She liked his rare sardonic remarks. ‘You’re supposed to be nice at your age, Granddad.’
Their walking now even more leisurely. A chance for Stephen to remark on who else had been there in the early days, although few enough of those families were still here. The Laverys who were Catholic, whose boy went off to become a monk, if that was the word, the ones anyway who didn’t speak, who lived on farms and he supposed were like farmers in a silent movie apart from when they prayed. Or sang. They were allowed to sing. And the Stoddarts around the corner, the tribe of them, Esther hearing again but liking the repetition, the story of Babcia walking across into the night with her spade, wrecking the geranium bushes under a late moon, and her never right after that, not really, as we say at some point, don’t we, about quietly crazy people? Quiet enough not to be remarked on. Not until someone else first says so out loud. Geoff Stoddart had caged her there in the bright ring of his torchlight, this crouching fearless old lady looking up at him in her sandshoes and her nightgown. Stephen said, ‘I remember the way he looked and Alan McIntyre from the house next door, as though she was something they feared to touch. Like something you get in ghost stories.’
‘And the Peacheys,’ he said, making a story of his memories, as they came up towards the house with its deep concrete base and the gratings that for years David as a boy had thought were the grilled windows where people hid. One of the Stoddarts had told him that. ‘Kids like you. They took their pants down, the ones who were after them, so they could tell you were one of the ones they were looking for so of course they had to hide. It’s dark as all buggery under there.’
Esther saying, ‘Is it any wonder my dad has hang-ups? He mentioned that a couple of times. It must have sunk in.’
‘He never told me that,’ Stephen said. ‘Even then we weren’t that close.’
So she tried to make light of it. ‘See, I do know something about the Crescent that even you don’t know.’ Yet knowing she somehow had hurt him, and wished she could take it back.
Stephen doing his best to cover it as well, nodding at the windows at the side of the house, saying, ‘The Peachey girls. They were very striking and never quite had the blinds down and Dick Horgan who was the local policeman had to call round one night and tell Wes Peachey, who was a schoolteacher, to do something about the blinds.’ But then he came back to his own story about David, as they crossed the street at the top of the Crescent and said about the house facing them, a faded blue that hadn’t changed in all the years they were there, ‘There was an unpleasant young fellow in that house. He did the lawns along the strip there on the footpaths and one day out there with his mower he called David over, David who was about ten at the time, and said could he give him a hand, would he touch one of those little white porcelain spark-plugs for a moment just to check it was OK? So David who liked to be asked by one of the bigger kids to do something grown-up touched the plug and of course got this one heck of a belt from the shock. At least that time I was able to talk with him. It was only brainless sort of stuff but damaging enough. I suppose we were lucky that’s all there was.’ But Esther knowing the old man walking with her did not mean ‘lucky’.
They kept on as far as the shops and then turned back. ‘See, what did I tell you?’ The sun had broken through again. They were high enough to see the black bar of the reef lying along the strip of water, bright in the late slant of light.
‘It still feels like winter anyway,’ Esther said. ‘Whatever it looks like.’
Back home Stephen insisted they sit in what used to be the sitting room but everyone now called the lounge. Where a long time ago the aquarium had stood that Babcia took such delight in watching there was now the big television set he was rather proud of but felt he should say, in an off-handed way, ‘I’ve taken to watching it a bit more in my dotage.’ The overseas news channels you could now get. Eva would have been a starter for those. ‘I’ll watch anything if I’m honest about it except motor racing.’
He took two small glasses from a cupboard beneath the TV, and a bottle he said a former customer regularly gave him, would you believe that, all these years he’d been out of the shop? Every year the same present. ‘He runs half-marathons to this day and thanks me for prescribing him fairly useless vitamins thirty years ago. He still takes them and still runs so who am I to deny science?’ He showed her the bottle with a cord around its waist. ‘My reason for drinking it is medicinal as well. To be taken especially after rain.’ He handed Esther a glass that she held between herself and the bar heater to catch its glint. ‘You’re warm enough there?’
‘I was having you on about the weather,’ she said. ‘It’s hardly cold.’
‘The young need pampering.’ Then he said, ‘I won’t put the light on yet.’
‘No, don’t. I love it like this too.’ The steeping of the room into that last hour before dark. The fat red coils of the heater. The soothing burn of the liqueur. Each of them at ease with long spells of silence. Until Stephen asked, ‘And so what now?’
‘My life?’
‘Now your degree’s knocked off.’
‘I’ve applied for a few things. A magazine in Wellington I’m not hanging my hopes on.’ She crinkled her face. ‘PR stuff for a while, if it has to be. There’s even an advertisement I answered in Australia. Slightly mad but I liked the sound of it. “An almost serious and soon to be mature person”, fancy saying that in an advertisement, “to assist an elderly long-retired ballet dancer with semi-fictional memoir.” It’s not as if I’m educated—how can you be with sociology, a bit of literature, a dollop of French, for a degree? Dad of course only believes commerce halfway counts. He’d probably accept Polish for genetic reasons but no one teaches it. But in the long run—’
‘What in the long run?’
