The Bride of Almond Tree

by Robert Hillman

  Within weeks of the atomic blasts, the Yanks and Australians in Bougainville had surprisingly accurate details of the devastation, the casualties, and even the mechanics of a nuclear explosion. Two bombs, and the Pacific War was over. An Australian major, one of the more courteous, told Patty over a beer: ‘Now we go and patch things up. A Commonwealth force is off to the land of the Chrysanthemum Throne. And the Aussies are slated for Hiroshima. Are you coming, Patty, my love? Want to see what a mess an atom bomb can make? All you have to do is volunteer. More than a hundred thousand dead in one big heap. Some still struggling on.’

  She went, not for the sake of the major, who had become her lover in a way so casual and comical as to be slapstick, but to see for herself the worst thing in the world. She was a woman who averted her gaze from nothing. But more than that, to experience this strange country that could produce expressions of both hopelessness and yearning on her patients’ faces, a country of a thousand years of sublime culture and sublime madness.

  In Kure harbour the wreckage of a hundred ships of the Japanese navy with blackened bows rose out of the sea, and the sea here was ugly enough as it was, chopped into an ill-tempered contest of small waves by the wind. But the sky was a motionless, cloudless blue. Further south, overland, the sky was the grey of gunmetal above what was left of Hiroshima, a no-man’s land of rubble stretching for miles. Any possible rebuilding seemed a fantasy. But Japanese in shreds and tatters, mostly children, searched in the debris for God knew what, stooped over, eyes scanning. Patty saw a girl gnawing voraciously on a block of charred wood. Australian troops shouted at the scavengers, aimed their rifles. ‘Fuck off, you little bastards!’ They were ignored.

  Just a God-awful mess, Bethy. The Japanese, so far as I can see, are completely baffled by defeat and don’t know how to grasp it. The Aussie troops are arrogant and mocking. The hospital is a mess. What equipment and drugs we have is all from the Yanks. The Japanese doctors are demoralised, but competent, at least. Anyway, I’ll be back at Almond Tree in about four months, maybe, and although you won’t be there, let’s arrange to meet at Di’s place for a natter. I’ll likely avoid the propaganda, if that’s okay. I know you love the commies to bits, but to me they’re nutcases.

  Your loving and adoring friend, Patty

  Not that she would be permitted to, but she wouldn’t be sending any pics of Hiroshima. She had seen the site of the blast twice and it still defied any belief she could muster that a single bomb had caused such complete devastation. One odd thing: grass was growing among the rubble, weeds, some flowering. But not a tree anywhere, not a shrub. Standing back from the rubble, she thought if we can do this to people, we can do anything. If we can burn a hundred thousand to cinders, we can burn a billion. She knew that bigger bombs than the Hiroshima blast were ready to be dropped from bombers, she had been told by the major. ‘This one was kid stuff. In a bit of time, they could wipe out Melbourne in a second.’ And Almond Tree, every stand of Bing cherries, every house, the racecourse with the new stadium, the old shops with their timber verandas along Columbine Street, the old hospital by the river and the new one on Cardigan Square. Patty had said she would be home in four months, but she knew she wouldn’t be home in less than a year. Maybe longer. Walking away from Hiroshima would be like pouring a canteen of water into the dust in front of a parched child. She knew that the major would endorse her request to stay. She had a life. Better expend what energy she had here. Almond Tree would live on without her.

  Chapter 5

  HORSE RACING and Quakerism were not natural cousins; nevertheless, Wes Cunningham had taken on the job of building the new stable area for the sixty-year-old course, regarded as the most beautiful racing track in the country. As a carpenter respected for his skill, he was given licence to incorporate features into the twenty-two stalls that would normally be found only at such sites as the stables of princes and millionaires. His designs called for the stalls to be built a third larger than normal to allow the horses the freedom to roll on the straw and sand floors without injury. The stalls were to be gated instead of left open at the front, to prevent punters offering a horse a lucky whack on the rear, an incitement to stumble forward for the confused beasts. The gables of the roofs were high, so that no matter how wildly a horse reared it could not strike its head. The walls were dovetailed cedar planks, simply because it pleased Wes to treat cedar in this way. Gutters would edge the floors, to facilitate the cleaning out with a hose. The number of each stall would be inscribed in white on a black background. In copperplate. Really? Derek Morack the sign-writer could do it.

