Nance went to Mittagong first. The farm was a dry stony place, always windy, the little house creaking. None of that mattered. Not being locked up in the pharmacy was a delight she didn’t tire of. It was enough to get up in the morning and live the day through, walking out into the yard or up on the gaunt paddocks whenever she pleased. She thought, The wonderful thing about hard times is that you don’t need a Caribbean cruise. It’s enough to have the day to yourself.
Whether it was the shame of the bankruptcy that could never be mentioned, or not having to deal with Dolly, she didn’t know, but her father was a good companion in the evenings by the fire, gentler and quieter than she remembered. For the first time he was willing to talk about personal things.
Your mother never thought I was good enough for her, he said. Mind you, she might have been right. On her good days you had to go to the front parlour to get someone better than your mother.
He laughed, rubbed his hands up and down his thighs the way he did when he was thinking about something.
Remember Rothsay, Nance, he said. Never any good there. My word, the rows we had! She threw me out once, you know. Frank a little baby. Then she changed her mind, sent word, would I come back. Well, I did in the end and you were the result. You were a fluke, Nance.
The window made its little song in the night wind, a shingle rattled up on the roof. He stared peacefully into the fire, rubbing the nap of his trousers as if he’d said nothing of importance. A fluke! She’d always known she wasn’t wanted. Otherwise why would her parents have sent her away so much? She’d thought nothing could be more bleak than knowing. She was wrong. Here it was, something worse: being told.
Bert got up to pour himself another whisky but stopped behind her chair and ruff led her hair, the way he’d done when she was little. Good having you here, Nance, he said. She knew what he was saying, and knew he’d never be able to say it. She touched his hand, held it for a moment. You had to take what you were offered.
The village near Frank’s place was called Bringalily on the sign, but Frank told Nance that it should really be spelled Bringalilli, because it didn’t have anything to do with bringing lilies. It was the name of the Aboriginal tribe of the area and should be pronounced with a hard ‘g’. He’d got to be mates with a man who’d worked on the roads with him, he said. Half Aboriginal, had told him a few things about the old ways. Seems only right to say it their way, Frank said. Least we can do, all things considered.
It was a Frank she’d never known before, someone who thought about such things as the right way to say an Aboriginal word. She’d never thought about anything like that herself, though once he told her she made a point of saying it the Aboriginal way. It made her realise how little she knew Frank, how far apart they’d grown since those sweet years at Rothsay. It was hard when you’d been separated for so long. A letter was no good for the small things like that, the ones that told you who the other person really was. For those things you had to be there day by day.
Dolly was calmer and more cheerful at Bringalily than Nance had ever seen her. She’d thrown herself into helping Frank. He’d dug a dairy, three-quarters underground, and she’d rigged up a clever system of hessian curtains and water troughs to make it cool, so they’d get the top grade, choicest, from the butter people. She was full of all her other plans to make things better. Nance watched her pour water into the troughs that kept the hessian wet. Oh, Mum, she thought. You should have been a man, or born later.
The place was doing pretty well, but even easygoing Max was sick of the cows. You had to milk them at dawn and dusk, no matter what. Frank had gone in another ballot, for some land at Guyra, not far from Tamworth. Sheep and potato country, he said. You can have a sleep in now and then.
He’d got to know the neighbours, all dairy farmers. Their lives revolved around the milking. They’d come over in the evenings, though everyone went to bed early. Being the host was a side of Frank she’d never seen. He was warm and smiling, quietly making sure everyone had what they wanted and heading off Dolly if she started to get hot under the collar.
And Frank, have you got anyone? she asked him one morning, walking back from the milking. She glanced up in time to catch a grimace.
Yes, he said. Norah. She lives along the way. You’d like her, Nance.
Well, she said. Well, Frank? Smiling up at him, but Frank didn’t look at her.
Norah, well, he said. She’s Norah Gallagher. Catholics. You know what Mum’s like about Catholics.
