by Carmel Bird
I think it is wise to sell some of the big furniture, and you probably ought to get the well filled in.
Your loving sister,
Iris
Mrs Morning Glory’s Anecdote
March 1987
Mr Sailor Cherry Plum Pip has died and gone to heaven. They dressed the admirable admiral up like a sailor doll, and put him in a box with his lifesaver. Just like the man who stares from the packet of Navy Cut tobacco, all white ropes and a beard. Mr Sailor had blue eyes too, and a naval funeral with a white rope umbilical cord and full navel belly-button honours and a guard of honour like a game of lead soldiers.
That man wished to be buried at sea. I have seen him sitting in his garden, staring out at the water, chuckling brightly into the Prayer Book. Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live. And we therefore commit his body to the deep to be turned into corruption looking for the resurrection of the body when the sea shall give up her dead.
They buried him in the ground with his wife, the late Mrs Sarah Bernhardt Cherry Plum, and his sister Gorgeous Angelina, sister-in-law of Sarah Bernhardt.
‘Oh, how I wish,’ said Sarah Bernhardt to herself as she slit the belly of the barracuda, ‘how I wish that Gorgeous Ann would choke to death on one of the bones of this very large fish caught by my husband this morning.’
If wishes were fishes there were dishes of wishes on Sarah Bernhardt’s kitchen table. Mr Sailor went out in his great big motor boat with his sister Angelina and, hooks baited with practically the best rump, caught a ton of slippery shiny gleaming silver barracuda silver fish.
‘I wish that woman would choke to death on a fishbone wishbone,’ said Sarah Bernhardt.
And there they all were at the dining-room table, Mr Sailor Cherry Plum Pip sunburnt and glowing; Mrs Sarah Bernhardt who had curled her hair for the occasion; the twins, Iris and Muriel (Arthur had not been long drowned, and had probably fed the barracuda); and Gorgeous Ann in a skimpy lace dress. They had silver dishes and dozens of double damask dinner napkins and Waterford crystal and with one great giant fishbone, Sarah felled her rival, Gorgeous Ann. Mr Sailor thumped his sister on the back as she went purple in the face, and he poured whisky from the tantalus down her throat.
Her cheeks were covered with splashing waves of Irish whiskey from the best cut crystal. The whiskey mingled with her tears and trickled across her gorgeous breasts. She died in her brother’s arms at the dinner table, as Sarah and Iris and Muriel stood at their seats, their mouths open in horror and alarm, their knives and forks clattering to the floor with accidental death.
Mr Sailor wanted to be buried at sea with all the other sailors he used to know, leaving Sarah and Gorgeous in their beds beneath the cypresses of St Mary’s churchyard. I had afternoon tea with them all once. Earl Grey tasting like blue cheese and some very insulting little cakes, which were iced in pink with a cherry on the top, exactly like little breasts. I know that Sarah made them with the help of the thieving twins who were looking like nothing on earth at the time. Gorgeous never did anything much except the obvious, and the occasional piece of very peculiar knitting.
So, now they are all up there with headstones. James Plum. Husband of the aboves. St Mary’s Church grows from the surrounding fields, and in the spring there are daffodils, planted a hundred years ago, like yellow figments of the imagination. It is a lonely Christmas card ancient church built by the early settlers, who have settled well and truly into the earth, and the Vicar is keen to keep the churchyard beautiful for the visitors who go winding up the track to it like medieval pilgrims. They read the headstones of the Cherry Plum Stones. Little do they know of what is meant by all those marble words.
Picnic at Woodpecker Point as Recollected by Florence Sister of Brigadier MacArthur
It was like an afternoon in Australian literature. Still air, bright sun, and a promise of tragedy. I don’t think that’s just hindsight. My niece, Caroline, was drowned on this picnic in 1965. She was engaged to the Plum boy, Arthur. He was all in white, with brown sandals, and she had a pale-lemon frock with a gorgeous green sash. My sister, that’s her mother, Gwendoline, was a beautiful dressmaker, and Caroline always had the loveliest clothes ever since she was a baby. They looked a picture, Caroline and Arthur. So young and happy. He was going to be an accountant. They found one of the sandals afterwards. It was washed up on the beach at Penguin. But they never found Caroline and Arthur.
