The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  Tony knew, Laurie thought. Even then he’d known. All her thoughts petered out and were replaced by a strong, an overwhelming, desire. She wanted to be in her room.

  After a while, during which she and her mother just sat there, she got to her feet. Her legs supported her, though her knees felt unreliable.

  In her bedroom, everything was utterly familiar. Her bed, hastily made, was rumpled but inviting. On her desk was her microscope, long-nosed and studious among her other paraphernalia. It was all as it should be.

  It occurred to Laurie, somewhere at the back of her mind, that this would make a good story to tell Carol and Ursula on Monday, that it would trump even the dismissal of Lynette, Dr Fearnley’s receptionist, which – Carol had let it be known, with hands cupped first around one ear and then around the next – was the condition on which she and her mother had returned to the family home.

  As if reading her thoughts, her mother put her head around the door. ‘This is all for your ears only, Laurie,’ she said. Then she was gone, leaving the silence behind her singing.

  Laurie’s cheeks burned. She was to bear this knowledge alone, then. She was not to speak of it. Not even to Tony.

  The sweet familiarity of her room. As she gazed, it began to fracture into a thousand crystal pieces. Standing on a sun-warmed piece of floor, Laurie took her glasses off and used the back of her wrist to wipe away her tears.

  Everything was different after that, but also completely the same.

  It was as if a stranger had not only come into their life but penetrated the very core of it, where affections grew thick and habits were immemorial. Laurie looked at Tony and saw things she hadn’t seen before. She looked for the trace of a man she never knew, except, perhaps, as a doubt, a shadow.

  She came to know him, that shadow. He’d taken up a place in her head, and she knew she’d find him there if she went looking. Like a shadow his shape grew and shrank according to the possibilities that came to mind. Like a doubt, he unsettled. There was a face, lean, olive-brown, tinted by a tender hand. This shadow of a man had known her mother before they had, when her hair was rolled and her skirts were skimpy. Had ridden a tram, gone to war. One day, somewhere, died.

  Had he known he had a son? The question haunted her, but she could never ask.

  In her dreams Laurie wasn’t always sure which were her feelings and which were Tony’s. They merged somewhere, and it seemed as if the ones she thought were Tony’s had a stronger hold on her than her own, and hurt more.

  Over the weeks that followed, things kept falling into place. She’d wake one morning and remember something else, another piece that fitted in. Or she’d be looking at the classroom window trying to think of eleven twelves when a particular expression on Tony’s face would come to her, or an offhand comment of her father’s. And it would make sense. At last, twistedly, achingly, it made sense.

  iii

  Having dealt with the demands of gallantry by offering Dossie and Great-Aunt Margot the muscatels, Grandfather Whittaker was making his way back to his armchair through drifts of cellophane when he was arrested by a thought. Grandfather Whittaker was tall and thin and had the slow grace of a praying mantis. His nose and ears were overgrown and his rheumy eyes were mild. Like his daughter he had a stoop, which gave him the air of one who has accepted burdens.

  Taking his weight with bent knees, he leant around the Christmas tree and addressed his son-in-law on the other side.

  ‘How’s the Coola– whatsit?’ He straightened and looked around for his daughter. ‘What’s it called, Rosemary? That’s right, Coolacane. How’s the Coolacane business going, Doug?’

  Tony rolled his eyes at the ceiling. He was sitting opposite Doug on a carver’s chair, which had been brought into the living room to supplement the seating, twirling his new Gray-Nicolls cricket bat between his knees. Laurie glanced at her father, hoping he hadn’t noticed Tony’s expression. The smell of mown grass drying to hay came in through the wide-open doors.

  ‘Well,’ said Doug. He motioned to his father-in-law to take his seat and swung his own chair around the tree to set it down beside the old man so that they could talk more easily. ‘There are a few little gremlins, Jim,’ he said. He grasped the seat between his legs and pulled it in closer.

  ‘Eli! Eli! Here, puss puss puss!’ Miranda called at window and door. But Eli had long since sought a spot where he would be free from the impertinences of society. Certainly the house was unusually full, with all of them there together and Grandfather Whittaker, Great-Aunt Margot and Dossie added.

  ‘Give your grandmother a kiss,’ Rosie had said, with a hand at Laurie’s back after she’d opened her stamp album present (Dossie had classified her as a collector, not understanding that she was really a namer, because naming sharpened your eye and uncovered hidden likenesses), and Laurie had got up and kissed the proffered porridge of Dossie’s cheek.

