But what is acceptable in a boy is absurd in a man. Harry has always been ashamed of the triviality of his thoughts. Without the ballast of work and family responsibility, where would he be? Who would he be?
Therefore he goes apprehensively into the burgeoning rose-plot, knowing that it has the power to lull and seduce him with past associations; to cover him over in careless oblivion. Slithering along the rows, he supposes he ought to feel low and cursed like the snake. The new season’s water-shoots hoop over and through the old wood, creating a thicket, so that he couldn’t stand up if he tried. The grass and milk thistles are alive with insects that spring and leap and burr in flight: dragonflies, beetles, mosquitoes. Frogs drum on the dam and a vaguely mournful booming, a peculiar bird call that ascends in semitones, emanates from somewhere in the hedgerows. In time he happily embraces this animal perspective. How else is he to pass the hours while she’s away? Close by, the bruised foliage of roses smells peppery. If he lies still, blinking at the sky, it is possible to believe the world hasn’t aged a day since he was a boy.
A knob of colour floats beneath the clouds, an improbably early bloom. Soon he finds others, twos and threes of the same ruffled pink, a whole tribe nodding in the sunshine. And these large matt leaves are familiar. What throws him is the vigour of the plants. Giants. Broad and dense, quite unlike the weaklings that hung on year after year in the Rushburn clay. Yet it’s the same cultivar. Paul Neyron. The same bright pink, the paler reverse like the plush inner lining of his mother’s sewing box. His mind reaches back to one of his father’s catalogues: dedicated to the memory of a medical student who died after having borne the fatigues of the recent siege. Well, wouldn’t this make the old boy sit up and take notice! His Neyron thriving in its native soil!
The recent siege ended almost fifty years ago. It’s said the Parisians were reduced to eating rats. They slaughtered the animals in the zoo; ate the flesh of elephants and zebras. How exactly the medical student distinguished himself is anyone’s guess. But the name is known in every country because of this flag of ruffled pink. Whether this amounts to anything, whether it’s trivial or important, it’s what his father bequeathed him and what he knows. He supposes he is like the hero of his youth – Crusoe marooned with his thoughts, retrieving all he can from his wrecked ship. He goes back again and again to his father, to his walled-up youth, in search of mental provisions.
Yet within a day or two he decides it’s an incomplete and patchy heritage. He’s tripped up by horticultural complexity, by false premises, by a vain longing for fresh confirmations of what he knows. While he has been loath to venture out into the exposed yard between the house and barn, he has nevertheless watched the explosive burgeoning of Mademoiselle Elise. Almost overnight the bare wood became a mass of soft purple growth. Tender water-shoots seemed to lengthen before his eyes and he awaited the flowers, watching for the egg-yolk yellow of the buds. They didn’t appear. Astonishingly, mortifyingly, they didn’t appear. He recognised in himself a pattern of unjustifiable contentment and sharp awakening. In place of the familiar flowers of Mademoiselle Elise came clusters of pinkish bells, attractive in their way, but distinct and therefore disappointing.
Then, as if to unsettle him further, the first and more reliable Mademoiselle Elise brings him a newspaper. Very kind of her, but he receives it with apprehension. He knows it’s quite capable of disturbing his peace. He gives it the once-over because she’s watching, and because he can’t resist. The date is April 9th. Eight days old. A photograph ambushes him. Australians. Men in chalk-smeared uniforms and the same tin hats the British wear, but somehow distinctive in their postures and expressions. A sporting insolence. At home he has seen it in the faces of boys in short pants, and hated it. Now he’s prepared to recognise its value. It seems they are the heroes of the hour, having stopped the Germans at a ring of villages outside Amiens. The fighting has entered a new fluid phase. Open warfare . . . conditions uniquely suited to the temperament of the Australians . . . High praise from the grudging British press. His pride, his warmth of belonging, can’t be helped. The world is offering accolades and Australia must have its share. Even hiding in a woman’s skirts he would like to indulge in the national swagger, until he considers his own soft body, and the wreckage of others. He shakes the pages to make them more manageable, licks his finger to catch a corner. A general sacked. Squabbles in London. His gaze strays down to a dribble of soup on his vest, then up to see whether she’s noticed. Almost certainly she has, though now she’s clearing the crockery. His idleness is an embarrassment, but she won’t let him help. She insists on a strict division of labour. For her there are nine hours at the factory, followed by farm-work, cooking and cleaning. His obligation? To eat, look contented and cast a manly eye over international events.
