The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  The cork drawn on a bottle of red, glasses were filled, drained, filled again, and Miles and Kit vied with flushed cheeks and at increasing volume to cap each other’s stories. Laurie watched their animated faces. Jerry had forgotten she was there. That was the thing about Jerry – she hadn’t been able to put her finger on it before – he was altogether too adaptable. She regarded him from a vast distance.

  They were onto their second bottle when the waitress backed through the swinging doors, arms loaded, and made for their table. Laurie’s eyes followed her steaming dish as it was set before her. A flourish of chequered napkins. ‘O-o-o so-o-lo mio!’ sobbed the speaker as Laurie fell to.

  Over their carbonara, Kit and Miles took opposing positions on some obscure rock-climbing matter. Principle seemed to be involved, so neither could give ground. Kit lengthened her elegant neck to make her points, while Miles sprawled and threw back his head and patted the edge of the table in an impatient tattoo. It was a muscular, shouting, wine-slopping scramble of an argument, punctuated by apologetic asides to Laurie: We must be boring you! Miles, don’t be boring! – Sorry! Sorry! – Oh god! Just shut us up if –

  Laurie watched Jerry. His mouth stopped with pasta, he let his shoulders jig with silent mirth, and reached out for his glass, and supped his wine. Even under these raddled lights there was a caramel cast to his skin that darkened below his rolled-up cuffs to buttery brown. In tender places (Laurie knew), it paled to cream, with an evenness of tone that wasn’t quite Australian. If only she wasn’t so hot. If only her heart was lighter.

  Taking its cue from Jerry’s, her hand went for her glass. The wine burned in her veins. Jerry’s lids seemed heavy. He fumbled under the table. And there was his hand, warm on her thigh.

  The two of them went back to his share house later. There they closed the bedroom door on the opinions, Bessie Smith and candle smoke that filled the living room from floor to ceiling and wall to wall.

  The phone at the other end of the line rang for some time, during which the expectant tripping of her heart altered its rhythm.

  At last, ‘Hello.’ Jerry. That familiar, cosy growl.

  ‘Hello. It’s me.’

  ‘Nim …’ dropping his voice, ‘Oh, I ah – Whatcha up to?’

  ‘I –’ She hesitated. She’d been thinking of turning up, making him hot cocoa as he worked, kissing the top of his broad, studious head. Warming his bed. But a note in his voice made her hold her tongue. She swallowed. ‘Miss you.’

  ‘Miss you too, sweetheart.’

  All her desire to talk left her. She could think of nothing to add.

  ‘So.’ Jerry cleared his throat. ‘Whatcha been doing?’ You asked me that before, Laurie thought. ‘Finished Darkness at Noon yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’ She did not elaborate, for what she heard had turned Koestler and his travails to merest thistledown. Some one at the other end of the line had put on a record of pan pipes and their breathy fluting – making its way across the suburban night along loose, arcing cables where possums scrambled – seemed nothing less than the rarefied acoustic of yearning.

  A mist had come between her and all her thoughts. Off in the distance she heard herself saying, ‘Have you got someone there?’

  ‘No. Well yes. Not really. It’s just Kit.’

  ‘Kit.’ She echoed his falling inflexion.

  ‘Yeah, she’s –’

  ‘Just Kit? Not Kit and Miles?’

  ‘No, he’s –’

  Laurie’s hand had replaced the receiver. Too leaden to move, it stayed where it was. She stared into the distance.

  The phone rang immediately. The receiver rose to her ear.

  ‘Laurie! What’s up?’

  She did not speak.

  ‘You there, Nim? Look, you duffer, I know what you’re thinking and it’s way off the mark. Kit just came across this obscure monograph on water turbulence and she thought – but anyway, can you get over here?’

  ‘You seemed’ – Laurie cleared her throat – ‘distracted.’

  ‘I was distracted! I was trying to come to grips with these weird figures. The thing’s a real poser. Quite intriguing – y’see the standard equations just don’t fit and – but please, why don’t you come here? Or can I come there? I’ll hop a taxi –’

  Laurie was aware of her parents getting ready for bed, Miranda in the kitchen making late pancakes, Tony occupying the bathroom. She shook her head.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Look, don’t worry, forget it. It’s all right.’ When they met again Jerry would kiss away her suspicions and she would see things in a more sensible light. ‘I was stupid.’