  The cousins, two young and excited and three adolescent and bored, had left with their parents after the present-opening to lunch with other, dimly conceived branches of the family. Only Nan was missing from the day. She was on the high seas, aboard a P&O liner bound for Europe.

  Great-Aunt Margot’s relationship to the rest of the family was obscure. She – it was explained – was ‘frail’, a word that silenced all three children for a moment and sent them into the burrows of their minds. She kept to her armchair, her dress slipping off her insufficient shoulder, piping up unexpectedly at times but mostly observing goings-on with a glittering eye. The adults treated her solicitously and the young with circumspection. Once Laurie, offering the sugared almonds, found her hand clutched and held little-girl-fashion, and was for some time at a loss as to how to get away.

  Rosie kept one eye on Miranda. Her gaze was always drifting to her, unbidden, whenever she was quiet.

  It was stiflingly hot. The electric fan droned in the corner, its dreamy oscillations raising small flurries of paper that settled as its influence passed.

  ‘Maybe it’s cooler on the verandah,’ Rosie remarked.

  No one stirred.

  ‘Financing it is the chief problem, of course,’ Doug was explaining, ‘but technically …’

  ‘Would you like some iced water, Aunt Margot?’ Rosie asked. ‘Iced water, Dossie?’

  Dossie fanned herself with a magazine and dabbed the moisture from her flushed face with a wad of hankie. ‘Now that would hit the spot, Rosie.’ She emphasised her words with a defiant little jerk of the chin. It was a mannerism that would have been pretty in a bit of a girl and even in her old age was endearing. She put her wad to her chest. Her voice was hoarse. Before lunch she’d mustered them all into some carol-singing, accompanying them on the old upright out the back (‘Con brio!’ she’d called to them over her shoulder), had sung with fortitude in the heat and was now worn out.

  ‘Get us another beer if you’re going to the fridge, Rosie,’ Doug called. ‘Jim? Another drop of Christmas cheer?’

  Laurie thought about getting up off the floor to help her mother as she knew she should, but the heat in the room sapped her will. It seemed to hinder not only the forming of intention but even, somehow, the passage of sounds, and ‘Christmas cheer?’ lagged between source and ear, listless and unresolved.

  ‘I’m hot,’ she sighed. The Christmas lunch lay like a lump in her stomach. She remembered the piles of dirty dishes out in the kitchen, the greasy plates, messy with ham fat, chicken bones and the remains of salad, the bowls of half-eaten Christmas pudding and brandy sauce, the glasses sticky with dregs of beer and warm lemonade, the scrunched-up paper serviettes. Later, they’d all be expected to get stuck into it, Doug included. Or maybe Doug would say that Rosie had done enough, slaving all morning in the stifling heat of the kitchen, and he’d take over, and she and Tony, at least, would be expected to help, and Doug would do things in the wrong order and put them in the wrong place, and their legs would ache from standing, waiting, and Doug would be falsely jolly and Tony sullen.

&n
bsp; ‘It’s a question of the bonding material. It has to –’

  ‘The glue?’

  ‘Well, yes, the medium. It has to be aerifiable and inert. I’ve looked into –’

  ‘But wouldn’t you have a problem with all this new, I don’t know, all these new products, fibreglass and whatnot –?’

  ‘Yes, well, fibreglass –’

  ‘And air-conditioning. Ooh hoo hoo! That’ll be a hard one to compete with! My word! I was at the bank the other day, and –’

  ‘Well that’s true, but you’ve got to consider the ongoing costs. It’s not as if –’

  ‘Not only that, all your new luxury whatnots. Office buildings. Department stores.’ Jim swept his glass of beer around in a vague arc, as if to encompass the whole scope of omnipresent modernity.

  Doug sat back and then leant forward impatiently. ‘But Jim, what you’ve got to grasp is –’

  ‘The point is,’ Tony broke in, his voice cracking, ‘you should be coming at it from the other end.’

  Laurie was always watchful of Tony; something about him stirred in her a deep protectiveness. But now as she watched him, seeing the hinges of his joints, the length of his wrists, his bare feet planted on the floor, she felt a kind of looseness about her middle, for it seemed to her that his inclusion here in this comfortable household was flimsy, provisional.

  ‘To absent friends,’ her father had said at lunch, raising his glass. ‘To absent friends,’ the others had murmured. Who had Doug been thinking of? Who had Tony? Who her mother?

