That’s the trap of thinking for two. Like a wife or a parent. Like Jesus or God, if they’re not a stupid joke. You learn the habit early and it’s there for good. I suppose it was conceit. I thought: Why not? What’s to stop me holding this one back? Just one. Surely they won’t miss one. I didn’t care whether he was good or worthless, intelligent or dangerous or demented. All I saw was that he filled the house. He tried to make himself small, but he filled every room.
Leave the cabbages. I’m dizzy. I can’t chop and speak. I need all my breath.
Maybe I’m childish, but after a while it was a thrill to know he was hidden away there. It put things right. It was payback, a victory. I was terrified someone would see it in my face. Still, I wanted to crow and sing. ‘Look what I’ve done! Given a man his life! Yes, me, a person nobody notices in the street!’
I came so close to telling Isabelle Bravy. You go through extremes – one minute over-confident, the next so suspicious you think kids are hiding in the hedgerow. I’m sure they were. Several times I heard someone playing a bottle, hooting on the opening like we did with my mother’s bottles. It makes a sound like a bird, which you wouldn’t know was artificial unless you’d made the same sound yourself.
Of course my Australian went on in blissful ignorance. He felt safe. He left all the risks and worry to me. Like a fool I was proud to keep it that way. I coddled him. I fretted over how he spent his days, whether he was bored or content, whether he had enough to stimulate him. A man loses his bearings so quickly. They don’t know how to endure. If it was me I’d have buried myself like a frog in winter. You wouldn’t have felt my heart or detected a breath. Not him. He sang! Did I tell you he sang? Oh, he was always driving me crazy, taking chances, showing himself for no good reason, even singing! When Isabelle Bravy and her halfwit son came to buy geese he was booming at the top of his lungs. Singing. They heard it. I know they heard it. He was there in the upstairs window, singing. I thought: You idiot. Do you want everything to go wrong? Do you want to be taken away? It was hair-raising.
Let me sit a moment. You don’t want me seeing black again. A moment.
Anyway, Isabelle gave me a look. What it meant I can’t say. Maybe if I’d told her everything there and then she’d have been too ashamed to speak against us. She’d have been bound. I was on the brink. But her older son wasn’t long dead. I gave up a morning’s pay to stand beside her at his funeral. I was there for her husband, then for her son. I think this is what restrained me. I was afraid she would say I kept him there for disgusting purposes. Grief makes people fierce. Isabelle could be like that. So I said nothing.
Strange how you think you know someone and you don’t. Nine or ten years we’d been friends. She came out to Montigny to dig roses when she got sacked from the mill. There was very little work that year. She wouldn’t have got it without me. It was too hard for her. She wanted it soft. Not that I blamed her, but maybe it created bad feeling on her side. Her men were mobilised six weeks before Joseph. She bitched because they got thrown straight into the fighting while Joseph went into reserve. A lot of good it did him. She had no reason to speak against us. We did her no harm. At least she has one left – not the smartest or the best, but a son all the same. I don’t begrudge her. If I ever see her again I’ll hit her face, but only to wake her up. It’s a common thing. You see it everywhere. ‘My pain is bigger!’ They think they’re evening things up. Misery for everyone in equal share.
thirteen
His drying laundry blocks the meagre kitchen fire. At the table a candle flickers and a white aura disintegrates and reforms repeatedly around the flame. A string of black smoke wriggles upward. The room has become very small, a glowing corral of light, and within this they sit at either end of the table, she leaning back in her chair, one hand cupping her wine glass. He has gulped his share of wine, indeed a glass more than she initially offered, and now he turns partially away, pretending to contemplate the darkness. It’s thirty minutes since they finished eating but neither moves. He guesses she is worn out after the day’s wandering. Her face is red and greasy with sunburn. Sometimes she reaches out to a packet of cards that sits on the bare wood. She toys with the cardboard fold, pulls it open, closes it again. He doubts this is anxious indecision or an aborted stab at communication. More probably she is tired and comfortably idle, indeed comfortable in his presence. He listens to the clack-clack of frogs on the dam. She lays down her glass and her hands come together, fingers folded. She looks up, studying him in the belief she’s unobserved. Wrong. He can see her perfectly in the glass pane of the cupboard. Of course it’s possible she’s aware of and connives in this mutual scrutiny, which makes him more self-conscious. What does she see? A soft-bodied oaf with no useful knowledge or capacity to contribute. A fraud who instead of defending her country imposes on her hospitality. It’s not pleasant, measuring himself in this way.