It never made sense, Frank, she said. Wouldn’t have a bar of Catholics but sent me off to the nuns.
You don’t look to Mum to make sense, he said. All I know is, she won’t have Norah in the house.
Nance could see it: the family divided all over again, Never darken my door! That iron will of Dolly’s. Nance wanted to say, Go ahead anyway, Frank, it’ll work out if you love Norah and she loves you. But what if she was wrong, what if the Catholic thing meant more misery for everyone?
When Nance got back home to Sydney, Frank wrote to her. He and Dolly had had a row about Norah, Frank called it the Row to End All Rows. Mum promised she’d make our lives hell, he wrote. But I should have stuck to my guns for once.
He’d won the land at Guyra, a place called Green Hills, but Dolly didn’t want to leave Bringalily. Well enough where we are, she grumbled to Nance in her letters, I don’t know why Frank’s got to be always on the move. Nance laughed so loudly she startled the others in the dining room.
She thought the real trouble with Guyra was that it was too close to Tamworth. Too much shame there. And too close to Currabubula. Dolly had grown up on a farm scratching out a living, and at Guyra she’d be doing it again.
Bert was leaving Mittagong and going to Guyra. He knew about sheep. Max went along with things in his easygoing way. Milk a cow, crutch a sheep. It was all the same to him.
SEVEN
THE SECOND night the shop in Enmore was open again, Charlie came in. He had on his big black overcoat, the September nights were still cold and thin rain was making the street gleam. Nance was awkward behind the counter, trying to think of words that would bridge the chasm between someone who’d never known the death of a loved person and someone who’d been crushed by it.
He lifted the counter-f lap, came around to the narrow space behind. She’d got the ledger out open, it was there on the counter in front of them. He looked at it and she thought he was reading the day’s numbers. Then he turned to her and put his arms around her, the big coat lapping them in its folds. They stood for a long time. She breathed in his smell, maleness and damp wool, a hint of the hospital he’d come from. She felt his chest rising and falling against her. She hoped he wasn’t crying. He put his hands on her shoulders, pushed a little distance between them, kissed her on the forehead, a brotherly sort of moment. Thank you, Nance, he said. Thanks.
The next night when he came he had fish and chips for them in steamy paper parcels. They stood at the counter together putting chips into their mouths, breaking off bits of yellow batter and flakes of fish. He pointed at 7/6 in a column and left a greasy translucent shape on the page, wiped at it with his handkerchief, spread the stain into the next column. Out, out, damned spot, he said.
Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him, she said, and as she said it she worried, Should I be talking about blood, will it remind him? She wanted to mention Win, though, make her normal again, and he must have been thinking along the same lines because he said, You know, Win never did the Leaving, didn’t know any Shakespeare. Regarded me as some kind of genius. Didn’t realise we’d all learned yards of it.
She admired you, Nance said. Told me you were the cleverest, handsomest man she’d ever met.
She remembered the slippery feel of the cards, the yellow light in Win’s kitchen, Win half laughing at herself but in earnest too.
I was a lucky man, Charlie said. And then we ran out of luck.
Win was with them from then on, a
comfortable memory. She couldn’t imagine you’d ever get over a death like that. You wouldn’t want to pretend it hadn’t happened, or that it didn’t matter. Still, you wouldn’t want to live every minute in its shadow.
One Saturday he asked her to the dog races at Harold Park. Said he knew a man who owned one of the dogs, that was why he wanted to go. But they never saw the man and Charlie didn’t seem interested in one dog more than the others. They went to the pictures a few times. No romances, only comedies. They’d come out into the late afternoon and he’d stride along the footpath not looking back. He was abrupt, spoke to her like a man talking to himself, not waiting for an answer. A picnic at the Audley Weir, the bush ticking all around, sandstone glowing golden where the sun hit it, old men fishing along the wall. He hired one of the boats and rowed her along but, although their legs were touching, he didn’t look at her. There seemed no way to have a conversation with a man whose eyes were always elsewhere, even when he was rowing you along a picturesque stretch of the Audley River, and who kissed you in that brotherly way at the end of each excursion.
