There was fury at the cowardice of it, the lack of honor. What they’ll do, Della said, reading the reports in her kitchen, to avoid a few protesters. Pearl folded leaflets, pressing hard on the creases. She knew where the rage began; it had boiled in her for months. They were all powerless before the old men of Australia, their cynicism and lies. The collusion of her newspaper colleagues, joining the troop ship secretly as it cowered in the shadows of the harbor. And Menzies, making plans to do what he swore he wouldn’t: send conscripts to war. They knew he would. It was another announcement in a midnight parliament, no one to object. The man was scurrilous, a coward. The stealthy departure, Pearl saw, symbolized it all. Made the rest of them powerless, mute.
A demonstration, even a placard, at least felt like volition, felt like a voice. Would have given them a sense of agency. How do you think I feel? she said, not meeting Della’s eye. She pulled the last from a cigarette and ground its end into the ashtray, savage. The betrayal: her own editor had known, and Henry too. It had suited them to keep the government’s secret this time. And not just for the front-page accounts, the interviews with soldiers. It became their secret too. It made the mindless work of the women’s section more galling than ever. She felt more powerless than she ever had, her hands tied.
Still, part of her wondered about the boys on that ship, their own volition. They might have volunteered to be soldiers, but how many knew what it entailed? They might be as ignorant as she was. How much choice did they really have, the sons of the poor and the naïve? Had they been on deck to see the banner, did they know what it meant? And the furtiveness of their departure: like sly dogs rather than heroes, slinking off in the dark. She felt the shame of it for them, the suspicion they must have: that there was something wrong in all this. It was not the way their fathers went to war.
In the days after, the newsroom rang with pro-war rhetoric. There was, Pearl felt, barely a dissenting voice. Only one newspaper—not her own—editorialized against it, and Arthur Caldwell led the opposition in protest. From her desk she watched as each edition rolled out, scaring up the national fear of “Communist China” and the return of the “Anzac spirit.” Australia, it seemed, had conjured a war for itself out of nowhere, out of nothing, a war that wasn’t a war and an enemy no one had heard of. When she stopped a cadet reporter outside the clippings library one day, he could not tell her where Vietnam was.
How could the whole country support this war? That was how it seemed. The losses and terror of World War II were just twenty years behind them, Korea only twelve. We followed Britain into the first, she thought bitterly, and America into the second, and now, compliant children, we were following them to Vietnam. And Menzies—she wanted to shout it to the newsroom—Menzies had led them into all three.
The full team was now at work in a dilapidated warehouse at Woolloomooloo Bay. It was near the site of the old swimming baths, and a pleasant walk back through the Botanic Gardens to the opera house. At first a few of the youngsters had frowned at the shabbiness, of tenements and streets, the air of decay in the area nearby, but Axel saw other particularities. This was the place, he was sure, that could locate and hold his thinking, contain his anxiety, anchor him. The shabby wharf and crumbling houses, the naval yards. And the rusted sheds like the old hot shops of his childhood, where his uncle still made his glass.
But more than all that: here near the water he could still feel the presence of Utzon, the boy he had been, growing up around the shipyards where his father had worked. Aage Utzon, he told the students. A naval architect; his sons had spent their boyhoods in boats. The coastal village of Aalborg was not like Woolloomooloo; its red-roofed houses and churches were centuries old, its air mild. But the color of its harbor was uncannily like Sydney’s; its blue as deep, like a pure cerulean, and singular. The town clustered around it so that, like the workers at the opera house, the villagers could go fishing right in the middle of town.
He had assembled the team of local craftsmen and students early. Insisted they should be involved as soon as possible to ensure that, as his drawings progressed, his small experiments, they understood the work at a cellular level. And that they understood him. This was paramount. At this stage the glassmaking was essentially a collaborative affair. It required not just craftsmanship but generosity, loyalty, trust in one another. They would be working with volcanic heat, with high risk. They would each depend on one another, not least Axel, who would entrust each man and woman with his vision and his heart, the translation of complex idea to tangible object.
The necessary equipment for the project had also been installed: the big furnace and crucible pot, annealing oven and mavers, welding equipment and steel. Sand. The enormous old benches were soon covered in tools: scoops and ladles, tongs, clipping scissors, grinders. At the back, an office and lunchroom had been divided off from the “factory floor.” He and the senior men would gather in this space for discussions, to wring solutions from problems as they worked towards the final form. It was far from final now, but for Axel the real triumph lay in these fraught weeks, in the solving of difficulties, one try after another, until the piece held together in his mind and in space. Until his thinking matched the physical presence of the glass.
He had asked the students to consider some smaller pieces that might accompany the main one. Had them walk around the opera house, examine its plans, and read the Red Book, a dossier of plans and sketches and reports Utzon had produced just after winning the competition. He was pushing them away from material value and pure technique. You have the knowledge, all of you. So go beyond function, beyond order, he told the group one day after they’d suggested clear crystal pieces, classic shapes all sheer or transparent. The opera house is not a classic shape. Have you noticed? What does it make you feel? What are your emotions?