She reaches again for the cards, fiddling. He observes her short fingers, the calluses, the blackened and missing nails, and posits a life beginning with toil in the rose-fields and progressing to toil in a factory. Her father’s fondness hasn’t saved her from this. He estimates that she is well into her fifties, and wonders how long she can keep working. Her head begins to droop. Strands of white hair, freed from the darker mass, loop about her temple. Her forehead gleams and her black eyebrows are impressive even when still. Then there is the misfortune of her crooked nose, the kink below the bridge that on certain angles, but not this one, creates the impression of pugged ugliness. Her mouth is lipless, and already drawn in on itself, rayed with minute creases. How will she look at sixty? At seventy? At his mother’s age?
But there is another question, one that has occurred to him more often: how did she look at twenty?
For some reason he finds it easy to conceive of her as a young woman. Not beautiful but fresh and brimming with cheek and arch bad manners. His imagination builds on the frame of her bones, lifts the ageing muscles. He enjoys the stirrings of bodily interest then quells it. A woman of her age! But his eyes, and his imagination, won’t let go.
At last she has decided to remove the cards from the packet. She flicks them between her fingers then lays down a ten and a jack of spades, shuffles again and finds the queen to join them. He turns from her reflection to face her squarely across the table. In the absence of language there is pee-kay. Rule by pernickety rule, term by term, she will lead him there, to a game with conventions as strict as matrimony.
‘Tierce,’ he says, naming the sequence.
‘Ben c’est combien de points?’
Yes, he knows this one: how many points is it worth? ‘Trois.’ Three.
Another shuffle and she extracts the king and ace to complete a meld of five consecutive cards.
‘Cinq,’ he says.
She congratulates him with a smile. Then: ‘C’est combien de points?’
‘Quinze.’ Fifteen.
She gives him the thumbs up (doubtless picked up from some Tommy). He’s aware that without words their gestures have become excessive. It is somehow wearying, constantly focusing on hands and eyes. He finds rest in her silent parts, in observing the arteries of her throat or the low-slung softness of her middle. It’s then that, out of the blue, and despite his relative ignorance of the female body, it comes to him: Mademoiselle Elise has had a child, or several, else her breasts wouldn’t hang so.
A six-card sequence confronts him on the table. He names it ‘Sixième’. How many points? Sixteen. Yes, she’s pleased with him – Madame Elise.
Later they climb the stairs together. He discovers that he’s wine-affected in that his tongue and extremities tingle, but otherwise sober, aware of her movement behind him, of her steps falling a split second after his. He is used to this, to being herded, even to being put away for the night. It no longer rankles. It is a kind of safe-keeping.
Madame Elise – why has he been so slow to
see it? Marriage. Children. A family life. It’s recorded in her face and body. Language and nationality don’t change these things.
Suddenly her naked ring-finger implies a tragedy. Not a natural tragedy. A woman doesn’t stop wearing her wedding ring because her husband dies. He has no difficulty conceiving of her as a deserted wife, as a person who has been ill-treated. From a bachelor’s high ground he has seen many bad husbands.
But the children? Where are they? If she has sons they must be old enough to fight. Yet there are no letters, or none that he’s found. Searching for food, he has pried into every nook and cupboard. Without scruple he has sorted through her private things – a girl’s white dress, photo-cards of singers and actors, tram tickets, a bottle of perfume, blood tonics, a transferable ration-card for coal (no name), a wad of paper money in a calico bag. Nothing to indicate she keeps in touch with her family. Which seems to preclude the possibility of daughters. Sons might be complacent or self-obsessed, but daughters know their duty. At least the daughters he’s known. Then again, the world is different beyond Rushburn shire.