He took it for granted that she was experienced. He knew about the men at the boarding house, how they waited for her to come back from the shop. Called them her admirers. She didn’t know how to tell him that they weren’t, or if they were it was all one way. He was a man broken apart by what he’d seen, what he’d heard, the dead child he’d held, the choice he’d made, and the question that never left him. What if he’d done things differently? He flailed around, she could see that, anything to stop the boiling away of those memories.
He’d only be in Sydney for another couple of months. He had a place at Edinburgh, he’d do his surgical training there. He’d booked his berth on the boat and put the business on the market. Now and then men would turn up and go through the ledger with him, stamp on the floorboards, turn the taps on and off.
One night he came to the shop with a glitter about him. He’d been drinking, she could smell it. But he was steady enough. He came up to her at the counter like a customer, closed the ledger, took her hands. Come on out of there, he said, and smiled a version of the old charmer’s smile.
He drove them to the little road beside the Lane Cove River, the winding dirt track pale in the starlight. Stopped the car under shifting black trees and everything was suddenly silent. They call this Lovers’ Lane, he said. Where we are, here. She heard the thinness in his voice, he wasn’t quite sure any more. But she was. Shifted on the creaking leather seat, a fraction towards him, and that was enough, he was on her like a starving man.
She was willing, more than willing. Oh, it was wonderful to be there in the dark with him, the water rustling across the stones. He’d brought a blanket for them to lie on and it was a warm night. She saw the stars through the trees, and the cut-out shape of a fruit bat gliding over the river. The water glimmered, a fish jumped. He pushed her back onto the blanket, she heard the buckle of his belt and the ripping of the package of the french letter.
Nance thought he’d be sorry afterwards, was braced for him to be cool to her in the shop, turn the ledger round so he wouldn’t have to come in behind the counter beside her. But they went back to Lane Cove. She got to know the shape of the trees above them, though the stars and moon were in a different place every night. After that first painful time, it was a pleasure that was always a surprise. He was a tender lover and could see the funny side of it, always had a joke to ease the awkward business of getting the french letter on.
She loved him, of course. Had loved him for ages, back when he sat next to her in the dark at the Enmore Cinema. Clever and witty but with a heart and, although he was a doctor now, they were from the same world. The Lithgow back streets of his childhood weren’t so different from the working men’s pubs of her own. Her father had struck lucky and made money and his hadn’t, but neither she nor Charlie was born with the silver spoon.
She loved him, but she wasn’t going to fall in love, because what was the point? He needed a woman, needed comfort and company, and he liked her well enough. She’d be a fool to think there was any more to it than that. So when he said, Nance, why don’t you come with me to Edinburgh, she was surprised, but dismissed it as the impulse of a warm moment. The next night he said it again. Come with me, Nance. Why not? Shout you your ticket.
This time she thought about it. Edinburgh. She’d find work, pharmacy was the same wherever you were. But she tried to imagine their lives. He’d be the promising young surgeon. She’d be Miss Russell, his half-educated pharmacist friend from the colonies.
And he was saying, Come with me. He wasn’t saying, Marry me. Not that she cared about marriage in itself, but Marry me would mean he liked her for more than a bit of comfort after his wife had died. Marry me meant I love you. He wasn’t saying that.
She went down to the wharf to see him off. Had to fight herself at the last touch not to say, I’ll get on the next boat! She stood beside his father, come down from Lithgow. He was a rough sort of a man from somewhere in England and spoke with such a strong accent she had to keep asking him to repeat himself. She hadn’t known his father was English. He was happy to see his son returning in triumph to the place he’d left as a hungry immigrant.
She held the streamer, looked up at the face that was already made small and anonymous by distance. When the streamer stretched and broke and the ship swivelled and Charlie was lost to sight, his father turned to her. Ah well, he said. Now there’s a good man. His eyelashes were stuck together with his tears.
