A Hundred Small Lessons

by Ashley Hay

  ‘Do you remember when Gloria was just born?’ he began, shushing her when she started to reply. ‘Of course you do—but do you remember, we had a princess come to visit? She came to open one of the new university buildings. Princess Alice; I got to shake her hand. She was very beautiful, I thought, and very clever, they said too. And I thought that boded well for our new girl.’

  ‘Oh, it will be different for her.’ The cold tone of Elaine’s voice made Clem flinch. ‘All the great change in the world—I’m not yet twenty-five, and my life’s laid out for me already. Those teenagers shouting at the Beatles last winter, they’ll have it; they’ll have it all. They’ll have a whole new world. Me, I was there with my old mum.’ She shook her head. ‘And she’s back, you know, your princess—I saw it in the newspaper. Back to make a fuss about the women at your university. Where I am not.’ These last words sharpened by the pause that emphasised each one.

  ‘I didn’t know, love. If you’d said something while you were at school, if you’d ever said anything, maybe we could have—well, we just didn’t know . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Elaine. ‘You didn’t.’ But she took hold of Clem’s hand from her shoulder, and she held on. ‘It’s all right,’ she said at last. ‘I won’t buy a boat and sail off. And I won’t do anything daft. I like leaving Gloria with Gerald’s mum—she doesn’t make the fuss of it that Mum does. All the questions of why I don’t want to spend my time with Gloria; all the comments about what I’d rather do instead.’

  It wasn’t right for her to talk about her mother that way, Clem knew that. He wanted to raise Elsie up again in her daughter’s mind. He wanted a way to defend her. That was his job.

  ‘She took good care of you, your mother. You mustn’t deny her that. More care than I’d ever seen a person take.’ He paused a moment. ‘She loves you,’ he said. Elaine should know that but he wasn’t entirely sure. ‘Don’t you ever let that go.’

  And Elaine did smile as she stood up and came around to stand behind him, kissing the top of his head as he had kissed hers. ‘I know you love us, Dad. And I’m sure that Mum does too. We’re just two different people, she and I.’ She kissed his head again. ‘If it’s OK, I’ll have a lie-down, before I go.’ And she went to her old room, shutting the door with a snap.

  Clem eyed the brandy, poured himself another half. He missed his kids. He missed their childhood. He missed the weekends ranging around in the bush and along the river, finding bits and pieces and working out what use they might be. Donny would suggest one thing, Elaine another, and somehow they’d find something the three of them agreed on, and work out how to make it together.

  While Elsie stayed at home and fed the mangle. Such a different experience of their childhood to mine, he thought, but she never seemed to think she’d missed out. He’d take Gloria fossicking when she was bigger—and Don’s kids, now that Carol was in the family way. They’d want rockets, not bikes and trikes, he supposed: there were so many things shooting up in the air. But guns, they’d still be a winner—particularly now this new war in Vietnam was getting off the ground. Little boys always wanted guns.

  War: Elsie kept her children safe from all of that, wouldn’t even let its stories touch their world. ‘You take the best care of them, Else,’ he’d said, standing with her by a bonfire of newspapers when the war ended, when they still lived with his mum, when the twins were so young and so small.

  ‘Give us a hand with this shopping?’ Elsie called now from the foot of the stairs, and he went to meet her halfway, reaching for her string bags of parcels.

  ‘You’ve got enough provisions for a world expedition,’ he said with a snort. ‘You planning on going trekking? Expecting World War Three?’

  Elsie set her things down on the table. ‘Don’t you make jokes about war, Clem,’ she said, and so sharply that he leaned forward fast to kiss her cheek.

  Let’s keep her away from all that.

  ‘Well, where would you go, Else, if you could go anywhere?’

  ‘Like your uncle Perce; off into the blue?’ She laughed, patting down her rumpled hair. ‘I’d go everywhere,’ she said. ‘I’d see the world. There must be so many places that don’t look like this.’ She paused; he could see her hunting for the most exotic place she knew the name of, in the spirit of the game. ‘Well then—Tashkent!’

  And he kissed her again. ‘Then I’ll take you, Elsie Gormley. You and our restless girl Elaine.’