‘Bonne nuit,’ she says. A woman of rituals. ‘Bonne nuit, mademoiselle,’ he replies. Can’t call her madame, not after they’ve both grown used to the other form. On cue she closes his door. He listens. No click. Just her flat-footed tread as she departs. He can’t believe this is an oversight, wine or no wine.
At the end of his bed the eiderdown is raised in an enigmatic hump. It doesn’t give under pressure. Something firm, indeed hard, and warm. He raises the mattress to untuck the bedclothes. His fingers encounter metal. Then it’s revealed: a brass contraption, a pan on a stick. A bedwarmer. When did she find time for this?
Within the family they made light of his disinclination to marry. His self-styled ‘uncle’ Lewis Broughton, a life-long bachelor himself, and therefore awake to aberration in others, was first to identify it as such – a disinclination. There was never any unkind intent, quite the contrary, though perhaps somewhere behind Lew’s jocular style there was a sensitivity to Harry’s earliest humiliations. Of course Harry’s reputation was a laminated thing, the upper layers more acceptable than the inner, because they involved women. In his later teens – and Lew believed the rumours – Harry was said to have redeemed himself with regular late-night visits, along with other boys, to Rough Rene. In fact he went there twice, to a tin-and-hessian shack on the Five Mile Creek. Rough Rene was barely forty but looked sixty. She reeked of sweat and spirits. He was never tempted, but waited on the far side of the linen partition while Tim McInnley got his six shillings’ worth. But for Harry’s nineteenth birthday Martin Tolmey teamed with Tim McInnley to buy him Rough Rene’s daughter. Five pounds was a lot of money, so Harry couldn’t refuse. The girl was seventeen, recently returned from a charitable home in Melbourne, but he remembered her as an underfed shrimp in second grade, always stinking of pee. She made out she didn’t recognise him, and lay vacant-eyed and motionless in her cotton nightdress while he peeled off his underclothes. When she thought he was ready, his nakedness dressed up in a thick prophylactic sheath like a mariner’s oil-skin, she reached for a jar on the bedside stand and hooked between her fingers a glob of some greasy stuff – butter perhaps. She smeared her private parts.
Five, six, seven thrusts and it was over.
He came away disgusted and ashamed. He was angry, blaming Rough Rene and his friends. He imagined the girl had been held down with invisible hands. What was terrible, he knew that this same thought had quickened and exhilarated him.
Lew welcomed the rumours. Harry was putting it about, as a man should. Yet this couldn’t be spoken of openly in the family. Hence his comic assertion that Harry was ignorant of women, even indifferent. Certain women swallowed it. They smiled at the mention of his name, especially his nieces, who imagined they had the wood on old Uncle Harry. Cousin Maggie, by then a young wife, communicated her doubts with a grave smirk. He was never too concerned. Exaggeration (not to mention falsehood) was the stock of Lambert humour. And while Lew was not a blood relation – as a child Harry had thought of him as ‘the left bower’, a powerful card of a different but complementary suit – he was an acknowledged master of the ridiculous. If the old Suffolker said you were a clot, how could you argue?
Friday afternoons, warming his fleshless buttocks by Harry’s mother’s dining room fire, Lew honoured them with private readings from his Rushburn and Burrakee Express. His delivery was always grave, but in those pre-war years, undermined by a mischievous twinkle. He made a performance of Getting The Best From Your Manure or Local Boy Excels At Merit. He delighted in a good wedding, especially if he imagined Harry had some interest in the bride. No matter how humble the participants, their special day took on the dignity of a vice-regal event: . . . the bride was attired in a very pretty costume of ivory crepe de chine with wreath and veil . . . sumptuous wedding breakfast laid out in the barn . . . toasts proposed and honoured . . . And at the end of it all, after reporting that the happy couple had left to catch the afternoon train en route to the Gippsland Lakes or the Blue Mountains, a rueful wink: ‘But for the grace of God, eh Harry-lad!’
