by Gail Jones
Twice weekly the whole student population did air-raid practice. A shrill whistle blew, they quickly lined up, and with swift organisation were dispatched to trenches that had been dug along the edges of the playing field. Students in the Junior Red Cross, or those who had scored highly in cloud or plane identification, led the way. For a time Perdita was designated a stretcher-bearer, but she couldn’t believe in this phoney, play-acting war, the way the girls clutched each other and whispered of possible atrocities and the boys, having fun, enjoyed their sense of control. Something in the delineation of roles and responses seemed way too improbable. Perdita began to long for a Zero to appear in the sky, so that her class might see for themselves what her nightmares had already shown her.
20
It is curious the way children come to understanding. I had circulated the words of sonnet LX around and around in my head, particularly the opening, the repetition of which I loved:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
It had rested in me, ticking over like the relentless minutes it described, providing a bright, fluent space I could play my voice in. Then, all of a sudden, I realised Shakespeare was wrong. There was no forward incessancy, like waves meeting waves, but recursion, fold, things revisiting out of time. The narrator of Rebecca returned to Manderley in dreams and memory; my sense too was of the implicating dragnet of the past, the accumulated experiences to which I was somehow compelled to return, the again and again, one might say, of moments drastically mistaken.
Dreams, nightmares, descriptions written to Mary; these summonings were a form of backwards learning. I recognised my haltings and erasures, my bothersome blanks. I recognised – with a gloomy apprehension – that although my body had moved, parts of my mind were lodged still in an altogether elsewhere, lagging behind, fraught and ill-fitted. Adults like to imagine that childhood has a wholesome and charming contiguity, but children too know, or at least now and then intuit, the dreadful fractures that craze any thoughtful life.
It was the beginning of 1944, the time of the Battle of Monte Cassino. The routine of school tends to steamroller memory. Hours of learning smudge into a toneless field, and what is recalled are rare moments of drama or triumph. Perdita remembered all her life her history teacher, Mr Graves, not for his lessons, which were plodding, strict and sincere, but for the occasion on which – outrageously – he burst into tears.
He must have been sixty, certainly too old to enlist, but perhaps, like her father, had been in the First War. In any case he had a somewhat military uprightness, which combined with his bleary myopic stare to suggest self-contradiction. He had a full head of grey hair, and his manner with female teachers implied that he fancied himself as a ‘ladies’ man’.
It was a Wednesday morning and Mr Graves stood before the class urging them, commanding them, to remember this time, this time of ‘the loathsome ruination of war’. There was a Benedictine monastery, he said, high on a hill, eighty miles south of Rome, over which the Allies and Fascists were fighting. It was a beautiful building – he had seen it himself on a personal pilgrimage in 1921 – containing both secular and sacred works of art and intellect from earliest antiquity. The great philosopher Thomas Aquinas had actually studied there. Thomas Aquinas: he wrote the name on the blackboard. The Allies had bombed the monastery in January and now, one week after school had recommenced, they had bombed it once again, this time pulverising the 1300-year-old building into merest rubble. It was gone, he said. Monte Cassino was destroyed.
‘Gone,’ he repeated.
There was a quiet moment, in which the students expected a homily, or a summary, or a date to write down, but Mr Graves let out a harsh deep sob, and began to weep. This was not a guarded loss of control but a full-bodied collapse. He was loud and distraught. It was as if some force of dissolution had swept right through him. ‘Monte Cassino,’ he sobbed. Some of the students nervously giggled. Others exchanged snide comments behind cupped hands. There was no sympathy for a grown man who would cry over a building somewhere; crazy old bugger. Some of the boys almost spat with masculine contempt.