The soup has already penetrated the glossy cloth and will probably leave a stain. He should be more careful. What will the legitimate man of the house, the brother or brother-in-law whose bed he has appropriated, say when he returns to find his things dirty and tampered with, the buttons shifted on his coats and vests, his trousers lengthened by six inches?
All night his mind, awake and asleep, brims with images of cocky Australians. Martin Tolmey is there, and Natty Mills as well, both wearing proud smears of dirt and blood. They jog by in the middle of an anarchic mass. Even Bunter is transformed, hardened and elevated by collective resolve or the power of print. He spares Harry a brief and dismissive half-smile, like something thrown to a child.
Next morning Harry does not descend to the rose-fields. Like someone fighting an addiction, he sits in the old monsieur’s bedroom, dutifully rereading the newspaper. He must keep his mind fixed on grim truth. The colony of swallows has swooped and shrilled then flitted out through the torn plaster. He feels very alone. He turns back and forth from war news to the little window, which affords a broad view of the plain. The roses form a dense wickerwork of canes and undulating foliage splashed with pink and purplish red. The air is thick with swarming insects, a drifting mist over the fields. There is the painted green of wheat, a paler green of tufted pasture, and far away where road, railway and river twine together, a soft haze, and a chalk outcrop as insubstantial as the sky. He can’t imagine a more indolent landscape, so separate and cut off from the feverishness of Rouen.
But then he is startled by a noise: a scrape from below, from the back of the house. He hears the clop of hard heels on board though he believed he had the house to himself. He doesn’t panic. The tread is recognisably feminine. He descends the stairs. In the salon they all but bump into one another.
‘Mademoiselle!’
From under a black gauze veil she regards him with impatience. She’s dressed primly, and too heavily for the warm spring weather: a dark hip-length coat and matching skirt, a round-topped hat, a parody of a bowler made more ludicrous by the veil, but fashionable from what he’s seen in town. And the shoes, small-heeled with high ankle-laces. She offers a parting word of explanation, as if his little pool of French words amounts to fluency. She needn’t have bothered. A funeral. He can see that at a glance.
She pushes past him and vanishes into the gloom of the hall. He decides it must be a peremptory and public mourning, that it can’t be anyone close.
After the bang of the front door he stands alone, wondering why he should feel unsettled. The funeral of a stranger in no way bears on him. Or it shouldn’t. Innumerable strangers die every day, every minute. A fellow worker perhaps. A neighbour? Someone’s husband sent back from the front in a box? And like it or not, Mademoiselle Elise must go. He has been inclined to think of her as a detached and isolated being, but of course she must be subject to the usual web of obligations. That she should have friends is only to be expected. Yet the thought disturbs him.
He sits on the back doorstep. The sun warms his knees. The jumbled scents of the garden are contaminated with dust, cloyingly sweet yet contaminated. He quells the
urge to sneeze, although there is almost certainly no one coming along the unseen road. He is invisible, unnoticed even by the thrushes pattering in the shrubs. An irresistible sadness settles over him, though all he can find for a cause is his inability to possess the mademoiselle’s outside life. It is as if she has broken free, escaped him, and with only a careless conception of his need for her. He feels as if he is in danger of slipping from human existence. If she wasn’t there to recognise his face, he might disappear forever.
His situation reminds him of his father’s precarious afterlife. By general consent the family spoke of Sammy as if he’d just popped out for a walk. His remains decayed in the Rushburn clay under a veritable battleship of pink granite and chiselled marble, but Sammy continued to share in family life. When visitors gathered for cards and there was an odd number of participants they employed a dead hand, the unknown cards lying face-down on the table. ‘That there’s Sammy’s hand,’ Ma quipped. At the end of each game she was always interested to discover what Sammy had been holding. ‘Well look at that! The king and right bower! And not a peep out of him!’
