cupboards and drawers for exactly the items he would have chosen himself.
But her accompanying letter lacks warmth. It teeters between displeasure and resignation: ‘So, Harry, you have cut yourself free. I can’t see your purpose. You have a screw loose if you think foreigners are any better than your own kind.’ Yet she has done everything he asked. She has organised the sale of his High Street property. The figure strikes him as somewhat low, but after a quick mental translation of pounds into francs he’s satisfied. No longer will he be obliged to go south chasing winter employment. Colombe will be astonished by the amount.
He looks up through the broken hedge. A troop of boys creep towards the tethered bull. From tree to tree they advance, moving silently over pasture that is still sheeted white. Armed with sticks, they respond to the hand signals of their leader – back, hold your ground, to the left . . . The bull nuzzles down through the snow to graze. It has no inkling.
Maggie gives thorough attention to banking. She will not risk sending a cheque by post. He must choose a reputable English bank with branches in Australia and also on the Continent. He suspects she wants to prolong his dependence on her. It is like a last hanging on of hands. She gives a short account of her family. Sons finding their feet in business once more after the war. Her father George regrettably worse than ever in a Bendigo hospice. Uncle Lew busy with the Returned Men.
But just as he begins to grow impatient with her guarded tone he discovers something beautiful: a short note in passable French intended for Colombe. Most probably her Melbourne-educated husband has helped. The sentiments are generous. She calls Colombe not cousin but ‘sister’. She says she speaks for all the family in wishing them many good years.
She writes a postscript in English, for Harry alone: ‘You know I loved your mother better than anyone. It hurts me to see the place closed up, both of you gone. Now it is filled with strangers.’
There are shrieks of titillated laughter from the paddock as the boys bolt into the mist. The startled bull dances back and forth, stamping and shaking its Roman head. Its mournful eyes are suddenly alert, awake to the mischief that surrounds it.
The church bell rings very early, as the travelling priest has a busy schedule, and after performing the christenings must be on to another village. In the night Harry was aware of the touch of snow on thatch, a suppression rather than an absence of sound. And now when he steps out with Victor into the light, he sees the result, snow lying like talc, thin and dry and glaringly white. They are among the last to climb the hill. The community isn’t big enough to fill the building. There is a crowd at the front, while the back pews are mostly empty. He’s reminded of the Pariah Service in Rushburn, particularly as they sing without accompaniment. He sings heartily, like the boy he was forty years ago. While the villagers might feel enhanced by the war veteran and respectable Christian in their midst, he’s aware of nothing so much as his contented insignificance.
In the French language, as in English, he sings about redeeming blood, because his individual opinions don’t matter much. The old ghost still exists – that seemingly passive spirit who lives behind other people’s impressions – but Harry no longer chastises him. He participates to the degree he is capable of. The priest cradles the child, dowsing him over the font. The mother weeps in the belief that ultimately her child is beyond all harm. Harry appears to lend his weight.
First published as Silent Parts in 2006 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
This edition published 2013
www.uqp.uq.edu.au
© John Charalambous 2006
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Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available at http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 0 7022 5011 8 (pbk)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5449 5 (epdf)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5250 1 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5251 8 (kindle)