by Thea Astley
“You are suggesting marriage?” I asked demurely.
“I suppose I am,” Seb said.
“It sounds enormously attractive,” I heard myself say. “Is there a large salary to go with the job? Will I be full time? Shall I pursue my current career as well?”
Is my irony too richly stressed?
“I had rather hoped,” Seb said with his delicious smile slipping a little to one side, “that you might keep on with your job. It really is a two-income economy, you know, and we’ll need the money.”
The cunning dog has turned it into a joke that barely conceals the real, the serious intent of his request.
“You make it sound irresistible,” I said. “How could I refuse?”
“Don’t be like that. I’m trying to be honest.”
That was the horrible thing. He was being honest. He meant every arithmetical total.
Figures like that present a monstrous challenge. It was apparent I must break down those figures into smaller aggregates. Why not marry? I wondered. Marriage had become such a meaningless ceremony in the quickie divorce zone. Why not? It might be a pleasure to reshape his expectations and demands. Cynical, you might call me, but children of the eighties are confronted with a world that makes their lips curl.
My reshaping program was only partially successful. Seb sulked and ate out. I cried and burnt chops.
Once during an armistice I had asked him about his family. For a bride of three months I knew surprisingly little.
“How many kids in your family, Seb?”
“Four.” He is reading The New York Times Book Review and hates being disturbed. “You know there were four. Three boys and a girl. Gloria was the eldest.”
Poor kid, I think. Poor poor kid.
I probe more deeply and Seb slams down the paper. These were early days in the reshape program.
“Four nicely spaced. Two years between each of us. Mother died when Jumbo was eight.”
Jumbo? Gloria? None of his relatives had come to the wedding, Seb explaining their absence with brief throwaway lines. When cornered he always became mono-word cryptic.
“Jumbo?”
“He was the youngest. Bit of a drag for Gloria when mother passed on. She had to leave school. Couldn’t manage it and us. Shame, I suppose. She was rather bright. She did everything for us.”
“Except have a youth?”
Seb smiles his brilliant smile. “Not sure what you mean, my dear.”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. She must have spent just about every minute washing your school uniforms and cooking your meals. That’s not much of a youth.”
“We were a very close family,” Seb says, smiling threateningly. “Very close. I don’t know, Belle, whether you understand the concept of family. God knows with that scatterbrain mother it’s a wonder you grew up normal. Well, almost normal.”
“Where’s Gloria now?” I ask.
Seb hesitates. I detect a variety of lies beginning to shiver into formation on his lips. Finally he admits, “I don’t actually know.”
“I thought you were a very close family.”
“Don’t chop logic with me,” Seb says nastily. “I said we were. Gloria did something pretty unforgivable, really. Three years after mother died she left home and went nursing in Victoria.”
I laugh and laugh. I can’t help it.
“She used to send a card at Christmas,” Seb goes on ignoring me, “but we never saw her again. And then two years after that we heard she’d married one of the interns.”
Hooray for Gloria! My silent cheers must have been audible to Seb’s foxy ears for he pulls a face.
“And how did you cope with Gloria gone?”
“Father got in a housekeeper.”
“He could have done that in the first place, couldn’t he?”
“Housekeepers cost, dear. They cost. We weren’t made of money.”
“Poor Gloria.”
“Poor Gloria nothing. She’s done very nicely, thank you, from all I hear.”
What does one say to spiritual blindness?
The brothers?
“Scattered,” Seb says. “Scattered. “Is it really important that you know?”
“Not important. Just mildly curious. You’re the one extolling the family unit.”
“U.K. The States. Jumbo got two years for burning his draft card. When I wouldn’t bail him out he severed all relations. Satisfied? He’s working on a daily in Southampton. Luke’s a biologist in Houston. Got that all sorted? We write. Sometimes. Luke and I write.”
“And your dad?”
“God, Belle, regular little ferret, aren’t you? The dad’s in a very expensive, very luxurious retirement home in Sydney. He plays bridge and bowls and he’s doing fine. No, we don’t see each other often. I go down about once a year. Now are you satisfied?”
About?
Satisfied is not the word I would have chosen. There was such aridity, such desolation in this rapid-fire résumé of Seb’s family history, I was inclined to discover a new warmth and interest in my own. Pondering these imponderables I wept and wrote a long and foolish letter to mother who rang back and wasted a fortune as I howled longdistance. I hung up the receiver and tears, marveling about the nature of idiosyncrasy, whether the refusal to conform made life easier or more difficult. Whatever case I examined, I came up with only one answer: screwballs had it made. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Seb responded to my plea for sharing with a nasty and chilly sarcasm that demoted and reduced me: he took up what I can only call “men’s cooking”—the infinite search for the perfect sauce—and whenever we had guests (oh, those longueurs of summer evenings on shaved lawns under the trees) insisted on preparing the entire meal, rejecting all offers of help, so that with the serving of each course he could discuss with Frank Hassler in boring detail the exact chopping, flavoring, cooking and timing methods.
“Belle’s a chop and two veg woman,” he would announce to gasping groups when he produced yet another triumph. “We’ve swapped roles. But she does a good mow job, I think you’d agree.”