In this way they kept him alive.
But it was a failing ploy, all that pretence and effort. They swallowed their grief down yet it remained there like a fishbone in the throat, or the sensation of an obstruction when in reality there was nothing. Until this event, until Sammy dropped mid-sentence at the dinner-table at Albion, no Lambert had died in the charmed land. In thirty-five years not a single death! In Britain little babies might starve, adult men and women might succumb to the cold and damp, but not here, not in Australia where working people prospered and grew sleek with comfort and the esteem of their neighbours. The old Suffolkers forgot their village pessimism. Apart from Sarah, they believed in constant increase, in never-ending pregnancies and births and youngsters maturing before their eyes. They believed in progress and social amelioration, in the Mechanics’ Institute and reticulated water and roses like captured booty in the backyard.
Then Sammy spoilt it all.
They all knew it was spoilt, for all their games and irreverence for the dead. But they kept mum; for years not a word.
Until Harry awoke one night to a succession of sounds that had the feel of wet offal. He gagged on the stench of vomit and thought: Poor Ma! She can’t help it.
He might have acknowledged her illness earlier. But he had learnt his reticence from her. And there was the dilemma of who to turn to. Certainly not to her sister-in-law, Aunt Mary, whom Ma detested. Nor to George, who was far too hard on himself to ever have sympathy for others. Harry might have confided in Maggie, if she hadn’t been so thick with his mother. Word would have gotten back. He could foresee the reaction. ‘Am I such a terrible burden that you’ve got to go whispering behind my back?’
In desperation he settled on Lew Broughton, trekking early one morning the hundred yards up High Street to the Express office. He knocked and gazed into the lighted window but the grime defeated him.
‘Door’s open,’ came the usual invitation.
‘You’re not too busy?’
Braving a miasma of pipe smoke, he stooped in the low-ceilinged room. Lew swivelled on his captain’s chair and smiled with all his own teeth – yellow and crazed but still intact after seventy-five years. ‘Harry-lad! Busy be buggered! Come and take the load off your feet.’
His table was a dog’s breakfast of writing materials and greasy wool, as he rose at five to do a little journalism and knit socks for the needy. He knocked his pipe out on an open book, leaving a small pile of resinous ash.
‘Do you like fish, Harry?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Then I’ve got just the thing for you. Uncle Lew’s perch hollandaise.’
‘A recipe?’
‘A recipe. They asked for it, and here it is.’
‘Who asked for it?’
‘You haven’t heard? A damn silly story but I’ll tell you anyway. Bill Koop comes in about this time and catches me pickling a fish in spirits – an oddity like nothing on God’s earth. I tell him the plain truth: it’s been caught in the Loddon and I’m sending it down to Melbourne for identification. End of story, or so I thought. Next I know I have a stream of facetious fools knocking on my door asking for my secret fish recipe. Well here it is. Lifted from Mrs Beaton, but who’s to know? They can read it in the Express and pay for the privilege.’
‘Good for you, Uncle.’
‘You can tell your mother I’m expecting an invitation for fish dinner. I’m expecting a great many invitations, but I’ll give precedence to hers.’
‘Ma’s very ill.’
‘So I heard. But she can’t be so poorly she don’t appreciate company – even if it’s only me.’
‘She’s very unwell.’
‘Never too bad for a hand of euchre. Tell her Sunday evening suits me nicely.’
It was then that, impatient and frustrated, Harry resorted to the kind of extreme statement that was normally anathema to Lamberts: ‘Honestly, Lew, it gets so I fear the worst.’
‘The worst! You are a dreadful worrier, Harry-lad. Too morbid by half. She’s got no intention of leaving us. She’s enjoying her twilight way too much. And I ask you, have you ever seen your mother give up something she’s partial to? Wait till she looks you in the eye and says “Harry-me-boy, I’ve decided to give up the ghost.” Then you might count it a possibility, though like as not she’ll change her mind. Creaky doors never fall, Harry-lad. Creaky doors.’
