One Life

by Kate Grenville

Nance wanted to find Wal Ward so she could talk to a man who’d known Frank, who’d been his friend through so much suffering. Wanted to find Ernie Chapman, too. Would have gone down on her knees to thank him. But Bert hadn’t thought to get any addresses. Wal Ward had walked away down the drive of Green Hills and disappeared into a world full of hundreds of other men called Ward or Chapman.

  One Sunday she took the boys down to Mona Vale Beach, the shallow part among the rocks where the water was still. Lay back on the sand, closed her eyes so the world was the red of her eyelids, the thump and rattle of the waves sliding up the beach, the cries of the gulls. She might have slept for a moment. When she opened her eyes the world was colourless, white shapes and black shapes, unfamiliar, sinister. Where were the boys?

  Nance lurched to her feet, stumbled in a panic down to the water’s edge. They could be anywhere, sunk to the bottom with their lives ticking away. The noise of the surf covered everything. Stop, she thought, for God’s sake, stop so I can hear them! She waded in, pushing against the solid dead mass that pushed back, heading to the shadowed part under the rocks where the water was dark and evil.

  Then they were there, two shining brown bodies up on the rocks, running along with their hands full of something, tossing them into the air—shells, they must be—and screaming with laughter to see them rain down onto the still water. She stood watching them, stroking the surface of the water with her palms. It was silky, soft against her skin, a part of the lovely merciful world that had not taken her boys.

  Later they came to where she was under the umbrella and lay on each side of her, their skins goose-bumped from the cold water. They fell asleep and for a long time she looked at the small things about them. The way the salt was drying on Christopher’s arm in delicate lacework. The way Stephen’s hair grew from two crowns, so that the hairs spiralled softly away from each centre like something stilled in the middle of moving.

  Frank’s hair had grown like that, from two crowns. Dolly had said it meant you were good at arithmetic. Like a gift, the thought came to her: Frank wasn’t gone. He was right here, part of his nephews. The boys had some of Ken, and they had some of her. Through her they had some of Frank, too. The world had taken Frank, but it had given her these two. And a few minutes ago it had given them to her all over again.

  She had to live the life that Frank had been robbed of. Live it in handfuls. Live all the possibilities, not turn away too timid or too sad or too weary, because that was the best way to honour Frank.

  FIFTEEN

  ULA BOUGHT the cottage and Nance drove to the city to order the stock. When she was near Central, in the middle of a complicated five-way intersection where three other cars were dithering about who should go first, the Essex stalled. She tried to look unconcerned, opening the door, getting down, folding back the bonnet. But as soon as she got out, horns started to blare and the men in other cars shouted at her. She closed her ears to the words, got the thing fiddled with, folded the bonnet back down, prayed the car would start. A man would have been forgiven, she thought, but not a woman.

  At Faulding’s the man behind the counter sent for the boss and the boss came down to have a look at this woman who thought she could start a pharmacy. Not buy one already going, not go into it with her husband—start it on her own! Nance had brought her new Certificate of Registration and it was good she had, because he asked to see it. He read every word, held it up to the light as if it must be a forgery.

  Newport! He said. Too small. You won’t be open a week.

  In the end he had to give her the stock. But he wouldn’t let her have it on credit. She knew pharmacists never paid cash, but he wouldn’t budge. Sorry, madam, cash payment only, he kept saying. Oh, how she hated being called madam!

  She got the little they could afford. Ula’s daughter Deirdre turned out to have a knack for arranging things so they looked more than they were. It was Deirdre who had the idea of filling some of the empty pharmacy bottles. Sand, cut-up leaves, gumnuts squashed on the back step with a hammer. Put them along the shelves with a nice label in Latin and who was to know what was in them?

