Reaching Tin River

by Thea Astley

  “We want the best for you,” Bonnie had often told me. As grandma had. “Only the best. You must do well, Belle dear, for there’s nothing like a good education.” (Was this really mother speaking? The original screwball from Drenchings?)

  “Not even the piano?” I would reply unpleasantly, for I was then and had been for some years, an unwilling learner.

  “I will forget,” Bonnie said icily, “that I heard that.”

  Another year. And another. I am fifteen.

  I shall put my personality cards on the table.

  I am staying at Villa Marina for the August holidays; Mother and Aunt Marie are on their annual leave from the checkout counters and are doing one- and two-night stands in the Mary Valley.

  There are four permanents in this downmarket Rattigan boardinghouse on the bayfront, but the two who matter to me are not there to give comfort.

  Hello Mrs. Burgoyne of the still pretty elderly face and the soft overrefined vowels she employs in her teaching capacity at the local grade school and the mouth like dry paper until it is touched up with a rose-pink lipstick, the merest stroke, especially on school inspection days. “You’ll know when it’s inspection time,” Bonnie has told me. “She’ll douse herself in Nuits de Curriculum.”

  So doused.

  I imagine her as sixty, seventy, one hundred and seventy, but she must have been in her late fifties I understand now counting on my worn adult abacus. I am frightened of her age and her unrelieved refinement, of her crankiness and her ability to see through.

  “You’ll like Mr. Renouf,” she had said to me as we walk in together to dinner. Her smile is too astute.

  And Hello Mr. Renouf.

  Mr. Renouf is the wreckage of a handsome man, a towering still elegant leaf-weight widower with an interested elderly eye. In previous years he was usually to be found roosted on a deck chair on Villa Marina’s front veranda while I raced past in my bathers to swim with mother and aunt in the tepid bay water. “Good swim?” he would ask indifferently. He is a retired merchant navy man and the telescope to his eye, I realized at twelve, scanned only horizons. “Cold in?” That rheumy blue would be nowhere near me but Mrs. Burgoyne would always smile at me, past and through and up the stairs to my narrow bedroom. Eight by ten by twelve. The twelve’s the height. One window and a holland blind, a stretcher, a clothes cupboard, a dressing table drunk with seventy years of salt air. Shorncliffe is an old village in an arm of the bay where the sea crawls in to jetties and mudflats and mangroves. In the park, the hardly patronized fish café stands high, with glass walls gaping at the sea, reflecting yachts and fishing boats prowling the sea-lanes.

  At night darkness clumps from the air, falls over and through the Moreton Bay figs like black syrup.

  “Meh husband, Tesman …” Mrs. Burgoyne would often say, mumble mumble.

  (He was dead? She was separated? Why didn’t I listen more carefully?) I know she’s a lonely widow of uncertain temper teaching beautiful copperplate and complicated money additions to ungrateful nine-year-olds. Later, when I was also teaching at the same grade school, I observed how the men on the staff brought out her terrible flirtatiousness but it was me they were kind to. Fatherly. The kid. Be nice to the kid. Where’s mother? Banging drums in a disco, Mr. Bonsey.

  Why am I in this dump?

  Why am I in this dingy dining room where we dip for soup in broken rhythm and fork up dubious roast and veg?

  I go to breakfast, lunch, dinner and try not to talk to anyone. Mrs. Burgoyne tells me it is rude to read at the table. I know it’s rude and it is my protection. Yet I close the offending book quickly, being still responsive to the reproof of elders and smile my apologies. Some residue of powder is trapped in the soft creases of skin about her mouth, and her lipstick has coursed little rivers into the downturns at each corner although she is harrowingly widow-smart.

  I am cruel. I am young.

  She nods approvingly at my obedience, graciously acknowledging so that I feel I have been given papal absolution. She tells Mr. Renouf that it is a lovely afternoon and I watch slyly for his response for now Mr. Renouf has been watching me and Mrs. Burgoyne’s preludes flutter around and away like broken butterflies.

  “No, May,” Mr. Renouf complains to the maid. “I said no beans.”

  “Meh soup, dear,” Mrs. Burgoyne reminds. “You’ve forgotten meh soup.”

  “It’s off now, Mrs. B. You was late.”

  “Eh em never late.”

  There will be five weeks of this.

