One Life

by Kate Grenville

  All week, people passing stopped to marvel. She’d wave up at them and then go back to work as if there was nothing out of the ordinary. Why shouldn’t a woman lay bricks? The world would never change if someone wasn’t prepared to be the first.

  Ria came one day with scones and a thermos. Nance, you’re a remarkable woman, she said. A really remarkable woman. Nance thought, Well, perhaps I am. She was pleased that the boys were seeing her doing it. They’ll be better husbands, she thought. They’ll know what women are capable of.

  Chapter Three was ‘Timber Framing’, but they couldn’t get timber. People warned her there’d be none, oh, not for years. People were such nay-sayers! Cast your bread upon the waters, she’d say, and pretend not to care.

  The bread upon the waters returned in the form of Mr Ferguson who lived further along the road. He was Ferguson Steel, he was making a fortune, had the best house in the street and three cars. She was standing among the piers one day when he picked his way down the block to her.

  Been watching you do those, he said. Done a bloody good job, Mrs Gee. Listen, I’ll give you a discount on a steel frame. And give you the roof for nothing.

  She smiled up at his silhouette, the sun in her eyes. Was he pulling her leg?

  One condition, he said. You let me take a photo of you and your husband building with the steel. He spread his hands out as if holding up a newspaper. ‘So simple even a lawyer and his wife can do it!’

  When the Sun came, a reporter and a photographer, they made her get up on the roof and pretend to bang away at the nails. ‘Wife Helps to Build Home’, the caption read. What did they mean, help? But in the story Ken said, ‘My wife laid all the brick piers and is helping with the flooring. Through the week she spends her spare time driving nails into the floorboards.’ It made nailing floorboards sound like embroidery, but he’d given her full credit. Many a man wouldn’t have.

  Seeing themselves written up, oddities worth a quarter of a page, made her realise she hadn’t done so badly in choosing Ken. He was disappointing in so many ways. But Wal Glendon wouldn’t have sent away for a book about how to build a house. Nor would Charlie Gledhill. Even if they had, they wouldn’t have been proud of having a wife who could nail floorboards.

  The person they didn’t mention in the Sun was Louis. Once the frame was delivered, Ken employed Louis as a day labourer. Together Louis and Nance came to hate Ferguson’s steel. The frame was like giant Meccano and unforgiving. Ferguson called it nailable steel, and it was, but only with a terrible lot of fiddling around. You had to find the exact slit in the steel. It nipped your fingers and left your hands black with grease.

  Louis spoke to the rotten steel in German. He never shouted but the long lumpy strings of sounds were all the more menacing for that. She remembered that poor teacher at Tamworth High who’d lasted a fortnight. With every language learned, man gains a soul. Louis speaking German was another man, and it was the words of that other language that shaped him. People said German was an ugly language, but listening to Louis talking to the steel she found it mysterious and attractive.

  What are you saying, Louis, she said. Louis had a lovely smile, warm and frank.

  Nance, he said, I could not dirty your ears with what I told this damn stuff.

  What, she said, worse than Himmel donnerwetter? I know you told me damn and blast, but what does it mean, the actual words?

  Himmel, that’s heaven, he said. Donnerwetter, that’s a thunderstorm. He laughed. Heaven thunderstorm! Silly, isn’t it.

  The two of them grew close, working side by side all day. She came to love the way he looked at her when he’d said something funny and was waiting for her to laugh. The joke was a kind of caress at a distance.

  She knew he fancied her, even in the terrible old overalls and the flannel shirt, her hair wrapped in a scarf and her face shiny from the struggle with the steel. He gave her the feeling she hadn’t had for a long time, that she was desirable. A desirable and interesting woman who could make a man laugh and look at her in a tender admiring way. For Louis, the entirety of her was desirable, her body and her mind and the whole muddle of things that made her the person she was.

