One Life

by Kate Grenville

  Ken frowned down at the newspaper. She watched his face, that surface she knew so well, that showed so little. What calculation was going on in his mind that would end in a yes or a no?

  There’ll be a bus in twenty minutes, he said. Think we can make it?

  When they got to the place in Crescent Road they were shocked, there must have been forty people milling about on the front lawn. Mr Wishart was frowning and laughing at the same time. So many! he kept exclaiming. So many people! Nance could see he had no idea how to play God for one lucky person. He was some kind of Continental, with his hair combed straight back the way they did, and his head a square sort of shape. You could hear the accent but his English was all right. Poor man, he was overwhelmed.

  Ken went over to talk to him. He pointed at Nance standing with the boys and she smiled. Mr Wishart smiled back and she saw the glint of gold in a tooth.

  No good, Ken said when he joined her again. All these people. We weren’t even the first.

  He took Christopher by the hand and turned away. Oh, you Strathfield types, she thought. Going by the rules and giving up at the first hurdle! She rammed the pram up the bumpy grass, good thing Stephen was such a patient baby, because he was being bounced around like a cabbage in a basket.

  Ah, Mr Wishart, she called, and he came down the steps smiling.

  Call me Louis, dear, he said.

  We’ve got a place, she said. It’s only that the landlady doesn’t like the children. But if you gave us your place, we could give someone ours. Then two people would be happy, not just one.

  She knew all the other people must have a place too, unless they were living in caves. But it gave Louis what he needed, a reason to pick one person and not another. It was settled, and what came next should have been her handing over a deposit.

  Oh, we came without any money, she cried. She was starting to panic. She’d been so clever but now she’d lose the place! I’ll leave you my coat, she said. Look, it’s good wool, I’ll leave you that.

  She was taking it off, but Louis stopped her and pulled the coat back up her arm. Took his time settling the collar. She felt his hand against her hair.

  No need for that, dear, he said. If a man can’t trust a woman, what’s life worth?

  The house in Crescent Road was a little weatherboard place, dunny out the back, the only hot water the chip heater in the bathroom, singing clouds of mosquitoes as soon as the sun slid down behind the ridge. But it was paradise after the gritty streets of Ashfield. She loved being out among trees, each one as individual as a person, the kookaburras lined up along a branch watching you, and that holiday feel of salt in the air. She never tired of the way the light moved over the water and the bush, the big sky with its endless drama of clouds and sunsets.

  Mona Vale was mostly market gardens and poultry farms. The milkman still used a horse and cart to deliver. His name was Homer but he was no bard, only an ignorant man who called the Hawkesbury the Oxborough the way Dolly did. You could get extra butter from him, black market, but Nance stayed on the straight and narrow because of Frank. Half a pound of under-the-counter butter now and then wasn’t going to make any difference to the war effort, but it would be like taunting the gods.

  It was an inconvenient sort of place. There was a grocery shop within walking distance, but for everything else you had to get the bus. If you went north to Newport there was a butcher, and Buford’s where they ran a flag up when the ice had arrived from the ice-works, and the barber who gave you a penny back if he nicked your ear. South, in the village of Mona Vale, there were a few more shops, but the nearest pharmacy was all the way down at Narrabeen. She got to know Mr Quinn, the pharmacist there. He was older than she was but they’d had some of the same instructors at university. He didn’t remember Charlie Gledhill, but he knew the Enmore Pharmacy. Every time she went into the shop he’d say, Fancy a job then, Mrs Gee? They’d have a laugh, Nance with a child on each hand.

  It took Ken over an hour on buses to get to his father’s office in Auburn. Now and then he stayed in town overnight, with his parents, he said, or with Laurie or Jim. She didn’t let herself wonder. In the late afternoon she’d take the boys to meet him at the bus stop, the same way her mother had taken her and her brothers to meet their father on a Friday afternoon. The boys would run to Ken and he’d swing them up into his arms. Seeing the three of them together, she knew she was right to stay.