Mind you, I didn’t go to the picnic. The Brigadier and I always open the Den of Antiquity on Saturday afternoons. In those days we were the only antique shop in Woodpecker Point. It’s a different story nowadays of course, with the tourists. And the migrants, but especially the tourists. We had such a lovely Royal Doulton dinner service come in the day before, and I was putting it in the window when Caroline and Arthur walked past on their way to the picnic. They stopped and waved to me as I stood in the window, and Caroline looked at the plates as I was arranging them. I could see that she really liked the dinner service, and I thought at the time that if it didn’t sell I might give it to her for a wedding present. Ironic that. As it happened anyway, Mr and Mrs Lilley bought it the week after for Jennifer. She was getting married and I got a very good price for it.
Caroline had a picnic basket with the thermos sticking out. Funny, the things you remember. And Arthur was carrying a tartan rug. A few minutes later the others came past. There were Iris and Muriel in floral frocks with white collars and big hats. I have a frock very like those ones in the shop at the moment. It came in a deceased estate just the other day. I should say it had hardly been worn. James and Margaret Plum and James’s sister, Ann, went past, James ever the handsome sailor and Ann in bright orange towelling with those gypsy earrings and a striped umbrella. I really don’t know how Margaret put up with her. She never lifted a finger in the house. Margaret had to do everything. And the girls, Iris and Muriel, were completely useless in those days. Couldn’t boil an egg as they say. I remember one time I went up there to have a look at a crystal decanter they were getting rid of. It was supposed to be Waterford crystal. Waterford my eye. And the girls were making paper flowers while their mother was slaving in the kitchen.
Well, they all went down the street and up the path that leads to the top of the cliff. And somehow in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the picnic, when the seagulls are hanging around the bits of rainbow cake, and the chicken and lettuce sandwiches are all gone, Iris is bitten by a bull ant and Caroline and Arthur go for a walk.
The next thing I know, I’ve just got the Royal Doulton looking right, the Brigadier comes running in to ring the police or the ambulance or whatever. He had gone down the road on his way to the Part and Parcel when Iris came screaming up to him out of the middle of nowhere in hysterics. Somebody had seen Caroline staring down into that terrible blowhole up there, and then she just seemed to go forward, they said afterwards, and tip onto the side of the cliff. It’s all covered in pigface. Arthur screamed and reached for her and together they slid and rolled down the cliff and disappeared into the water. Sucked into the black blowhole and simply never seen again. I said how they found the sandal at Penguin, didn’t I?
Item from the Parish Paper St Marty-in-the-Fields January 1965
Memorial Service
On Thursday afternoon there was a memorial service in the parish church for Caroline MacArthur and Arthur Plum, whose lives were lost when they fell from the clifftop at Woodpecker Point. The lesson was read by Mr Ronald Hope, and Brigadier MacArthur delivered the oration. Miss Ginger Hope played the ‘Brahms Lullaby’ on the violin.
We extend to the families of these young people our deepest sympathy.
May light perpetual shine upon them.
The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible.
Caroline’s Journal
January 1965
I love you.
Dearest Arthur,
I love you.
With all my heart.
&nbs
p; I love you.
If I practise saying this, thinking this, writing this, it must come true.
I dream of you night and day because you are my one true love, my sweetest, dearest, only Arthur.
I love you.
I have decided to keep a journal because I think it will help me to sort things out. Sort out my life, my feelings. As I write ‘I love you’ over and over like this, it begins to sound less true. It might have been almost true when I wrote it at the top of the page, but now I have worn it out.
I am not used to telling people I love them. Do I love them? Do I really love anybody? What does it mean? Mother? Father? Jane? Peter? Do I love Arthur? Will I love Arthur? Will loving Arthur come true, like getting teeth or wrinkles or dying? I nearly died from pain and weeping when the vet said Toby would have to go. I must have loved Toby, and so I will try to remember how it felt. Then I can imagine loving Arthur.