  In the week before the shop opened, Ken nailed up signs everywhere: Pharmacy Opening Monday. He was a poor sort of a husband in many ways. But he didn’t despise women the way so many men did. When she’d told him about the man in Faulding’s, he’d called the fellow a maggot. He built the shelves in the shop, found a second-hand counter and hired a truck to get it up to Newport. It wasn’t only that he wanted the money she was going to make. It was as he’d told her all those years ago: he admired her and esteemed her for having a profession, and for being a pioneer. He was proud of her and respected her for throwing aside convention.

  She thought it might be what he’d married her for: her difference from the traditional idea of a woman. That included things he didn’t know how to deal with—how she wanted more from him, emotionally, than he could give—but it also included her drive, her ambition, her ingenuity. In a way, she thought, it was the man in her that he liked.

  On the day in October 1946 that Nance and Ula opened the doors, three customers were already waiting outside. A few minutes later a mother came in with her little boy and Ula did a lovely neat job of the big cut on his knee. Nance was on the go all day, out the back with the mortar, racing to get the stuff into the pill machine, the pills scooped into the bottle. She’d hear the shop door ping and ping again, and a swell of noise in the front room like a party, except it was customers waiting to be served.

  At the end of the first week they could hardly believe the figures. Oh, you’d expect a rush at the start, the man at Faulding’s said when Nance came back for more stock. Flash in the pan, mark my words.

  Within a month the order was getting so big that it wasn’t safe to carry so much cash. He had to give in and let her have credit. But no man would ever admit he was wrong, she thought. He always found something disparaging to say, and if all else failed he could come the big I-am in the yard getting the Essex started.

  The shop opened at nine and shut at five during the week, and four hours on a Saturday morning. At first they didn’t open on Sunday but people came round to the house and in the end it was easier to open for an hour, so it was seven days a week. Still, compared to the hours at Enmore it was heaven. Ula was a good nurse and was often called out to a job. Then Nance was on her own in the shop. How could she nut out the doctor’s terrible handwriting on the script, dispense a dose of chlorodyne, weigh Mrs Phelan’s baby and serve the woman wanting calomine lotion, all at the same time, and keep smiling the way a shopkeeper should?

  Part of the problem was that a pharmacy could only be open if the registered pharmacist was on the premises. When Nance slipped over the road to the butcher to get something for dinner she was breaking the law. The inspector who’d signed the Certificate of Compliance, Pharmaceutical Premises had made no secret of his belief that a woman’s place was at home. He’d spent two hours in the shop, getting out his tape measure to make sure the dispensing bench was the regulation size, measuring the flow of water from the tap, checking that the British Pharmacopoeia was on the premises as by law it had to be. He even took it over to the window, peering to check that it was the right edition. He’d love the chance to close her down.

  Dolly did as she’d promised, kept the house clean and got the tea on the table. But there was so much else! Nance felt some days that her brain would explode. They’d run out of sultanas, vanilla, sugar. Christopher had grown out of his shoes, the basket was full of mending, Mr Goldsworthy’s account was overdue, and she’d have to speak to the delivery boy about always being late. Oh, and mousetraps. And she hadn’t reconciled the cheque-book for two weeks. She was a woman running ahead of a whirlwind.

  She’d prepared herself for that. What took her by surprise was an uneasiness that was first cousin to guilt. When she was with the boys, half of her mind was still with the shop. But when she was in the shop she thought of the boys, their precious childhoods racing
past. She loved her children but she loved to be out in the world too. How did you divide yourself?

  When the magazine came home from Lakehouse School she was proud that the cover was a linocut by Stephen, a train with a hill and the sun rising, or perhaps setting. Christopher had a long story about flying in an aeroplane. He’d never been in an aeroplane but he’d imagined it vividly, a wonderful story for a boy only five years old. The ending was a jolt, though. Soon when we got home Mummy went to work the day after. Daddy had to go to his office to make money and Mummy made a lot of money at her shop. He didn’t mean it as a reproach. But she had to fight the feeling that it was.

  The shop had been going five months when Dolly told her she was leaving. Oh, Mum, why, Nance said, wanting to shout, But you promised! It’s the everyday, Dolly said. You know, every day the same. It was what Nance had seen in her childhood: her mother’s craving for change and challenge. There was no point arguing. It was her own fault, for fooling herself that this time would be different.