  He never complained about the long bus ride. In fact she thought it was the remoteness of Mona Vale, its foreign feeling, that freed something in him. No one in the Strathfield house would have dreamed of picking up a hammer or getting their hands dirty growing vegetables, but at Mona Vale he took the skills he’d learned as a dilutee tradesman and made them into the pleasure of his free time. He designed a chook house, drawing with his thick builder’s pencil on the back of an envelope. The idea was to give it wheels so you could push it to a new piece of ground every so often. Nance thought it would be too heavy to move. She told herself to hold her tongue. Ken let the boys help, showing them how to use the bit and brace, sympathising when they missed with the hammer.

  The chook house looked magnificent but it sank to the axles in the soft ground as she’d thought it would. Untroubled, Ken found another envelope and started to sketch another idea.

  That’s the difference between us, she thought. For me, a project is about making something work. For Ken, it’s the pleasure of nutting out the physics of it. The chook house was like Trotsky’s revolution: a lovely theory that fell apart in the real world.

  One night he came home driving a strange-looking car with a square cabin at the front with space for two people and tapering away to a point at the back. He boasted about what a bargain it had been and what a good car it was. It’s an Essex Super Six, Nance! A sports car!

  But the boys, Ken, she said. Where are they going to go?

  Oh, I’ll cut them a dicky seat in the back, he said.

  She thought he was joking and walked off so he wouldn’t see how cranky she was. What was the use, the money was spent now. But at the weekend he got to work with the cold chisel and the hacksaw and finally had a hole big enough to slip in a wooden box for a seat. It looked strange but she had to admit it worked. The boys thought it was wonderful, squashed in there with the slipstream making their hair stand on end.

  As Ken tinkered away with his projects she’d hear him singing softly, The people’s flag is deepest red, or murmuring to himself. It was like hearing two old friends having a conversation. She was coming to see that he was most at ease on his own. Something in him had been driven underground by that family life where he’d always been the odd man out.

  He taught her to drive. He was a good teacher, methodical and patient. It didn’t seem hard, the co-ordination on the clutch no more complicated than working the Singer. The Essex had been adapted to run on kerosene because of petrol rationing and it stalled easily. You had to get out, fold the bonnet back and prime the carby. That wasn’t as hard as you might think, once you were shown. Give credit where it’s due, she thought, Ken isn’t one of those men who keeps a wife helpless.

  When she went to do the driving test she put the boys in the dicky seat, but Stephen was upset about something and couldn’t stop crying. The policeman was a kindly older man. Oh, give me the little one, he said, so Stephen perched on his knee while she did the test. People complain about women drivers, the policeman said, signing the certificate. Far as I’m concerned they’re worth a dozen show-off men. Best of luck, Mrs Gee.

  They got to know Louis Wishart well. He was renting them the cottage because his wife had gone off with another man and he wanted to keep things going in case she came back. He was German, he’d jumped ship twenty years before. Now he lived in a little place across the road from the cottage on a couple of acres he owned, and grew tomatoes in hothouses.

  He was cheerful and friendly, liked a laugh, kept them supplied with tomatoes. Taught Christopher and Stephen some German swear words an
d thought it was a great joke to hear them shouting Himmel donnerwetter! It’s only like damn and blast, Nance, he said. Nothing bad, I promise.

  Louis’ place had no hot water, so he’d knock on their door on a Saturday afternoon, have a bath and spruce himself up ready for a night at the Newport Arms. He was a dapper fellow, liked to wear a suit and tie even at the Arms. It was the Continental way, Nance thought. She’d be aware of him lying in the water, imagined him soaping the hair on his chest. She’d hear when he pulled out the plug and sluiced down the bath. The room was always immaculate after he’d used it.