At the very back of the room, Perdita was moved by Mr Graves’ theatrical announcement. She sat motionless, aware of the varied responses around her, perceiving the spread of this tear-stain from which Mr Graves would never recover his authority. There were, she knew, whole cities that had been destroyed; millions of people had been massacred and lay with their faces on black roads, or in mud, or in gaping pits, gleaming with blood-thickened rain. Survivors stared from the shells of bombed-out buildings, or hid terrified as war vehicles, hot with recent violence, rumbled by, crushing anything in their paths. Here was a man mourning a single monastery. Perhaps this was what war did – destroy scale altogether. In order to feel anything there had to be an attachment of some sort, a personal violation, a memory forfeited. For Perdita this was like the moment when she had glanced up from her playing cards and seen the newspaper photograph of the weary soldier. The error of things seemed so huge; and the gap between different orders of experience so taut and so meaningless.
Mr Graves had now crumpled into his seat. He put his head on his desk and wrapped his arms over him, as if an air raid were in progress somewhere above. The classroom quietened. Students seemed to know now that some irrevocable point had been reached. No one moved. Then Perdita rose from her back-row seat and slowly, oh so conspicuously, walked to the front of the room. Gently she lifted her teacher, Mr Graves, under the armpits, took a portion of his weight, and led him away, out of the room, out of the school building, out into the blinking and unforgiving light.
When she wrote to Mary about this incident later on, Perdita felt a new measure of respect for her teacher. It was not his collapse she admired, but his edifying tears. In her small world there was a kind of seizure of feeling: Stella, Mary, herself – none of them now cried. For all the woebegone and sorrowful events that had occurred, indeed for all the enormity of the war and the cataclysms of history, they had practised their own severe forms of containment and reserve. What in the school had been an outrage seemed to Perdita a breaking-through. Mr Graves had in some way responded with appropriate distress to a war habitually deadened in newsprint, abstracted into maps, rendered light entertainment. The phrase ‘loathsome ruination’ remained and haunted her. It sounded Shakespearean. It had a dimension of passionate declaration she felt she understood.
Perdita spent a lot of time in the bathroom, in front of Flora’s mirror. There she watched herself practise iambic pentameter sentences.
When she had told Doctor Oblov that the children at school called her M-M-Martian, he raised an index finger as she spoke, halted her and said, ‘Mar-shun, da-Dum, da-Dum, da-Dum. Make it an iamb. Think of the stress, the rhythm, as if it is a word in a sonnet. Not your word, but existing in a sentence already known. Put the stress on the second syllable.’
Perdita thought that perhaps he did not understand how it felt to be teased. Children were monstrous in their vehemence, their punishing exclusions.
‘When I was a bald boy,’ he added, ‘other children called me “the egg”. They used to come up from behind, flip off my cap, and rap my skull with their knuckles. I was a weakling, I cried, so they grew more cruel.’
Perdita was repeating in her head: ‘I was a weakling, I cried, so they grew more cruel.’ She wanted to discuss this with Doctor Oblov. She turned the flower dome in her hands and tried, with an agonising expectation of failure, to formulate a question.
Then instead, on an instinct, she simply said, ‘Mar-shun!’ She had successfully converted Martian to a sayable iamb.
‘Bravo,’ said Doctor Oblov. He gave an enormous smile, leaned back in his chair and laced and unlaced his fingers.
Perdita was now looking at herself in the mirror, repeating, ‘Mar-shun.�
� No stutter, no stumbling mountain range of Ms. She looked at herself critically. She would have liked a crimped hairdo and fuller lips. Better still, she would have liked to be the woman in the booth at the cinema, so gorgeously synthetic that she was a figure of awe.
‘Mar-shun!’
Flora’s voice came plaintively from behind the door. ‘Are you going to be all day in there?’
Perdita looked at herself one last time. Her face floated, pale and extraterrestrial in the shadowy bathroom. A plastic curtain of crudely drawn fish framed her head. All of a sudden she could scarcely breathe. There was contingency here, and painful faintness. She shaped her lips around a rhythmical sentence she did not try to speak. The sentence was: ‘I am coming, Flora. Just one minute more.’
