by Thea Astley
The hammock creaked in duet with its sobbing burden and the branches, gripped by ropes, moaned and tugged to get free, then capitulated, sagging with her.
“Bikky?” Miss Paradise asked, chirrupy to the end.
Father Lake was crooning softly in the presbytery garden as he polished the entire range of priestly footwear—a self-imposed penance—especially as the lumpy leather brogues of the Mons were nicked and cracked.
“Caint use yer cors yer feet’s too big!” he sobbed over-slowly. “Caint luv yer cause yer feet’s too big!” Except for that tiny section of his spiritual page, one bottom corner turned whimsically over like those small ears in the autograph books of teen-age girls (“Don’t look” on the outside and “Sticky-beak!” on the inside), he was sonorously happy.
Happy as Monsignor asleep in unsafely green vales, padding past Clongowes, not rich enough to go there; seeing Mourne on a trippers’ holiday with the other goggling Dubliners, leaving it all for God and coming here now to this rolling brown land of flat voices and beer and dust and sins dry as overbaked scones. He snored untidily and dreamt the Virgin was scolding him about something and he clutched the wheel and spun it and spun it. “Pray for us now,” he mumbled.
Father Lingard came out from the telephone, dangling a collar on one finger.
“Don’t wake the Mons,” he said into the sunny air of polish. “I’ve got to go on a call.”
“Someone sick?”
“No. A Miss Trumper up near the convent.”
“Not the old lady who ran across there the other night?”
“That’s the one. Don’t worry about mine. I’ll do them.”
“No, sorry. I have to. Hang on a moment. Do you think she knows something about Sister Matthew? Why she went? I must confess, Doug, the excitement of the scandal has done me a world of good.”
“That proves what I’ve always said; we feed on each other’s misfortunes.”
“Shouldn’t I fight it?”
Lingard laughed.
“You’re honest. That’s the main thing. I cannot bear the long sanctimonious clucking face. See you in about an hour. God bless.”
If He could be bothered, he would have added.
Yet he himself bothered now, about some fragile plea through a courtesy he could not shake off, no matter how his soul corroded within, and each hour, of which each action seemed a deadly explicable second rusted, piled up its uselessness. Out of courtesy, too, he thought, I turn in the gate, gently reclasp the latch, pad down between hydrangea bushes to the front elkhorned veranda as much a stereotype of colonial living as steep galvanized roofing and ornamental timbering on gables.
Something scrubbed, something painful about the house hesitated with him as he heard Japanese wind-bells make glistening sounds above the plop-plop of an end tap weeping into a pot of maiden-hair. The door opened on Miss Trumper buckled into the armour of a Sunday suit, backing away, but still in control. He examined her face with interest. It was narrow and nervous and in the eyes was that frightening honesty that preludes disaster. Her hair was badly tinted and could not make up its mind to be one thing or the other, though it had settled largely for copper, a startling eruption above her pale washed-out face and faded blue eyes.
“Father Lingard,” she said, “come in, please.” And put one hand upon his sleeve as if he mightn’t.
They faced each other in the haunted living-room packed with dozens of Miss Trumpers who observed them from the protective frames of glass and gilt.
But she did not seem to know how to go about starting and could hear the priest making flattering remarks about the garden and the garden and the garden.
Garden meant Chookie.
Miss Trumper flinched.
“No,” she said. “No.”
“I thought it quite lovely,” he persisted out of ignorance, but wondering at the agitation that made her hands journey for rest along the seams of the aseptic settee cushions with their fragrance of Dettol and lavender.
“I have to tell you something,” she gasped suddenly. “Something that has worried me for years.”
“Yes?” he prompted, in a familiar situation at last.
She could not look at him across the surface of this great lake in which she was sure she must drown. Help, a small voice cried a long way away. Heeeeelp.