  At Beth’s initiative, he wrote to her once a month. at Di Porter’s in Fitzroy where she was now living. He described the progress on the stables. He received letters in reply, lively and full of university and Communist Party gossip. Wes wrote: ‘I’ve been dovetailing cedar. It looks beautiful, Beth. These stables, you could live in them if you had to. Can’t tell you the happiness it gives me to make something proper. If you ever see the house I’m building above the river, you’ll love every bit of it.’

  Wes allowed his mother, Daisy, to read Beth’s gossipy letters. She came to a point at which she felt she must say something. ‘Wesley, you’re not still holding a torch for Beth, are you?’

  They were on the back veranda drinking tea, Daisy with the bible and Beth’s latest letter on her lap. She never drank tea or ate anything without first reading verses from the New Testament.

  Wes smiled. ‘No, mother. The letters are Beth’s idea. I asked her out once, five months ago and she said no. Very polite about it. We’re friends, that’s all.’

  Daisy nodded. ‘Because she doesn’t want you, Wesley. She doesn’t love you. Beth is a zealot. For her, romance is a folly. A waste of time when she’s trying to convert the world to a utopia. And I know, Wesley, I know that we have something of the same mission. But not with guns.’

  Wes’s reply was a little less patient than was usual for him: ‘She’s not a zealot, Mother. You know as well as I do that she sold stuff down at the shopping centre to help out the poor in the shire before she took up politics. She probably gets it from her mother, who crochets those rugs for the poor. She has a good heart.’

  ‘She doesn’t love God.’ The real issue.

  ‘Mother, we’re friends. Have been for years. You’ve read her letters, you can see there’s no romance. We don’t love each other and I have enough to keep me busy with the stables.’

  Daisy nodded. ‘I wish I believed you, Wesley.’

  The construction of the stables would cost a fortune, considering the care Wes was taking. The track held only six meetings a year, and the Almond Hill Turf Club was unlikely to cover the expense through bookies’ fees. No, the financing came entirely from one man, Sir Jim Morecombe, an enthusiast of the gallops whose fortune had been made miles away from Almond Tree in the city, where he ran a half dozen department stores. But before he left the town to become a millionaire, he’d developed a vision of the racecourse as a thing of beauty. Year after year, he poured thousands of pounds into its upkeep. The most stunning feature of the course was the giant oak in the middle of the mounting yard, ninety years old, with boughs that reached all the way to the fence of the yard. Roses of four shades were planted along the rear fence, just in the sunlight. The white grandstands, freshly painted each year, were thought to be masterpieces of late-colonial architecture.

  It was Jim Morecombe’s habit—he never insisted on the ‘sir’, discouraged it more than otherwise, but his wife was always ‘Lady Mary’—to motor up to the turf club in his Bentley a couple of days a week if work was going on, and there was always work going on. He wore tweed on these visits, a green homburg and two-toned shoes of cream and brown. This outfit was his idea of ‘looking the part’ of a man of the turf. He always carried a hip flask of cognac which he would offer about to anyone craving a pick-me-up, even to the strappers. His generosity in every other way was equally legendary—lunch for the trainers with an appeti
te at the Chinese Town pub, the ‘pigtail’, which did not serve Chinese food but a wonderful roast lunch six days a week day-baked by Mandy Patterson and her two married daughters.