  ‘Now what end would that be, lad?’ said Doug.

  ‘The design end. It’s all in the way you design buildings in the first place.’

  ‘Tony’s interested in architecture,’ Rosie explained to Dossie. ‘It’s just a question of whether he should go to the tech or uni.’

  ‘That’s all very well, but this can be part of the design.’

  ‘But you shouldn’t be building heat traps and then thinking about how you can cool them afterwards. You should be using scientific principles to –’

  Doug drew back, raised his eyebrows and chuckled deeply. ‘Well, now! Science. Now why didn’t I think of that!’ He glanced around the room, chuckling still.

  Laurie was uncomfortable. Her father seemed unlike himself. Unmanly.

  ‘I didn’t know you wanted to be an architect, Tony,’ Dossie said.

  ‘Thinking about it.’

  ‘Well, people are going to be wanting housing, without a doubt. So many babies being born, and all these New Australians coming! What are you going to be when you grow up, Laurie-love?’

  ‘A research biologist.’

  ‘Research biologist?’

  ‘Yes. Working for the CSIRO.’

  ‘Scientific principles are precisely what I’ve been applying for years,’ Doug went on. ‘It’s a catchcry, my boy. Scientific principles. Catchcries don’t solve problems.’

  ‘It’s more than a catchcry. It’s –’

  But what more it was they did not hear, because just then the phone rang piercingly in the hall and all heads turned towards it.

  Laurie was scrambling to her feet when Miranda reached the phone and shouted ‘Hello? Hello?’ into the mouthpiece. Her mother, also on her feet, extended her arm and flicked her fingers. Obediently, Miranda passed her the receiver.

  ‘It’s a telegram!’ called Rosie. ‘Quick! Get me a pencil and paper!’ Miranda and Laurie flew around to do her bidding.

  ‘That’ll be Nancy for sure!’ Grandfather Whittaker declared, struggling to his feet as if he must now take charge.

  ‘From Aden!’ reported Rosie, listening intently.

  Grandfather Whittaker nodded and scanned the room, indicating with a sweep of his beer that he addressed them all. ‘What’d I tell you! Nancy!’

  ‘Noel Noel stop,’ Rosie called loudly.

  ‘Aden! I thought the ship was taking the Cape route!’ Grandfather’s mouth hung open as he turned inward to his thoughts.

  ‘Suez blocked stop,’ Rosie continued. ‘Camels date palms guns stop. Bound for Cape stop –’

  ‘The Cape! There you are!’

  ‘Salaam stop Nan. She’s in Arabia!’

  ‘What’s “salaam” mean?’ chirped Miranda.

  The old man stood with his hands on his hips in the middle of the floor. ‘Guns!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I knew it! Getting herself mixed up in that Near East shambles! Probably has some hare-brained scheme to give ’em what for. Pull ’em all into line.’

  ‘Does it mean “goodbye”?’

  Rosie handed around her hasty transcription of the telegram. ‘She says the canal’s still blocked. That means –’

  ‘Nasser’s agreed to Britain’s terms. The British troops have left,’ said Tony. ‘It was on the news this morning.’

  ‘So why …?’ asked Rosie.

  Tony began, ‘Nasser’s troops –’

  ‘The whole situation’s devilishly complicated,’ Doug cut in. ‘Israel’s mobilised for reasons of its own –’

  Grandfather’s mind was still on Nan. ‘Next thing she’ll be sitting Mr Nasser down and giving him a good talking to.’

  ‘We had a postcard from Colombo. Have you seen it, Dad?’

  ‘Who’s Nasser?’ Miranda was waving the transcription at Tony.

  Tony rocked the cricket bat from hand to hand, ignoring her. ‘It’s not Nasser who needs a talking to,’ he said. ‘It’s the British.’

  Laurie frowned at Tony. ‘The British? Why?’ she asked. Plucky Londoners carrying on as the bombs fell. How could the British –

  ‘Hold on there, lad,’ said Doug, closing his eyes and holding up a judicious hand.

  ‘And the French.’

  ‘Whoa! Whoa! Don’t get carried away.’

  ‘I’m not getting carried away. Anyone can see –’

  ‘Who’d like a cup of tea?’ Rosie called, hands aloft. ‘Anyone for a cuppa?’ She looked pointedly from face to face. ‘You, Aunt Margot?’

