Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  My habitual insomnia became worse; I roamed the house at night, distraught, afraid that if I lost hold of my composure for a moment I’d never get it back. There was not one whose advice I could ask. The doctor, a kind thoughtful man, was concerned about his patient. When I consulted him about D’Arcy’s refusal to give up smoking, or even smoke less, he cautioned me not to bother him further.

  ‘He’s stuck with the habit. No use now. But you mustn’t pester him. Never get him upset over anything.’

  I believe this advice should have been qualified. The well people of the household have their rights, too. The children had the right to challenge their father’s withdrawal from them, in a time when they felt hurt and frightened. Their companionship and confidences would have been mutually rewarding. And what did he think of my calm efficiency? That I didn’t care? I longed to tell him otherwise but every time I spoke of his illness he brushed me off.

  ‘Don’t bother your head about that! Now, off you go, I have to work.’

  It would have been much better, much wiser, if we had wept together, but in those days I didn’t know that.

  There were also periods of tranquil achievement as though he were going through a remission. Every time that happened I thought, ‘The coronary must have been an anomaly, a one-off thing. He’ll never have another.’ And this was in face of the small ‘cardiac disturbances’, blackouts, frequent deathly exhaustion, the way his looks had altered! The loving heart will, I suppose, lie to itself until the end.

  I noticed every change in his appearance.

  ‘He’s getting older,’ I chided myself, ‘Only seven, six, five years away from fifty.’

  And I was encouraged in this folly when I observed that I seemed different, too. More than ever, I saw my mother, as she was when younger, peeping out of my face. There you are. Getting older, just as he is.

  D’Arcy Niland was a good-looking man. Now that he was changing he did not resemble either his father or mother. He came to look like somebody else, similar and yet not the same. An elder brother, perhaps.

  Only in the last ten years, since I’ve been able to find photographs of earlier Nilands, closer to Original Thomas, do I see that he was beginning to look like – in fact, became almost a replica of – kinsmen who died at the end of the nineteenth century. How he would have enjoyed this affirmation of the continuity of life.

  Almost every day he wrote as much as he had ever written; sometimes he went out to visit the more elderly friends in his vast circle of ‘good mates’ – Charles Laseron the geologist; Griffith Taylor, the geographer, who had gone with Captain Scott on the epic expedition to the South Pole in 1912; Cyril Hume, the ship modeller, and the many old seamen who frequented Cyril’s world. D’Arcy wrote about them all.

  ‘I’ve an awful fear, Tiger, that men like that, real men, are becoming extinct. I want to make sure they’ll not be forgotten.’

  During this time we returned to London for three months while he wrote the script for Twentieth-Century Fox’s film of Call Me When the Cross Turns Over. I was terrified, feeling that the long hours, the incessant contradictory yap about the script always indulged in by everyone connected with a film – in short, the false hysteria of the movie business – would affect his health adversely. Still, he finished the script, a fruitless business, as shortly afterwards the film was shelved indefinitely. During this time we had a meeting with the head of Fox in Europe, Darryl Zanuck, then declining, I believe, but still immensely powerful. He was a strange man, very small, with a two-storey forehead and many, many teeth. Throughout the interview he jumped up every few minutes to chin himself on gym bars that stood beside his immense Mussolini-style desk. It was unsettling, though probably a necessary brag from an insecure person. I may be small, but by God, I’m strong! Mr Zanuck had begun professional life as a scriptwriter and was brilliantly informed about scripts. Just by listening (I was invisible to him), I learned much that I was later able to put to good use.

  ‘But he’s a dead man running,’ said D’Arcy on the way home. ‘If you walked around the back of him you’d see nothing but air.’

  It took him a long time to recover from that frenetic time in London, but he rallied once more and began mapping out a long, substantial novel set in the middle years of World War I, when Australia at last cut loose from colonialism and became a nation.

  ‘I’m calling it Dead Men Running. It’s about a mercenary soldier, and they’re always dead men running.’

  He worked at the book for a year, finished it in March 1967.

  ‘Crikey, I feel whacked. But I had something to say, and I’ve said it.’

  Two days later he went to the doctor for his usual checkup, and was told he’d better go into hospital for some tests and a few days’ rest.

  I went to St Vincent’s with him in the ambulance, Rory followed in the family car so he could drive me home. All was leisurely and unworried.

  We waited outside the room while the nurse settled him in, and I was glad to see that the cardiologist, Dr Selden, had already arrived.

  Rory and I were standing there idly talking when Dr Selden came out and told us D’Arcy had suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. He died ten or fifteen minutes later. We did not see him again.

  Inscribed on the bronze plaque which marks his grave are the words: ‘Sing No Sad Songs for Me.’

  PART THREE

  • 1 •

  When my husband died I handled grief very badly. People remarked on my calm or the capable manner in which I handled the innumerable complexities that follow a sudden death. I was unlikely to embarrass or distress them by weeping or throwing myself in front of a truck, and though their desire to console was genuine, they were secretly relieved.

  ‘You’re being wonderful,’ they said.

  To be wonderful is to handle grief badly. And so I nearly died. In a way I did die, as one might die of shock after an amputation or a dreadful wound.