Was there something dog-in-the-mangerish about my resentment? I wilted under phrases like “the merest dash of fennel, not a smidgin more than an ounce of rum at this stage, pan broil for the quickest three minutes you’ve ever seen.” At these parties the great Australian division of the sexes still took place but now the men spent their time trading hints for choux pastry while the women—well, the women, relegated to the backblocks of gastronomy, talked concerts and theater and on the home front, as the men would say, the best ways to clean out rain-gutters and grease-traps. Absorbed in their new authority and involved in inventiveness the men recommended dishes discovered on business trips or at conferences in out-of-the way places like Anchorage, Paramaribo, Sandakan.
I cannot see Gaden Lockyer interested in the properties of empadade camarao or even the four-egg sponge.
Would I have been different nine decades back? Would I have plunged into Betsy’s role with the sacrificial joy those times expected, tendering daily offerings to the teeth father?
I still have a photograph I took one late afternoon of Seb and friends in a huddle over the traditional way to prepare moussaka. Their faces have a glittering intensity their wives never elicited. It’s the only photograph I have kept of my marriage.
The camera shutter is diabolically fast.
Some quirk of conscience niggles me as I drive blearily away from the pub next morning, the box of photographs and diaries stowed in the trunk. I have every intention of returning it but at a time that suits me and I leave instead an explanatory and apologetic note on newspaper letterhead promising to post back everything as soon as my research colleagues have assessed and notated. I cannot bear the thought that all that material, even those photos and letters that are irrelevant to my purpose, should go back to join the clutter in the horse shed.
I have my poster in the trunk as well, my friends of the people poster, and now one hundred and twe
nty closely written pages of not so intimate jottings and a sense of expectancy. Driving on to Mr. Gaden Lockyer’s next life-stop which must also be mine, I repress the jabs of rationality that keep warning me of spectacular idiocy as I accelerate towards the coast.
Hello Comet Bluff Dingo. Goodbye. Hello Duaringa.
I have chosen this place for entry. It will be no random attempt and obsession convinces me I can make it. I thank God I am not attempting to fight my way back into the script-time of the Decameron, the Canterbury Tales or the Iliad. On the one hand the expense would be mammoth and on the other I suspect there would be unsympathetic foreigners who would know I was a suitable case for treatment. Proust would have understood what I am doing, or trying to do, and have given a long-winded cheer. I am doing it with all the finesse of the most private-eye, retaining mother’s sense of fun and supplying ambience as I bucket over back roads with the car tapedeck playing Blossom Dearie chirruping “I’m Shadowing You.” I chirrup along with her as my car devours miles of road on the way to Duaringa.
Although I discover the right location, there are only remnants of the old buildings, glimpsed as I drive along half a mile of fenceline to where the current farmer has housed himself in triple-fronted brick. The farmer’s wife to whom I reveal only my researcher identity and a falsely claimed relationship to the first settler, giving my name as Lockyer, subjects me to a good ten minutes’ probing before she reluctantly walks me across to the broken-down stumps and partly caved-in walls of the old farm. It looks now like an abandoned packing shed.
“There,” she says. “The old place was there. My father built the present house after he bought the property.”
I unsling my camera. Besides being a convincing prop, it is a meanly professional looking Ricoh automatic with shutter speed of up to one thousandth of a second and a 35-70mm lens. The price tag would have assuaged doubts. I line up the stumps, the decaying walls. I click away and wonder how much film I must waste in this foreplay to establish authenticity.
She’s a carefully spoken woman who, after the diligence of her questioning, now seems unsurprised by the assaults on family history of female strangers. She tells me her father had lived in the old house for about fifteen years before he rebuilt and had used some of the timber for the new place. “There’s not much left, is there?”
It is unreasonable to resent those fifteen years of what I regard as intrusion. I move away from her into my own silence and look.
Desolation.
I climb up onto the creaking and doddering remnants of floor and stand on what was once a veranda, staring past her at the view his eyes must have taken each morning. If I block out the sight of the present farmhouse with its gleaming white trim and cherry red roof and subtract the monied results of crop-duster attention that has given the paddocks a fearsome verdancy, I can find desolation without the building as well.
Or is it in me?
She looks up at me anxiously. Her eyes are still curious behind spectacles, her thin worried face all wrong in this landscape stupor. I step over to the doorway and stand where Lockyer must have stood. With one hand on the paintless frame supporting me, I nudge off my joggers, still laced, and then my socks.
I catch twitches of alarm on the woman’s face.
“I’m getting the feel,” I explain in my flattest voice. “Please understand. It’s rather hard writing a report, even for research departments, unless I get the feel.”
Why does she stay? The word “report” smacks of public service coma that should be sufficiently calming.
“Be careful,” she warns, suddenly anxious. “There might be snakes as well as splinters.”
I want my naked feet to tread in those long-gone places where he trod. The woman watching me is dreading a crazed alien thrust on her hospitality with broken leg or shattered ankle.
