The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  These days, Laurie had less interest in things that had once seemed compelling. Her childish collection was in disarray and her microscope was gathering dust on her desk. Now she made long, hard-eyed appraisals of her image in the mirror. At school she doodled and daydreamed. At night, sitting over her homework, she twisted a strand of her hair around her finger and brought it into close-up, turning it under the light to see it gleam. She stood under the shower for as long as she was allowed, steaming up the bathroom, nicking her shins with her father’s razor.

  ‘Mum, is my complexion sallow?’ she asked.

  How to see and present herself, what to make of others and divining what they made of her – these were difficult, subtle matters, and they made constant claims on her attention.

  It was only after talking to Ursula that she rediscovered in herself a capacity for disinterested reflection that, when exercised, yielded richer and more lasting satisfactions.

  Laurie missed Ursula’s plain-speaking and sharp wit.

  vi

  ‘He’s here!’ Miranda sang. ‘Lo-ol! It’s your swain!’ She giggled.

  Laurie poked her head out into the hall. She could see Russell’s silhouette at the front door.

  ‘Won’t be a tick,’ she called.

  ‘Come on in, Russell,’ came Rosie’s voice. ‘Laurie won’t be a moment.’

  ‘Hello there, young Russell,’ Laurie heard her father say. ‘So where are you and Laurie off to this morning?’

  ‘Head o’ the River, Mr Carlyle. Regatta.’

  ‘Regatta, eh? You rowing?’

  ‘Yes, I …’

  Laurie ducked into her parents’ bedroom to check herself in the cheval mirror. A tall girl met her gaze, looking fetching in a coffee-and-cream striped A-line and short cream gloves, her light-brown hair suppressed under a Breton hat of panama straw. Pity about the glasses. Then an unfamiliar sound distracted her.

  Someone was playing the piano.

  Laurie lifted her head to listen. A few stray notes, then a loose arpeggio. This was a practised touch.

  After a moment’s silence, it really began, liquid and playful, warm and melodious, drawing surprisingly rich tones out of the battered old instrument.

  It had to be Dale, Tony’s bohemian friend. No one in the family could play like that.

  Russell, spruced up in school blazer and tie, was waiting uncertainly in the living room as Laurie passed through. She beckoned him with a nod of the head, and he followed her out to the little closed-in verandah off the kitchen where the old Belling upright stood. There was Dale, hunched over the piano, his hands roaming with calm assurance over the keys.

  Others were drifting in – Doug, newspaper in hand; Miranda, silently laughing; Rosie in overalls, wiping paint off her fingers with a tissue. Tony was already there, propped, arms folded, against the wall.

  Dale was improvising. All his awkward irony had left him, and he played with fluency and elegance.

  ‘Well,’ said Tony when at last Dale paused. ‘Who would have thought it! You do have a soul, François! Laurie’s lost in admiration!’

  Dale shrugged. Absently, his left hand played a little riff.

  Russell touched Laurie’s arm.

  ‘We have to go, Laurie,’ he whispered.

  Laurie left a trail of her accessories through the house. Ribbons in school colours were still pinned to her dress. She lifted the lid of the piano. Still standing, left hand holding the lid open, keeping things provisional, she played the C major scale with her right hand.

  vii

  There was a figure up ahead. It was a fisherman, working a gutter with unhurried thoroughness. He moved back and forth in the wash of the waves to lob his line out beyond the breakers, casting, retrieving and casting again, hunching over the rod on the retrieve. His legs, braced against the surf’s surge and suck, looked spindly in all that headlong energy and foam. A car was parked behind him, in front of the dunes. As Laurie came closer she could see that he was using a tailor rod, and the bag slung over his shoulder bulged. The car was an old jeep.

  There were more fish in a bucket up the beach – tailor, she guessed by their tails – and a couple of dart lying with blood stains on the sand. Laurie stopped to inspect them. The clouds that had lined the horizon had built up and obscured the sun, and the dart caught the oblique light as silvery gleams, spills of mercury. With their swept-back fins and swallowtails, their streamline of lateral spots, they were speed abstracted, quickness stilled.

