by Alex Miller
We stood silently staring at it – we might have been waiting for a sign, a movement transmitted to the surface from what lay beneath. See! he exclaimed, delighted with my silence. I put mine on top of hers. Just for a day or two, when I moved in. Till I could find the time to sort it all out. You should see the mess she left. He pushed at a protruding Joel’s catalogue, a relic of the days when these had been stapled lists. And look! It’s all still here! I haven’t touched it. He moved away from me, along the table, examining this and that at random, taking care not to shift anything from its place – an archaeologist respectful of each item’s position within the matrix of the strata: we shall only know the meaning of a thing if we know the place we encounter it.
I keep putting more on top, he said. I’ve thought of pretending to have a nervous breakdown so I’d have the time to deal with it. Archly he looked across at me. What do you think of that idea? He continued his inspection. Compo, he murmured, wonderingly.
He stopped on the far side of the table, his hoard a rampart between us. We could sort it all out, Steven. Together we’d have the time. We could work our way through it. Starting from the top and working our way down. He waited, watching me. She was half Chinese, he said. You won’t understand her. There are things you can’t guess. You’ll have to go through my stuff or hers won’t make sense to you.
His telephone was ringing in the hall. He let it ring, watching me, enjoying the moment, before going to answer it.
She was absent from the official record. I hadn’t expected to find an entry under FENG, Victoria (1878-1968), in The Oxford Companion to English Literature. I’d never imagined it was going to be so easy. But I had felt a little hopeful when I’d consulted the index of authors at the end of Nettie Palmer’s prize-winning essay Modern Australian Literature, the purpose of which, in 1924, in the publisher’s words, had been ‘to stimulate an interest in our own literature’. Published in 1912, The Winter Visitor fell exactly in the middle of the period covered by this essay: 1900 to 1923. But there was no reference in it, or in any of the other histories of Australian literature, to Victoria or to her books. I’d tried the antiquarian dealers. They’d never heard of her but expressed an interest in seeing The Winter Visitor. There was nothing in Ferguson’s seven-volume Bibliography of Australia, and the vast index of the State Library contained no clue.
I placed my hands on the unsteady pile in front of me. A good shove would topple it. I could feel her there, under my hands in her documentary form, waiting to be recovered. I rocked the pile back and forth experimentally. The table creaked and something beneath it shifted. I bent down and looked to see what had fallen. The space under the table was crammed with stuff. I made out a paint-spattered easel among boxes and cartons and bundles of magazines and newspapers. Beside it there was a large ceramic pot filled with artist’s brushes. I knelt down to see better. From the doorway Lang called, That’s it Steven. You’re getting warmer.
He came over and put a glass of wine on the carpet and sat beside me. There’s some of my mother’s gold in there. We gazed in through the chair legs at this secondary hoard. He reached through and dipped into a carton. Here, he said, handing me a thick bundle of what looked like new banknotes. Shanghai bonds. I’ve got thousands of them. They were worth a fortune one day and nothing the next.
He worked to free the chair from an obstructing leg of the easel. That was Gertrude on the phone. She’s got hold of something at an auction. It belonged to my grandfather. You should have come earlier if you’d wanted to know about Victoria.
I watched him struggling with the chair. 1878-1968; she’d survived almost right through the sixties. I found it impossible, however, to imagine her watching the news of President Kennedy’s assassination. For me she was a woman of thirty at the end of the first decade of this century writing about herself being a child at the close of the nineteenth century. And the woman and the child persisted; they possessed an ahistorical existence parallel to my own. It was only a matter of bridging the gap, somehow.
He freed the chair and pushed it to one side. I’ll show you something Steven. I’ll show you something that will interest you. He lit a cigarette and released a thick yellow cloud of smoke, as if he were a Chinese conjurer and this were his preliminary theatrical effect. His crafty gaze flickered at me. With care he pulled out a cube-shaped Liptons tea box from under the table. It was a very old box. The cinnamon wood was stained a few centimetres from the base by a dark line, like the wavering shoreline delicately inscribed on an explorer’s chart. Victoria wasn’t interested in me. You should have come earlier and you could have talked to Gertrude’s father. He placed the box between us. Look at this Steven. He opened the lid.