She looked at him. He was aloof and not especially reassuring, although there was a despair about his mouth that had familiarity, that suggested he might not only understand but forgive. Putting off the deadly moment, she managed to pack a tea-tray, to fuss about helping him to sugar before she should offer the bitter pill of her guilt, struggling with the biscuits. Observing her antics with a milk-jug, Lingard was at once aware. God help her, he prayed. God help. And his own automatic appeal registered within his prayer-dry soul and gave him a pleasure he had not now had for years. He smiled.
The smile jogged her. She put down her cup, rattling it lop-sidedly upon its saucer.
“It was years ago”—as if time excused or absolved—“I did something . . . I have never ceased . . . regretting.”
He did not say anything for a minute while she fought a strange battle with the comers of her mouth that threatened to become that other mask, the one in planetary opposition to the grinner.
Lingard had heard too many confessions to make a mistake. Bowing his head, he prompted gently, “Go on.”
“It was the war, you understand. We were all silly, you know.”
“We were,” he agreed consolingly and gravely.
“Yes”—eagerly—“I thought I was in love. Oh, I was really—and—well—you understand?” These lacunae, the moral lapses for which one supplied the hard fact!
“Yes,” he said.
“And so I was expecting his child. And suddenly he went off. I never heard another word. I tried. I don’t think he was killed. Or married either.” She cried a little at that stage. “He just got tired of me, I suppose.” She picked carefully at a thread on her skirt. Something would unravel. “Anyway, I couldn’t face it—the baby—I didn’t know what to do. I went to a doctor and—”
“Yes?” he asked, for she must confess it herself.
“I had an abortion.”
Father Lingard remained entirely still.
“It—that—” she began to cry again. “It worries me all the time. I’ve never forgotten or forgiven myself.”
“Of course, that is the hardest thing of all,” he said gently, “to forgive oneself. It’s easy enough to forgive others, I know. But never oneself. Don’t cry,” he said. “I do believe God forgives you. You have only to be sorry for that. And you are sorry. You’ve proved it by suffering for the last fifteen years.”
The rain of this particular charity felt warm. He had neither moved away in shock or horror.
“You must try to forgive yourself,” she heard him saying, “if God can. Otherwise you will be at war with yourself for ever.”
“Oh, I am,” she said. “I am. . . . But there is something else . . . something.”
He nodded, a trick of the confessional that prompted without a word.
“That boy.” She went scarlet with shame. “That lad who gardened for me.” She was dying within. “I . . . he . . .I caused him to come in . . . I made him. . . .”
“Here,” Father Lingard said at this juncture, “let me pour you another cup.” He put it gently before her shaking body.
“Can’t you see,” she cried, “that is another unforgivable thing? I caused him to sin. He’s only a baby. If only I could tell him I’m sorry. Or ask him to forgive. But he has run away.”
“Run away?”
“Yes. I suppose he thinks he is to blame. Oh, if he only knew!”
“Perhaps he is sorry, too.”
“Oh, could he be?” Miss Trumper leapt pathetically at this, longing that she be able to pardon also. It could be her salvation to restore hope in another.
“I’m sure he is,” Father Lingard said. “Very, very sure. And if he eve
r does come back or tell you he is sorry, in some way, you must accept. Accept his sorrow before you insist on burdening him with your own. For that will be the much harder thing. I’m not excusing, you understand. Or even saying you should not still be sorry. But what is done is done, and the worst thing of all, my dear, is to feel no shame and no sorrow. After all, you have suffered intensely for the wrong you did and now you have a duty to God. To yourself, really, too, to try to live as He would want.”
“But how is that?”
He consoled her as best he could. He drank tea. He asked for a pelargonium clipping and borrowed a paperback as insurance against another visit and a proof that he did not find her corrupt beyond redemption. It was this last gesture that helped most of all. And as she tottered with him to the front gate he said unexpectedly, “If one saw behind the faces into the hearts, one would die.”
They had slept through the bumping night and in the morning the truck pulled up somewhere at a town that was still rubbing the sleep from its eyes. Sunburnt timber houses straggled out along a main street which led directly to a river of sorts. But the east was the town’s pillow, dirty dunes rumpled along the grey sky. Weak pink filtered upwards.
