One Life

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by Kate Grenville


  N. Gee, Ashfield

  29th May 1942

  She showed it to Ken before she sent it. Very good, Nance, he said, but you know the papers aren’t interested in prunes. She sent it anyway, and a week later there it was in the Sydney Morning Herald. Your name in print at last, Ken said. Not at last, she said, trying to keep the annoyance out of her voice. On the first try!

  Max finally got over the typhoid apart from a stiffness in his back and they sent him to Bathurst on light duties. He wrote to Nance every month. The letters were always the same: he hoped Nance was as well as he was, the weather was fine or it looked as if they were in for a spell of rain, they were going to go to the pictures on Sunday, it was saveloys tonight in the mess. Once he’d filled the two pages it was, Well, Nance, that’s all the news for now, I’ll say cheerio. She treasured that connection across the years and wrote back with the same small news. Family was precious, a bond like no other, even if you didn’t have much to talk about.

  She was longing for Frank. Something had happened in that ragged growing-up. They’d lost touch with each other. If he came back she was going to find him again, the brother who’d been like an extension of herself, crouching in the cubby at Rothsay. Stay alive, Frank, she urged him in her mind. Just keep going, whatever it takes. She imagined what she’d say when they met again. Frank, she’d say, how did we drift apart? Let’s start again and be a proper brother and sister again.

  Reading the paper one day, she saw the headline ‘Grave Shortage of Rubber’. All the rubber had come from the part of the world where Frank was. Perhaps at this very moment he was looking at a rubber tree and thinking that there must be a shortage back home, and for a piercing instant she felt joined to him across the miles. Frank. Oh, Frank!

  Ken had made himself the shop steward at the Ville d’Amiens and was always trying to get the men out on strike. He was surprised and disappointed when none of them even showed up at the meetings. Nance thought, They’re on a good wicket with all that make a show business, they’re not going to spoil it. She was starting to see that while Ken was an intelligent man, he understood less than the most ignorant worker. She tried to tell him, but he dismissed her comments. The workers might be bought off for a while, he said, but they’d rise up when the time was right. With the right leadership.

  One day he got home early. They’ve given me my money, he said. They could see I was making headway with the men. I was too dangerous for them. He regarded being sacked as a badge of honour. What a survivor he is, she thought. Everything turned to good account.

  Before Manpower could get him, the comrades organised a course at Tech for him to become a Dilutee Fitter and Turner. The Dilutee part meant he wouldn’t be a proper tradesman but good enough to be a wartime stand-in. He got his certificate and landed a job at a place called Morris Hearses, except that with the war on people were economising on hearses and the company was making trailers for the army instead. Ken was shop steward there too. Came home in high indignation about the primitive dunnies, a rough plank laid across a row of pans. Full of splinters, Nance! He was agitating for a fight with the boss. It could be a f lashpoint, he said, and tried to call the men out on strike. But again nobody turned up to the meeting and again Ken was given his notice.

  Then he got what he called a gem of a job over at Commonwealth Aircraft, where they were tooling up to make jet engines.

  But isn’t that war work, Ken? Nance asked.

  No, Nance, he said, we’re making the tools, not the engines.

  She opened her mouth to say, That’s splitting hairs!

  He got in first. The Revolution takes the long view, Nance, he said.

  Again he became shop steward, and again the dunnies were the issue. This time the problem was that they were so comfortable that the men were taking the racing pages in there for an hour at a time. The boss was threatening to dock their pay.

  Fair enough, isn’t it? Nance said. If it was my business, I wouldn’t want to pay people to sit on the dunny reading the paper.

  He was unruffled. It’s a question of the historical moment, Nance, he said. Seeing it and seizing it.

  But she started to feel some extra preoccupation in him, some extra withdrawal into his own thoughts, and braced herself for another story of his triumphant dismissal. Or was it that this time the Revolution really would start, right now, ignited by the dunnies at Commonwealth Aircraft?

  Instead it was Ken coming home a month later from a Trotsky meeting with a look she’d never seen before. I’m out of it, Nance, he said.