  But a germ had entered her bloodstream and she spent the night in half-dreams. In them Kit eyed her knowingly and Jerry chuckled. A crater opened up in the darkness and before dawn she had toppled into it. She dreamed of Dale then – of his solitariness, his crafty fingers finding ease only at the piano.

  In Jerry’s arms again, then eye-to-eye and thigh-to-thigh in a crowded train, and later watching lights swarm in a ferry’s dark wake, she recovered her balance. How could she have doubted him! He was so ardent, so constant.

  But sometimes, wakeful in the small hours, her heart ached for no good reason. A song, a stray thought or word, reminded her she had been hurt, that beneath the heady distractions of love there remained a residue of unhappiness. She had been sampled: kissed, entered – and put aside.

  Laurie lost her good cheer at such times and spoke little, though her mouth went on smiling.

  Jerry was explaining something, in which she must take a bright interest. She nodded and tried to follow, but the sense of his words was crowded out by sadness. The mood of her night was still upon her and she couldn’t throw it off. Her ribs ached with suppressed sighs. She bent over her milkshake and sucked at the straw, but the thick, sweet liquid turned to lumps in her gullet. She gave him an apologetic smile.

  ‘I can’t finish it,’ she said, letting her hands drop into her lap.

  Jerry looked at her evenly.

  ‘You’re not the first person in history to have their heart broken, you know,’ he said, without the flicker of a smile.

  He pushed back his chair, got up and left. She saw him through the gauzy curtain of the café window, walking off. Then he turned on his heel and wove back to her through the passers-by until he was right there, leaning over her, his knuckles planted on the table next to her unfinished milkshake, his thumbs extended, so that the sinews stood out in his forearms.

  ‘All of us,’ he said, speaking in a low voice but very distinctly, ‘are stuck out on a rock with the tide coming in.’

  Then he was really gone. She saw his head disappearing in the crowd, and there were only strangers dawdling in front of shop windows or hurrying past.

  She waited for a while, but he did not come back, and she caught the bus home alone.

  It tickled her in spite of herself, when she thought about it, as slow poles pressed close to the bus window, shuddering. Even at the time it had tickled her – imagining the words honed in that broad head, whetted on anger until they fell into line, pulling him up in mid-flight, obliging him to turn back through the crowd, step aside for waitresses, avoid the splayed legs of bentwood chairs, come back to her, that he might deliver himself of them.

  Later, along the river, rooflines wriggled and trees leapt.

  They’d been walking apart, Jerry striding out ahead along the mountain track, Laurie following, snapping off twigs.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jerry,’ Laurie was saying miserably, trying to keep up. The track was uneven, made difficult by loose stones, ruts and sharp outcrops of traprock. Last season’s dead growth scratched her arms. Sticks reared up and struck at her ankles. ‘I just thought – I don’t know what I thought. I probably should have said something.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  They reached a clearing, beyond which was a ledge of rock and a steep drop. Trees clung to the valley walls, the sun on their hard leaves makin
g them glitter. Below, the foothills fell hazily away to the west.

  ‘Can’t we rest here?’ Laurie complained, tired now. Tired of the hard walking. Tired of being sorry.

  Jerry looked indifferent, but sat down on the grass, facing the view. She joined him.

  ‘You better check yourself for ticks when we get back,’ he advised, and glanced sideways at her.

  ‘Look, I was surprised to get a card from him. It gave me a jolt.’

  ‘But you didn’t think to mention it to me.’

  ‘I was going to, Jerry, but I thought –’

  ‘In fact you hid it.’

  ‘I didn’t hide it, Jerry, I just didn’t – Anyway, that’s all past. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I was taken aback. It made me – I don’t know – glad? Sad? But in any case, it’s finished with. Over.’

  She’d toyed with it, though. Seeing Dale. That was the truth. She’d imagined it in detail. She’d ring to thank him for his card, and he’d beg to see her. They’d meet somewhere in the dark, and the emotion he’d always kept at bay would rock him on his feet. His eyes would utter what he had no words for. They would find a private place, and she would draw him knowledgeably down …

  Shabby dreams. This was Jerry beside her. There was his sullen shoulder. The cloth hat pulled down over his face.