I love you.
Arthur.
Toby knew I loved him. I didn’t have to tell. Does Arthur know I feel nothing? No, it isn’t nothing. But it seems to me it isn’t much. Is it enough? Is this how everybody feels when they are going to get married? Love, honour and obey. I don’t believe I understand the meaning of ‘honour’. And obey. What about obey? If he commands me to do something very awful, will I obey him? Do the words in the service actually mean anything? I do not obey, do not honour, do not love. ‘Obey’ is the only one out of the three words that I understand. And I’m not going to do it.
Dearest Arthur,
I love you with all my heart and soul, my own true angel. I honour you and I obey you. I go to Ralph’s cottage at the bottom of Mrs Morning Glory’s garden. Ralph is the gardener. It is such a sweet cottage with ivy creeping all over the chimney. I wonder it isn’t too hot for it there. He lives all by himself in the cottage with his Bible and his fishing lines and his rifles. His bed is really old-fashioned, a black iron one, and he has a quilt made by his mother. He always folds the quilt back before we get up on the bed. It is quite a high bed, like in a hospital. Ralph is extremely tidy and likes me to put my shoes exactly side by side on the hearth. He is very particular and he is very religious. He thinks the Vicar is too high church, but he says his wife is a pretty good cook. She made him a bright yellow cake for his birthday. He was thirty. Seems old when you think of it. Mrs Morning Glory gave him a cup and saucer with violets on them. I thought it was a little peculiar, giving a thing like that to a man, but Ralph was pleased. Sometimes he is not easy to fathom. He never drinks tea, and certainly not coffee. So the cup and saucer just sit up there on the mantelpiece next to the text: ‘Thou God seest me.’
He puts pins and buttons in the cup and his late father’s glass eye. Of course he is against alcohol and tobacco. He chews American chewing gum, which he says is made by Christians in Pennsylvania. If I am very good we eat Turkish Delight, which he calls Rahat Loukoum. And he is a good gardener, I know. He has made all the difference to Mrs Morning Glory’s garden. I wish I understood how it is she loves her dead husband. He was killed in the war. Dear Mr Glory, I love you. With all my heart and soul and strength. Dear Arthur, this is just a note to say how much I love you. How much I love you. Deep down. I am deeply fond of you. Nobody ever says ‘deeply fond’. Except Ron.
Dear Diary,
I am telling you everything in the hope that you will understand and help me. I think that I should somehow feel something for Arthur if I am going to marry him. He is so suitable. He is so sweet. Sweet Arthur. Dearest, sweetest Arthur, you are so very, very sweet, and I love you with every part of me. I am deeply fond.
Ron is Ginger Hope’s father. I went to school with Ginger but she’s younger than me. She is clever and pretty and I will long remember her with affection.
(Dear Arthur, I will long remember with affection the times we spent walking on the cliff.) The day when Ginger took me home with her for afternoon tea, I was so surprised when her mother said, ‘Call me Audrey’. And when Ron said, ‘Call me Ron,’ I nearly fell off the deckchair onto the grass. Audrey was so perfect pouring tea from an enormous silver pot into the thinnest china cups you ever saw. The air around her seemed to tinkle. She was like a lady in a play or in a painting. That was how I saw her at the time. They seemed to be so happy. Ginger was turning cartwheels on the grass.
‘But Caroline,’ said Ron, ‘is too ladylike to kick up her heels like Ginger.’ I didn’t know what to say. Afterwards he drove me home. First we went to the top of the cliff and looked out across the grey and endless dreadful waves.
‘You look like a mermaid, but I suspect you are not,’ he said as he put both hands, quite suddenly, under my skirt. It got late and dark and Ron was deeply fond of me.
I thought of calling off the wedding. Then I thought that was a bit melodramatic. Giving back the ring, sending back the presents. Cancelling the dresses and the reception and the church and the florist and the man who is tinting the satin shoes for the bridesmaids. And the photographer. Telling the printer to unprint the invitations and the order of service. But now this thing has happened and I’m going to have a baby. So now I really do have to marry Arthur. I wish in a way that it was Arthur’s baby. Failing that, I wish I could persuade him to go to bed with me. That is what is really worrying me. But perhaps it will work out.