  He’d come out washed, shaved and in his suit, and have a beer with Nance and Ken. He was a communist, so he and Ken had plenty to talk about. Ken enjoyed showing off how much more he knew about Marx than Louis did. Loved to prove him wrong on some point of theory. Louis didn’t argue, just smiled and nodded. When he told them about how terrible things had been in the Germany he’d left, so much worse than it had ever been in Australia, she saw that, for him, communism was a belief too deep to need logic. She understood that. Ken could always win an argument, but that didn’t mean he was always right.

  There were evenings when she felt Louis was in no hurry to get away. They’d have the wireless playing and, when dance music came on, Louis would stand up, click his heels and put out his hand to Nance. At the end of the dance he’d take her to Ken and Ken would get up and dance too. How dancing reveals a person, she thought. Ken held her formally, used his hands and elbows to lead. Not as good as Astaire, but in the same elegant mathematical style. Louis gathered her in, used his whole body to show her what he had in mind, smiled comfortably as he danced.

  He told them one evening that, when the war started, he’d got a grilling from Special Branch. They thought he was a Nazi because he went to the German club in the city. I told them I was only going there for the girls, he said, but they didn’t believe me. So I did the foxtrot for them in their office. My word, that did it. They knew a Nazi could never dance like that!

  So do all German men dance as well as you do, Louis? Nance asked.

  He looked affronted. Certainly not, he said. Most German men dance like sausages. In a bun. With sauerkraut and mustard!

  And you, Louis, she said, what do you dance like?

  A glass of champagne, he said. He said it the French way, a soft flourish of a word. Plenty of bubbles and love, and no headache in the morning.

  Homer told them that nearby Waterview Street was called the Mad Half Mile because all the people who lived there were pinkos and artists. It turned out that Ken and Nance knew one of those pinkos, Guido Baracchi. He’d been in the party with Ken, had been Comrade Barker. Nance had never much cared for him, in spite of his courtly European manners, but she liked his wife Ula. She’d been a nurse, was a sensible clever woman. She had a little girl from a husband she’d left when she went off with Guido. A perfectly nice man, Ula called that abandoned husband, and Nance thought she heard the tone of regret.

  Guido and Ula were hospitable and invited Ken and Nance to meet the other Mad Half Mile people. Arthur Murch was a painter. He’d brought along a picture he’d done of his wife. Nance thought it was a very good painting, but she wondered how his wife could be so calm with everyone looking at her naked up on the wall. She just said, Look, hasn’t Arthur given me a nice bosom? Better than my f lea bites! Arthur had trained as an engineer but painting was his passion.

  His wife’s name was Ria. When she introduced herself to Nance she put out her hand to shake, like a man. I’m Ria, she said. Not diarrhoea, not gonorrhoea, just Ria. Until her children were born Ria had worked for one of the city papers as a journalist. Oh, Ria was the breadwinner, Arthur said proudly. And will be again, unless someone decides I’m Michelangelo! That was new to Nance: not the idea of the woman as breadwinner, but the man not being ashamed of it.

  Weaver Hawkins was a painter too, but apparently quite famous and, unlike Arthur, he made a living from his art. He was a modest quiet man with something wrong with his hands, he’d been wounded in the first war. He introduced himself and his wife Rene by saying, We are rationalists, socialists and nonconformists. He was English, had that crisp upper-class way of talking, but he and Rene wore funny drapy clothes and great clunky homemade sandals. Nonconformist. Did that just mean Methodist?

  Nance was out of her depth. She’d never heard of Annie Besant or Henry Moore. But she liked these people. They never made her feel foolish. They were honest and straightforward and didn’t care about doing things the way everyone else did them. She thought they had the right idea, living for their art, their beliefs and the pleasures of life. Her parents had put money-making at the centre of their lives because they didn’t know anything else to put there, and where had it got them? An unhappy marriage, unhappy children, and then they’d lost the lot.

  I suppose they all think of themselves as bohemians, Ken said on the way home, and he gave the word a mocking slant. That was what he’d have liked to be, she thought. Fearless and free-thinking. It was what the Trotsky time had been about. He loved to be the one running against the herd.