  From way off came a currawong’s clear notes, sounding out the valley’s distances.

  Jerry lay back, his hands pillowing his head. He stared up into the trees. Laurie lay next to him. The armpits of his shirt were sweat-stained, and the sharp, interesting odour came to her. She pushed herself up and discarded her glasses to examine his profile at close range – his cheekbone, the methyl blue of his eye. His breath smelt faintly of gooseberries. When she kissed his dry mouth his lips did not reply, but the skin of them adhered for a moment to hers. She lay still against him. Moments passed. Then he groaned and rolled towards her and lifted her onto him and held her there, so that his breastbone dug into her chest and she rose and fell with his breath.

  In the spicy, glittering afternoon, under the warmth of reconciliation and the heat of coupling, there burnt in Laurie a small, exultant flame.

  ii

  ‘Laurie will be teaching after one more year,’ came Rosie’s reasonable voice through the thin wall that separated the bathroom from Tony’s bedroom on the verandah. Laurie, drying her hands, heard her name and cocked an ear. ‘Carol has work at the university. Doesn’t it make you feel just a little bit –’

  ‘I am not idle.’ Tony’s voice was cold.

  ‘But you could do more for your cause –’

  ‘What? From the inside?’ There was a sarcastic edge to his voice. Laurie stood in the middle of the bathroom as the shush of the cistern died away, staring at the pinkish mould on the shower curtain but seeing in her mind the scene in the cramped little room beyond the wall.

  ‘That wasn’t what I was going to say, but now that you mention it, yes –’

  Shuffling. The scrape of a chair on the floor. That would be Tony, shifting it about impatiently. Now the bed creaking, making Rosie’s reply harder to catch. Perhaps she had sat down on it, bouncing her fingers on the mattress while she hunted for the right words. Or perhaps she was staring out through the wooden shutters at the sky, as people mostly did in that room. Now she must have turned around, for her voice carried more clearly:

  ‘– if you had a secure position in the world –’

  ‘Designing dream homes for the bourgeoisie?’ Fingers drumming.

  ‘Don’t be cynical, Tony. It’s unbecoming. You must surely realise that being hauled before the courts over and over again –’

  ‘“First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.”’

  Rosie sighing.

  ‘“Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then –”’

  ‘This –’

  ‘“Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.”’

  ‘Tony, this –’

  ‘Hold on a minute. “Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.”’

  A hair’s breadth of silence. ‘This is not Nazi Germany.’

  ‘Niemöller.’

  Rosie sighing again. ‘Tony. Come on, sit down. Sit down. Look. Ruining your prospects won’t do a thing to help the Vietnamese, and it’s foolish and headstrong to behave as if it will.’

  Nothing. Sounds from elsewhere in the house and farther off. A peewee calling. Now Tony’s voice again, soft.

  ‘And if everybody told themselves that? If nobody spoke up for fear of harming their career? What then, Mum? What then?’

  There was such a long silence that Laurie began to wonder if her mother was still in the room. She heard the peewee, children’s voices in the distance, a car turning into Wiley Street. Then, gently:

  ‘Have you considered, Tony, that while you’ve chosen to sacrifice your prospects for the sake of this cause, you’ve also been making choices for others? No. No, wait. You’ve chosen – hear me out – you’ve chosen to let Doug go on supporting you, simply as if it’s your right. And you’ve given no indication of how long you expect him to go on doing it, diverting funds away from projects that are dear to his heart.’

  There was a loud groan.

  ‘Oh god!’ Tony exclaimed. ‘Oh god! Coolacane.’

  Here’s what she’d like to do. She’d like to descend into the murk of the Primitif and arrange herself on a stool. Then, when he lifted his hands and turned with saurian lassitude from the piano, there she’d be, in her Russian boots, Tolstoy shirt and cloud of candle-lit hair. And surprise would make him meet her eyes.

  iii

  ‘’Ullo, ’ullo!’ called Doug from the hall – and thereby sank the last of Laurie’s hopes. ‘Where is everybody?’

