But this meeting with Bert stands out more than any of the others. It is the first time Johnny has seen the light of the future on someone’s face, and he is left with a more defined picture of what is to come. A few other men have mentioned to him ‘the rumblings of war’ as if it is nothing but a slogan; this is the first time he has felt a real presence on the horizon. When he wished Bert to stay safe, he really meant it.
He settles down into the saddle and leans forward so that his weight sits more on the shoulders of his horse. She responds by moving faster, the rhythm of the hooves picking up. When they emerge from the trees Johnny can see that thunderclouds have passed over him, heading to where he has come from.
Alfred Covey from number nine Currawalli Street has a map shop in the centre of the city. His maps are highly sought after: anybody travelling across the southern part of the country knows that a Covey map will be the best aid to have on hand when heading into such a vast unknown. And a Vast Unknown is exactly what most of the country is. So Alfred’s business, begun in the last ten years of the nineteenth century, is booming as more people arrive and are paralysed by what they see: black mountains sitting in the distance that change colour and shape; trees that hold out the sunlight and bend stiffly in a wind that is unrelenting and unwelcoming; weather that can be hot enough one day to start a monstrous fire and also, without warning, bring enough rain to send a sudden flood roaring down from the hills; animals and reptiles that are aggressive and deadly; and natives who are assumed to be treacherous. Finally, there is the distance: everything is so far away from everything else. No one wants to be lost. It is a horrible thought.
And Alfred Covey’s map-making business has enabled him to buy a home on the outskirts of the city and pay for a good education for his daughter.
His wife, Rose, started her working life in Alfred’s shop. That’s how she met him. She responded to an advertisement placed in the window. Eventually she left to go and work in a delicatessen. He followed her and courted her over the counter. They were married and chose a block of land out at the edge of town among the currawalli trees. They lived in a tent and watched as their house was built. Rose was pregnant by the time she sat in their new felt armchair, and Elizabeth was two weeks away from being born when Alfred planted the apricot tree in the front yard and thought, for the first time, about buying the land next door.
Now the apricot tree hangs over the front fence and they are having a house built for Elizabeth at number seven. It doesn’t occur to Alfred that she might want to be somewhere else.
On the other side of Currawalli Street at number sixteen stands Maria Conte who emigrated from Italy after her heart was stolen by a wandering Englishman. That’s what her family decided had happened. From the oldest habitable part of Rome, she came with him to this new country. William’s wanderlust evaporated as Maria’s grew, and she settled down only reluctantly. They haven’t moved from Currawalli Street since. She and William produced two children and eventually she didn’t feel the loss of her original family quite as strongly.
Her grandmother had told her what would eventuate—it was something the old people in her village said: the wandering man will eventually put down roots deeper than anybody else. And that’s exactly how it turned out. William, who once saw new countries to explore, new horizons to head for, new borders to cross, now doesn’t see beyond the front fence, and he is happy. Still, when Maria describes him to other women, she says simply, ‘He is a good man.’ And when she looks at her children, she knows that’s what he is. It wasn’t he who stole her from her family in Rome; it was that uncaring moment called love.
Maria’s mother and father are now dead, victims of a famine and a life of hard work. Under a mantel clock that she and William bought in the city, Maria keeps the letter from her brother telling her of the sad news.
And if playing on the crowded streets of her childhood, watching, as she grew, all the different types of people around her family, has shown her anything it is that everybody has an affinity with something. For her father, it was rope; her brother, donkeys; her friend, cooking fish. And Maria has an affinity with chickens. Ever since she was little she was able to manage the hens and roosters her family owned and make them do the things that chickens have to do to make them worth keeping: lay eggs and get fat.
Maria’s chickens were fatter than they should have been considering the small amount of food that could be put aside for them, and they laid more eggs than any other chooks in the street. No one knew for certain why this was so, but her mother was convinced it was because Maria made them happy. And it was true that they liked to be around her, even when she was sleeping. There is now a chook pen at the back of number sixteen and the chooks supply enough eggs for her family, and for the general store near the railway station to become known as a place to get good eggs.
William must have always had a sleeping passion for geraniums and now that he has settled down they are planted all around the chook pen. The chooks like to eat the buds just before the flowers bloom. The chooks are happy and so is Maria. William doesn’t say anything.
At number thirteen lives Morrie Lloyd, the son of the once-celebrated Melbourne theatre impresario H.G. Lloyd. Morrie is a widower who buried all of his plans, all of his dreams, with his wife Gwen. He was once an elegant man, a barrister who walked the floors of many established city houses with his head held high. Now he walks the streets dishevelled, with his dog, head down.
Where once he rolled glamour and success around on the tips of his fingers, walked into a room assuming there would be a woman or a man present who was in love with him, expected to always be heard when he spoke, and where once he sailed before a strong steady wind, he now leaves glamour and success in a back drawer in the kitchen; he looks at the radiogram without turning it on, tries to avoid speaking to too many people.
The woman he loved died.