Keith rolled over and sat up, each vertebra throbbing, his bladder uncomfortable. Somewhere in front of the truck he could hear Chookie arguing with the driver, who was keeping the engine running. Over the back-board Keith observed a ritzy motel, crab-lazy, sprawled on the opposite side of the water, with its snoozing cars drawn up blindly before each blind door, shuttered across family units and the sinning couples who made love to synthetic music that trickled through speakers above the wall-lamps. There was a lot of plate-glass on the river side of the building, a dining-room and bar sumptuous beyond the detached appearance of this fly-speckled town.
Slinging his legs over the side, Keith slid to the roadway and walked round to the front.
“Where are we?” He yawned. The sky opened up a little to allow some dim light to seep through.
The driver tended to be whining. “Yers was asleep. So I never woke yer. Anyway, I tole yer we had no time to stop, we was going through.”
“It’s just outside Coff’s. A place called Moonee Beach,” Chook said. “We slept right through.”
Damn, thought Keith. Oh, damnation! He felt like howling with irritation.
“Sorry,” the driver said. “I gotter put you off here. I live near by and then we’re goin’ straight through to Sydney.”
“That’s okay,” Chookie said. “It don’t matter. We’re on a walking tour, anyway. We’ll soon hit the big smoke, but.”
“Yeah,” agreed the man. “Y’ll see it okay.”
They watched him go. Keith excused himself, vanishing behind a tree near the bridge, then came back scowling.
Across the river, curtains had been twitched from the plate glass and, as if it were some fantastic theatre, waitresses could be seen moving round tables with such vigour he imagined he could smell the bacon.
“There’s nothin’ open yet,” Chookie said. “She’s only just on six.”
“Well, what do we do now, traveller?” Keith held his crankiness carefully, allowing none to spill over, for at the first opportunity he would toss this clod off and get a train back. “Do we merely keep walking? Are we going to keep dodging south with no point in it? No point at all? It’s ludicrous, isn’t it?”
“No sense in standin’,” Chookie said placatingly.
And they set off again along the dew-grey road, past the School of Arts and a church hall and a closed all-nite diner that had been shut for months. Slow as remorse the sun crawled up the sky; the cars kept on passing them and they felt the sea pressing in on the land as they sought the next township. It was four miles and took them nearly two hours before they came down the highway to its neglected fibro outskirts.
“I’ve got a quid after this,” Keith said, chipping congealed yolk from his late breakfast plate and wiping a bread crust across. “That won’t take both of us back.” He felt secure in his nastiness with the warmth of food settling down inside.
Chookie shrugged and grinned, knowing he wasn’t wanted but unable to accept. “Here’s my five bob,” he said, sliding the coins across the laminex. “Can I have that last chip if y’ don’t want it?”
Keith nodded sourly, thinking of his parents. Would it be worth it if he did go back or would the cold war go on and on and on? Really, they didn’t give a hoot about him—only themselves and what he reflected of them like a vaguely distorting mirror in which they chose to see only the glamourized reflection, never the fat man or the skinny lady or the dwarf hedged in by autumnal circumstance.
“Your parents get on?” he asked.
“Now and again. Every Saturdee!”
“My mother has a lover.”
“A what?”
“Another man. She sleeps with another man.”
“So what?”
“What do you mean ‘so what’? Don’t you think it matters?”
“Not much.”
Keith was sorry he’d opened his mouth. He poured himself more treacly tea, tipping the pot till the lid napped down and the overworked leaves began dropping out.
“Why should you care? Does your old man care?”
“Oh, skip it!” Keith snapped.
“But does he?”
“Oh, I don’t know. No. I don’t think he does.”
“Well, then, that’s all that matters, isn’t it? I mean his feelings are worth more’n yours, aren’t they? Mine fought, sometimes. There was too many of us ever to care more about one than the other really, not that they ever did care much about me. But the ole man, he only played up once. He useter say if he was offered a sheila or a schooner he’d sooner take half a schooner.”
Keith giggled. “My dad would say ‘neither just now thanks’.”
