‘I thought more of you than that, Laurie,’ she said. And she quietly closed the door.
Now to Laurie’s embarrassment was added shame. She screwed up her eyes and lifted her face to the ceiling. ‘I can’t,’ she groaned.
She felt her ribs. Her heart beat thickly below them and she wished she was with Jerry. She pushed back her chair and, elbowing aside the anatomy book, laid her forehead on her folded arms.
Suddenly she rose, wrenched open the door and made for the bathroom. No one was there. Lucky. She lifted the seat of the toilet and knelt before it, smelling faint traces of urine and the sickly astringency of Harpic and staring at the brown stain on the porcelain under the rim at the back, where the water leaked after flushing. Then she vomited as quietly as she could into the bowl.
vii
July 1969
Six weeks after Vitaly Anton was born, he and his novice parents travelled across Brisbane to move into a ‘flatette’, a couple of poky rooms in a bricked-in garage at Annerley. It adjoined an undistinguished post-war bungalow, and its outlook was a row of rangy shrubs and a Hills hoist in a sunny back yard.
They’d been staying with Laurie’s parents in the commodious old Wiley Street house since their marriage in the January heat. An obliging Presbyterian minister had conducted the rites on the verandah, where the two of them had stood hand-in-hand in the layered green shade of the grape vine, Laurie wearing a high-waisted dress of white dimity, with the hint of a shy, Arnolfini prominence about the belly.
Vit had been stowed in his basket on the back seat of the little Renault and Laurie and Jerry’s household goods had been stacked around him for the trip to their new home across town.
Laurie was driving when the accident happened. Jerry was in the front passenger seat, his left arm out the window so that he could grip the innerspring mattress that had been lashed onto the car roof. There was no sound from Vit. His complaints had been instantly hushed by the sound of the motor and the car’s motion. Laurie was undone by fatigue, by days of packing and broken sleep. She wished Vit would utter just a small cry to let them know he was still alive. Here was the wry truth, she thought: when he wailed and wouldn’t be comforted, she begged him tearfully to stop, to vanish whence he had come and leave her with golden silence. Yet when he slept, she was compelled, time and again, to tiptoe into the room, peer into his basket to see the pulse beating in his fontanel and put her ear close to his face to hear his breath.
A strong breeze was coming off the reach of the river as they slowly crossed the Grey Street bridge, and they could feel it getting under the mattress, lifting it a little, nudging the car a fraction off course.
‘Have you got it, Jerry?’ Laurie called, her voice raised by anxiety and the need to pitch it above the noise of traffic and the rush of wind at the window and the hollow rumble of the bridge beneath them.
‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve got it. Just keep your eyes on the road.’
She glanced at the rear-vision mirror, hoping against reason to see into Vit’s basket and glimpse his silken head.
‘Watch it, Laurie!’ Jerry yelled.
Too late. A station wagon had bloomed into existence beside them and was even now floating peacefully into their path. At the same time her foot, thinking for itself, was rising, rising from the accelerator and making the long, lonely trip to the brake. But nothing could stop the orderly unfolding of events, like a time-lapse film of an opening rose, which the mind comprehended distantly and according to some other time scale, in which humans did not figure.
There was a lag between deed and consequence. Despite the brake pressed to the floor, the little Renault persisted in its forward inclination, slowly crumpling, and all its contents followed. Laurie and Jerry drifted onward until halted at last by material unyielding; unnamed chattels, somehow freed from the boot, came wafting from behind and struck them one by one about the head and back. Over it all, the innerspring mattress descended like a heavy eyelid.
Laurie had no recollection of how they got off the bridge, other than Vit in her arms and a dreamy memory of a siren.
No one was seriously hurt. They found Vit on the floor, dumped by his upended basket and screaming lustily under a rubble of household goods. He’d suffered a few bruises but was otherwise unharmed. Jerry’s forehead had been gashed and bled liberally. Laurie was very sore about the chest, where she’d been rammed against the steering wheel, and was later found to have a broken rib. It healed, over the next few weeks, with maddening slowness, causing her sharp discomfort whenever she coughed or Vit fed on the left side.