  ‘Nice catch,’ she called to the fisherman. They were the only souls on the beach.

  He was a big man, rather bulky in the shoulders, with a broad, cheerful face, sunburnt nose and blondish stubble on his jaw. Untidy strands of nondescript hair hung from beneath a battered cloth hat.

  He gave her a sidelong nod. He was younger than she’d taken him for at first.

  ‘They’re on the bite,’ he said. His voice had the same register as the surf, a chesty, rather muffled tone, like the woofing of a large dog. He looked up and down the beach. ‘Where you heading?’

  Laurie wandered down and stood near him, the water creaming around her ankles. ‘Oh, just up the beach a way,’ she said. Her attention was arrested by his eyes, which, narrowed against the glare, were winter blue.

  ‘’Cause I reckon we’re in for some rain in the next hour or so.’ His hand left the reel to present for her dark clouds over the sea.

  Laurie pressed her glasses back onto her nose with her thumb and squinted doubtingly at the clouds. ‘Most of our rain comes from the south-east,’ she said.

  ‘Not this time. Those clouds are loaded, and they’re heading our way. Where’d you come from?’

  Laurie looked back over her shoulder and pointed vaguely. ‘From the river,’ she said, thinking of the hours uncounted that she’d been walking, walking, hearing the sea’s roar as the roar of her unanswered heart.

  The man whistled appreciatively. ‘Well, I’d be making tracks if I were you.’

  Laurie looked again at the clouds. They hung low over the ocean, and were linked to it by slanting brushstrokes of watercolour grey. The sun was quite blotted out now, and the sea glinted strangely. She shrugged and smiled. ‘Yeah, I should get going, I suppose. I walked further than I meant to, really.’ And she turned her steps for home.

  She hadn’t been walking ten minutes when the rain hit her. Within moments she was wet through. Her hair clung to her head, the rain running in rivulets into her eyes. Her glasses were a fog, so she took them off and tucked them into a sodden pocket. Her shorts were uncomfortable about her thighs. The wind had picked up and was buffeting her so strongly at times that it knocked her off course.

  Laurie put her head down. There was a lot of walking ahead of her. She began to count her footfalls on the sand.

  She’d mucked it up. Twenty-one had two beats; so did twenty-two. She’d started with one step per number, and now there were two. Somewhere in the hundreds she gave it away. They persisted at some level, though, those numbers, even when her thoughts were elsewhere, even when her mind was numb.

  Soon the tide would be coming in. That would make the going even harder. She’d have to move further up the beach, where the sand was soft. Or wade through the wash of the waves. Creeks were flowing down the beach in tannin-stained pulses, coming up to her knees in places, and treacherous with quicksand. She should look for a track through the bush.

  Behind the low dunes, trails led off this way and that, and, hopefully at first, she followed first one and then another. But time and again they petered out in thickets of rain-drenched, wind-torn casuarina scrub. Sharp sticks hurt her feet. The roar of the sea blended with the roar of rain and wind in the trees, stopping her ears, so that her struggle against the surging branches occurred as if in silence. Misgivings took hold, and grew, until they crowded her lungs and made her breathing shallow.

  No chance that she could find her way in this. She would have to go back to the shore.

  Breasting the dunes, s
he saw before her the wild grey waste again. In each direction, the beach vanished within yards in rain and spindrift. She strained to follow the curve of it south-east, to guess how far it would be to the river mouth, the miles out of her way she would have to trudge before she could round the point and turn west along the riverbank for home. It would be impossible to make it before dark. And as she strained, she realised that she was seeing something unexpected.

  A dot was running counter to all the forces of nature, defying the tyranny of the driving rain and the ravening sweep of the sea. It was coming towards her.

  Once she lost it, but then it reappeared, and bit by bit, as she watched, the dot achieved dimension, and even a hint of yellowy-green, until at last she could make out the blur of a vehicle, growing larger, running straight as a die at times and then suddenly describing wide, wild arcs, as if it was stitching a deeply scalloped hem to the sea – and then she felt sure it was a jeep, and understood its veering path as the effort to outrun the enormous fetch of the waves.