  She didn’t know what he meant. Was he leaving her?

  The Trotskyites, he said, impatiently, as if there could be no other reason for anything. Jim’s left, Laurie’s left. John always said it was a fantasy and he was right.

  A fantasy, Nance said. But Trotsky…

  Oh, Trotsky had some good ideas, he said. No doubt about that. But I’ve been there, I know. There’s no international working class waiting for the Terminal Crisis. Just a lot of blokes diddling the system.

  He was going back to his father’s legal practice. His father wasn’t well, couldn’t manage the work any more.

  I’m afraid the Fourth International, all six of them, will have to get along without me, he said.

  She listened for the bitterness, the grief of someone whose dream had died. There was none. What an amazing man! Already it was a joke for him. He’d gone in one direction when it had looked right, and when those men he admired urged him to it. Now they’d moved on in a different direction and he was moving on with them. It was good to have an open mind and be willing to change your views. Still, wouldn’t you expect a little more mourning?

  Dolly wrote to say she had a job at the Repat Hospital at Concord but they couldn’t give her a room, so she’d be stopping along with Nance and Ken for a time. Nance’s first impulse was No! She told over to herself all the terrible things her mother had done to her. Sent her away at eight years old to live with people she’d never met. Farmed her out to the Medways. Oh, that woodheap and the longing to be an orphan! The scorn of Oh, you children! You children don’t matter! If she’d had a proper childhood, been properly loved, she knew she’d have been able to refuse her mother. As it was, she couldn’t. I’m trying to buy her love, she thought. If you don’t get that love when you’re a child, you’re going to spend the rest of your life looking for it.

  Ken didn’t mind one way or the other, and she appreciated that. Many another man might have refused to have his querulous mother-in-law living with them. Over dinner Nance looked at them in amazement: her husband, the privileged Strathfield professional, and her mother, the rough country woman who called the Hawkesbury the Oxborough. Dolly would come back from a chest X-ray at the hospital and say, I had the rays but they weren’t any good, I didn’t feel the heat of them. Ken would listen politely and say, Really. Is that so. My word. With Nance later he enjoyed going over it again. I didn’t feel the heat of them! Nance laughed along with him. It wasn’t nice to laugh at your mother, but how good it was to have Ken warm and full of his old humour. Relief, too, came out of making the tyrant small.

  Nance had got to know the pharmacist at the Ashfield Pharmacy. He’d gone through a few years ahead of her and remembered Charlie Gledhill. Oh, Charlie! he said. Now there was a character.

  If you ever need anyone, Mr Felton, she said. You know, as a stopgap. My mother lives with us, she could look after the baby as long as it wasn’t for too long.

  Mr Felton looked surprised but not more than she was herself. It had flicked through her mind once or twice that she could do a bit of casual work. Hearing herself say it, almost on impulse, she wondered at the other Nance inside the one she knew.

  Mr Felton was keen. With so many pharmacists away fighting, everyone was short-handed. What about next week, Mrs Gee, he said. Say, Thursday and Friday?

  Walking home she thought, What have I got myself into? Explaining to Ken, squaring it with Dolly, and hadn’t she always said she
hated pharmacy? But it would only be a couple of days here and there. The money would make a big difference. And if she was truthful, the idea of being out in the world again—just now and then—was exciting. Christopher was a year old and she’d been with him night and day for that year. She’d loved every minute. But while she was a mother, she was also a person. Dolly wasn’t a warm grandma, but Christopher would be safe with her. Soon enough Dolly would take off again, and the chance to make a few pounds would go with her.

  Ken had made good money as a worker. There’d been all sorts of perks with overtime and tool allowances. At his father’s practice he made much less. He didn’t have the knack of buttering up the old folk who came in to have a look at their will and a long yarn about nothing much. They still asked for old Mr Gee, not the new Mr Gee who was a bit too brisk. When money did come in you never knew how long you’d have to make it last. Clients might pay their account straight away, or not for months.