As for the driver of the other car, he was unhurt, and according to Jerry – for he and Laurie went over their versions of the accident compulsively in the days that followed – stood about alternately scratching his head and rubbing at the damage to his car.
As a result of the accident, the move to the Annerley flat was delayed, and when they found themselves finally there, with their possessions about them, it was as convalescents, in a mood that was oddly serene.
Something occurred within a week or so of when they’d moved in. It was Sunday afternoon, Vit was sleeping and Laurie and Jerry were resting, reading the papers and listening to the radio.
When Laurie became aware of the music, she saw that Jerry was listening too. There in the lazy afternoon, with the radiator warming the room and the sun beginning to edge down the sky, they were drawn into the sounds that came to them from the little radio set as if they were the only sounds the world could possibly produce. It was an ensemble of strings – violins, viola, cello – and they played with a sense of imperturbable repose, rising and falling with oceanic nobility and boundlessness. The music was immense, its complexity ever forming and ever resolving into simplicity.
Laurie felt her heart beat with the same slow majesty, as if she and Jerry and small Vit in his cot were all of them carried on the music’s swell. A tree of music, it seemed to be, living in a tree’s larger, slower time. It was the cello’s hoarse undertone that pulled at her most, its stately, measured pulse beneath the lucid meditations of the higher strings.
When after an eternity the music ended, Laurie and Jerry looked at each other.
‘What was that?’ they whispered. ‘Shh! Shh! Listen!’ For the announcer was speaking.
‘… and the long third movement, composed after he had recovered from an illness. Beethoven’s name for it translates as “A Convalescent’s Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity, in the Lydian mode”.’
‘Thanksgiving,’ said Laurie. ‘It’s about gratitude. Is that why it was so moving?’
Jerry gazed out, with Laurie, to the afternoon sunshine gilding the nappies on the line.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
Laurie looked at her companion, forgave him comprehensively for all past and future shortcomings and would have moved close, if she had not been stilled by the music, and put her lips to his scar.
In September, Miranda flew to Sydney with her mother and a letter of introduction from Dr Fearnley, and the tiny swarm of cells that had nested in the plush lining of her womb was aspirated (breathed? sighed?) tactfully away.
viii
December 1969
The wedding of Tony and Carol at the River House was also a uniting of anomalies – damask and silver with she-oaks and sandflies, Dior and crystal with citronella and soldier crabs, Villa-Lobos and Segovia with cicadas and sea-moan.
Most anomalous of all, most flagrant, was the wedding of erstwhile – impeachable – kith, with kin.
We don’t see any need, Carol had declared, to prove our commitment to each other by getting married …
Laurie wore sage linen – an ankle-length sheath – with a coral necklace, Miranda dark-blue silk pantaloons and an embroidered waistcoat (hair loose, eyes mild), Rosie a cinnamon suit with a big straw hat and Carol’s mother a modish, draped affair in watermelon jersey.
Vit wore a blue sailor top and a progressively moist sailor bottom.
Carol had considered h
er setting – the river, the dappled sunlight among the trees. The shade of her dress (of Pre-Raphaelite inspiration) was limpidly indeterminate, changing from lily to pearl according to the light. She wore a tasselled girdle around her hips and a garland of may in her dark, loose hair. Tony stood beside her in a Nehru shirt and baggy, off-white trousers that almost hid the tremor in his knee.
Chinese paper lanterns were strung through the banksias. Even unlit, they looked daintily festive. Here and there, citronella candles burnt with invisible flames and wafts of pungent scent. A small table with a lace cloth and a vase of heath flowers – epacris, boronia and may – stood as an altar in the shade of the carbeen and a trestle table was set up under the blossoming bloodwood. Throughout the afternoon small, hard, green bloodwood buds fell as a steady rain on the damask tablecloth, the eggshell-blue dinner plates and the silver platters of food (oysters au naturel, bugs with lime aioli, mackerel smoked and chilled and served with dill and sour cream, peach-nectar sorbet, fresh figs …), in the crystal glasses of Great Western, down the men’s collars and the women’s décolletage, and on hats, hairdos and un-adorned heads.