I was more than half-prepared to see Victoria’s Tang horse, Tianma, her heavenly horse of the West. There was a skull in the box. It was very clean and white and it was lying face up. A heavy-browed individual with a perfect set of beautifully even teeth. Dorset, he said, with a kind of awe. Let’s have a drink.
THE MOTHER
HOMECOMING
Lien got out of the car and stood in the middle of the road. It was three in the afternoon and very hot. There was no one about. She breathed in the familiar Hangzhou dust, the essential smell of summer. She told the chauffeur, who was standing uncertainly beside her, to go away. She knew he was thinking of Feng and was unwilling to leave her alone with only her maid. In English this time, she said, Did you hear me? Leave us. He got back into the car and drove a little way then stopped. She wanted to be alone. She waved at him to go and the black Pontiac rolled forward a few more metres, unable to resist her, before coming to a stop again. She could see the Russian twisted round in the driver’s seat watching her. She made an obscene gesture at him. There were dark sweat stains in the armpits of her linen suit, which was crushed and soiled from the train journey. She bent down and picked up a stone the size of a walnut from the roadway and turned and threw it hard. It struck the rear window of the car with a loud crack. The Pontiac jumped forward and stalled. Her maid giggled nervously. Lien picked up another stone. The Russian re-started the car and accelerated away, the rear wheels throwing up a scatter of gravel. Lien dropped the stone and lit a cigarette. She instructed her maid to stack the luggage in the shade against the wall and continued to stand in the sun herself, the wide brim of her pale straw hat casting her features in shadow.
She was facing the long, rear wall of Huang’s house. The doorway before her was the second entrance. It was the doorway through which she had told her father she would return, as if she were returning from an excursion to the temple at Lin Yin. The door was scarcely more than two metres high and a little over a metre wide. She wondered now at her insistence on reentering her home, indeed her father’s home, by this means. It was a servant’s entrance, or a child’s entrance. Only now did she observe the method of its construction, though she had known it all her life. It was made of adzed planks set within a heavy rectangular frame, and towards the top in the centre there was a little trap through which the gatekeeper might safely observe visitors. Why the construction of the door should be significant she could not imagine. It was the peculiar, detailed way she was seeing things. She thought of it as a Shanghai way of seeing things, and she resented discovering it in herself. A stranger’s way of seeing. The door had once been a bright vermilion, but had faded to an autumnal sepia. Above it, providing an area of shade around its base, there was a tiled roof with upturned eaves. When it rained, street vendors sometimes took shelter here and smoked a pipe while they waited for the weather to clear, and beggars were permitted to sleep here undisturbed at night. When she had been planning her strategy in Shanghai, when she had been dreaming of returning home, when it had seemed to her that she might never realise the dream, during that time she had thought of this doorway and of the courtyard to which it gave access as her principal goal. Now, standing here in the hot sun on the roadway, she thought, I am no longer the child; today I am the woman carrying the child. And she be
gan to fear that she had miscalculated.
When she was very young, between lessons with her father, she had often come to sit on the bales of rice straw at the window of the storehouse that overlooked the courtyard of the little red doorway. From under the dark, sheltering eaves she had watched the rain falling onto the grey stones of the yard and had pursued her solitary enchantments. And through the rain, always the little doorway in the wall, the doorway to the other world, to the lake and to the mountains and to the temples hidden in the forest. Shanghai had not existed for her then. On hot summer days, such as this, Yu had opened the door and they had cut up watermelons and given the refreshing slices of fruit to thirsty passers by. It had been through this doorway, too, that she and Yu had secretly gone at night on their smoking excursions to West Lake. On those strange and wonderful occasions she had disguised herself in the clothes of a boy.