  My own character and disposition made things worse for me, terribly worse. Reserve, independence, stoicism are not the qualities needed in grief. My sorrow when Mera my father died had taught me only one thing, that I could survive that sorrow. Not how one survived.

  Our culture knows little about meeting grief head-on. It has come to be our most impregnable Tower of Babel, the very symbol of non-communication. We stand about in tears, wishing we could assuage the pain of persons dumbfounded by woe, but mostly we don’t know what to say. Better to make no reference at all? Better, more tactful, to allow them to get over it in their own time?

  It is all kindness, and no help. Thus, thrown entirely upon oneself in a comfortless darkness, one has the choice either of being wonderful or falling to pieces. And if you have children or others dependent upon you, you cannot afford to fall to pieces. So mourning is not done, and the tears that run down inside turn to acid that may corrode your soul for years.

  I found myself in a strange country, where no one knew the way except my fellow bereaved. There was no one in those times to tell me anything. The doctor gave me tranquillisers, D’Arcy’s priest friends ‘religious consolation’. I looked at these genial or melancholy fellows and thought sadly that they were, as D’Arcy had said, tucked away in a pod, isolated from the bloodstained, blissful, bawdy life of what, somewhat slightingly, they called ‘the world’. Had the sword of unbearable sorrow ever pierced their honest hearts?

  You can’t learn about bereavement; you can’t teach anyone. It is like cold. You may inform a person who has never felt cold of every scientific fact - cause, consequence, attributes - but he will have no knowledge of cold until he experiences it.

  So it is the fellow bereft who help. Tears were beyond me until an Italian shopkeeper, John Quattroville, who had suffered the loss of his baby daughter in a dreadful accident, took my hands and with speaking eyes gazed into my face. That was all. After that I was able to cry, but never where people could see me.

  No one ever told me that the body grieves, slows down, its systems short
circuit; that the immune system becomes so unstable you become a target for the so-called ‘widow’s syndrome’. All kinds of small illnesses occur, in a long chain of aggravation, not psychosomatic ailments but real ones. The red vanished from my hair; in three weeks I was ash blonde. My teeth began rapidly to show small specks of decay. I had so many bodily disorders that I expected any moment to hear two sharp snaps, as the arches of my feet gave way.

  Today we know of the effect of extreme sorrow or shock on the hypothalamus, and how a stressed body can succumb to much graver diseases, such as cancer. But we didn’t know then.

  Our family’s financial emergency was extreme. Because all our belongings, all our savings, were jointly owned, everything was frozen. For some months we existed only on what I could earn from the Australian Broadcasting Commission children’s scripts. There was no insurance. The Niland family did not believe in insurance after poor Auntie Bid lost all her premiums in an insurance crash in 1928. The question was never examined; I think there was some superstition attached to it. Four or five days before D’Arcy died, he came to me in the kitchen, and with a half shy, half wistful expression said, ‘I suppose I really ought to get insured.’

  It did not seem to have occurred to him that no company would insure him. I said gently, ‘Oh, don’t bother your head about that,’ and he went off quite happily.

  Perhaps illness had made him even less practical than usual. Or was he fully confident that I would manage somehow when he had gone? I don’t know these things. I could not bring myself to think of them; certainly not to discuss them with him.

  Perhaps he really thought I was a warrior woman.

  It was a terrible time, robbing Peter to pay Paul in order to cope with bills, as I had done in earlier, poorer times – ‘if I pay the gas account now, and leave the rates until the second notice from the Council, maybe that magazine will pay for the short story before then …’ Miserable subterfuges and ruses.

  At this period I cashed in my own life insurance and those of the children, at considerable loss. For a long time it was a case of chin above water, and little else.

  In those days we paid estate or probate tax, and I had the humiliating experience of going slowly through the house with a tax inspector, valuing all we owned. We had a thirteen-year-old refrigerator.

  ‘Who bought this?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Where’s your receipt?’

  Any article for which I did not have a receipt – and most were so old receipts had vanished years before –- was automatically attributed to D’Arcy’s estate.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘The Department deems that the breadwinner purchased the item. So it is part of his estate.’

  Over the years I had bought most domestic appliances, the car, the furniture. My husband, in our easy-going and practical manner, coped with council rates, accounts of all kinds. We had never had any disagreement over money. It was not his, not mine. All that came into the house belonged to the family. Now almost everything we owned was assessed as my husband’s property.

  Oh, my sisters, I lamented, never think of yourselves as contributors to assets, actual or potential. No matter how hard you have laboured to support the family, or build up your man’s profession or business, your name is written in mud.

  The little inspector was into power. How he bloomed when I revealed that I had bought the house, and it was registered in our joint names.

  ‘But you’re not going to say our home is part of my husband’s estate?’

  ‘Only half of it. I notice you did not pay gift tax.’

  ‘But it wasn’t a gift! It was our home! And besides, I’ve never heard of gift tax.’

  ‘Ignorance is no excuse. You’ll have to pay that now, and also be fined for not paying it when the purchase was made.’