fourteen
Audrey Tanner,
3 Williams Court,
Balwyn,
Melbourne, Victoria,
August 16, 1968
Dear Miss Keely,
Thank you for your recent letter. At the risk of seeming testy, I must tell you that my mother was never engaged to be married to the man you’re inquiring into. She did speak of him occasionally. She knew him briefly before she met my father. I understand they were connected through amateur theatre. I understand she coached him, as she did many people. It may be a tradition in your family that she had ‘hopes’, as you put it, but my mother never expressed anything of the kind. She respected the fellow’s memory, as she respected all servicemen. It is no small thing to fight and die for one’s country. However, by no stretch of the truth could my mother be said to have been Harold Lambert’s fiancée, disappointed or otherwise. I’m sorry if this spoils things,
yours sincerely,
Audrey Tanner
PROJECT NOTES, August 22, 1968
Exactly as I expected. If she knew the trouble I went to to track her down, all at Mum’s insistence. ‘Find someone belonging to that Minton woman. If she loved him she’s sure to have talked.’ Mum would like a pleasant romance. If you put events far enough back in time all the heartache and disappointment, even premature death, flattens out into a nice romance. Still, it keeps her off my back. I can show her this. She will say something catty about the Mintons and Miss Audrey Tanner and feel a certain satisfaction.
I still haven’t found the courage to mention Mrs Straughan. Mum would be offended that I went up there without her. Were I to suggest that Uncle Harry might have deserted she’d have kittens. Waiting for corroborating evidence. Still nothing from Army Records. Public servants! If Harry was up to no good it will be there in black and white. Mum can look at it for herself. They all can. Why do I find the idea vaguely pleasurable?
Rang cousin Terry again. Two trunk calls in the last week, very expensive. We haven’t talked so much since we were kids. That’s what Mum enjoys – resuming contact. He doesn’t like the old men any more than I do. He doesn’t seek them out but if he happens across one of the New Guinea crew they’re all over him in remembrance of his father. Hates Uncle John. Has a soft spot for Uncle Dick, because he’s ancient and ridiculous I guess. In any case, I have put Terry to work. My mole in the boys’ club. Don’t know how committed he is. But I’ve got him thinking. He offers all sorts of new nonsense. Not only did Uncle Harry run under fire but he survived his famous drowning in the mud, indeed the whole war. He has this from his grandmother Margaret McArdle, who died in ’51. Another one to be settled by his service records – when they arrive. Bloody army. Also, he’s warming to the French Wife. His dad never pooh-poohed the French Bride. T
he letters, yes, they are a figment of someone’s imagination. But the French Bride is quite possible. Terry has promised a further prize, if he can find it. Says I should remember. Have I heard of the Ashes? I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Harry Lambert’s funerary urn!’ he said. ‘The Ashes.’ I knew he was having me on. He loves a good scam, especially at the family’s expense. But he swears he has something for me. It’s all getting too big. There are too many stories. They accumulate like the rubbish in my spare room. I have three cardboard boxes of dubious relics handed on for safekeeping. In a few months they’ll get their hour in the sun, then what? I won’t keep them. But I will definitely write the booklet. It will be like one of those recipe books with treats from far and wide, inclusive but lacking in quality.
fifteen
Harry must go back to childhood to remember a time when he was so dangerously idle. His mother, and successive teachers, diagnosed a congenital dreaminess. They watched his vague expression as he floated far away from the topic or action of the moment. He had to be dragged back, tied down and earthed with repeated questions, though often his answers betrayed a skewed understanding of the serious matters that occupied others. Sammy was blamed for permitting him to remain whimsical and childish. Aged seven, Harry enraged Uncle George by shutting down the little donkey engine in his workshop, telling him that the donkey was tired and hungry and needed a rest. George thought he should be walloped, but didn’t dare, fearing repercussions from Sarah. Sammy laughed himself hoarse. He laughed again, as if he knew better, at the nonsense and half-truths Harry made of what he learnt at school: that Wellington invented gumboots, that the ancient Greeks played with boats in the bath. Mr Saunders told his parents, ‘Your son has a romancing mind.’ They took it as a plus.
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