  ‘Is that Lainey’s car out the front?’ she said then. ‘Is Glory here?’ Already heading for the hall.

  Clem shushed her from the doorway, swinging her around like the beginning of a dance. ‘She’s having a little lie-down, love—one of those shocking headaches, I think. Gerald’s mum’s got Gloria, and she’s just gone in for a rest.’

  Elsie sat down, pushing off her shoes under the table. ‘I’ll take in a drink and a facecloth,’ she said.

  Clem nodded. ‘She’d like that.’ He wasn’t sure how much of the morning he should share.

  ‘Is it flu, do you think?’ Elsie asked, moving to fill a glass of water that Clem knew was for Elaine. ‘It’ll probably go to Gloria if it is, and then we’ll have her sick as well.’

  But he knew she loved that too—the soup and the blankets and the hugs and the baths.

  ‘It’s not flu, love. Glory’s fine.’ He watched Elsie go with the water towards the hallway. The props of affection. ‘Go on in, but go easy on her. She really is a bear with a sore head.’ And then he heard her, in the usually empty room, doing her best. ‘Here you are, Lainey: don’t sit up, love. Just pop this on your forehead and have a drink when you need it. You’ve done the right thing, you know, coming home. Here you are. Try this now. Safe and sound.’

  And he loved her for it. She was the centre, the heart of his world.

  23

  The curlews

  It was late spring when Clem died—pneumonia, like his dad, and his last days so miserable as he worried this would turn him into the one man he hadn’t wanted to be.

  ‘If I could’ve gone any other way,’ he’d whisper, holding fast to Elsie’s hand.

  Talking himself into it, she thought, terrified that that might indeed be what he was doing. But she patted and soothed and said, ‘You’ll be up and about in no time, Clem. There are too many chores that want doing.’

  He was only fifty-four, and suddenly all the plans they’d thought of making were too late. Elsie had marked a story about a cruise in one of her magazines and mentioned it one weekend. Clem had clipped an ad from the weekend paper for a little runabout—twelve foot of zippy hull—and left it on the kitchen bench. And Elsie, who’d never thought of such a thing, found herself imagining skimming across the surface of the bay, anchoring off a sandy beach, wading ashore, making a little fire, cooking some sausages, and pouring a thermos of tea. Cruising, either way.

  Now, he was diminishing before her eyes, his lungs racked and his nerve just about gone.

  ‘Wanted to see the world with you, Else,’ he said one morning. ‘Wanted to take you to Tashkent.’

  His words fell into a cough that Elsie tried to mop away—drink this, swallow that, and shh, don’t think of such things now.

  The doctor gave him some medicine and not much of a chance; Elsie kept telling him he’d be up and about in a jiffy.

  And then, lying by him in the middle of one night, she dropped off for a moment listening to his broken run of breaths and, opening her eyes, in a silence, knew, just like that: he was gone. She took his hand, but all the life and warmth had gone from it, and it felt strange, and solid, and nothing like skin or pulsing blood or anything to do with a person.

  Let alone Clem.

  Still, she held on. She held on, as if she could push all the loving she was supposed to do for him in their next ten, twenty, thirty years together, into the wake of wherever he’d gone.

  Neither of them were church people. In the quiet dark of twenty minutes past two in the morning—she could see the luminous green han
ds of the little clock Clem kept on his bedside table—she wished for the first time that she was. There’d be some comfort in believing in a hereafter. But the world was so still and quiet this morning that she wasn’t sure there was anyone left alive in it but her.

  She got out of bed, pulling on her dressing gown and pausing as she went by Clem to kiss his cool, smooth skin. In her world, Clem was always that young man looking up at her from the bright sunshine of a Brisbane afternoon. ‘Let me help you there,’ he was saying, holding up his hand as she swung down from the still-moving tram. Fifty-four, and dead, was no part of her image of him.

  In the lounge room, she fumbled with the telephone. The black Bakelite receiver felt heavier than usual and she stood for a moment with her finger above the dial, wondering who she should call, and why. Dialled the first two digits of Don’s number, and hung up. Dialled the first two digits of Elaine’s. Pushed the cradle down to clear the number, and listened to the purr of the dial tone.