Of course, he said, there is a place for pure skill You must achieve it but then go beyond it. Beyond bland perfection, beyond mere things. These young Australians, individually chosen for their potential, had not initially understood. They had blinked at him, nodding courteously, but in their eyes he could see it: they were constricted by convention. By the pursuit of technical purity at the expense of freedom. Was it their isolation here, their island mentality, that pushed them towards the utilitarian and prevented free flight? Surely, he thought, it should be the opposite. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand beauty. But there was a sense of being embarrassed by it, that it was an indulgence. The practical was held in such esteem. It made them too polite.
He thought about his own student days with Per at Konstfack. They had gone there together to study ceramics, and they too had been like these students; locked into presumptions about form and function, adopting a kind of toned-down simplicity their own country was obsessed with then. Axel had quickly become uneasy with the approach: It’s the downside to the welfare state, he said to Per. I can’t bear it. It’s not all about usefulness. But his new teachers soon opened their eyes to the intellectual force in art, its expressive potential. They began to find their own style.
There’d been a letter from Per a month before, from Åfors. He was writing poetry at night, making glass by day. Experimenting with new types of molds and coloring methods, running with the avant-garde, in a group of young people from various glass houses who challenged one another in the glass room and outside it.
He wrote about the “Nobel Club” they’d recently formed. The name an ironic reference to the great man but really to their explosive meetings. We had fun at the club last week, Axel read. The press is reporting naked games in the fields and rockets fired at midnight, parties, homemade schnapps . . . and some of it might be true. But you know how it is, Axel, because we push each other in every way, and if we go beyond certain lines at the club then it works for us in the glass room too. We compete with each other, we go beyond what we thought we might, or could. We are all producing our best work, and the energy and sense of camaraderie is higher than ever.
Axel smiled to him
self now, as he thought of telling these young locals to just relax and take their clothes off, to enjoy some naked dancing on Bondi Beach. Perhaps that might produce some startling work in the glass shed, something beyond expectation. A piece to defy the great Australian complacency, a piece that was more than a scoop of bowl, or a perfect cup.
But Per was right. There were some shapes drawn in his notebook that slipped alongside conscious thought, shapes Axel did not know or recognize until he drew them. At times monumental, archaic, from the heads of the old kings, runic in their promise and mystery. Or miniature, frantic with detail, whole worlds through a window, or cupped and held like a ball. He would follow their lines on the page, trying for less, to eliminate falsity or sham. Tried to keep the form pure, free of rhetoric and sentiment. Occasionally he would take those thoughts to the furnace, would invite a local art student to assist him. And find himself speaking as Lars had, using language to shape the piece as much as his hands did.
That is the tension, in what the light suggests, where it falls or bulges, disappears. Or Look into the deep, the heat fading to ice— If a student turned blank eyes to him, he was careful, but plain: The pipe is an extension of you, the air from your chest. Do you see? The glass will reveal itself but will also reveal you. That, he knew, was precisely what frightened them, what sometimes frightened him.
Now in the red-rusted shed near the water, there were two large prototypes and a gallery of pieces on the floor and shelf and table. He stepped from one to the next, gauging color and line, a finger to edge and roundness. One surface sand-blown and ancient, another imprinted with wire net. Urgency tapped at his shoulders. And fear: the underbelly of art. The thought reverberated in his head: if the final piece revealed anything of this place, of these people, it would reveal just as much of its maker. He stood in the middle of the room, encircled. Felt a pulse, a current beneath his skin. It fizzed and faded. But he knew what it was: an intimation of the story here, of chaos shuffling its reptile feet towards order.
He sank to his haunches to properly see, let the hemispheric, the grooved blue, settle into themselves. The rheumy gray of the arcs and spheres. Let his body find its place with them.
What do they mean by the “Country Party”? Do they mean they are a party for the whole country? When the men began filing into the warehouse, Axel was reading the morning paper. And what is meant here by “Liberal”?
There was the sound of muffled laughter and low hoots of derision. Axel looked up from the pages spread over his knees. Smiled. I didn’t realize I’d made a joke.
The men fanned out to gather their gloves and tools. They’re the joke, one of them said. That’s the meaning of Country Party. They’re clowns, all of them.
The senior man, Barry, looked over Axel’s shoulder at the Herald’s front page. The Liberals are conservative. They joined up with the Country Party and they won the election last month, he said. And no, the Country Party is about people in the bush, the provinces. He grimaced at an image of the new Minister for Public Works, Davis Hughes, who would now be in charge of the building—and of Utzon, who was smiling up from the page. Don’t know that they care much for opera.
By lunchtime preparations for the next experimental casts were done. Axel sent the men home early and slumped in a chair, his legs thrust out before him. Took the deep breath he had withheld for the past hour, felt adrenaline seep from his body. The work was not perfect, just as he’d expected; the depth of curve had made it static and the color had been guesswork, though the brown still pleased him. Not perfect, but still enough of the idea was alive in the work to take it to the next stage. This would be crucial, would make demands on him he had never before allowed. His head, his heart. He felt the fear of it pool in his belly. Utzon might talk about the edge of the possible, but Axel knew that in this new glasswork he was working at the edge of the known self. It was, he could hear Lars say, what all artists do.