  It was raining, the sound so steady on the roof that they hadn’t heard him arrive. This was to have been Jerry’s formal welcome to the Wiley Street household – though, wanting to keep things relaxed, Laurie may not have made that clear. First Miranda hadn’t put in an appearance, then Doug wasn’t home at his usual time. ‘He’s finally got a meeting with someone from the CSIRO,’ Rosie had explained, coming from the phone. ‘Sounds like it’s at the pub …’ They put the remainder of the beef stroganoff in the oven to keep it warm. Then came Miranda’s call, wondering if someone …; whereupon, after discussion, people getting up, milling about, sitting again, Carol had offered up her car keys to Tony, and Tony gave his apologies and left. The dinner, which had begun in the dining room with dark-blue Arabia ware and a Marimekko cloth, ended up in the kitchen, Jerry sitting at the table with the three women, Rosie and Laurie plying him with coffee and after-dinner mints, playing two Marthas to Carol’s Mary.

  Now here was Doug, smelling of beer, his head appearing in what he clearly thought was a waggish fashion around the kitchen door. His features had softened, become boneless, the lax muscles distorted by the spasm of a smile he couldn’t quite hold. Raindrops sparkled in his hair. He narrowed his eyes suavely under his brows. ‘Whasis? A party?’

  Jerry’s chair squawked on the floor as he stood. To Laurie’s dismay he had turned up in a paisley shirt, a pattern that always reminded her of liver flukes.

  Rosie, too, had risen from her seat. ‘Where’s the car, Doug?’ she fussed as she went to him. ‘You didn’t drive home, did you!’

  Doug entered, raising a hand to forestall her questions. ‘Rosie, love,’ he said, eyes closing as if with supreme forbearance, ‘it’s fine. I left it in the street.’ The rain sighed on the roof. He drew himself up and looked from side to side. ‘This’s cosy. Looks like everyone’s here, eh.’ He frowned. ‘Whasat smell?’

  ‘It’s beef stroganoff, Doug. Laurie made it.’

  His unstable grin reappeared. ‘Thought for a minute there it was bully beef. Evenin’, love,’ saluting Carol with his fingertips and bringing his heels t
ogether smartly. ‘Now. Laurie m’girl, I think you’re forgetting your manners …’ He indicated Jerry with a glance as he struggled out of his damp jacket and hung it on the back of a chair.

  ‘Dad, you remember Jerry, don’t you? You met him at the River House.’

  Doug looked lost for a moment, and then his face cleared. His jaw strained sideways as he loosened his tie and came around the table to shake Jerry’s hand warmly.

  ‘’Course I do. The Weather Man. The Galahad who rescued our Laurie from the cruèl sea. Good to see you, lad. Now.’ He rolled up his shirt sleeves. ‘How’s about a beer for a hero?’

  ‘Laurie’s just made coffee, Doug. We’ve all eaten. Yours is in the oven.’

  ‘First a little cleansing ale, Rosie. Tucker can wait.’ And he turned to the fridge. While there, his hand resting heavily on the open door and the unkind fridge light shining up, returning the crags to his face, he fell prey to sadness.

  ‘It’s over, Rosie,’ he said with sweet simplicity. ‘Coolacane. It’s dead.’

  ‘Did they –’ Rosie began, coming to him.

  ‘No go, my darling love,’ he said. ‘No go. They weren’t –’ he searched for the word, ‘persuaded.’

  There was silence around the table. The rain sighed. Jerry awkwardly resumed his seat. Seeming to remember they had company, Doug looked over his shoulder, now cheery.

  ‘Beers all round?’

  ‘Doug, we’ve all had a glass of burgundy. We’re onto coffee. You have one too. Oh, empty. Laurie, put a fresh pot on for your father? Doug, there’s beef stroganoff in the oven if you’re hungry. With sour cream. Laurie made it.’

  Laurie got to her feet and took the percolator to fill it at the sink. She was not sorry to have a task to do.

  ‘Beer for the men, I reckon. Beer for you – uh – Jerry?’

  Laurie halted while spooning in the coffee. Should she keep going with this? Yes (tamping the coffee down). It was a project. So, the matches. She ran a hand along the shelf above the stove, found them, lit the gas.