  Not like anyone can do anything, she thought, replacing the receiver and heading back to bed. She wished she knew what she should do, awake and alone. Knitting, reading, watching—you could make a vigil out of each.

  She climbed across Clem’s still, quiet body and settled herself cross-legged, the way her children and grandchildren always sat when they were waiting for her to read.

  ‘So I can read to you,’ she heard herself say, and she reached over for the novel she was halfway through, flicking on her tiny bedside light. She’d read to him this past week, on and off, pushing them both through a difficult book she’d picked up in a second-hand bookshop in the city, where the lady had called it a classic. ‘Iconic, even. The great Australian novel, I’d say.’ It was about some bloke trying to make the best way in his world. It wasn’t in a hurry—that was like life, she supposed—but she wanted to see how it went in the end.

  ‘It’s lovely, the sound of your voice,’ Clem had said. ‘Reckon I could stand any of your hard books like this.’ She wished she’d thought to read aloud to him before. Now she’d just have to plough on on her own.

  Every so often, Elsie liked to read a hard kind of book, or take Clem to hear some classical music or see some paintings in the Exhibition Building. ‘I think we should, love,’ she’d say, as he shook his head and made a joke about being out of his depth.

  Wanting something different, something exciting: it was to do with Ida Lewis and the size of other lives.

  Holding the book open now with one hand, she let the other rest on Clem’s immobile torso as she scanned to find her place: ‘“The man returned to his chair on the edge of the room, and looked at the blank book, and tried to think what he would write in it.” Remember Stan Parker,’ she reminded her husband. ‘There was his wife, rummaging for something in a cupboard, and she found a notebook that she’d thought to give her son. Then Stan Parker asks her for the book, says he might make notes in it, or lists.’

  She cleared her throat self-consciously and went on:

  The blank pages were in themselves simple and complete. But there must be some simple words, within his reach, with which to throw further light. He would have liked to write some poem or prayer in the empty book, and for some time did consider that idea, remembering the plays of Shakespeare that he had read lying on his stomach as a boy, but any words that came to him were the stiff words of a half-forgotten literature that had no relationship with himself.

  Shakespeare, she thought. It’s always Shakespeare. When she was a girl at school, she’d tried to read one of the plays—The Comedy of Errors—but got no further than the first few pages. People separated at birth, one mistaken for the other, no one recognising anyone: you wouldn’t credit it in life. Yet it was only ever Shakespeare and the Bible that clever people said you should read. Shakespeare and the Bible and now this book about Stan Parker.

  She set the book down again; she knew how this Stan Parker felt, and she felt for him. Here she was, in the deep in the hours of darkness, in the middle of the most shocking thing that had ever happened to her—her husband dead on the mattress beside her—and she too wished for a poem or a prayer.

  She thought of the painter again.

  ‘I want to tell you something, Clem Gormley,’ she said then, as quietly as she could. ‘About that painting you were set to buy.’

  She knew what had seduced her: it was the sight of the one part of the artist’s body she’d been able to see—her right arm—rising and falling in great, majestic sweeps as she blocked in the pure blue.

  ‘Cerulean blue,’ she told Clem now, remembering the word, savouring it. She kept the tube of colour in the bottom of her crystal jewellery box at the back of her dressing table, and she uncapped the lid every so often, sniffing its pungent, oily smell.

  ‘And then she’d stop and swap brushes, and I’d see the tiny busyness of her hand making this intricate picture of me. There was another version of me coming out of the movements, big and small, of her arm. And it made, it made me feel, well . . .’ She was blushing even now. ‘It made me feel adored.’

  She picked up her husband’s heavy hand from where it lay on the quilt, and kissed it. ‘There was nothing in it, nothing but a single kiss—I kissed her hand. And it’s been worming away at me ever since. More than ten years, Clem, on the brink of telling you.’