In the street the sun grappled with them. Chookie took off the duffle-coat and carried it untidily on his ginger arm, looking slightly puzzled, his lashless lids pulled together in thought, his free paw cracking two pennies in his pocket. I’ll write to the ole girl, he thought. I gotter do it. Don’t care if they find me and pin me. She wasn’t a bad ole kook. Tell her I’m sorry like. I pinched her biscuits, too, he remembered. But that ain’t the main thing. It was the main thing, the main thing, that gripped him and squeezed and squeezed.
“Half a mo,” he said. “I gotta find a paper shop. I wanter send a card.”
“Who to?”
“Y’d never guess.”
He went into the newsagent’s and thumbed through a pile while Keith, clutching his money greedily, glanced over the paperback titles. One of the cards sported impossible flowers. It said, “Thinking of you”, in Gothic gilt. Chookie paid for it and its envelope, said he wouldn’t be a minute, and went back fifty yards to the post office where he scratched clumsily on the card with a government nib: “Dear Miss Trumper. I’m sorry. I hope your alright. I thought I was helping you first then when I saw I wasn’t it was to late. I’m sorry. Chookie.” He printed her address and licked the stamp thoughtfully. On the top right-hand corner of the envelope, tiny as ants, he printed S.A.G. and gummed the stamp down over its prayer, and then the red lips of a postal bin claimed it quickly and cusped over his secret.
Dim, distant, disturbing, the kneeling penitent bent forward in Chookie’s brain as he slipped the letter into the right hole, and he found his left hand clutching the coat so hard there was sweat on his clammy freckled skin and a stain on the fabric.
Keith had come up. “You’re a mug.”
“Why?”
“They’ll see where it was sent from.”
“Aw, I don’t seem to care this morning. I feel better now.”
“What was it? A public confession?
“You might call it that,” swanked Chookie, who now was confident enough to tell the other boy to bugger off. “I’m goin’ across to the sea for a cool-off.” Water-holes and creek reaches he’d ploughed across with his heavy untrained st
roke, gulping, gasping, loutish, yelling, blowing his nose between his fingers, diving from half-sunk logs, swinging from motor-tyres, doing a Tarzan on a rope that pranced above the water. He’d never argued with a bright blue biting stretch like this before, that vast blue and white moving plain that caught his eye and enraptured him.
Keith should have grabbed the chance. He couldn’t analyse the reasons that impeded his travelling limbs.
“Listen—” he began. “Listen.”
But some tide had turned within Chookie this morning and he was off down the branch dirt road to the thin line of blue, striding steadily into heat and dust with Keith pattering after him. I’m going back, he wanted to yell. I’m hitching to the next station and I’m going back. Do you hear? But he didn’t yell. He kept on after him, jog-trotting to catch up past the dance-hall and the corner store and the bum houses split at the seams that hung on with the windiness of men on cliff edges. Someone a week before, maybe, had dropped a cigarette carton and a chocolate wrapper, and this link he perceived in the incandescence of such moments as he skipped over the truck ruts and cried hopelessly to the not-looking-back figure, “Hang on. Wait, can’t you? Wait. I’m coming.”
Chookie had peeled off down to his underpants, revealing the coin-spotted shoulders of the red-head. All his clothes he had dumped untidily on the sand when he remembered the harmonica. Fishing it out of his trouser pocket, he shook it, then, unable to resist, capered and sucked a tune from the cheap reeds, brassy, cheeky, while the sun worked pinkly on his bony shoulders and back as he made love to the instrument, playing nothing in particular but something he intended to be the purple sea nibbling the shore rind, putting its cold tongues into bays and caves. All the loneliness of the wild plains which he saw merely as the brown shimmer of the west penetrated his mournful insolent tune as he cradled the tiny mouth-organ, rocking it in his knuckly hands, his thighs swaying.
“What’s that?” Keith asked, spoiling it, the silly bastard, and coming up like a mug.
Chookie shook the moisture out, wiped it across his underpants, and wrapped it up carefully in a hanky.
“Y’ never know,” he said. “I might be another Adler.”