  During the week she spent a lot of time with the women from the Mad Half Mile. They’d take their children swimming in the shallows at the end of Mona Vale Beach or wind down the track for a picnic at Bungan Beach. Nance watched to see how they did things, because she was making up motherhood as she went along. Her own childhood had given only the certainty that she didn’t want to repeat what had been done to her. The other mothers weren’t sure either. It was a bond, sharing the doubts and the dilemmas. Perhaps there was no right way, she decided. There were certainly wrong ways, and she’d had that. Still, children did survive. She had, after all.

  Her two boys were so different in temperament—there were days when it seemed they’d never stop arguing, one provoking the other, the moment ending in tears and each saying the other did it. She never hit them, though her mother and father had hit her. But when she was at the end of her tether she heard her voice go like Dolly’s, the voice that had made her shrink as a child. She hated herself for it, but it worked. The boys’ little faces closed, they looked at her sideways, fearfully, and for a while they stopped squabbling.

  The other mothers were happy to let the afternoon drift past, chatting about nothing much, watching the breakers swell, bulge, break, run out into foam, then pull back and start all over again. Nance loved those times too, but there was always a gap between her and the others. As the women sat there, moving the umbrella to chase the shade, she’d start to feel restless. She wanted to be doing. She might start to think about the possum fence she was going to try to rig up to keep her lettuce safe—could she get some chicken wire from somewhere? Homer might know a farmer who had a bit out the back she could get cheap or swap for some eggs, but that mightn’t work because everyone had eggs. Perhaps she could knit them a pair of socks. Not everyone knew how to turn a heel.

  There wasn’t much money around, and with the war on you couldn’t buy things. But she enjoyed the problems. Like Ken, she loved kneading away at a difficulty, loved to have a project. The other mothers didn’t seem to be driven in the same way. Was this the same dangerous restlessness that warped Dolly’s life? Always looking for a way to make things better, and ending up making them worse?

  Rene got appendicitis and had to be rushed to the hospital down at Manly. Weaver and Guido visited her together every day. Weaver couldn’t drive and Guido had a Manpower job driving a Ve-Toy Biscuits delivery truck. Nance wanted to do something for Rene, so she gave Weaver oranges from their tree to take to her in the hospital.

  A few days later Weaver came round to their place with a painting he’d done of Bungan Beach.

  A little thing to say thank you, Nance, for your kindness, he said. Rene was very appreciative. And so was I.

  Nance was embarrassed. The painting was more than she deserved for a few oranges!

  She’d never owned a real painting before. Not just a painting, she thought: a work
of art. She looked at it so closely, she realised she’d never really looked at a painting before. Sometimes when Ken had been dealing with the hecklers in the Domain she’d wandered over to the art gallery, but nothing she’d seen had anything to do with her life. This was different. Bungan Beach was one of the boys’ favourite picnic spots, and she loved it too. She’d scramble down the rough track, through the scrappy windswept bushes, the boys running along ahead. She loved the place, but she’d never thought of it as something you’d paint a picture of. It wasn’t Venice, or Paris, or any of the places the art gallery was full of.

  Weaver had caught the exact feel of the beach she loved. With a thump of recognition she saw the track, the coarse golden sand. You could just about smell the salt. Yet it wasn’t like a photo. Weaver had moved the track so it wound down the slope differently, had brought the headland closer. It was as if he’d seen past the surface to the essence of the place, some truth beyond the real. She felt as if she was seeing that familiar landscape for the first time.

  If you looked closely you could see the white paper that Weaver had left to make the foam on the waves. The painting was a window onto Bungan Beach but it was also just coloured water. You could see how it had been done, and that showed you the mind of the man doing it. It was a picture of his thoughts as much as a picture of a landscape. She’d have liked to talk about it with him, but was shy of making a fool of herself. She didn’t know the proper words for any of it. And you might not be supposed to notice the white paper.