Buckets of dry ice smoked under the banksias.
‘What about the victuals?’ Doug had worried when all this was being planned. ‘The provender? We’ve only got the Kelvinator upstairs and the old bait fridge downstairs. This’s midsummer we’re talking about. How will we keep everything cool?’
‘Dry ice for the sorbet and iced syllabub, and ordinary ice for the champagne and everything else,’ Helen Fearnley reassured him briskly. ‘We’ve ordered it from the ice-works at Nambour, and they’ll deliver it to Teebah. It’s really much more straightforward than I expected.’
‘Leave it to Helen, Doug,’ said Dr Fearnley, uncorking an anticipatory champagne. ‘She’s in her element.’
The officiating minister was a handsome C-of-E rector of liberal conviction and genial disposition, who, after reciting (with expression) the critical formula from the Book of Common Prayer, forbore to append the traditional prayers and expatiated instead on the transformative possibilities of erotic love. Indeed, he used the word ‘erotic’ with breezy self-assurance, and his congregation of mildly embarrassed sceptics agreed that the manner in which he combined time-honoured ritual with enlightened realism showed both artistry and an engaging naturalness.
Displaying two mint-new bottom teeth in a wide, wet smile, Vit lunged for sparkling coupes, scrunched the tablecloth and dampened a series of laps. ‘What a fine boy he is!’ people said, looking down on his big round head, and passed him on.
Dr Fearnley (cream shirt, camel trousers) rose to toast the bride and groom after the smoked mackerel had been brought out but before it had been served, and Rosie was obliged to leave her chair and lean over the table to wave away the flies, holding her wine glass clear of heads in the hand outstretched behind her. The doctor spoke with understated affection of his daughter and his wife, and touched on his long acquaintance with Tony – ‘Saw this lad into the world, did you know, and saw him grow to manhood, and a rare young man he turned out to be’ – and his eye roamed around the table and fell now on this listener, and now on that.
Vit, scorning sleep, was by this time wildly excited and crowing loudly, tramping the sage linen of Laurie’s lap until it was crushed and baggy. She handed him to Jerry, who’d resumed his round of the table, filling glasses, at the end of Dr Fearnley’s speech. Silent, now, as he rode his father’s hip, Vit took a keen interest in this work, his wet mouth open, his round blue eyes on the tipping bottle, the gush of pale-gold, the fizz, his small arm flung out as if to be wide open to Experience.
Whenever the tape of Villa-Lobos pieces had played to its end, it was rewound and set to run again. The portable tape-recorder wasn’t powerful enough for the delicate notes of the guitar to be heard above the chatter, but when there was a lull in the talk the music became faintly audible, as if the strings were being plucked by the leaves that stirred in the breeze.
The table had been set up in the deepest shade in the yard, but the river was another source of light, like a second sky. People’s faces and the leaves of trees were brightened by it. It seemed to Laurie to be this light, as much as the wine, that resolved the anomalies and brought a mist to her eyes.
Rosie was on her feet. Doug was dinging his glass with a knife.
‘Everyone, everyone,’ Rosie said, and took a deep breath. She’d removed her big straw hat and her greying hair was dishevelled. She looked hot and flushed.
‘Robert here’ – she indicated Dr Fearnley without looking at him – ‘spoke for us all, I’m sure, when he talked about how dear these two lovely young people are to him, and I can’t hope to match his eloquence.’ She fingered the brown boronia pinned to her lapel. ‘It remains for me, on behalf of Doug and myself, to give them a wedding gift that I hope they will receive as symbolic of our faith in them both.’ She looked around at her husband. ‘Doug?’ she said.
He handed her a small, parchment-coloured scroll tied with a crimson bow.
‘Red tape,’ she said, holding it up and smiling. Then she turned to Tony and Carol. ‘This, my dears, is the title deed to the River House. May you love it as we always have, and may the holidays you spend here bring you joy for many, many years to come.’
Tony had risen slowly to his feet. Rosie pressed the scroll into his open hand and took him in her arms.
‘My darling boy,’ she said.