  Mr. Renouf is watching me again, a tiny smile (why? why?) on his age-freckled face. I decide to give him something to smile about, to widen that skin-stretch on his boulevardier visage. After lunch I go upstairs to my room and change into my new swimsuit. It is black and rather daringly cut. My own fairness is outrageous. Almost albino, Marie says unkindly when I annoy her. Like a negative, aren’t you, darling?

  I stand absorbing myself in the wardrobe mirror, a spotted sliver of glass attached to the inside of one of the wardrobe doors. I slip on sandals with unsensible heels and sling a psychedelic beach-towel over one shoulder. I absorb again. I remember Aunt Marie’s remark and watch my face react with resentment. It’s true. I am almost a negative. But other words rock through me. Young young young. I refuse to admit anything else. Nothing else. Does anything else matter? The face is—reasonable, perhaps pretty at certain angles or in certain moods; the body is a slim and developing ghost. I blow myself an ironic kiss. Ooooh Mr. Renouf, I simper, and close the wardrobe door on the mirror. My reflection remains in the mirror and smiles at the empty space.

  Already Mr. Renouf is seated for his post-luncheon pipe, fuzzily gazing through the giant figs of the park at lost blue roadways. He’s in one of those deck chairs with wide extendable arms on which legs or drinks may be propped. Where is the drink? Where are the lazy feet? There is no sign of decadence except that aromatic pipe. His bony knees could almost slash back at the knife-creases in his dated gray flannel casuals.

  Too slowly I saunter past his chair, too close, and pause at the top of the steps where the sun gropes for me like a lover until I turn my back on it and my own smile into Mr. Renouf’s.

  He nods. He smiles and nods. Is it approval? Can those rheumy eyes really see me. He says, “Lovely day for it.”

  For what?

  Mrs. Burgoyne is a pink and gray manifestation of perfume in the hall doorway watching us both.

  “You’ll get horribly sunburnt, dear, in that—that costume,” she says hopefully. “You should take more care of your skin.”

  I drop my towel on her remark, exposing more, and wave a languid fringe of fingers, provoking her. There is a lot more skin as I dangle the towel on the veranda floorboards.

  When I come back from the beach through the little park, I can see Mr. Renouf still sitting on the veranda. My hair is flattened, my body stinging with salt. My bathers cling like a second skin but now I feel more the small girl, wanting to gambol on the thick turf, be applauded and laughed at and approved. Good girl, I long to hear someone say. (Where is mother?) That’s the girl. Good girl. You’re back then. You took care. Was it lovely in? Where is mother? Anyone?

  Mother is beating drums in every country dance-hall north and south of Kin Kin. I bet she’s copping a lot of slow claps, hoots. There’s irony for you.

  Mrs. Burgoyne and Mr. Renouf are posed on the stoop like a couple at Bournemouth boardinghouse. Any minute the band will start its tarum-ta-ta on the pier. But it’s different here. There’s a touch of Diane Arbus. There’s sun and almost white sand and a racing blue sky under which the whole of Brisbane bakes its prejudices. The two of them watch me drip across the road, through the gate, along the garden path to the foot of the steps.

  I flaunt myself. See me, Mr. Renouf! See me in my half-naked state, costume gripping. Want me? Someone want me. And Mrs. Burgoyne says, her paper-strip lips looking like Band-Aids, “Why, Belle dear, you’re very red. Very. Does it hurt?”

  I catch Mr.
Renouf’s aged eye traveling a scarcely remembered journey up my legs which are now become his abstraction, a half smile still on his mouth, and I say,

  “Everything hurts, Mrs. Burgoyne.”

  That week is full of silent turmoil.

  Beneath the silence can be detected the violence of resentments and jealousy, of screaming domestic rows conducted pianissimo. May, the dining-room maid, is married to a local busdriver, a wiry and intense mustachioed masher whom I see chatting up a sunny redhead no older than I am every time I catch the bus to the railway station. They huddle when she buys her ticket with the intimacy of lovers. In the cold way of adolescence, I understand. May is twig-thin from running her gaunt body between kitchen and tables, from washing up and sweeping floors. Already she is lined like a fifty-year-old. Her eyes are gummy from tears. One appears to have been blackened. As she wilts, husband Reg blooms. Mrs. Burgoyne has had a verbal tiff with Mr. Renouf. She cuts him dead at breakfast and lunch but relents towards dinnertime. I wonder about alternatives to the burden of marriage.