Gwen was one of those people he had read about; he had seen theatre shows about them, he had heard clients talk about them. The sort of person who turns your life upside down quite easily. He met Gwen without meaning to; he wasn’t looking for anybody, certainly not in the reception room of his office. She was the sister of one of his clients. A lost cause certainly but for a reason Morrie could not identify at the time, he found himself working harder than he ever had to successfully defend this man. In the end, he didn’t succeed but by then the distant view of Gwen had become a fixture in his life that he did not want to lose.
He didn’t know how to win her heart, which was a result of never having to do it before. Therefore he accepted and gave up a lot more than he probably had to. She was younger than him but he was used to walking out with younger women.
But he had to shed a lot of his habits and manners before he impressed her. His reserved seat at Flemington races, his enjoyment of late-night dinner parties, many friendships that were good for a single man to have, the flippant amusing responses that he used instead of saying what he felt. Finally he gave up his Savoy Hotel suite to move into a thinly built wooden house on a street at the edge of the city when they married.
Gwen loved him and understood that, just as the Italian woman across the street was living in a foreign country, so was he. She taught him how to speak the language of the street, how to be discreet about how much and how little he knew, and the extraordinary value of being anonymous.
He happily gave away most of his work so that he could spend more time with her and together they enjoyed a honeymoon that lasted seven years.
But then she died.
The Reverend Thomas Tierson and his sister Janet live beside the church at number fifteen. In reality their home is only a small weatherboard house, but in church records it is always referred to as a manse, and so the siblings have adopted the term with a certain amount of humour.
It is Thomas’s second church. His first was in a little country town called Leongatha where the congregation was never
very big. People worked so hard that they generally slept right through the ringing of the Sunday church bell. Thomas couldn’t blame them; he saw how solidly they worked and so he performed most of his duties by going out into the paddocks and onto the factory floors. A farmer would say more in a field than if he was sitting in a church office tugging at a stiff collar; a worker in the town’s drainage-pipe factory would be more inclined to talk about his darker concerns at work, where he could be sure that his wife and children and neighbours weren’t somewhere about.
But eventually Thomas was called into the city. The church authorities felt that he could be of more help in a place where there were more people. He was sad to leave Leongatha but he knew that this nomadic lifestyle came with the job. When he left the little town he shook hands with the same amount of quiet enthusiasm as when he met his new parishioners in Currawalli Street.
Janet Tierson had been with her brother in the damp old house in Leongatha. She had swept nests of bush rats from her armoire, and a black snake from the kitchen that appeared just as she was about to remove scones from the oven. There were other assorted animals and insects too. She was happy to come to the city, although she discovered it was a lot harder to find a way in among the women of Currawalli Street than she had in the country town. She suspects that it has something to do with Thomas’s delicate manner. The men don’t seem worried by it but it is a great concern to the women—she can tell by the way they look at the pulpit and talk to each other after the service ends on Sundays. Janet deduces that women in the city like their connection to God to be masculine and rugged—the things that Thomas isn’t.
And she doesn’t mind the spinster connotations that come with being a sister looking after her reverend brother. In fact she welcomes them; the situation gives her much more freedom than she expected and she makes good use of that freedom. She has learned to look for and cultivate discretion. She finds it very enriching to be able to see another view of the world from the window of a lover’s bedroom. And so she is happy to appear to be the sad sister who has no other interest in life than her brother’s welfare. It works well for her.
Currently she is entertained by a gentleman of wig and gown on the other side of the city. James has his own world and his own life to contend with and she wants no part of it. Nor does he want her to be a part of it. They meet with a subtleness that he, as a lawyer, is used to. He has no interest in finding out who she is or where she sits in society and it is enough for him that she wants him to lie by her side. He knows their relationship is transitory and will last only as long as his conversations hold her interest and the view from his window is fresh and enticing.
James expects her to leave him as lightly as they met; in this instance, it was with the brush of a hand at an after-show dinner. She looked at him, he at her, and the rules of engagement were silently established. He is used to cultivating this type of relationship, and always surprised by how many women are willing to accept the terms. There are many people in this society who can’t fit into the confines created by the mores of the day but who have no inclination to stand up and rail against them. They prefer to just quietly ignore them and go about their business with their own notions of morality and decency.
And there is in this type of lovemaking something powerful and exciting that Janet thinks might fade in marriage. She doesn’t know that for sure but she does harbour strong suspicions. The thought of being with one partner for the rest of her life fills her with enough dread to give her a steel spine that will not bend. She does not want that kind of life.
James is a good man, strong and interesting, but she feels they are reaching their end. She expects that he feels it too.
She knows that the time to leave is coming because they have stopped meeting as two individuals who each bring a scent of mystery with them. That scent has evaporated into the night air. She knows that the time to leave is coming because they no longer talk of abstract visions but speak, with a type of familiarity, mainly of things that will see them through the next moment in their life together. She knows that the time to leave is coming because she has realised that they are just two everyday people who like being in each other’s company. One night they sit together on the side of his bed and swap small gifts. They didn’t plan to do this together. They arrived at this exchange individually. He has a pair of delicate pearl earrings for her to remember him by, as she has a thin silk scarf that she hopes he will keep in the drawer by the bed. The thought of him being blindfolded by a lover with this scarf gives her a delicious feeling that she keeps secret from him.