Tony was still on his feet, abashed, looking as if for help at Carol, at Rosie, around the table, shrugging and spreading his hands. He opened his mouth to speak. But then he turned about and looked up, over his shoulder, and all the heads around the table turned and looked up too, hearing, at last, a noise that had been in their ears for some time. Growing louder. Coming closer. Flogging the stillness. Belaying every other sound.
WHOP WHOP WHOP WHOP WHOP. And over the trees came a helicopter, dark red with silver lettering along the sides, pausing aloft, oddly hesitant, twisting a little as it hung there heavy-bellied, blasting the treetops and making them toss this way and that in a sudden gale. The Chinese paper lanterns skipped and danced. Leaves spun.
Then it rose straight up as if pulled by a string, tilted, so that they could read the big silver lettering, and disappeared over the trees whence it had come.
PRIMAX.
Primax?
The trees swayed. Slowly settled. All heads were turned south-west, Tony still standing in his place, the title deed in his hand. Then, as the ordinary afternoon breeze returned, they looked at one another and a buzz of talk arose.
‘Primax Property Development,’ someone said. ‘Didn’t they do that canal estate south of Alexandra Heads? Key West … something?’
Segovia’s guitar thrummed softly. From away upriver a faint throbbing sound came to them, fading, until they could no longer distinguish it from the drone of the surf on the bar.
CHAPTER 11
Rip
i
June 1970
It could not be denied that Tony and Carol had been generous. ‘Please regard the River House as still yours,’ they’d urged the family. ‘Use it as you always have, as often as you wish. As far as we’re concerned, the name on the title deed makes no difference at all – though of course we’re very, very touched and honoured by the gesture …’
When they made plans to holiday there for a week in late June, things being quiet in the university department where Carol worked, they invited the rest of the family to join them. Doug and Rosie were preoccupied with setting up a studio as a lure for Miranda (who was herself unreachable), but Jerry arranged for leave from work and he and Laurie accepted.
The Reconciliation Holiday, Jerry called it.
Jerry had brought his guitar, and sometimes at night, when Vit had been bedded down and the fire in the stove was crackling and they’d opened a bottle of red, all four of them sang snatches of song to his strumming.
This evening had begun cosily with a game of F
ive Hundred before the wood stove, where the well-fed fire sprang cheerfully. The westerly wind that had been blowing for days had died away, leaving a cold, still night.
‘So quiet!’ whispered Carol.
They listened. Nothing but the pop of a banksia cone in the flames and the fire’s hoarse breath in the flue.
‘Must be some movement of air from the north,’ Tony said as he listened, ‘or we’d be getting a bit of racket from Baroodibah.’
‘You wouldn’t know Baroodibah was even there,’ said Carol with luminous eyes. ‘We could be the only humans here. In the middle of the wilderness.’
Tony laid down a run of hearts. ‘Not exactly wilderness,’ he said. ‘Laurie and I win again.’ He gathered up the cards, shuffled them briefly and began to deal. ‘It’s not pristine. They ran cattle here way back.’
‘Yes,’ said Laurie, warming to the memory. ‘The old stockyards out the back, they’re, I don’t know … Has Tony taken you there yet?’
Carol shook her head.
‘Atmospheric,’ Laurie said, rearranging her cards. ‘They’re very atmospheric. They …’ She stopped. ‘Tony, this is a horrible hand you dealt me. You’re supposed to be on my side!’ As soon as the words were out they rang with a second meaning in her ears. She fixed her eyes on the fan in her hand.
‘This was – who? Your grandfather, Tony? Who ran cattle here?’ Jerry asked. Good old Jerry.
‘Wish me luck …’ Carol murmured, staring at her cards.
‘Great – great-great? – my great-grandfather. The cattle were just a sideline. He had a timber mill at Teebah. He used to raft the logs down the river. Satinwood, turpentine. Cedar, of course. But he’s a bit of a mystery figure. I don’t know a lot about him.’
‘What do you know about the people who first lived here?’ Carol asked.
Laurie looked up. ‘The Aborigines?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not much,’ said Laurie, ashamed. ‘Nothing.’ She laid down a queen of spades. Carol followed suit mechanically.
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