  They were from the opposite sides of the globe but they were from the same world. Louis’ father was a railway fettler, his mother a peasant who could make anything from a potato. Louis had only had a few years’ schooling, ran away to the merchant navy to escape from a hungry Germany, jumped ship when he got to Sydney. In Australia he’d been a dairy farmer, a butler, an extra in the movies, a tablecloth salesman. He was in awe of Nance’s education, the way she’d been in awe of Ken’s.

  For lunch they’d go down to Louis’ place among the banana trees and boil the kettle on his Primus. She liked his small neat house, one room really, the scrubbed table in the middle with the two chairs and the narrow bed in the corner with the crocheted coverlet. They’d put the wireless on and listen to the news, but one day they were too late for the news and it was dance music. May I have this dance, madame? She loved the way Louis called her madame. Not madam, like those awful men at Faulding’s, but madame in the French way.

  It was the most natural thing in the world to find themselves one day on the bed. Even there, ripening tomatoes lined up on the windowsill beside them, he was making her laugh. Absurd, he mumbled into her shoulder. This nun’s bed! These damn tomatoes watching us! She hadn’t laughed, doing it, since Charlie Gledhill on the blanket out in the bush.

  There was nothing in it. They didn’t even need to have the conversation. They both knew that there was no happiness in her marriage, and that she wasn’t going to leave it, because of the boys. But if she had to live the rest of her life without that loving connection to another human being, she thought, something in her would die, as it had in her mother. If you denied the animal pleasures, the animal bonds, the connection of one soul to another, you were half dead, trudging pointlessly through life. It was life’s power and pleasure moving through her when she lay with Louis, and it would keep her alive.

  No one would ever know and be hurt by what was happening on the nun’s bed. She would make sure of that. It was as they said about lighting one candle from another: one gains everything and the other loses nothing. She and Louis knew the same truth: life was short. It had its hard times and its sad times. All a person could do was to enjoy whatever there was to be enjoyed. Which, for a time in quiet Crescent Road, with the banana leaves scraping together and the magpies carolling, was each other.

  Once the building was finished, so was the closeness. Louis still came up to the new house on a Saturday afternoon to spruce up. Still danced with her in the kitchen. There was an extra, affectionate depth now to the warmth between them. Something lovely had happened. Now it was over. It was exactly as he’d promised: bubbles and love, and no headache in the morning.

  SEVENTEEN

  THEY CALLED the house Bringalilli, in memory of Frank. The place in Queensland had been his first real home since he’d left Rothsay as a boy of seven. This place was the same for her. So many years of pubs, boarding houses, rented places. Other people’s furniture and saucepans, and always the worry at the back of your mind: have we got this week’s rent?

  With no mortgage and no rent, and Ken’s steady money from Sullivans, for the first time in her adult life Nance didn’t have to worry about money. All around her she saw people who’d been through the Depression the way she had, who’d become frightened of spending money. Something in them had become shrunken and fearful. Even when they had plenty, money still ruled their lives. They kept their nice things for best, stinted themselves in small meaningless ways. She’d taken a different lesson from those hard years. When you didn’t have money, you made the best of things. Once you’d gone without, you knew you could manage. But when you had it, you should enjoy it.

  She wasn’t interested in becoming a late-in-the-day lady or in spending money to impress other people. She wanted the kind of small functional luxuries that made ordinary days
a pleasure. Good knives and forks, the feel of quality sheets on the bed, furniture that was comfortable but robust enough that you didn’t have to fiddle around with coasters and antimacassars.

  A piano was still beyond their means, but she found a second-hand pedal organ that she thought would get the boys started, and took them every week to lessons. Took them to the local C of E church most Sundays. Not because she believed in anything beyond the world she knew, but because every child should know the Bible. It was like knowing those lines from Shakespeare and Keats. Without that sense of what other people had created, without a connection to that body of tradition, you were a floating nothing.

  Guyda was right, the boys were reading and writing and doing sums. Still, Nance thought it was time they went to a proper school. Otherwise the rules and regulations of high school would be too much of a shock. The house was halfway between the public school at Newport and the one at Mona Vale, but she heard something about the teacher at Newport that struck her as barbaric, though she’d seen it done in her own childhood: left-handers had that hand tied behind their backs to force them not to write with it.