  With her mother gone, the whirlwind caught up with Nance. It was half-past five by the time she got home with the boys. The house cold, the breakfast dishes not washed, and nothing to cook for tea unless she’d been able to snatch a moment during the day to slip out and get something. The boys tired and cranky, falling asleep in their dirty clothes, and no clean ones for the next day, and her white coat too dirty to go again but the other one still not dry.

  When she said, Ken, I can’t do it all on my own, he was astonished. But I help, he said. I help all the time!

  I don’t want help, she said. I want someone to think ahead the way I have to, and do it without me having to ask. Not just help! Afterwards she was sorry she’d spoken so harshly. She was in the right, but if she wasn’t grateful for his help he mightn’t do even the little he did. She thought, If it was me on my own I could go on strike, but the children are his hostages.

  There was something wrong with the whole set-up, but she couldn’t step back from it far enough to see what it was. She couldn’t even seem to find the right words to talk about it. It was as if the situation was too strange or new for there to be a language to describe it. When she tried to explain, Ken said, What, do you want me to be the wife? And you the husband? She was silenced.

  The winter school holiday was approaching. Lakehouse would be closed for three weeks. She asked everyone she knew if they could think of anyone who’d mind the boys. She put up notices in all the shop windows in Newport and Mona Vale. It was worth her whole profit to find someone and it would only be for three weeks, so she offered good money.

  Ken told her that in Russia the government set up creches so women could go to work knowing their children would be properly cared for. Shame there’s nothing like that here, isn’t it, he said. That was the extent of his engagement with the problem.

  Finally a woman responded. Nance didn’t take to her, she was a huge slatternly woman, broken shoes and the kind of nose that suggested too much of the bottle. She’d look after the boys, but she’d only do it at her place. Nance had no choice. The school was closing the next day.

  Each day when she picked the boys up from the woman’s house their faces were pale and strained. The fourth day she stopped the car, took Stephen on her lap and put her arm around Christopher. It all came out. The woman was shutting them in a cupboard to keep them quiet.

  She had to take them with her to the shop. They’d be in the back room, and it would be all right for the first hour or two. Stephen would make cubbies out of toilet-paper rolls and Christopher would work on his model plane. Then they’d start to squabble. She’d have to drop whatever she was doing to sort it out. When Ula was there she could help, but if she was out on a nursing job it was impossible.

  School went back, but then there was a cold snap and both the boys got sick. She made a nest for them out in the back room, and went in to see to them when she could. But everyone else was sick too and the shop had never been so busy. Ula was away all day, banging people on the back to bring up the phlegm.

  The boys lay like foundlings in their nest of cushions and blankets on the f loor, watching their mother come in and out, in and out, with never the time to sit with them. At the end of the day, when she picked Stephen up, she saw that his cushions had separated. The poor thing had been lying on the boards. Why didn’t you say? she asked, and heard her voice sounding sharper than she’d meant.

  She knew why he hadn’t said anything. He had protected her from his need because he’d seen how harassed she was. She stood in the back room holding him, a hot weight in her arms, and saw that her children must be coming to feel that the shop mattered more than they did. They were being bundled around with whoever would have them, parked away wherever they’d be quiet enough to let her work. It wasn’t what a loving parent did.

  If the business hadn’t been so successful she’d have been able to manage. It was a sad irony. She’d thought she could make it work, but she’d been wrong.

  The pharmacist Ula found to buy Nance out could hardly believe his luck. Nance tried to smile as she shook his hand. He was already behind the counter—her counter!—starting his first day in a lovely starched white coat. He had a wife at home, naturally, to do the washing and the starching. Not to mention the shopping and the dinners, and sweeping the floors and looking after the children.