  After dinner these evenings I sit a little longer in the shared sitting-room across the hall from the dining room. There are salt-riddled lace curtains, six easy chairs of yellow vinyl and a black-and-white television set whose images waver and wobble so excessively it is hardly worth turning on. There is also an old piano. On the coffee table are piled five-year-old copies of Newsweek, Time and Woman’s Day. It could be a dentist’s waiting room.

  I am waiting for a tooth to be pulled.

  I extract a thought.

  I shall make a list of all the convent-school girls who learned to play “The Rustle of Spring” by Christian Sinding (born 11/1/1856, died 3/12/1941), between the years 1945 and 1960. It will be a prodigious project.

  It would be an enormous task for anyone normal but already I sense I am not quite that. I have developed a penchant for lists and for the camera. (Stand still, mother! Just for a minute, will you! Marie, make mother stand still! It’s my only chance of getting to know her.) Photographs give me a reality to clutch at—or a sense of it. And my bulky snapshot albums accept this new project as respite.

  I’d bet my bottom dollar Mrs. Burgoyne played “The Rustle of Spring” in her heyday. Oh Mrs. Burgoyne, I shall ask at breakfast next morning, did you ever play “The Rustle of Spring”?

  And Mrs. Burgoyne will take a tiny handkerchief of spotted muslin and dab tea-wet from her upper lip and the little dribbles at each corner of her mouth and her eyes will be suddenly sharp.

  Oh I did, she will say. Why do you ask?

  I shall make wordless sounds.

  “It wasn’t meh party piece,” she confides in actuality a few days later to my concealed and rude teenage mirth, “not really. Not that. I used to play Ketèlbey, dear, whenever I was asked. ‘Bells Across the Meadows.’ I’m sure you’ve never heard of him. A lovely rippling piece. And there was another. Let me see.” Mumble mumble.

  “‘In a Monastery Garden,’” I say confidently, spoiling the whole conversation for her.

  She glares into my cocky eyes.

  “Yes. Why yes. How on earth did you know?”

  Mr. Renouf is observing Mrs. Burgoyne shake with annoyance as she reaches for the butter and begins scraping the last of it across cold toast.

  “I’m sure you could still play it!” he says gallantly, the silly old bugger. Why suggest it even?

  There is a great deal of agitated movement on her chair at this, simpering and wafts of eau de cologne.

  “Tonight,” she half-promises. “Perhaps tonight.”

  There she would be, I imagined, cushioned with excuses—I’m dreadfully out of, the piano hasn’t been tuned in, cannot remember after—swaying her top-heavy but frail torso at the out-of-tune Challen in our private parlor, her bum looking wider on the piano stool than it should, her arms busy under see-through voile, all feminine allure while the wrong notes jangle.

  I was cruel. I was wrong. She played like a professional.

  I would applaud till I had to be removed.

  I begin my list.

  “A school project,” I explain to returned Bonnie and Marie, to the library assistants at Sandgate, to Mrs. Rose Burgoyne and Mr. Clarrie Renouf. I do not reveal its nature. Boredom, the long stretch of vacation, even Bonnie’s reminiscences, inspire my mania.

  Play something, dear, they had always asked grandmother and then Bonnie and Marie (they never now asked me, being electronically sated) in those corseted sweating country evenings. “It was like a nightmare,” Bonnie sighed. In every Saturday-night living room, the piano threatened Liszt consolations, Chopin preludes and Brahms rhapsodies, rattled off prestissimo. And like a nimbus, “The Rustle of Spring.” Spring has never rustled in that part of the country, but nevertheless spruced-up husbands endured spring as they champed on pipes, sucked cigarettes or tried to hide themselves on shadowy verandas. Scabby-kneed kids lingered, picking at shins in doorways. The hostess always had three sorts of sponge and a boiled fruitcake. Cracker biscuits were topped with mounds of cheese and tomato savory.

  “Do play something dear.”

  “Play?”

  “Yes dear. Something pretty.”

  “Pretty?”

  “Well, you know.”

  “Bash ’em some Bach,” Marie used to whisper to Bonnie.

  “No no, dear. Not that. That’s too—intellectual. Something …”

  “‘Rustle of Spring?’”

  “Oh yes, dear. That would be lovely.”

  “It was nearly always ‘The Rustle of Spring.’”