It was too late to recall the Russian and his car. And anyway, she had been too imperious with him to bear his scorn. She dropped the butt of her cigarette on the road and ground it under the heel of her shoe, and she went up to the door and thumped on it with the flat of her hand. The sound echoed within emptily, seeming to touch some sensitive vital muscle deep inside her own chest. Several seconds passed. Then the trap was opened and the gatekeeper’s daughter-in-law looked out, her eyes narrowed against the sunlight.
Lien was aware suddenly that her western clothes made an intruder of her. The woman’s eyes were unhealthy, fatigued with laziness and habitual inaction. Why hasn’t the dust been laid today? Lien asked her softly.
The woman blinked.
See that the roadway is watered at once, or I shall have you flogged. Are you going to make your mistress stand in the sun all day? Fear came with recognition into the woman’s eyes and she quickly unbolted the door and stood to one side, kowtowing repeatedly and begging Lien to forgive her. Lien ignored her and stepped through the door. How could she have imagined it would remain the doorway to her childhood?
Before her was a squalid and narrow space closely surrounded by darkly stained brick walls. The courtyard resembled a portion of an alley behind a cheap Chinese eating house in Shanghai. A mixture of rotting cabbage stalks and straw and duck droppings littered the paving. A broken water pot lay where it had fallen, a desiccated weed rising through the shards. She lit another cigarette. At the touch of the smoke her stomach contracted uneasily. She sensed her maid and the gatekeeper’s daughter-in-law waiting behind her with the luggage. How amused Feng would have been to have witnessed this abbreviation of her domain. How he would have smiled to see the poverty of her resources; he whose spaces were vast and whose resources were princely. She visualised him in the citadel of his white villa within the unbreachable lines of the International Settlement, and she felt herself to be provincial and vulnerable. She imagined his voice, low and ironic and dry: So this is your enchanted courtyard that I must fear?
Her project seemed hopeless. The vision of a madwoman.
In four hurried strides she crossed the courtyard and reached the entrance to the storehouse. The air within was heady with the acid fumes from a layer of fermenting poultry droppings. Her heartbeat thickened and slowed as she stumbled forward, her shoes slipping on the mess, and a moment later emerged into the sunlit rectangle of the chrysanthemum courtyard. Here she must be safe, for here she had cultivated her flower garden, staking the slender stems of the dark velvety blooms with golden slivers of bamboo. The raised garden bed was dry, the earth cracked and uncultivated. Then she saw the sunburned beggar squatting against the wall. He was picking over a heap of rubbish, which he had gathered together between his raised knees. His shorn scalp was bare to the blazing sun and he was naked except for a wisp of rag about his hollow loins.
He was watching her, his frightened gaze clinging to her, as if he would immobilise her with the force of his fear. There was a terrible, disfiguring scar across his neck, which terminated in a deep cavity where his collarbone should have been. It appeared as though someone had once attempted to behead him. He was keeping very still, except for his long fingers, which, like crabs, scrabbled together the rubbish and folded it into a filthy piece of cloth. When it was tied he took up this bundle and eased himself half-way to his feet. He did not rise to his full height, but remained crouched, and in this attitude moved with surprising agility to the open archway at the far end of the storehouse.
A hot gust of wind drove down into the yard from the surrounding roofs, sucking the dust and particles of straw and a stray duck feather or two into a whirling spiral: she perceived a demon rejoicing and mocking her, for he had just that moment transformed the chrysanthemums of her youth into the sinister dark-skinned beggar.