  The boys started at Mona Vale Public. Each morning she watched them pedal off on their bikes down Crescent Road, out into the world. She saw, with sadness, that family gave meaning to life, but it couldn’t be forever. Your children are just on loan to you, she thought. You have to be worthy of the loan and do your very best for them. Then you have to be willing to let them fly away into their own lives. It wasn’t happening yet, but she could see that it would come. That will be my last gift to them, she thought: to let them go.

  She’d turn back into the house, with nothing much to do until it was time to wait for them at the gate in the afternoon with milk and biscuits ready on the table. She laughed at herself with the other mothers. Oh, I don’t know myself now, she’d say. I’m a lady of leisure! They looked at her strangely when she said it. It took her a while to realise that doing nothing but keeping house and looking after children felt like a holiday to her, but for them it was a full-time job. Lady of leisure. They probably thought she was laughing at them.

  She had time now to read. For a while she bought the women’s magazines, but she soon became impatient with them. Kings and queens! She couldn’t care less. She ended up subscribing to the Saturday Evening Post. She liked the stories and poems and the articles about ideas that were new to her. More than once she thought, I could write a piece about something, but perhaps it was that good writers made it look easy.

  Words had been her first love, Keats in that hot classroom with Mr Crisp, entering the mind of a poet more than a hundred years dead. Mr Crisp had helped her glimpse that literature was more than entertainment. It was a kind of instruction manual for life, circling the great glowing mystery at the centre, the mystery of being human. You were alive for such a short time and then you went back into the great silence. The only ones who didn’t vanish were the artists. While you were reading their words and looking at their pictures they were still alive, and you shared some of their life too.

  Other people had religion to give them a connection to eternity, and good luck to them, but religion was too narrow for her, too unforgiving, too literal. Literature encompassed everything, forbade nothing, endorsed nothing. Writers, like scientists, had the greatest respect for the world as it truly was. Their job wasn’t to judge but to examine, to experiment, draft after draft, century after century.

  She read the writers praised by the reviewers: Huxley, Waugh, Snow, Greene, Hemingway. She was amused by sly Waugh, recognised something from her own experiences in earnest Snow. But the world of these writers was the world of men: politics and war and cherchez la femme. Women had no place except as objects men desired or didn’t desire. To enter the world of their books, she had to temporarily turn herself into a man.

  Ria lent her a translation of Madame Bovary. Perhaps the French had a different view of things: she thought Flaubert didn’t like women much, but for all her silliness Emma Bovary was a full human being with a complicated internal life, not just a set of surfaces that a man might or might not find desirable.

  She expected women writers to understand more than men, and some of them did. They knew that, in a world run by men, marriage could only be a strategy to survive. It was nasty but it was simple. For Jane Austen’s women, husbands were meal tickets. These days it’s more confusing, she thought. A woman like me who’s her own meal ticket doesn’t know how to choose. That’s what got so many of us into a bad situation. For men, though, nothing has changed. They still marry for the reasons they always did: sex on tap and a free housekeeper.

  But even the women writers didn’t go very far in understanding the real heart of a woman’s life, because most of them had never been married. They were like men in not knowing the most basic things: how it felt to be financially dependent, to create and nurture children, to be obliged to find satisfaction in the narrow world of the home. Yet what could be more dramatic than surrendering your autonomy? What could be more profound than the bond between a parent and a child? The intensity and complexity of that relationship made mere romantic love look shallow.

  One Saturday the paper carried a review of a book by a writer called Elizabeth Taylor. Her dinners burn and her children mess themselves embarrassingly. She has an exact eye for trivial domestic detail. No book Nance had ever read described burned dinners or messed children. None had even mentioned trivial domestic details, let alone been exact about them.