  Laurie was laughing with relief when the jeep pulled up beside her. It was a battered, tinpot-looking thing, but re-assuringly manmade, a product of human industry, shaped to human needs. The fisherman leant over and opened the passenger door.

  ‘Hop in,’ he yelled. He glanced at her as she climbed in. ‘We have to head north. There’s an access track a few miles up.’

  The din of the surf and the engine and the mad clapping of the canvas hood made conversation difficult.

  ‘Where’d you get to?’ he shouted. ‘I was beginning to think you were just an apparition.’

  ‘I tried to find a way through the bush.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I SAID I TRIED TO FIND A WAY THROUGH THE BUSH.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘THIS LOOKS LIKE AN ARMY JEEP,’ Laurie shouted.

  ‘It is. Or was. World War Two job. Not mine, worse luck. Hired it from an old codger name of Virgil Moss.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘VIRGIL MOSS. WAS A TIMBER WORKER. LIKES FISHING. YOU KNOW HIM?’

  Laurie shook her head. They sped north, changing into low gear to crawl through the creeks, dodging the waves as the tide raced in.

  ‘Where’d you say you lived?’

  ‘On the north shore of the river.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘ON THE RIVER. NORTH SHORE. ACROSS FROM BAROODIBAH.’

  ‘Oh … Oh I know! That old place on the river!’

  ‘That’s it!’

  Eventually they slowed, and the fisherman started peering through the windscreen, craning round Laurie to study the tree line along the dunes.

  ‘There’s a pandanus somewhere around here … There it is!’

  He spun the jeep around, circled widely, took an angled bearing, changed into low gear and pressed his foot to the floor. They roared up through the soft sand, slewing crazily, to a gap in the dunes, and they were through. The wheels found a rough track through the scrub. Sometimes, in places where the casuarinas had laid down a soft carpet of needles, the going was easy. At other times they bumped over roots and fallen limbs, and climbed in and out of deep ruts, and Laurie had to grab hold of the dashboard to stop herself being thrown from roof to windscreen to door. The rain had slackened, but the wind still blew furiously, and though the heavy cloud and dense bush made it hard to tell, night was falling.

  The fisherman turned on the headlights.

  I know where I am, Laurie thought suddenly. ‘I KNOW WHERE I AM,’ she yelled.

  ‘YOU SURE?’

  ‘Yeah. This track heads west from here, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I SAY DOES THIS TRACK HEAD WEST FROM HERE?’

  ‘Yeah, it skirts the swamp.’

  ‘Well there’s a path connects up with it very close to here, and it’ll take me straight to the river. It’s just a hop, skip and a jump to – THAT’S IT! THERE, SEE? THAT’S IT!’

  The jeep shuddered to a stop.

  ‘Thank you for coming back for me,’ Laurie called through the racketing wind. She stood with her hand on the door, looking, now with the benefit of her glasses, into the fisherman’s face. But it was too dark to see anything more than the bulk of him and the line of a cheekbone singled out by the dashboard light. He leant across the seat towards her.

  ‘Sure you’re okay now?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  The path was sandy and well-trodden. She knew every turn. The rain had stopped, but it was cold. In the wind the rangy limbs of the she-oaks were clacking all about like witches’ sticks. Then the path dipped down towards the river, the trees grew tall and the wind was banished to the topmost branches.

  CHAPTER 7

  Stingers

  i

  1962

  Tony’s piano-playing friend came to stay at the River House that summer. He arrived in the new year, when they had gone through all the phases of sunburn and were nut-brown and tousle-haired from weeks of seaside living. Though he swam at times and went for walks and slept without demur on the floor, he remained at some deeper level unassimilated, as if the city had claimed him before the age of seven, as Jesuits were said to do, and nowhere else would ever have, for him, the slightest charm.

  For reasons of his own, Tony always called him François, but to most people he was Dale. He was tall and thin, with a skullcap of dark hair, and he wore priestly black T-shirts, horn-rimmed glasses and an air of ironic detachment.