  A hearty patron was a godsend, but Jim Morecombe had the annoying custom of hanging over Wes’s shoulder while he was working. Wes at work exercised the concentration of a dog with a lamb shank to whatever task he’d set himself and had to exercise extraordinary patience when Jim wished to know exactly what his stable builder was doing at any given time. Bevelling the top of walls between the stalls. ‘Don’t want the neddies rubbing their heads against any surface that hasn’t been smoothed.’

  ‘You think of these things don’t you, Wes?’

  ‘I do, yes.’

  ‘You Quakers make bloody good carpenters. Must go all the way back to Jesus. Ha!’

  ‘Might do. Jim, don’t put your clodhoppers on the cedar planks. You’ll leave muddy marks and I’ll have to sand ’em back.’

  ‘Clodhoppers? Ha! These are from Italy, Wes, Italy, bloke in Milan makes then specially for me. No others made for anyone else, not the same. But yeah, I’ll move my trotters if it pleases you.’

  Wes wasn’t simply bevelling the top beams of the fence stalls. He was fitting the beams into the corner posts without glue, since it had come to his notice that horses were oddly attracted to the taste of pearl glue and would gnaw at the timber to get at it.

  Wes’s true motive in building the stables was the welfare of the horses. From the age of fourteen, horses had been put into his care for their education on the back block of the Cunningham spread below the foothills with Chinese Town on the other side. He spoke to the colts and fillies in a conversational way, sure that they understood. ‘It’s a saddle. So that you can carry a rider. Like a seat on your back. You do the leg work, the rider sits there smoking his pipe. That’s the way it is. You get along on your four legs, the rider smokes his pipe. Never going to change. A couple of weeks, you’ll like it.’

  Treats did no harm. He brought the horse he was educating mashed apple and carrot in a big terracotta bowl from his mum’s kitchen, let the animal drool for a few minutes while he stroked its face, then allowed it to drop its head and make itself ecstatic on the contents of the bowl. He saddled it while it was eating, and when it had finished the fodder, bridled it, then cantered it along the perimeter of the paddock.

  Wes since a young age had been one of the best riders in the district, amateur or professional. He never rode against the jockeys who came to Almond Tree for the six meetings a year; he was too big and he had no registration. But he rode in the amateur race at each meeting, the Mad Mile, free to choose any horse he fancied, and often won. He would set aside a neddy with heart, one he’d given some stiffening. Horses have moods. Days come along when they have no interest other than going through the motions, as if the point of racing seemed fruitless. But any horse that Wes had lunged and taught to accept the bridle, the saddle, had developed an intimacy with, that horse would race for him, give it everything. And Wes loved winning the Mad Mile. It was the only time that victory became vivid to him.

  He’d been asked to teach Beth to ride when she was thirteen. Bob Hardy had opened up his leg with a chainsaw and couldn’t take on the job. Not that Beth was interested in riding a horse. Any creatures not equipped to make political distinctions seemed a waste of time to her. But Bob Hardy insisted that a farm girl should know how to get about on horseback, and asked Wes to take it on. It was futile. Beth rode like a robot, no feeling in her legs and the reins held so tight that the poor beast was left baffled as to her intention. Instruction irritated her. ‘It knows what to do. Why does it need me to poke and prod it?’ Yet even at fifteen, Wes two years older, there was an intensity in her that fascinated him. She said that preparing horses for racing was ‘immoral’ and after the second lesson, said that she didn’t want any part of it. Too bad, for Wes delighted in watching her hair bouncing on her shoulders with the horse’s motion.

  Opposites don’t attract, except for a short time; it’s those with complementary tastes that attract, or else a broadly generous nature that can happily accommodate variance. What Wes identified in Beth was something that he admired without having a wisp of it himself. She wanted to alter the world. His own Quaker faith would never achieve such an outcome. He had no faith in anything that would be likely to alter the world.

  But to believe in it. That was something.