  ‘Yes, please, dear,’ she quavered. ‘Sweet and strong’s the way I like it. An old woman’s allowed some bad habits.’ She smiled with a flash of insecure teeth.

  ‘Now that’s a good thought,’ Dossie put in, as heartily as her husky voice would allow. ‘A nice, reviving cup of tea. It’s that time of the afternoon. Can I help you, Rosie dear?’

  ‘No, you sit tight, Dossie.’

  ‘Makes you think, by George,’ Grandfather mused. ‘We’re here, she’s there. Cable whizzes –’ his hand sliced the air, ‘halfway across the world. Makes you sit up and take notice!’

  ‘Oh, cables are on the way out these days, Jim. Still big in the war, of course. Morse code. War couldn’t have been won without it. Now if you were a signaller – in the army, this is – the wireless was your right arm. Two-o-eight, I had. Lovely little set, but it was a cow of a thing to lug around, and, more to the point, its range was miserable. You’d be forever shinning up trees, trying to … So. Dah-dit-dit-dah. I remember once –’

  ‘Oh I know all that, Doug,’ Grandfather Whittaker said, finding his seat again. ‘I know all that. I’m just saying it’s all damn marvellous.’

  Doug stopped, abashed. ‘Well, here’s to the Brits, anyway,’ he said, recovering himself and raising his empty glass. ‘They’ll have everything shipshape in no time.’

  ‘Here’s to ’em,’ agreed Jim, and likewise raised his glass.

  Tony’s knee jigged, although the rest of him was very still.

  Rosie came in with a tea tray and put it on the table. ‘Tea won’t be long, everyone.’

  ‘Shipshape and Bristol fashion,’ blurted Tony.

  ‘What?’ said Doug.

  ‘Don’t mumble, boy,’ said Grandfather Whittaker.

  ‘Now, I’m checking,’ said Rosie loudly. ‘Is everyone for tea?’

  Tony stared at the ceiling, rocking the bat. ‘Everybody’s conveniently forgotten how Eden did the dirty on Nasser over the Aswan Dam.’

  ‘Tommyrot, my b
oy,’ responded Grandfather Whittaker amiably.

  ‘Sink a few Egyptian ships, and everybody starts singing “Rule Britannia”.’

  ‘Ha-a-n-g-g on there, son,’ said Doug, now taking notice. ‘It’s not a matter of “Rule Britannia” or any other Britannia. Leave Britannia out of it. Suez is vital strategically. It’s vital to world trade. What that confounded Nasser’s doing – no, wait! Hear me out! – what Nasser’s doing is putting his own ambitions before the welfare of the world.’

  ‘So, you’re saying –’ Tony lifted visibly in his seat. His shoulders and chin rose too, his voice, returning to boyish treble, propounding a view, and Doug was coming back at him, leaning on his thigh with his strong left hand, raising his glass.

  Laurie tried to follow the exchange, but it was confusing, what with Doug and Tony talking over the top of each other and Grandfather Whittaker saying ‘Oi oi!’ and waving a long gnarled finger at Tony warningly, and Miranda yelling ‘What’s “nationalise”?’; ‘Who bombed where?’

  ‘Even the Yanks are against this,’ she heard Tony bawl in desperation. Heads turned. There was a lull.

  ‘Eyewash,’ said Doug quietly.

  Tony matched his steely calm. ‘It’s not eyewash. It’s the truth.’

  Doug gave Tony a long look. ‘Where’re you getting this stuff from?’

  ‘Around.’

  ‘Around. Around where? The mulberry bush? Around where?’

  ‘Centenary Park, for one. Newspapers. Tribune.’

  ‘Tribune? That rag? You been reading that? You’re soft in the head!’

  Tribune? What was that? Laurie’s stomach went baggy with anxiety.

  Grandfather Whittaker wrinkled his brow. ‘You gotta be fair, though. Eh? When those Reds do decide to come to the party, you gotta hand it to ’em, they stick to their guns! Leningrad –’

  ‘Oh, yes yes yes, my word, Leningrad, Stalingrad!’ Doug cut in, waving his hand. ‘I’m not saying they didn’t play their part in the end! But that’s not what we’re talking about here. That’s not … germane.’ His tone became sententious. ‘I’d take all that stuff with a grain of salt if I were you, lad. They’ve got a barrow to push, and don’t you forget it.’ He got up. ‘The Yanks. Yeah well.’ He went to the kitchen, returning with the half-drunk bottle of beer.