There was no getting through to Lew. ‘That garrulous little parrot,’ Ma called him – in the nicest possible way. Rather than despair Harry decided it mightn’t be such a bad thing, a visit from Lew. Just what she needed. Bring her out of herself. And even if it did no good, at least Lew would see the extent of her deterioration.
Sarah winced at the idea of Lew coming. But she stirred herself to clean the house and for the first time in days put in an appearance behind the counter in the shop. She looked jaundiced and miserable and without specifically discussing her health, let it be known that she was suffering. It probably wasn’t good for business, but Harry was glad to see her up and about rather than moping on the back verandah.
More heartening still, she marched across High Street into McInnley’s Butchery and told Jack McInnley he must procure for her a couple of decent-sized perch by Friday afternoon. Jack offered her a nice rabbit. Nothing doing, said Sarah. Fish it had to be, preferably perch, though she might be persuaded to accept something similar. Jack said she was the tenth person after fish that week. If he got hold of Lew Broughton he would ring his scrawny neck. How was a man to come by fish under present circumstances? His old supplier, a fellow who had come up once a week from Bendigo, had gone missing in Belgium. Sarah said that was neither here nor there, leaving Jack mindful of the small mountain of minced steak the bakery bought from him each week. And when Friday rolled around there were the perch, not two but twelve silvery tiddlers pulled out of the town reservoir by Jack’s enterprising grandsons. Sarah didn’t complain. She guessed the trouble they’d gone to.
On Sunday afternoon Harry lounged in the warmth of the kitchen watching her make hollandaise sauce. She whipped the egg yolks with a vigour that was positively violent. The whisk clattered against the bowl and her face jigged and her bosom shook. Healthy as a horse! All she had needed was a project, a little interest shown in her. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He observed how expertly she warmed the mixture over a pot of simmering water; how she added the butter patiently in drabs.
‘You’re not using Lew’s recipe.’
‘To blazes with him! Who does he think he is?’
In the evening Lew turned up in his tweed sac suit and presented her with a monster bouquet of blue everlastings, which Harry recognised as the sea-lavender that grew wild by the side of the road. Lew sniffed the aromas of food.
&nbs
p; ‘Oh lovely, just lovely, Sarah. I knew you’d do it justice.’
Sarah gave him a wry glance as she took his homburg and hung it on the highest peg of the stand where he wouldn’t be able to reach it without a concerted stretch.
They ate at the big deal-wood table in the dining room, a match to the one at George’s Albion, on Sarah’s good china which hadn’t been out of the sideboard in many months. Head bowed, his crown a disorderly rick of grey fluff, Lew slurped his soup and mumbled appreciation.
Over the fish, which Lew dubbed Minnows Broughtonaise and picked from his teeth with a fingernail, there was the inevitable talk of France. Lew rejoiced in the war. It was the unexpected fillip of his latter years. As president of the Patriotic Committee he visited boys in their homes, urging them to sign up on their eighteenth birthdays. Just a few weeks later – Sarah being dead and buried – he would add to the thespian unreality of Harry’s send-off by styling him ‘the fist of Leviathan’ sent to smash the enemies of the Commonwealth.
For now he contented himself with gossip. ‘You heard about Robbie Maslin?’ he asked.
Sarah pushed a morsel of fish into her sauce and said nothing. Lew looked back and forth inquiringly – a wizened little countenance, more whisker than flesh.
‘That he got killed?’ Harry said.
‘Aye, but the manner, lad.’
Harry glanced at his mother. Lew wasn’t known for his sense of time and place.
‘As I heard it,’ Lew’s voice became grave and important, ‘it happened away from the front line. I grant you the letter they sent poor Dotty said killed in action but they have to say that don’t they? In consideration of the loved ones. No, the truth is he was well back. Him and three others, squatting in some old support trench. Playing a quiet hand of vingt-et-un and out of the blue it comes – kaboom! Got the lot of them. A right butcher’s shop, apparently. Poor old Robbie had his innards blown high and low. They identified him by his insignia. A bad business eh! You won’t read that in the obituary.’
Silent Parts Page 11