  Chapter 6

  THE VARIOUS halls in which meetings of the Eureka Youth League were held all smelt of stale urine and sewers, as if the plumbing had been contracted, one hall after another, to the one slapdash tradesman. The number of halls available to the EYL was limited. Church halls were out of the question, not simply because committees of management were reluctant to facilitate a movement that was pretty much committed to the mass murder of the clergy, when it could be arranged. The RSL wanted nothing to do with communists, even when it was pointed out that some millions of Russians had given their lives to defeat the armies of the Third Reich. The choices were limited to Mechanics Institute halls out in the suburbs—those whose admin was in the hands of left-wing unions, by no means the majority—or oddly surviving shacks erected ages ago by such organisations as the World Brotherhood for Understanding between Nations and the Daughters of Non-Violent Dissent.

  The stink meant nothing. The zeal of the Youth League brethren was such that they barely noticed it. If a portrait of the queen were displayed, it was turned to the wall for the duration of the meeting, but the tawdry furnishings, the dim fifteen-watt lighting, the oppressive heat in summer and the frigid cold of winter were endured not so much with stoicism, but with a sense of betrayal if the discomfort were so much as mentioned. The cause was the thing; a sore behind from sitting on an uncomfortable chair for three hours was insignificant.

  Beth, deputy chair of the committee, was always seated at the front where the most uncomfortable chairs were located. Her back and behind bore the pain with pride. The committee of her branch comprised three EYL members, which left six of the rank and file in the audience: Valentine Tell and his French wife, Eloise, both twenty-one, and four students from Melbourne Uni: Christian and Helen from Law and Andy and Denise from Physics—unusual, since the physics people were politics averse and believed that solutions to social problems would mostly be solved by the behaviour of molecules and advances in technology in ways not yet revealed.

  ∼

  The issue of the moment was a visit to the USSR by one of the EYL kids, a kind invitation extended by the students of Moscow University. Take a first-hand look at what’s being achieved by the Soviet people. Visit factories and newspaper offices, join in the joyous ongoing celebrations of the October Revolution that lasted into December. Also, performances at the Bolshoi. Ten days. All expenses paid. The candidate would leave on December 1st on the first flight between Australia and London, then fly to Vienna, then to Moscow.

  The most obvious candidate was Beth herself. But her sheer competence excited a certain amount of envy. Beth ran the branch and one office holder after another surrendered to her in her suggestions. It had nothing to do with ego; it was simply that she was intellectually equipped to identify solutions that it was impossible to fault, so astute was she in managing dogma. Valentine proposed Beth, and his wife Eloise seconded. Made sense. Beth was the only Russian speaker in any branch of the EYL, three years of tutoring by Di Porter. Beth could also be counted on to provide a conscientious report on the Moscow expedition, including details of factories, most important, since it was the sacred view of the EYL members that the bitter conditions under which Australian working folk laboured were unknown to the workers of the Soviet Union, where the samovar was always kept warm and apples and pears were handed out liberally.

  On the other hand, Beth’s merit was—how can this best be expressed?—undemocratic. She certainly wasn’t a show-off, but it put members off when official documents were always handed to her for interpretation—and the docu
ments needed it. She grasped what was being asked of the members at a deeper level than the wording strictly suggested. When the Party Committee wrote to insist that charity was no more than a bourgeois strategy of placation, including a penny tossed to a beggar on the street, she paused to explain that a penny for a beggar endorsed a life of humiliating mendicancy that served merely to salve the conscience of those who benefitted from inequality. It would help the beggar more if we ‘took ten minutes to enlighten him on the rotten system he was unwittingly perpetuating’. Nevertheless, when a vote was called for, all hands were raised. And Beth was chosen from the six candidates from other branches of the EYL.

  She travelled in December at the end of her first year of university. Her mother thought the whole business ‘interesting’; her father thought she would be shot against the wall of the Kremlin. For what? Being too pretty? Too clever? Too something. Beth’s preparations for the visit were insanely comprehensive. She would be able to speak about the activities of the EYL down to the finest detail. Patty in Hiroshima wrote to say: ‘Bring me back a bottle of the people’s vodka.’