  It was hard to walk away from the thing that had got her living again after Frank’s death. She couldn’t face going home straight away and walked down to the beach, took off her shoes so she could feel the coarse yellow sand between her toes, sat on the dune among the pale stringy grass. The waves rolled in, each one different and each one the same. It was good not to think about anything, not to do anything but watch. Big waves and small ones, crooked ones and long straight ones. Waves swelling and folding under themselves, a neat quick line of foam running and disappearing, and always another one behind it, swelling and glittering and folding under itself.

  By the time she got up and brushed the sand off the back of her skirt she could see it all in a better light. She’d made seven hundred pounds. After less than a year, that was what the goodwill had been worth! It would give them most of what they needed for a modest house. Something else: she’d proved it could be done. A woman could open a pharmacy and make decent money. She’d proved that she was that woman. She’d done it once, she could do it again. She just had to be patient. When you’re a woman, she thought, you can do everything. Just not all at the same time.

  SIXTEEN

  THEY GOT a couple of builders to quote. Six hundred pounds was the lowest, and that was only for the labour, no materials. They see a professional man, think they can get away with anything, Ken said. I know the tricks these grimy-handed toilers get up to. Oh, how he loved giving a sardonic twist now to the old Trotskyite phrases.

  He had an idea even more outlandish than a woman starting a pharmacy: they’d build the house themselves. Why not, he said. Remember, Nance, I’m not only a lawyer, I’m a Dilutee Fitter and Turner too! He was laughing at himself, but she knew him well enough now to see he was going to do it. She thought the two of them weren’t so very different. If things were in line by a few more degrees they might have had a happy marriage.

  He sent away for a dense little book, How to Build Your Own Home, and one Saturday in March 1948 he brought the mattock down into the soft dark soil. He made a little ceremony of it: the Turning of the First Sod. She turned the second. They helped Christopher do the third and Stephen the fourth. Other families go to church together, she thought, or play charades together. The Gee family turns the first sod together.

  By the time Ken went back to Sullivans on the Monday the trenches were dug, but that was the only easy part. Building materials were still in short supply after the war and there were no bricks to be had for the foundations. That was Chapter Two, ‘Footings and Piers’. The trench filled up with rainwater and weeds sprouted along the edges. She had to remind herself that it was no more absurd to imagin
e a house rising up from those puddles than it had been to imagine a pharmacy at Newport.

  One Saturday, Ken came in with a bucket full of rough clay. Look, Nance, he said. Got this down by Louis’ creek. The Medes and Persians did it. Or was it the Israelites?

  There was nothing in How to Build Your Own Home about making your own bricks but you could put together a surprising amount of information from Exodus. All that time at the convent hadn’t been a waste after all. She went off to Homer’s dairy and arranged for him to deliver a bale of straw. She pretended it was for strawberries.

  Ken made two wooden moulds for what he proudly called the prototypes and they mixed up the clay and the straw. The boys loved it: mud pies with a purpose. The next Saturday, when the bricks were as dry as the sun could make them, Ken put them in the kitchen oven. A couple of hours later he took one out. It looked like a real brick but it crumbled in his hand.

  It was some bit of a fiddle, Ken never told her the full story, but one day there were the bricks in a tidy stack by the side of the road. He told her he’d been spending his lunch hours during the week watching bricklayers at work. He’d get them in conversation, he boasted, and they’d be so flattered at the interest that they’d show him all the tricks of the trade. Nance saw that it was the lure of the secret world again, one thing on the surface and another hidden away below.

  There was a little smile at the corners of his mouth as he buttered up the end of each brick, tapped it into place with the handle of the trowel and scraped the excess off with a flourish. No doubt about it, she thought. He’d been born into the wrong sort of family. As a bricklayer or a carpenter he’d have been a happier man.

  He did as much as he could that weekend, then he showed Nance how to do it. She was surprised at how easy it was. The mortar was a lovely creamy consistency and laying it on was like icing a cake. On the Monday, when he had to get into his suit and catch the bus into town, she took the boys to school, then came back and put on her overalls and old boots and got to work.