  “Nearly?”

  “Always. Always always always.”

  “Shit,” Marie would hiss behind a cracker. “That Sin—ding!”

  Sometimes one of them would whack through the “Raindrop Prelude” or dazzle with the “Minute Waltz” (I think Chopin really meant minute!) played in fifty-five seconds flat, but one starter movement only of a Beethoven sonata had the guests writhing while outside the interpreted white moon scalded the inland plains and slapped wash-silver down the sides of the virgin rock.

  “No dear. I didn’t mean that piece. I meant that other piece. You know …”

  “Ah! ‘The Rustle of Spring!’”

  “Lovely, dear,” they always said when the last whining motif was hacked through. “Really lovely!” What a lovely touch she has—Ena, Gert, Maureen, Bonnie. What a lovely touch!

  The vision of old Fred Bathgate, my teacher and mother’s, intrudes at this point to be flashed cholerically into all those spring-rustled living rooms, convent practice studios, school concert halls.

  Oh—my—God!

  So, I am making my list.

  Already I have two thousand eight hundred and forty-five names—and that’s only Brisbane. It hasn’t been easy making this list, mark you. I started off with all the girls I knew who had learnt it and reached one hundred and seven in under an hour. Maybe it would have been easier to make a list of all the girls who didn’t learn to play it. I’m one of those. One of the lucky few.

  Aunt Marie reinforces Bonnie’s stories.

  “I guess it was a nightmare,” Marie agreed. “There was always some splendid girl in white who’d seat herself, no sweat, at the piano and off she would sail. We never had spring, for God’s sake, and I was only ten and for a while I didn’t think there were any other pieces. Maybe Mozart’s ‘Rondo alla Turca’ or that goddam ‘Raindrop Prelude.’ God! ‘The Raindrop Prelude!’ And the sheep were all keeling over in dozens in the muddied water-holes and claypans.”

  “Oooh,” Bonnie interrupted, her eyes glistening, “I heard de Falla once, ‘The Ritual Fire Dance,’ at one of Mr. Bathgate’s student concerts. I don’t think they taught that either at the convent. I think the nuns would have thought it too inflammatory. Every Saturday, Belle, Marie and I were allowed to go to dear old Fred’s studio, just like you. What a pet! Anyway, we learnt masses of Bach and Mozart and Haydn and lots of Clementi studies. Especially those. So you can imagine how ‘Rustle�
�� affected me when I heard it for the first time ripped out by the head girl in one of the practice rooms. All those trills and bird tweetings and leaf shakings. The convent was pretty big on Grainger’s ‘Country Gardens,’ too, and a terrible thing called ‘Bells Across the Meadows.’ You notice, Belle, how all those pieces were gentle nature scenes, tralala, English, non-Australian in flavor and with pastoral evocations unlikely to arouse our girlish senses. This is sex instruction, darling.”

  “We didn’t have any girlish senses,” Marie put in at that point. “I think they still remembered the horrors of the American invasion.”

  I, Belle, never hear “Rustle” or “Bells” these days. Yet one morning just before or just after Mrs. Burgoyne’s recital, I can’t remember exactly, I heard an announcer on national radio say, “The next piece will be a no-frills version of ‘The Rustle of Spring.’”

  How do you like that, Christian? Does it stun you up there in Oslo, composer of “The Holy Mountain,” three symphonies and the “Rondo Infinito!” Pretty rude, eh? I couldn’t believe it. Anyway, this version sounded much the same to me, the same that grandmother, when nagged, could dish out at seventy, her fingers moving automatically into all the right places on the keyboard. The same that all my piano-playing classmates could whip through. What was this no-frills business? I couldn’t believe it. Glued to the radio. No frills? There was the same family-and-friend-sized package. There were the same whistlings and whooflings, shakings and tremblings that used to be served out or dished up, as Bonnie relates, to the accompaniment of all those supper sponges.

  That really started it. The list, I mean. So back to that for a minute as I give my no-frills version of the growth of obsession.

  I drew up a pro forma letter.

  It was difficult to word my inquiry without sounding unhinged.

  I spent a lot of time at the bayside library where the smell of old books and newspapers besotted me. I used their photocopier until it caused comment. I posted those letters off in their dozens to every convent in the state (did I miss a couple?) with a postscript plea to pass on my request to any older or retired music teachers.