Arthur’s Recollections
January 1965
We always had to wash our hands before we played the piano, so it was a shock to me when Ginger Hope ate a large ripe peach and while she was still sucking the bits of flesh from the ridges of the stone she stretched out her fingers, which were slippery with juice, and started to play ‘Blue Moon’. She had a gold bangle that slid up and down her arm while she played, and a little blob of peach-flesh came off her finger and stuck on a black key way up in the treble.
That day was the first time I had actually spoken to Ginger. She is younger than me and known as a child prodigy. Her father is a poultry farmer so our families don’t mix. In fact, I never took much notice of Ginger. When she was playing the piano I was waiting for Mr Hope to bring Caroline back from a choir practice. Mrs Hope was sitting in the fernery reading her book and eating the chocolates I had brought. I was glad she liked the chocolates, but I was a bit surprised when she just took them and went out and sat in the fernery and started to eat them, without even offering one to me and Ginger. She didn’t care about Ginger and the peach and the piano either. Then Ginger said she was sick of waiting for her father and Caroline and she suggested we could go for a walk.
‘Bring your camera with you,’ she said. So we went up the road till we came to the toy factory and then we went towards the cliffs. Ginger was talking a lot of the time. She said she was glad she was going to be Caroline’s bridesmaid but she hoped there would be time before the wedding for her to have a new gold filling in her front tooth. I said you could hardly notice. Then she told me how her tooth got chipped in the first place.
‘We were in Spain,’ she said, ‘and Mother, who is, as you know, rather high church, insisted upon visiting every mouldy old shrine and creepy statue you could think of. We were in Segovia, which is actually quite pretty, and Mother dragged us off to see the tomb of St John of the Cross. You have simply never seen anything so hideous and bleak as the Carmelite convent in Segovia. I shudder to think of it. There, in the church, there is a grave, an actual hole in the floor where St John of the Cross was first buried. He must have been no bigger than a dog if that’s true. But next to the hole there’s this huge tomb where they put him later. It’s all lapis lazuli and bronze. I was so tired and bored and worn out anyhow, and the place honestly smelt like an attic full of dead dogs, that I sort of tripped and bashed my face on the lapis lazuli and that’s how my tooth got chipped. I had a black eye and you should have seen the blood.
‘En una noche oscura con ansias en amores inflamada.’*
…I don’t know the rest.’
‘It doesn’t show,’ I said. ‘The chip, I mean.’ But Ginger said she’s
very self-conscious about it.
We had reached one of the little hollows high up in the rocks, where you can sit in the shelter of a kind of cave and look right out across Bass Strait. I have never been out of Tasmania myself and Ginger’s talk of Spain was very exciting and sophisticated.
‘You brought the camera, didn’t you,’ she said. And then she asked me to take some pictures of her.
‘Pretend you are an explorer and I’m an Aborigine,’ said Ginger, ‘and you’ve never seen anything like me, and you take pictures of me for a learned journal and become famous.’
Then she took off her clothes really fast and stood with her back to me, sliding her bangle slowly up and down her arm, looking out across the water. When she turned around she was laughing and her skin was as white as sugar, tight across her bones, and there were freckles on her arms and a tuft like russet seaweed between her legs. She made me take nearly the whole film of her and then she said, ‘Now you take off your clothes and come over here.’
She made me do it. I didn’t really want to. I had never done it before. She frightened me. I kept remembering Caroline. There was sweat glistening on Ginger’s temples where her coppery ringlets trailed damp and flat. She looked beautiful but somehow horrible too. Then she said, ‘Now take another photo, thorn in the flesh, fly in the ointment, nigger in the woodpile.’
I couldn’t understand her, but I was suddenly very angry. I pulled the film out of the camera and chucked it into the sea. It glinted as it flew out and twisted and curled, down down until it hit the water far far away beneath us.