Never again, she resolved, would she deny herself the full dignity of her position. Instead of arriving unannounced and a day early through the second entrance, as if she had been divorced by her husband and were ashamed to show herself, she should have arrived at the principal entrance, chauffeured by the Russian in his uniform, with the entire household assembled to meet her. She should have kept them waiting in the hot sun for an hour, at least. There should have been banners and fireworks and feasting in her honour. No matter what her secret aspirations, she knew – and she knew all this in a flash of comprehension while the dust and feathers whirled around her – that she should have returned to Hangzhou as the honoured wife of the Shanghai banker C.H. Feng, a man whose name was feared and respected throughout the province. It terrified her to think how poorly she had exercised her judgement in this matter. Another such grave tactical error, and surely her project must be defeated.
Even now that possibility remained. For the air of abandonment about the courtyards and buildings made her wonder if her letter had actually been received. Or had her father and Yu gone to the lodge at Huang Shan to escape the heat? Perhaps the apartments were empty and she would find her unopened letter waiting for them. For a wild instant she imagined herself retrieving the letter and returning to Shanghai, her father and Yu none the wiser, then going through the entire exercise again properly. She turned to the gatekeeper’s daughter-in-law, who stood behind her, a large suitcase in each hand, waiting sullenly. Is your master at home?
The woman did not reply, but looked past her towards a point over Lien’s shoulder on the far side of the courtyard. She turned round. Yu was standing in the doorway opposite, his hand raised, shading his eyes from the glare. Relief swept through her and she took off her hat and opened her arms. It’s me! she cried. It’s me, Yu!
The old man hesitated, then shuffled towards her.
She ran to him and embraced him, hugging him tightly to her. Oh my dearest Yu! I’m so glad to see you!
He cackled with delight and struggled to draw breath. I thought you were a foreign devil, he wheezed.
She released him and looked at him. They held hands. How is he?
Your father will be very glad to see you, Yu said breathlessly.
Did he get my letter?
Yu smiled broadly and pointed a long sallow finger towards her flower garden. That is why nothing has been planted, he said, in the manner of one who has that moment encountered enlightenment, certain the neglect of two years would be accepted by her for the oversight of a single day. We weren’t expecting you till tomorrow. He told her maid and the daughter-in-law to take the luggage to their mistress’s apartments, then he took her arm and drew her into the shade of the doorway. He placed his hands one each side of her face, cradling her cheeks, and examined her with a kind of mischievous reverence, as if he were searching for secret signs. He made an approving noise through his nose, a little moan, which he repeated a number of times.
She took his hands in hers and held them before her. I’ve brought you a thousand cigarettes.
You will shame me, he said happily.
She closed her eyes and put his hands to her face again. You smell just the same. Now I know I am really home!
He is not ill, Yu said cheerfully.
She f
rowned. What is the matter then?
Yu shook his head, awed. A thousand is many more than I had hoped for. I dreamed of a hundred.
Five cartons of Camels. Will you take me boating on the lake at midnight tonight?
He hesitated.
You think I can no longer pass for a boy. Well, you shall see.
Then I shall take you.
He sounded serious and perhaps a little sad, she thought. She remembered that the last time they had gone boating on the lake together had been the occasion of her meeting with Feng. She decided to disclose her important news to him at once. Yu! she said.
He looked startled.
I’m going to have a baby. Unless through rumor or gossip, they knew nothing in Hangzhou of the stillborn sons.
He did not react. It was a very complicated matter. Incredibly complicated. What could he be certain of? How long will you stay with us?
Just tell me you’re pleased. She gave his shoulder a reproving shake. Tell me you’re still with me, Yu.
He groaned and clasped her hand tightly and looked down unhappily at the paving. Feng, the foreigner who was not a foreigner, who had come here only once and to whom she had gone, surprising everyone, her demon burrowing out. To the infernal regions. To the city of the Lord of Death. Was Feng Chinese or not? It was very difficult.
Do not disappoint me. It has not been easy to make my way home.
He looked into her eyes. I have never possessed courage such as yours.
I shall feel myself to be utterly alone if you persist in saying such things.
How was he to bring himself to consider the fact that she was carrying Feng’s child? People said Feng had no ancestors. What sort of a person could such a child become? He looked at her belly. There was no sign. Does it make you happy?