  Dale played chess with Tony for hours at a time, crouched over the board, puffing on a richly aromatic pipe. They’d set the board up on a crate on the bed-crowded verandah, making shells do for missing pawns, locked in frowning combat and silent but for an occasional muttering and a rare bellow of triumph. Now and then Miranda would sidle over to watch, sitting with her chin cupped in her hands, for she’d been a keen if unschooled chess player once. Sometimes she’d extend a finger to point something out, but then she’d grunt and withdraw her hand. Her gaze would wander to the windows and the river beyond, and before long her body would follow, through the kitchen and down the stairs and gone.

  Laurie watched Dale from under lowered lids, fascinated by his fishy mouthings of his pipe. For all the closeness of the quarters, she felt excluded. Conversations between Tony and Dale went on over her head, alluding to things she had scant knowledge of – Dadaism, existential absurdity – and unfamiliar names were tossed around. Rosa Parks, Dave Brubeck, Le Corbusier. ‘Who’s she?’ Laurie asked as often as she dared. ‘What did he do?’ Dale unnerved her. There was a creakiness in his voice that made him sound tired. He laughed at unexpected times, at things that weren’t funny, with a sardonic warp to his mouth, and kept a straight face in the midst of hilarity. He was rigorously unsurprised. He seemed indifferent to his surroundings – even when the river was Moroccan blue; even when, in the cool of the late afternoon, it answered the sky’s transparency or began to smoulder with the coming dark. It was as if the material world came a poor second to the finely wrought ideas that furnished his mind.

  At night Laurie would sometimes wake and listen, hoping to hear his breathing. But nothing seemed to stir, and even in the morning he was slow to wake, lying long and still on his mattress on the floor, the sheet pulled up around his ears while people stepped over and around him. When at last he rose, he smelt of sleep.

  Everything that happened to you in the little house happened under the eye of everyone else. Closing the door to the bedroom was little more than a gesture, because the lino whispered loudly underfoot and the walls could not keep secrets. Privacy was attained by a tacit agreement not to look, a sort of willing retraction of the focal length, but also by the very elbow-bumping crowdedness in the house, the muddle of people all off chasing ends of their own, which gave a kind of cover to one’s deeds.

  In the thick of it, Laurie sometimes stood and considered. We should put a deck on, she mused. We should polish the floors, hang some baskets of ferns. Make the place look nice.

  Over the after-dinner was
hing-up, through crosscurrents of comment and instruction, through dodgings and sorries and steppings aside, Laurie tried to work up a conversation with Dale. There was Doug, sitting on the top step under the bright light over the stairs, binding a runner to his rod with painstaking care; here Rosie, scraping scraps off plates; and, passing through, Miranda dawdling over preparations for a shower. Dale and Tony drying up. The feeble kitchen light threw Laurie’s shadow over the sink, so she had to lift each article up to eye level to check that it was clean. In the window was a dark, indistinct impression of her face – little more than a smudge of light for the forehead and a head-shape fuzzily back-lit. Behind it, reflections of Dale and Tony moved even more obscurely under the flare of a naked bulb, and behind that, gloom.

  ‘Dale, you know “In the Mood”?’ Laurie began.

  ‘Leave some hot water for me, Lol,’ sang Miranda from the verandah.

  Laurie glanced at Dale over her shoulder to gauge his reaction and poked her glasses back onto her nose. ‘You know, da-de dum de-da-de da-de da de da dum.’

  ‘Glenn Miller-r-r,’ said Dale, drawling it, burring the r.

  ‘That steel wool’s had it. There’s more under the sink,’ said Rosie at Laurie’s elbow, handing her some plates.

  ‘Glenn Miller, yes. Do you think they’d have a transcription of it for piano?’

  ‘If you’re going down to the shower, Miranda,’ – Doug’s voice – ‘go easy on the water.’

  ‘I know it’s really a big-band number, but I thought it would be fun to play.’ Laurie jigged her shoulders and hummed a couple of bars. ‘Do you play it?’

  ‘That tank’s less than half full.’