And they both have the same words: ‘I hope you remember me.’
But the leaving is not quite for now. They still have a few nights of passion to share.
Returning to Currawalli Street on the train the next morning after giving the gifts, Janet looks out at the ever-expanding rows of houses spreading across the paddocks, and thinks about the reasons she wants to move on from James. Time has left them exposed as the people they really are. And she doesn’t like that she can see that.
By the time she opens the front gate of the manse, her mind is made up. Happy that Thomas is still at church, she walks through the house, pushes open the back door and without stopping sweeps up Thomas’s trowel. The high heels of her shoes make it hard to dig in the damp soil and so the process takes a while and she has time to reconsider her decision. They are beautiful earrings; they give off a blue glow in sunlight and a greenish tint when in shadow. She has never owned pearls like these but she thinks her decision is the right one. She puts the earrings back in their embroidered red box and places the box in the bottom of the hole. She sees for the first time that across the top of the box are her initials, embroidered in gold thread: JT. Replacing the soil is easier than the digging was, and as she walks back inside she decides that she will ask Rose Covey for a clipping of some bush or flower to plant there. She will do that tomorrow.
No one has ever moved into number fourteen. Finished, its door was never crossed. The garden and lawn are maintained by a stranger who knows nothing of its owner. He is employed by a solicitors office in the city.
The house stands among its young trees and bushes yet there is no mistaking that it is empty. No one in the street knows why. But that doesn’t stop rumours, some of which develop a life and energy of their own. And in the end, that can be mistaken for the truth. For example, Rose believes that a gangster has had the house built and plans to move there after he is released from prison. But his parole request has been rejected yet again and so the house remains empty as he serves more time. Whereas Maria believes that a rich family have built it for their lunatic son, who they plan to move in there when he is stable enough.
Next door to the empty house live Eric and Nancy Dunold at number twelve. On the other side are Johnny and Kathleen. Johnny was at first very concerned about having people living this close to him, until Kathleen explained to him that just because neighbours can look, that does not mean that they won’t look away. They know that you will, and you learn to know that they will. It’s a kind of privacy and discretion that everybody shares. For her part, she is used to having neighbours live much closer to her than this, and she explained to him what London was like.
Eric Dunold had been a junior crewman aboard the thirtieth steamship that sailed from the shipworks on the Clyde River. He finished his sea-going career as the first officer of a large cargo ship plying the South Seas route, bringing strong tropical timber and fibres to this country. He gave up the sea because he was tired of saying goodbye to Nancy and she was tired of seeing his chair empty at the dining table.
He had walked down the gangway for the last time when the ship docked in Melbourne and then watched it sail away without him. He had brought all of his worldly possessions with him on this voyage. He also brought Nancy, and they set up a home in Currawalli Street almost before the ship had disappeared over the horizon.
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br /> As with Johnny, it took some time for Eric to grow accustomed to living like this. In Eric’s case, he wasn’t used to having so much earth around him. He was used to his landscape being fluid. Nancy helped to reacquaint him with the ways of the land and eventually he saw that most things in this landlocked life rose and fell like water and were swirled around by a deep current. The waves that were around him now looked different and moved slower, that’s all—waves of new feelings, people’s faces, strange animals, unfinished conversations and tides of struggles, joys, confusions and contentments. Once he was able to see that, he no longer looked for masts and furled sails among the currawalli trees. The way to judge the land and all that was on and in it was exactly the same as the way he had judged the ocean and all that was on and in it.
The thing that was the same in both environments was time, and he was well versed in watching its passage. After he realised that, he found his land legs for good.
Nancy Dunold had left behind her home in a medium-sized Scottish village where she was used to living largely alone. Eric had gone away each time for at least three months, sometimes for a year. And now she had travelled with him to a new land. She too is learning how to live again. Not just to be in a new country with new ways but to have someone by her side every day. It is a new experience for her but she remembers all the times she had wished that Eric was with her. And now he is.
Before, the ocean had been like a mistress that he kept, and Nancy knew about. A third party in their relationship. Nancy would never ask Eric to give up the sea because she knew that the love he felt for it was vast enough to stretch beyond any horizon that she could imagine. It might even have been deeper than what he felt for her. But he has walked away from this love to be with her. As far as she is concerned, that is something more golden than a ring.
He is a good man. And she sometimes hadn’t minded being on her own. She had become good at it. She had found a type of comfort in adhering to a routine, finding companionship in odd places: the ticking of a clock on the mantelpiece, the turning of a leaf, the ageing of the bristles on a broom. But more often she had wanted his arms to hold her and hide her face from the world. Now she spends every night in them listening to the night pour itself into the morning.
Currawalli Street Page 4