  She made light of her plan to Ken, pretended she was missing the pharmacy work, needed to keep her hand in. You had to save a man’s pride, she thought. It turned out that his pride didn’t need protecting. As long as Nance was home at both ends of the day, what she did in between wasn’t his concern.

  Leaving Christopher on the first morning was agonising. His face contorted with entreaty, his eyes locked on hers, his arms stretched out pathetically. She got to the end of the street and had to turn back, crept along the side path and there he was out the back with Dolly, pushing his wagon about on the grass. His cheeks were still shiny with tears but all his new teeth were showing in a smile at his own cleverness.

  She slipped back into the work as if she’d never stopped: taking the script and seeing at a glance what the doctor wanted, going to the bottles to mix up the stuff, smiling at the customers and listening to them complain about their rheumatism. She loved the bustle of the shop, the way you had to be thinking all the time, because everyone who came in had a different problem. Catching sight of herself in the weighing-machine mirror, pink-cheeked with pleasure after seeing off someone else singing her praises, she amazed herself. She’d always hated pharmacy. So why was she seeing the face of a happy woman in the little circle of mirror?

  Impressive, Mr Felton said, and smiled warmly into her eyes. She could see he liked her. She wasn’t interested, but, oh, it felt good to have a man look at you admiringly. Mrs Gee, you’re an impressive woman, he said. She didn’t get much of that at home.

  Two months later Dolly announced she was going to Walgett to help in the pub that Auntie Rose had leased there. Walgett was a long way away, right out in the west of the state. Nance waved her off with no regrets. The work had been energising, and not too much of it, a few days here and there. She’d proved that she could still work, and enjoy it. What should come next had gradually made itself clear to her. She didn’t want Christopher to be an only child. It was time to make sure he had a brother or sister. That bond she had with Max and especially with Frank was precious. No one should go through life without something like it.

  She was surprised that Ken readily agreed. It made her think that he must really love Christopher in his own way. He can’t show the feelings, she decided, but he must have them. And the reality was that whether they had one child or two wasn’t going to make any difference to him. His life would still be elsewhere. She’d be the one looking after the new child, as she’d been the one doing everything for Christopher.

  The new baby was due around Christmas 1943. The pains started after they’d come home from Christmas lunch at the Gees’. Dolly had come to stay with them again, just till the baby was born, so Nance put Christopher to bed, and she and Ken started walking to the little hospital round the corner where she was booked in. It was only a few blocks but she realised she was cutting it fine. The pains came every minute or so, making her stop and lean against someone’s fence until they passed. Cars rushed along and whirled the grit up in their wake, the pain came on her in a huge unfriendly gripe. She turned to Ken but he was standing apart from her, looking off up the road. The pain was taking the words away but she wanted to shout, Put your arm around me! Take my hand, anything, but be a human being!

  He was embarrassed, she understood that. He was frightened too. The baby might come there and then on the footpath on King Street, Ashfield, and he’d have to do something that he didn’t know how to do. But she was frightened too, and what sort of person could turn aside at such a time?

  They got to the hospital in time and Stephen was born on Boxing Day. Christopher had been a restless baby, whereas Stephen lay in her arms watching her, thoughtful and serene. What a humbling mystery it was, the way the sperm and the egg from the same couple could produce two such different new humans. You had to do your best for whatever person nature presented you with. But you weren’t completely responsible for the person the baby grew into, because that person was there from the beginning.

  By the time Stephen was six months old Nance had come to accept that Ken didn’t love her. Something had shifted in her the night he’d stood aside on the way to the hospital and nothing had happened since then to shift it back. He’d never told her he loved her, not once in three years of marriage. Admire and esteem was as close as he’d ever got. The wit and charm were still there, and the warm beam of it was still directed at others. But not to her.

  Sometimes he was so distant she thought there must be another woman. She asked him one day but he seemed astonished. Astonished, or a wonderful actor? It was beneath her dignity to spy. Another woman would only bring a literal dimension to what was true in spirit: she couldn’t touch any true emotion in him.