When he glanced at his watch it was mid-afternoon; he tucked his swimming trunks into a pack and ran up through the Domain for the ferry.
Pearl had fought and cheated for time on her writers’ series; it allowed the slip of consciousness that kept her demons at bay. Prevented her from saying too much, thinking too much. The lives of Devanny and Tennant and Dark fixed her mind on determination rather than despair, reminded her of the standard required:
In 1932, when she was twenty, Kylie Tennant walked six hundred miles from Sydney to Coonabarabran to record the lives of destitute families who had taken to the roads of New South Wales to save themselves. The Great Depression had exposed the injustice and inequality endemic in Australia’s social and political systems. Her long walk also informed her furious lifelong fight for the sexual and professional freedom of women.
The next sentence began to form in her head. Something about that sexual and professional freedom, and its costs, its demands. The things Tennant and others had done to win it, or just to survive it in the thirties and forties. But her fingers stilled on the typewriter. She was not yet born in 1932, when Tennant had done her long walk. Her mother had been twenty-one; Tennant a year younger. At the end of that walk the young writer would marry the man she seduced on the banks of the Castlereagh, and embark on the most productive years of her writing life. She’d had two risky abortions to ensure it.
Her mother’s face swam up before her, as it always did when she met or read about a woman of that time. The same hard fact of her life, of her mother’s and her own, implicit in the expression she always wore. A year after Tennant’s long walk, Amy too had been pregnant. Had she actively chosen to have her baby, or been too afraid to seek out an alternative? Pearl had never considered the fine line of it. Had assumed that for Amy, there was no line at all. There had been none for her, either, when it came to it.
Her mother would be fifty-five now, if she’d lived. The tragedy of it, and the irony, Pearl could see, was that she hadn’t survived her own innocence, in a way, the innocence of her choices. Had died in the aftermath of another pregnancy. She should have lived. As always she wondered what her mother would look like now. For Pearl she was frozen in her midthirties, still lovely, still angry. Would she have mellowed with age? Pearl tried to imagine her as a grandmother and couldn’t. The only certainty was that she’d be raging against this government, penning letters to members of parliament against the war. Unleashing her formidable temper on local representatives, the system, on anyone who thought her boys should fight.
The telephone shrilled; she propped it against her head and kept typing.
There’s a record of James and William Keogh at St. Vincent de Paul’s in Melbourne just over two years ago. Jeanne’s voice was steady, promising nothing. The right ages. They were there for three nights.
Pearl stopped typing, held the phone hard against her ear. And.
And nothing. I’m sorry. Jeanne breathed out. But it narrows things a bit.
Pearl’s first impulse was to say: it’s not enough. She leaned back in her chair and breathed out, let it go. It does, she said, thank you. Don’t suppose there was a forwarding address, or work records?
No, nothing. I spoke to the director, he wasn’t in the job then. I left my name and number.
She replaced the receiver. Her chest empty and taut as a drum. This was how it was some days: this hollowing, her body a brittle shell. At these times her mind was not her own. At work she imagined silent enemies, at home she imagined shapes behind curtains or under the bed. She would check each room when she walked in at night, open cupboards, stare at the arrangement of items on shelves. Dark thoughts rushed in: she would never escape the women’s section, and she would never find the boys, never know where they’d gone. She threw equations around in her head—what might be worse, their permanent absence, or telling her father? The weight of each in the air she walked through.
But in her head, her mother’s words. All those years before, but written large in front of her, daily. If they ever try to send them to war—she’d eye
d the boys, still babies dribbling their food—I’ll hide them in an attic somewhere. I’ll get a gun and shoot off one of their toes. Her fierce mother, who couldn’t squash a spider or a snail. Who would never strike a child for punishment, not even when the twins accidentally burned down the woodshed.
Her mother would never have lost them.
Late that afternoon she sat opposite Suze in a back alcove of a city café. Do you think they might target the boys? Because of me. As if speaking the words might burn up the fear, the anxiety that stalked her. They’re capable of that. They could work the numbers so they both get called up.
Suze frowned. I don’t think so, love. They’re not clever enough for it.
They’re corrupt enough for it. She was sure it was not beneath them, whoever they were.
They tapped your phone, Pearl. They’ve tapped lots of phones.
In her rational heart, she knew this was true. But it was all right for Suze, painting in her garret. I’m a reporter, Suze. And I go to protests. I march. Or used to. They’ll have a file on me as thick as your arm. She stared hard at her friend. If they got enough they could jail me. I’d lose my job. My home.
They ordered tea. As the girl left Suze straightened her back, hands clasped around a salt shaker. Now, listen to me. Then leaned in towards Pearl, her voice mocking, theatrical. Have you heard of Mrs. Booth’s Investigations Department? She smiled, her eyes wide.
Pearl levered her shoes off under the table. Her whole body felt tight, constrained. Now she allowed the muscles in her back and neck to loosen, and with them something childish. Petulance. This a joke? She pulled off her cardigan and dropped it on the seat. Her voice sullen, her eyes.
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