‘Well, a decent job obviously. But time too to work all that out about us. Ourselves. Why we’re the mess we are.’ But laughing, as Stephen did. He knew what she meant. To understand something of it at least.
‘Go easy on your grandfather,’ he said.
The glow of the heater was brighter, the windows now almost dark. ‘You’ll be right,’ Esther said. ‘You’re the straight man. And so much of what I know comes from you anyway.’
He blocked out the orange bars for a moment as he stood in front of her and tilted the corded bottle. He said, ‘Reminds me of an old man who was half my age when I thought him that, who had little glasses like these and thought your grandmother was going to live on a desert island.’
‘But not with her own people?’
‘Have I told you this before?’
‘Well that, or I’m better at making things up than I thought.’
A few minutes later Stephen said, ‘You must go to Australia. Of course you must,’ when Esther told him, ‘I feel I’m marking time.’
‘Such a good phrase that,’ Stephen said, ‘when you think of it. Marking time.’ And after another pause, he reminded her, ‘Eva was glad we were set on coming here. I know I’ve told you that, but it’s good to know.’ His hand lifted from his knee and moved slightly to indicate the room, the house, the street where he had brought her. All this. In spite of everything. Glad.
They were like a parody of the short stories she had read in a literature course at university, lectured by a woman who was sharp and vivid in her first lectures and a few weeks later seemed opinionated and without great substance, and by the end of the term, once Esther had read in the library beyond the set books, was admired still but for her deftness in taking from other scholars the colours she flew as her own. When she mentioned it to David, he good-naturedly instructed her, ‘You must realise scholarship is authority. It does not mean being the first to get there.’
‘Well, thank goodness for Henry Lawson. He made up for her.’ Those droll and probing stories flitting back to her now as she stepped from the interminably slow train taking the gradient of the hills, and saw three men in their slouched hats, their dungarees, who leaned against an iron railin
g, nonchalantly eying the few passengers who left the train. Yet how lovely the country had seemed, once the train left the sprawling flatness of the city’s suburbs, their stretching out in haze and glitter like great sheets of heated tin. Then the train’s rise through cuttings of ochre rock, bush-concealed villages, through the repetitive and speckled screens of gums, their grey and almost white-limbed reach towards a sky so intensely blue it seemed like overdone advertising. Then half an hour before she read the name on the wooden station telling her this was the place to get off, a storm had blackened above the bush and heavy rain slid against the window she sat at. The deluge though had passed when she stood and took her shoulder bag from the empty seat beside her, and the platform and the road beyond it steamed as she stepped down from the carriage. The air smelled of lush wetness, the sudden tang of eucalypts, as if she had broken brittle leaves and rubbed them against her palms. She glanced again towards the men leaning at the rail. One of them dropped a cigarette and ground it beneath his boot. A shorter, younger man, his hair shiny as straw as he removed his hat, came towards her. The Lawson vignette fell apart as he addressed her in a polite voice from the other side of the world. ‘Milan,’ he said. ‘I’m sort of English.’ As she would joke with him much later, ‘Here was I expecting a stockman and found I was in the next thing to Coro Street,’ and he will tell her back, ‘If you’d played your hand right with the bloke next to me you might have got yourself a geologist. He only looked like a shearer for the easily taken-in.’
As she walked through a stile into the street, she saw the two other men lifting a heavy piece of equipment from the van at the back of the train. Only when they had crossed to a ute with a crumpled mudguard the man who led her flicked his head, suggesting someone, somewhere, they would drive to. ‘He said you’re sort of Polish. Not that you sound it.’
Esther laughed, thinking he referred to something she was not quite onto.
‘Just saying what he said.’ And clarifying that at least, ‘The man you’ve come up here to see. Letting me know you’re not from here.’
She remembered the word from her time years ago at school in Melbourne, at ‘the Ladies’ College’ as its notepaper claimed, which her father for no more than a year thank God had paid to refine her. The hard time two foreign girls had had of it, the favourite term to remind them there was a price for open skies, for the privilege of singing the anthem with others young and free. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I do have a touch of wog in me, way back. Perhaps he was thinking that. The man who told you.’
The man David had insisted she must visit. All right, it was in the mountains, it was hours away from the city, but there were debts one paid with a few hours’ courtesy, she might at least see that? David’s voice insisting across the phone line, reminding her yet again of the old lady who had been their aunt’s one consolation for years. All right, his saying again, so she was an oddball, Miss McGovern, she was as far from us as they’re likely to get, but they were close as that, closer than sisters, she and Babcia. You don’t forget that. She had been kind to David too because he was the only one who gave a damn about it, about back then, and she understood him. The way even his mother didn’t, let alone. He meant let alone his father, who thought the world began and ended at Surrey Crescent, maybe Newton Road if he thought expansively. And once Babcia her great friend died she went within a month to her relatives in Sydney, then on to a nephew on a scrap of land in the hills, as mad probably as she was when it came to whatever the stuff was they believed. As if that came into it. So his daughter could at least do that for the family, what was left of it. And it doesn’t matter, David said, if he really knows who you are or not. ‘It’s something I want you to do.’