“I’ll only be a moment.” I weave lies that startle me. I rattle on about instructions from my employers, the importance of Gaden Lockyer as Member for Walla, commemorative articles. It is, I think, eight decades more or less since Mr. Gaden Lockyer became the Honourable Member for, and now, as my sacristan feet pad across to the hole of a doorway, we are united by something as close as the feel of cool old wood.
She appears relieved somewhat by my gabble. It has been delivered with a sufficiency of authoritative detachment and when I add that I would like to spend a little time taking more photos of the surrounding countryside as well as interior shots, she says well of course and asks can I find my way back to the house where she’ll be putting the kettle on. I tell her I will probably have to go back to my car for more equipment.
I track her departure through disturbed air, through the scarlet quiverings of acalypha that hedge the farmhouse garden.
Gone.
I close my eyes and listen in to Gaden and his wife and children in this box of a dwelling, examining the hollows, not of the four small rooms but of life’s demands. Standing by the battered tin recess of their cooking place, I listen in. More memories can crescendo through this old tin flue than ever came from Stanley’s exponential horn. I listen in. Each speaker has a voice my heart recognizes and his is lighter than the baritone depths I would wish on him. Betsy is not the nagger I mean-spiritedly hoped for and by lamplight the table, set simply for their evening meal, speaks plainly to me. I want to join them.
Through one paneless window I see an outbuilding where, by some trick of shadow, the rusted roof becomes a chiaroscuro representation of a man’s face, brushed out in that blurred style of portraiture of past centuries. The features approximate those of a clerk outside the Jericho Flats bank. I shake my head and the effect vanishes. I blink and it returns.
I go back to my car, open up the trunk and slide out the poster, my movements unfortunately furtive. Repressing the impulse to look at the house but conscious of eyes, for soothers I make play with a large clipboard that I tuck obviously beneath my arm. Then I carry everything over to the shack with my back smarting under inquisitive stares.
I stand twenty yards off and assess the situation.
I am going to get right into the picture.
Right in.
At this point I am sheltered from the farmhouse by a line of orchard trees that must obscure my actions from the glaring windows of the farm. There are enough protuberances on the rotting timbers of the veranda for me to tie my poster into position across the gaping doorway. Once more I go up the steps, unfold the poster and, by standing on some loose bits of lumber, manage to reach up and get the first tie in position. One sharp dagger of ironbark gashes my thumb. Blood creates a smear down the pictured margins of their shack, the clump of stringybarks and Betsy’s skirt. I smudge away what I can and tie the other side into position. More blood dabbles. Heart-bleed. The poster flaps in a small breeze until I stabilize it by the bottom ties each side of the doorway. Better. Much better. So that when I turn, step back down the stairs and walk away into the tussocks of burr a little distance before again swinging round to look at Mr. Gaden Lockyer’s settler hut, there they are, en famille, waiting on their veranda, togged up for the cameraman, holding their posed half smiles and their bodies for a second of biography.
I raise my own camera to them, whisper “Hold it!” and snap them.
God! The very sight of them makes my astigmatic eyes spill over and this natural mist, plus the non-specifics distance affords as I back even farther to the fenceline, gives them a realism that is shattering.
Can I now be seen from the house?
This isn’t exactly as I had planned.
I should be dressed for the occasion in long skirt, shirt-waister and lace-up boots. But there is a limit to the outrages of trespass. Although these garments are in a bag in the car trunk also, I am not yet crazed enough to go back and put them on. The farmer’s wary wife, whose name I have already forgotten in the speedy way in which I dismiss irrelevancies these days, might easily ring for the police. Could be so ringing at this moment.
My eyes are riveted on
that family group (with whom I am shortly to dine) which buckles in the breeze on the veranda of the abandoned farmhouse.
I concentrate on them, on their oneness, their existence then, willing myself back and backforcing my thoughts towards that center until everything outside me is diminished and my mind lasers at unseeable speed towards the flaming expected core.
Abandoning this decade, this century, I move forward from the fence, telling myself and that watching wavering group that I am about to join them.
I have all manner of sesames.
I have held the hand of a grandniece and drunk from her cup.
I have dined with a grandson.
I have anointed the soles of my feet on the timbers of his floor.
I am surrounded by the stage props of a landscape still unchanged.
I lengthen my stride to trot, to sprint, running faster than time until I am hurtling forward up the veranda steps and hurling myself bodily through my paper hosts, making sure it is Mrs. Lockyer I obliterate, and I am gaspingly through beyond their startled faces to the other side in an empty room whose walls and floors bear the injuries of absence.
Nothing.
Nothing but a wood sliver in my foot and an overwhelming emptiness with a throbbing in my ankle where wood has ripped flesh, a trickle of blood, and pain for every reason.
The hollowness mocks me. There is absolutely no one, not even the sensation of anyone, there. I doubt my own presence.
Lucidity arrives in a cold splash.
When I turn about to push out through my rent family, the farmer’s wife is standing below the veranda, her eyes wide and unbelieving, as she takes in the enormous portraiture.
“My God,” she breathes. “My God.”
I think she’s on to me.
“It’s nothing,” I say. “A shame about the poster. I tripped. Look, it’s absolutely nothing.”
She doesn’t believe a word I am saying and I untie the corners and roll my family up.