It was when Miss Renshaw had stood up in the café to say goodbye. She’d leaned over Cubby and touched her arm, and the collar of her geometrical dress had opened like a boulder rolling from the mouth of a tomb.
There, nestled around Miss Renshaw’s neck on a string of black leather, was the tear-shaped amber bead: the necklace that was safely wrapped up in a police evidence bag in a warehouse of unsolved crimes. Cubby saw it, unbroken, hanging around Miss Renshaw’s neck in Madame de Pompadour’s Continental Café, with the little insect still inside it, trapped forever in the bright golden honey of time.
And at that moment Cubby realised she was not going to turn into the person she had thought she would become. There was something inside her head now that would make her a different person, although she scarcely understood what it was.
And we shall all be changed in the twinkling of an eye.
Miss Renshaw was dead. And yet she was not dead. She had spoken to them, she had tossed back her springy hair, she had touched Cubby’s arm. Was nobody, then, really dead? Was Morgan, too, alive and well, drinking herbs in a hidden hamlet in the hills above Lismore? Perhaps nobody was dead. Not even Ronald Ryan, hanged in prison on that faraway February day...
The four girls stared out at the blue-grey, rocking water of the Pacific Ocean, each with their own secret thoughts. They were too big for the pond now. Soon they would be caught up in a net and tossed high into that open sea. They would strike out and flap their fins bravely through the rolling waves.
What would happen to them? They might struggle in the cold depths, with only the occasional glimpse of the sunlit world above. They might even die, their tiny fragile bones sinking to the ocean floor to turn slowly into grains of sand. Or they might prosper and grow sleek and strong, and shine like silver.
That afternoon, they felt no astonishment at any of it. Perhaps a butterfly, too, is unimpressed by its transformation from those worm-like beginnings. Why shouldn’t it crawl out from the darkness, spread its tiny wings and fly off into the windy mystery of the trees? The grub lies quietly in its soft cocoon, silent, thinking. It knows everything.
A ferry was just leaving the wharf. It sounded its horn and moved through the harbour like a swan, towards an uncertain horizon. And although it was the end of the day, for all of them it felt like morning.
When the golden day is done,
Through the closing portal
Child and garden, flower and sun
Vanish all things mortal.
—‘Night and Day’
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Author’s Note
The Golden Day is a novel set in Sydney in 1967, ending in 1975, about a group of schoolgirls whose teacher bizarrely goes missing on a school excursion, apparently murdered.
The idea began at least 30 years ago, when I saw Charles Blackman’s wonderful Floating Schoolgirl in the National Gallery in Canberra. It’s a painting of a surreal schoolgirl in hat and tunic floating above the city in the darkness – like an image from an urban Picnic at Hanging Rock. The flying child may be frightened, but she’s also brimming with the joy of a secret life.
That painting was the seed, but as with any book, there were many others. Some were grim – the Moss Vale schoolgirl shot dead in the chapel by the artist Lennie Lawson in 1962; the disappearance of Juanita Nielsen from Kings Cross in 1975; the murder of nine-year-old Samantha Knight in 1986. Then there was the great classic of Australian schoolgirl life, Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom; the gentle, hidden poetry of John Shaw Neilson; Freud’s notion of the ‘mystic writing pad’; and the melancholy abandoned pleasure park by the Lane Cove River, known as ‘Fairyland’. But the greatest debt is to Charles Blackman’s many astonishing, lush depictions of schoolgirls – enchanting, disturbing, and endlessly evocative.
Of course, pulsing beneath it all must be the memory of my own Sydney schooldays, however transformed into fiction The story is told essentially from the point of view of eleven little girls, who spend their days under the protection of an almost entirely female private educational institution in the late 1960s, at at time of overwhelming social changes which are both robustly embraced and robustly rejected by the various adults about them.
The little girls watch, wonder, respond, change and grow – and then they’re gone, forever. This element of the story, I suppose, is at least partly autobiographical! But you can rest assured that all my own teachers came home safe and sound in the end…
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