  The night Ken brought the novel home for her she burned their own dinner, reading in the kitchen, so engrossed that she didn’t smell the potatoes until they were almost alight. At Mrs Lippincote’s was about the world she knew: the invisible armies of disregarded mothers and housewives. Elizabeth Taylor proved what Nance had always known, that the quiet domestic dramas of women’s lives might be invisible to men, but they mattered just as much.

  Apart from his eighteen months as a proletarian, Ken had been a solicitor for ten years. The work at Sullivans was more interesting than probate and conveyancing but it didn’t fully engage him. The only times he came to life were when Sullivans represented a client themselves rather than briefing a barrister. Appearing in court called for the kind of quick ingenuity he loved. The cut and thrust, he called it. He’d come home exhilarated and boast to Nance about the traps he’d set in cross-questioning. The best way to rattle a male witness was apparently to start by asking them the dates of their children’s birthdays. Usually they didn’t know and it threw them off balance. The best way to make witnesses blurt things out was to leave a silence. It was the excitement she’d seen in him before. Being on the inside, having the secret knowledge.

  So when he came to her one day and said, Nance, I’m thinking of going to the Bar, she thought, Yes, he’s got to do this. She’d come to understand that there was something romantic, even flamboyant, in his nature. It was what had got him into the Trotskyites: big ideas, big ambitions, big secrets. He was thirty-four. Too old to have too many more fresh starts left in him, but too young to look down the years and see no chance to live a larger life.

  You know, Nance, he said, there might be less money for a while.

  She’d already thought of that. I’ll go back to Quinn’s for a year, she said. Give you a chance to get established. It’s no good being miserable.

  He thanked her, sincerely. He did have some idea what working at Quinn’s was like. Mr Quinn had been smug when she’d had to sell her Newport business. Well, Mrs Gee, he’d said, unable to keep the triumph out of his voice, you know you’re welcome back here at any time.

  Going back to work for him would be to eat the humblest of pies. Surely, though, it wouldn’t be for long. All Ken’s colleagues from Sullivans and the old comrades from the Trotsky days would send plenty of work his way.

  With the boys older and the war finished, it was easier to make domestic arrangements. Miss Bowden down the road had worked during the war but once the men came back she’d bee
n let go. Nance gave her three pounds a week, a quarter of what she got at Quinn’s. Miss Bowden minded the boys when they got home from school and got dinner ready. Nance missed those hours after school with the boys, but it would only be for the year, less if Ken got plenty of work straight away.

  Another big slice of her pay went into the new machines to keep food cold or suck the dirt off the f loors. She’d always liked the iceman with his great tongs holding the block, the tunnels of air like beads through the ice. She apologised to him. All the people like her who were buying fridges were doing him out of a job. But how much easier not to have to worry about the ice melting, and mopping up where the icebox was always leaking!

  A woman a few doors along got a washing machine and all the women in the street crowded into her laundry to watch the miracle. You dropped the clothes in and turned the machine on. When you came back, the washing was done! But Nance didn’t think the little paddle feebly agitating the water would get the clothes properly clean. She knew from the ads in the Saturday Evening Post that there were machines in America where you put the clothes in the front, so that gravity moved them around. She was going to wait till they were available in Australia.

  Ken was shocked at how much the machines cost. But he’d never washed a shirt or had to worry about keeping the milk fresh. Your mother had a maid and a cook, she said. Well, these things are the new servants. He wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t have to be. It was her money. Still, even with everything so much easier than it had been last time she’d worked, Nance once again had her day divided into small segments of time, each with its task.

  Ken went to his chambers every day and waited for briefs, but they never came. After all his grand plans he grew silent, his face dark with humiliation. Why weren’t those comrades sending him work, Nance wondered. He was clever, ingenious in argument, spoke well and wittily. He worked as hard as anyone she knew. It was something else. She’d watched him doing that gusty banter that men did, that empty camaraderie. It was as if he’d learned it out of a book. The others picked it up: the scent of the outsider. They were affable with him, but not truly friends.