She understood him more than her father had thought likely. Not the details of his reasoning or what particularly led to it but the general drift it took. It was a duty. A covenant, even that. ‘Of course I’ll go, Dad,’ she told him. ‘If he’s still there. You know he’s there?’
‘I wrote to him, the nephew.’
‘Back then?’
‘This month.’ He described the reply. It was not illiterate, but clearly from a man who would prefer not to write. Square firm letters, one sentence to a line, on ruled paper. The first line said, ‘She can come.’ The second, ‘My aunt died earlier this year, when she was very old.’ Then the last, ‘Tell the girl to write and I will have her met.’
David had said when he and Esther talked of it, ‘I had no idea she lived so long.’
And as Esther told it now to the man driving her, ‘I’m the sort of end to a long story I don’t even know. If you’re wondering why I’m here. I wouldn’t know how to tell it even if I knew what it was.’
She was glad the young man did not quiz her as she expected he might. Instead he told her, perhaps by way of preparing her, ‘The man I work for sometimes talks about God as if he holds the mortgage on the farm and other times as if he’s an employee he’s disappointed in. He never talks to me directly about it but when I overhear him around the place I know he’s got God’s ear. Either thanking him or slightly ticking him off. Rain not delivered in time. A disease one of the cattle has got. When God’s around all the time I suppose you tend to get a bit casual.’
She liked the way he spoke of the man he worked for. Making fun of him, but a warmth there too, a tolerance for something slightly crazed. Which Esther understood at once as he stood on the veranda waiting to greet her, a tall spare man whose features might have been chipped from weathered wood, but who extended his hand towards her in an almost delicate arc. He introduced himself by saying his name was Cameron, but he was comfortable with Charles, he would find acceptable whichever she chose. He turned and walked ahead to a sunless kitchen with deeply stained rough walls, its white plates set along a rack, white moons in the gloom after the brightness of outside. Where he then told her again, ‘Cameron. The nephew. You are far too young to remember her? Ellen?’
‘My family. They owed her a great deal.’ She added, not sure why it must be said, ‘My grandfather who disliked her for a long time then came to respect her. But my father was the one who wanted me to come.’
‘David,’ the man said. ‘The one who kept his faith.’
Why be embarrassed by that, and yet she was. Then the man said, ‘She died soon after my labourer here’—his turning slightly to Milan who still stood at the doorway to the kitchen—‘soon after he arrived to help keep this place together.’ Was that a smile even, she wondered? The younger man raised his eyebrows as she looked to him beyond the other, who now kicked at the grating of a range that flared to life. He threw a length of wood through the metal door he yanked at with its wire handle. A sharp waft of burning gum filled the room. The man turned to look at her again. Strange that she thought of him as that already, ‘the man’, as a couple of times on the drive from the station Milan had called him. As though the vagueness of it nevertheless defined him. He told her she must not believe the country looked like this all the time. A few months ago, had she seen it, she might think it was ready to burn. But a month of rain. So green it might well surprise her.
Then the strangeness of it, their sitting in silence in the darkened kitchen, the heavy breathing of the man now that she was aware of it, while Milan’s thumbnail tapped at his mug. A plate of biscuits was moved towards her. ‘They are not things I crave,’ he said, ‘but because of you, these were brought from the village.’ And another pause, before his announcing, ‘Women say they make such things for men, but it is their own inclination, I think.’ And, of all things, smiling at her as though in the midst of some solemnity. ‘Although it is not as if I am expert on such matters. Is that right, Milan?’ The young man whom he liked because he was good for the farm. Because he did not talk unless addressed. And for that other reason too he would tell the girl. ‘And because he is a Czech,’ he said. ‘My aunt knew Czechs where she also knew your aunt, and said she liked them.’
‘Great-aunt,’ Esther said.
She
expected he might ask Milan to explain to her, but instead they sat quietly until he said, ‘Ellen was with me here almost until the end. When she left Auckland she came to me. We followed different truths but she respected mine.’ He said he was not a man at ease with writing letters but Esther might assure her father, her grandfather as well, that she was contented in those last years on the farm. He told how his aunt read aloud in the evenings yet spoke sparingly through the day, and laughed at times so that he too laughed, for the joy she found in life. And the rare gift she had, he explained, for what he called her curious grace with the hives, and the combs covered with damp cloths on the ute as they drove to Sydney a few times a year, and she attended meetings with those of a like mind to herself. So long as she was at the farm she seldom wore her scarf in those last years and her hair falling loose as it might have been as a young girl. He said she would listen to the wireless so long as there was music even of a modern kind, but felt to listen to voices talking contravened her precepts, and so they knew little of what some think of as indispensable news, or of the world much beyond the line of trees she would watch from a chair on the veranda on clear evenings. The man saying how the stars first pricking out against the dark was something she loved as she did few other things. He said again how in her last months she had been with her own Witness people in the city. A short time before Milan came to work for him.
Then the man stopped and stood abruptly. He told her again he appreciated her coming. ‘The boy will drive you back,’ he said. ‘The train leaves Lithgow at 15.25. It is here at 16.32.’ He waited on the veranda until Milan had stopped at the wire gate, opened it, driven through to the road and again fixed it with a loop of chain, before he turned to walk back inside.
All This by Chance Page 23