Charlie had fixed up a job for her at the hospital where he’d trained. Be a walk in the park, he said. None of the damn customers. But at Prince Alfred it was Mr Denning with his steel-rimmed glasses, never speaking except to tell Nance to use a smaller bottle, or rouse on her for gluing the label on crooked, and what’s this doing here? Nance was surprised that she missed the customers. You never knew if they’d be kind or rude, whether they’d wheedle for credit or flirt, and that kept the day interesting. In the high-ceilinged silent austerity of the hospital dispensary, she even began to long for the noise of the trams.
She met a pharmacist from Prince Henry Hospital, the Coast Hospital, near Maroubra. Joan told her about a vacancy there. You’d like it, she said. We have a bit of fun. Nance applied and got an interview. The man wanted to know if she was thinking of getting married. No, she said, and she could hear the coldness in her voice, because there’d never been any talk of marriage, and now he was gone. The interviewer looked at her appraisingly. Oh, how she hated the way men looked you up and down! She knew what he was thinking: Twenty-five. What’s wrong with her, why is she still on the shelf?
There were only three of them in the dispensary at the Coast, the third a pleasant man named Duncan who she came to realise went home at night to his boyfriend. Joan was a Catholic and was supposed to disapprove, but as long as Duncan was discreet she could pretend she didn’t know. There was something about him that reminded her of Arthur at the Cally, and gradually she realised that Arthur and Con must have been a couple like Duncan and his friend. She watched Duncan holding up a bottle to pour something, his face intent, a man like any other, except that he could go to jail for whatever it was that he and his friend did at night. Being a woman in a man’s world wasn’t easy, but you didn’t go to jail for it.
They worked hard, but only from nine to five. They had every third Saturday off, and no work on Sundays. For the first time in nearly eight years she had a weekend, even if it was only once a month.
The Coast Hospital was out of town, a hundred acres looking out to sea. It had started in the nineteenth century as a place for people with smallpox. When Nance went there smallpox was in the past but there was a lock hospital on the grounds for the people with syphilis and a lazaret for the lepers. The main hospital dealt with diphtheria, typhoid, tuberculosis, all the worst contagious things. You didn’t go to the Coast if your leg was broken.
That might have been why it had a particular feel to it. Not a hospit
al of crisis so much as a hospital of lost lives, men and women shut away with only each other and the nurses and doctors for society. The lepers were mostly Chinese. They had a vegetable garden and she could see them from the window of the dispensary, walking backwards and forwards in their big conical hats with drums of water on sticks across their shoulders. When the weather was good they’d bring their mahjong outside and on a still day you could hear the click and clatter of the tiles.
The nurses had made a rock pool where they swam in summer, had a raft that they poled around the bay. They lived with death every day. Now and then one of them caught something from a patient and died. Just the same, at lunchtime they all went down to the little beach and swam in the home-made rock pool as carefree as if they’d never heard of dying.
She thought about Charlie. Every day at first, then less often. You had to look forward. That was something she’d learned. If you looked back at the good times you’d only make yourself miserable. Life wasn’t going to hand anything to you. You had to go out and find it.
Charlie wrote to her from Aden and again from the boarding house in Edinburgh. She wrote back and he wrote again. Every time a letter arrived, so did the wondering. His letters always began My dear Nance. She thought, Perhaps he liked me more than I realised. But he never wrote, I’m in love with you. Come to Edinburgh and we’ll get married. His letters began to feel like a taunt. The wittier they were, the warmer and more affectionate, the worse they made her feel. Look, here’s what you’re not going to have.
She turned twenty-six in August 1938. Joan made a cake and Duncan brought candles. At lunchtime they went down to the beach with some of the nurses. The candles kept blowing out in the breeze and the singing was thin out in the open air. Happy birthday, dear Na-ance. A few of the lepers came down to the top of the ridge and when it came to Hip-hip, hooray they cheered too.
One Life Page 7