  Where was she now, the Elsie in the picture while this Elsie blushed and held her husband’s hand. Once in a while, she let herself dream that the Elsie in the painting was off with Ida, on her adventures, together somehow. Now, with Clem’s strange-feeling hand in hers, it occurred to her for the first time that the canvas might be anywhere—she might be hanging on her own in some dark hall, or filed away and forgotten, out of sight. And then it also struck her that she, the real Elsie, might now go anywhere too.

  She swallowed a sound like a sob, and heard an echo of it in the night: the strange and mournful shriek of a curlew. It was impossible not to interpret the sound as grief or loss or suffering. That is the right noise to make now, she thought, fierce and alone.

  The clock’s hands had crept on an hour: the night was unbearably long.

  Maybe everyone had that one thing that would tempt them—in her case, the sight of an artist’s arm rising and falling as it brought a new version of her into being. And if you caught sight of that, in the right place at the right time, then some new bubble of possibility opened out, and some extraordinary thing unfolded.

  Some people walked in; some people turned away.

  What if I’d turned away when he put his hand up to me on the tram? What if I’d said, ‘I’m right, thanks,’ and swung down unassisted, on my own? There in the night-time, Elsie felt as if her children and her grandchildren were fading a little, less secure.

  Or what if he’d married that Jan? She gripped his fingers, knew their shape.

  I must let the kids know, she thought then, and sat still, afraid to move in case her husband’s body disappeared while she was gone. No. She didn’t want Stan Parker’s life. She wanted to hold on tighter to her own.

  Somewhere in the darkness, the curlew called again and the sound worked like an alarm, propelling Elsie through the house towards the kitchen, where she lit the gas stove and shifted the kettle onto its bright blue ring.

  ‘I’ll just make a cuppa,’ she called, as she would have done if Clem had been awake, if he’d been alive, and found herself taking two cups down from the hooks above the bench. Which was when she cried, and cursed, and realised, for the first time, the full size of what had happened.

  Her husband was dead. There was such force in that sentence, and she felt her hand grip the pretty cup until its handle snapped in two.

  She cried some more, splashing the kettle’s boiling water in a wide arc across the table, its mat, a box of pictures she’d been sorting, and her own left hand—so that she could only call out and cry harder again. She grabbed the box, as angry with it as if it had caused her husband’s death, wanting to hurl it away.

 
That woman, Jan: she’d shoved her photo right up in the roof, well away, with that wretched portrait too. She should shove the rest of them up there as well. Tears flowing and her mind a kind of frenzy, she dragged a kitchen chair into the hallway and stood on it, ramming the box into the cavity’s darkness.

  Look at yourself, Elsie Gormley. Look at the state she was in. She stood there crying for all she was worth, her face snotty. Reaching up to steady herself against the manhole, her hand brushed the slivers of those two other prints and she pulled them down. She wiped her eyes as she stared at the photograph, the painting.

  It must have been the light, or the darkness, or the crying, but she almost thought that both pictures were pictures of her. You can come down now. He’s gone. She’d found something powerful in the threat of this Jan sometimes: a thing to push against, a thing to fear when she wanted to rail against Clem for some minor, inconsequent thing. It had been a kind of strange relief to think something hard and horrible. And now that made her cry even more.

  Off the chair, in the kitchen, she held her hand under a gush of cold water. Outside, behind the hill’s ridge, the faintest line of silver was coming up, like one of those Beatles songs about the sun.

  Here it comes.

  She’d been singing it to her smallest grandchild, Don and Carol’s new boy. Little Clemmie. And she hummed a little now to calm herself as she went back in to Clem.

  ‘I’m going to go out,’ she said, as she usually would. ‘I’m going to walk down to the river and back. When I come home, it will be morning, and I’ll . . . do whatever you need me to do.’

  In the still-dim bedroom, she fumbled for any clothes—the grubby green pants she usually wore in the vegie garden—and tied a scarf around her bed-squashed hair.

  In front of her mirrored dressing table, she paused, picking up the pretty bottle of cologne Clem had given her for her last birthday, squirting a little of it on one wrist and pressing it gently against the skin of the other. How did it work, dying? Did everything stop at once, or did your senses peter out at different times? Would he smell this scent, this rosy blossom?