On a scorchingly hot day in early March they picked up Stella from the hospital. It had been arranged that she would stay for a while with her daughter at Flora and Ted’s, ‘to settle her’, said Flora.
She stood passively in front of an electric fan in the foyer of the hospital building, wearing a pale blue dress Perdita had never seen before. It had a cloth belt that accentuated her terrible thinness and a neat narrow skirt. At her feet sat a touchingly small vinyl bag of personal items. Although accustomed to Stella’s absence, Perdita was glad they were to be reunited. She felt a surge of affection – surprised at its tenacity – and stepped forward to embrace her mother. Perdita had grown and perhaps Stella had also shrunk: they were misproportioned, the daughter now slightly taller than the mother. Perdita lay her arm around her mother’s shoulder, just as Billy sometimes did for her, as they walked the sombre route between the bus stop and Greensleeves. Ted carried the vinyl bag, Flora fussed as she hurried ahead to open the windows of the car, so that they would not all swelter.
At first Stella remained staunchly silent, not responding to questions, not offering conversation. But gradually she seemed to sense the Ramsays’ beneficence; the fuss was for her, their intentions were generous. Perdita watched her mother make a valiant effort to be sociable.
‘I’m not good for anything much,’ she heard Stella declare, ‘but I can try to get work again, I suppose.’
Ted reminded Stella she had a widow’s pension. She was pleased and surprised.
‘We can help you find somewhere to live,’ Ted announced, steering the car around a corner. ‘But only when you’re ready. There’s plenty of time.’
‘There’s plenty of time,’ Flora repeated.
In the back seat with her mother, sticky with the fierce heat no open window would alleviate, Perdita was aware of the fulsome goodness of the Ramsays. They acted helpfully because they were disposed naturally to do so; there was no calculation or pause, no hesitation or profit. Outside the car window the impersonal world streamed by, the mysterious energies of all those independent lives, laborious or playful, embedded in complex unhappiness or pleasure, the lives of men like Mr Graves, undone by a single confiscation of the war, or Mary, incarcerated, experiencing who knew what daily humiliations and plights.
‘Is the war still on?’ Stella asked. She looked straight ahead. Her face was flushed with the heat. She had not once looked directly at Perdita.
‘Yep,’ said Ted decisively. ‘Still the bloody war. But it won’t be long now. We’re gaining the upper hand.’
This expression sounded odd to Perdita, but she was relieved to hear that the end of the war was in sight. It was not something she had seriously considered before. She had no sense, really, of future time, of what life might be in a different field of possibilities. Vaguely she imagined the flapping of wings and a kind of swift uplifting, the horizon dipping and sliding in a pinkish grey light, draughty exposures, vistas, space. The future was this imprecise aerial beholding.
‘My husband died in the war, you know,’ Stella announced. ‘In France.’
Perdita stared at the coral-coloured neck of Ted as he drove.
‘How dreadful,’ said Flora. ‘We are sorry for your loss.’
There was a silence in the car, heated and uncomfortable. Did Stella not remember, Perdita wondered, or had she remade her history? Did Flora and Ted know? She felt a sensation of sudden emptiness, as if all they had shared had been scooped away.
‘It was a bomb,’ Stella insisted. ‘A bomb exploded behind him and blew him apart.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Flora weakly.
Perdita looked down at her lap. The thin bowl of her cotton dress quivered with the motion of the car. There was a vacancy, a strain.
‘Ted?’
‘Yes?’
‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
Ted caught Perdita’s glance in the rear-view mirror and pulled over with a jerk to the side of the road. Perdita climbed from the car and fell to her knees on the verge; she saw the dry blond grass heave and sink before her, felt her body’s tight clench, retched, but nothing came. She closed her eyelids, nauseous, absenting herself. It was Flora’s palm, not her mother’s, which came to rest on her forehead, silently commiserating.