  In anger sometimes she wondered if he’d only married her because she was a pharmacist and could earn money. Or because all his friends were getting married. He liked the idea of her, she thought, rather than the reality of the person she was.

  At other times she blamed herself. Her face was too big, her hair was too thin, her eyes were too small. She wasn’t feminine enough. She was too bossy, too much of a know-all, she argued too much.

  In the end, though, she always returned to the same truth: she could only be the person she was. She’d thought that would be enough, and he must have thought so too. If that was turning out to be wrong, no one was to blame. He’d never pretended, never promised anything. She was the one who’d pretended. She’d told herself that he wasn’t loving towards her only because he didn’t know how to be, that his cold upbringing had made him frightened of showing feelings. Now she was prepared to face the facts: needing to be loved, she’d invented a love in him that he didn’t feel. She had to face something else, too: she still loved him, even though the cloth of her love had been rubbed into holes by his indifference.

  She thought again about leaving but again she drew back. It was too drastic to deprive the boys of their father. From her own life she knew that children without a proper home life had the feeling they were second-class citizens. Always apologising about something. She thought it was why she’d picked the wrong man: she hadn’t had enough experience of love. She didn’t want to do that to her children. It was better to sacrifice one generation and break the cycle of unhappy unsettled adults having unhappy unsettled children. And, if you did that, you had to do it with your whole heart. Not do what her mother had done: stay, but taint all the lives around you with your unhappiness. Not being loved was a bleak and chronic pain like a toothache. But admitting and even accepting it let you become a person again. Not being loved didn’t have to stop you. You had to get on and live your life around that fact.

  There were times, too, when the marriage was companionable. A book or a film could set the two of them off on a conversation, let them take pleasure in engaging with each other’s minds. Sometimes, Nance felt a good old argument about a film was the best part of their marriage. If I can’t have love, she thought, I’m willing to settle for a companion.

  Above all, the children made sense of everything. She might not be happy, but natur
e didn’t care about happiness. It only cared about putting the right egg together with the right sperm. She and Ken had come together thinking it was because they liked each other, but something more primitive was at work, something that allowed each to recognise the other as good mating material. All those frogs puffing out their throats, bowerbirds collecting blue things, pigeons strutting and bobbing: it was all right to admit that this particular breeding pair wasn’t so far removed from them.

  THIRTEEN

  AS CHRISTOPHER got older there were problems with Mrs MacFadyean, the landlady in the other half of the house. She’d thump on the wall and pass Nance on the side path with a glare. Mrs Gee, that child is uncontrollable. It didn’t seem to Nance that Christopher was doing anything worse than a normal three-year-old could be expected to do. He made a bit of noise sometimes, and he’d pulled up one of her salvias. She shushed him as much as she could, and replaced the salvia. After Stephen was born Mrs MacFadyean was even crankier. Some mothers shouldn’t even have one child let alone two to run wild, she told the woman over the fence, plenty loud enough. Nance wanted to say, They’re lively clever children, Mrs MacFadyean, do you wish yours were lively and clever too?

  Every Saturday she went through the classifieds but nothing for rent was ever right for them. People wanted a tidy single woman or a quiet business couple. Landlords could pick and choose because there’d been no new housing built for four years, and people were flooding into Sydney for the war work. She rang about one place, just on the off-chance. The woman sounded friendly. And what about a child? Nance asked. She thought she’d better not say there were two. On no account, the woman said. No children.

  At last, one Saturday in June 1944, she saw Nicely furnished cottage to let, close to bus, Wishart, Crescent Road, Mona Vale. Mona Vale was north of the city, on the coast, the suburb before Newport, where Dolly had run Beach House when Nance was six. It was a long way out, but there was a bus. Back then, Bert had come from the grocery shop on a Friday night by bus. He’d told her that when it got to Bushranger’s Hill it had to turn around and go up backwards because the hill was so steep. It was one of those little things you remembered from your childhood but now she wondered, Had he been fooling her? The memory brought back the smell of salt in the air, the rumble of the surf, the way the afternoon nor’easter made Pittwater roughen and sparkle.

 

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