  In fact, however, after I had appealed to the latent humanity of the Taxation Department, the fine was waived. Still, I had to pay the gift tax. Would the same situation have existed if my husband had bought the house and registered it in out joint names? No. He is deemed the breadwinner, the natural purchaser of the family home, and if he wishes in his generosity to add his wife’s name to the deed, who could construe that as gift-giving? I came to the conclusion that in the Department’s eyes the wife is never the breadwinner, even when she is.

  Presumably, with the abolition of probate and gift tax, many of the cruel absurdities confronting the widow in my time of trial have vanished. But you never can tell.

  So life was hard, often bewildering. But avalanches of financial worries are only an exacerbation of what is essentially a time of bitterest depression. During such an experience some people fall into accidie – listlessness, torpor, sloth – a snail’s withdrawal from the normal world. Some take to drugs, or drink, or comfort food. I continued writing scripts and anything else I could lay my hands on. Inside I was eaten up by sorrow, devoured.

  ‘It’ll be better when a year has passed,’ said the doctor. Lies. For many years I was a castaway, isolated from the world at large, moving civilly through a professional life that scarcely impinged upon my inner world.

  One of my children said to me in later years, ‘I always feared you were going to knock yourself off.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say something?’

  ‘Didn’t know what to say. But I kept an eye on you.’

  And I recalled how, when my family was marooned in a frigid and isolated mill valley in New Zealand, my father was made so wretched (and I understood him so well) that every time he picked up his rifle and went out hunting, I went too, a gun-shy, silent girl, tense with terror, tagging along stubbornly in spite of his exasperation. Until at last he cried, ‘All right, then. I won’t do it. I give you my word! Yes! Go home, damn it!’

  Because we have forgotten how astute is the observation of the children who love us, we do terrible things to them.

  Nearly every night I had violent, perilous dreams, often of a blue sky, nothing but blue sky, a void. In it a gap would open, sometimes even a door. In a frenzy of longing I would rush towards it, knowing I could jump through it into oblivion. But I always awoke, sweating and shaking.

  Then I’d get up, get the children’s breakfast, send them off, and begin to write. A lifetime of literary practice had taught me that I no longer had to know delight, or humour, or energy in order to convey it. The woman and the writer were separate.

  For six weeks the enormous heap of typescript that was D’Arcy’s last novel, Dead Men Running, lay on his desk. I did not have the heart to touch it. He had left few things because he had so few possessions; this typescript, his old Olivetti portable (upon which I type these words today), his fountain pen, a thin gold chain with a cross and St Christopher medal which I had given him to replace Sister Roche’s ragged scapular, a pair of nail clippers that he’d never learned to use successfully – ‘bloody thing took off a piece of thumb!’ - and his library. He’d never been one for owning things; he didn’t even have a car, but drove my unkillable Morris.

  Still, he’d left many good things that could not be called possessions. And I remembered how, in the early morning after the night he died, I awakened from a distracted half-sleep to see two little pyjamaed figures standing beside the bed.

  ‘We have made a solemn vow to make Dad proud of us,’ said whichever twin was spokeswoman for that week.

  So they have, as all his children have. That’s something for a man to leave.

  But it was necessary for me to edit Dead Men Running, have it typed, and get it published. Even to read the book was painful; the writer’s voice was so clear in those sharp sentences. But there was really nothing to edit. I checked dates and events, for the novel is set in the tumultuous days of World War I, when Australia, still a new Federation, was torn apart over conscription and the nation’s ambiguous loyalty to the old Empire. But he had done very concentrated research; there were no errors.

  The novel was published simultaneously by Hodder & Stoughton in Australia
and Michael Joseph in Great Britain, a little later in the United States. It also became a most successful television mini-series.

  As soon as our funds were released I took the three young ones to England, the girls to further their art education, and Patrick to attend the Royal Academy of Music. He was an unusually talented pianist, and D’Arcy and I had long before decided we would stretch every financial sinew to give him his chance.

  It was a quixotic decision; I couldn’t afford to keep three students in London, and, as it turned out, the art tuition the girls got there was not as good as they had already been having in Sydney. Still, somehow we managed, and the experience was valuable to them.

  It was 1968. Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward were in London, like other Catholics waiting for Pope Paul VI to release the encyclical Humanae Vitae, summing up the decisions of the endless deliberations of the Vatican Council, set in motion by old Pope John’s desire for aggiornamento or updating. A group of us – I was still officially a Catholic – were in Rule’s, a fascinating restaurant once frequented by Edwardian men about town and their light ladies but in the 1960s favoured by representatives of ancient English families which had remained loyal to the Faith during the bad centuries of persecution. Dungeons, fire and sword were part of their family histories. My friend, Frank Sheed, ran through rapid introductions - Peter, his ancestor the Venerable Gervase, copped it under Henry VIII, hanged, drawn and quartered. Christopher, collateral descendant of Blessed Margaret, burned under Elizabeth. And so on. I was just about to tell them about a collateral ancestor of my own, a Covenanter who for his loyalties was squashed to death at Paisley in the seventeenth century, when in hastened a pallid messenger from Westminster Cathedral.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this, but that absolutely blighted old wop has come down against contraception!’