21
In early November 1944, Perdita was visiting Dr Oblov for one of her sessions. She had been seeing the doctor by then for well over a year, and there had been some definite progress with the control of her stutter. It was less pronounced and less insistent; indeed, she could now and then produce complete premeditated sentences, on the principle of an imposed iambic pentameter structure. Perdita examined and re-examined the way silence weighed inside her, what devices she must have employed, what abolitions.
She had secretly believed – she knew it now – that her mother had murdered her father. Stella’s Shakespearean rhetoric led Perdita to suppose she had rehearsed hostile Elizabethan intentions, exultant and fearless, and that her recitations had fixed her on a course of dramatic action. Aloof as she was, caught in her own infirmity, Stella’s words still carried a sensuous violence. She had performed virtual murders as other women did gossip, and she had been seduced not by the comedies, but by the horror of the tragedies; not by the love sonnets, mellifluous and sweet, but by those that dealt with the morbid erosions of time. Unmaking obsessed her, and the making of nonentity.
It was, Perdita remembered, not a remarkable day. It was a day like any other. Dr Oblov wore a starched white shirt and a grey pinstripe waistcoat. At his neck, pertly, sat a small black bow tie. He stood up and smiled warmly as Perdita entered the room, making her believe she was one of his favourite patients.
‘Dear Perdita,’ he said, reaching to shake her hand.
She had always enjoyed the ritual of their greeting; it formalised the occasion, endowed her with maturity, instated an atmosphere of polite exchange. No other adult in the world had ever shaken her hand. Dr Oblov passed Perdita the turquoise flower dome and took up his sailing ship, rolling it affectionately in his slender hands.
Their meetings often began with a reading from Shakespeare; this ‘loosened the tongue,’ Dr Oblov said; it meant that Perdita began with confidence, knowing that by some bizarre resource of maternal impersonation she returned to the easy-motion ripple of a sentence. As usual, it was Perdita who chose the speech. She opened Doctor Oblov’s copy of Collected Works at random and chanced upon the tragedy of Macbeth. As she was flicking through the tissuey, ivory-coloured pages, her eye caught, as if fated, on something wholly familiar:
Infirm of purpose!
Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures; ’tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil …
Perdita read the words silently and was returned to the moment her mother last chanted them, as her father lay dying. Fearful of what was rising inside her, a dark shape pressing, an ominous swelling, she turned back a page, seized upon another familiar-looking speech, and in order to calm herself began slowly to read aloud:
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Perdita paused and looked up at Dr Oblov. His chin was resting in his hand. He nodded, and she continued.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Like the iron gate dissolving at the opening to Rebecca, some mind-forged impediment to memory fell away. Was it a trespass, or a reclamation? There was a rush of anxiety and a rush of illumination, and Perdita saw before her, as if cinematically arranged, the complete, recovered scene of her father’s death.
‘What has happened?’ asked Doctor Oblov. His voice came like an echo, from a long way away.
That day the air had been heavy and incandescent with heat, the sky brittle, gold. Stella and Perdita were returning from a visit to the Trevors’; Perdita was running ahead and Stella was following a little way behind, walking with Billy, who was carrying something for her. From the distance came the sound of a rusty windmill, creaking as it turned on a single gust of wind. Horatio was lying on his side in the shade beneath the tank stand; he cocked his head, banged his tail once, but was too hot and sleepy otherwise to move. As Perdita approached the house everything appeared as normal. But at the door she halted. Behind the screen she heard the sound of Nicholas panting and groaning, and beneath that, a childish, shallow moan.
When she pushed the screen door, as quietly as she could, Perdita saw Nicholas on the floor, pressing brutally into Mary. His trousers were caught about his ankles, above his large boots, and Mary’s brown thighs were splayed open before him. Perdita did not then decide to kill her father; there was no deliberation and no resolve. She simply took up the carving knife lying on the table and walked steadily towards him, enclosed by muddle, alarm, perhaps a dull impulse of revenge, seized by the circulation of her own blood pressuring in her head, causing her to act, to act, so that she gripped the knife and was gripped, so that she saw only a target and fixed her intention.