Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  He was serious, ‘I would hate to lose you, Edith. We’ve come a long way, and have a long way to go.’

  ‘I, too, believe that,’ she said.

  They kissed.

  ‘However strange this partnership is, Edith,’ he said. ‘It’s a very fine thing we have. We should not lightly treat it nor risk it,’ he said.

  She had never heard him show emotional nervousness in this way.

  ‘Dear Ambrose, I’m aware of what we have. It’s safe—believe me. Trust me. But you must see it’s time for me to go home? You see that?’ she said, searching for his blessing.

  She sought it not entirely in good faith. She was not really sure what would eventuate from her return to Australia. But she needed the blessing, selfishly. ‘You agree?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at her shrewdly. ‘This will be a momentous visit for you. A return. Maybe you should not be making promises about the future at this time. To anyone.’

  She saw what emotional bravery was behind this gesture. A generous offer of ‘latitude’.

  ‘Thank you, Ambrose. Thank you. Of course, you’ll stay on here in the apartment.’

  ‘If you so wish.’

  ‘This is your home. Of course you’ll stay on. Guard the fort.’

  ‘And when and if Robert comes to Geneva?’

  ‘As usual, you two will get along, I’m sure. I’ll write to him and let him know I’m going home.’

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘do you know he has rooms in London?’

  It hit her like a slap. She was strangely offended that Robert had not told her.

  Why should he tell her?

  ‘I didn’t know—who told you?!’

  ‘Someone casually mentioned having visited him there—a journalist.’

  ‘How interesting.’

  ‘Probably for convenience. I assumed that you knew.’

  ‘Probably. His postcards still come from exotic places.’

  ‘He probably needs a place in London.’

  ‘Yes, probably.’

  She wondered if this told her anything about Robert’s attitude to the marriage.

  ‘Anyhow, they can’t dismiss me while I’m on home leave.’

  ‘No. And out of sight, out of gossip. And Edith, one other thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Take your hip flask—as a talisman.’

  ‘Thank you, dear Ambrose. Thank you.’

  Edith experienced a growing excitement from her decision to return home. She did not wish to lose Ambrose from her life but the return would be a time of reassessment—the time on the boat going over, the time among her country folk.

  It would normalise her life for a while. She wouldn’t be a married woman living with a man not her husband.

  And she would not be telling them back home that she’d flunked her marriage.

  Maybe she should see Robert while on leave?

  She thought it should be mentioned. ‘I could well bump into Robert,’ she said casually one night. ‘If he’s in my neck of the woods.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Last address was Ethiopia. I wouldn’t mind rendezvousing with him somewhere. To find out what we should do with what is left of our marriage. Perhaps consider divorce. Perhaps on my way back through London.’ She mentioned divorce because she sensed that would calm Ambrose.

  He made no comment. She could see that Ambrose had been made to feel vulnerable by the idea of her taking long home leave and the mention of Robert.

  She continued her appointments with Doctor Vittoz up to the time of her departure. She now felt at home on the couch under the gaze of the African masks, kicking off her shoes, lying back and letting her mind float.

  Her appointments with Vittoz at first concentrated on the idea that Robert had perhaps, or indeed, left her and they gradually reached a point where she saw that she was fearful of Robert’s strong male nature and following from that, she feared, in some sense, marriage itself. And motherhood.

  Their conversations—if that was what they were—also drifted further towards her earlier life back in Australia.

  Her talking to Vittoz about her father and mother and her distant, wandering brother was like some preparation for her return to Australia, a going over of the ground and ploughing it before she landed back there.

  She glimpsed something else about it all. It may indeed be a break from things but it could also very well be a fleeing—a fleeing from all of her life here in Europe as her coming to Europe had been a turning of her back on Australia.

  If it were a fleeing, would she also be leaving Ambrose?

  On the matter of Ambrose, Doctor Vittoz had suggested the possibility that she was suffering chagrin d’amour—the tendency when disappointed in love to turn against the opposite sex. Hence her turning to a man not quite a man. But this interpretation denied the friendship which preceded her sexual involvement with Ambrose. And it ignored the ongoing, undiminished pleasure that this part of him gave her.

  The Vittoz observations did, however, cause her to ask seriously if Ambrose was the right person for her. He was, apart from the irregular side of their sexual matters, just a little too much older than she.

  As they would say back home—‘couldn’t she do better?’

  Because she’d be catching the boat in Marseilles there’d be no streamers, no on-board entertaining on sailing day.

  On the day she was to leave, Ambrose gave her a gift.

  It was his second gift to her in all the years that she’d known him.

  He gave her a silver medallion on a fine silver chain to go around her neck. On one side of the medallion was her name and her address c/o the League, and position at the League, and on the other side, his name as next of kin. He gave his address as White’s. She’d noticed that he still had mail forwarded to him from the club.

  He had assumed the role of next of kin.

  ‘Wear it so that you can be found,’ he said simply. ‘If ever lost.’

  She kissed him and held him.

  They let go of each other and she looked into his eyes as if trying to say with her eyes that which she couldn’t find to say in words.

  ‘It is a beautiful thing,’ she said.

  She raised the medallion to her lips and kissed the cold silver.

  ‘It’s modelled on the Red Cross soldier identification tag, better crafted than those they give the soldiers—pure silver. Well, sterling silver—as good as it gets.’

  ‘And I will wear it so that I can be found.’

  What were the implications of this particular gift? Was it another form of marriage? Or was it a command to return to him?

  She had no contract with Ambrose. It had been a coming together without calculation.

  There were implications in the gift but they were loose. More liberal than a ring, for example. More in line with the generous release he’d given her from making promises for the future.

  What pledges were exchanged by the giving or by the wearing of this?

  She offered her neck to him so that he could put on the chain and the medallion.

  As she bent forward she felt that there was some meaning in this gesture too but she felt safe about it. It was security without bondage.

  It was simply an affirming of an uncommon connection.

  An expression of an exquisite form of loving.

  Father

  Australia 1936.

  As she stared out of the railway carriage window at the coastal bush landscape, Edith felt a low revulsion.

  Appalling, she thought, the bush is simply appalling. It appeared to her to be grasping and twisted. Grasping for water, grasping for soil—the way the roots of the eucalyptus clutched rocks and clutched the soil.

  She turned her eyes back to the food laid out on the narrow first-class carriage table. She had declined the refreshment service and had spread out her own picnic to the rather amused glances of the few others who occupied her section.

  She remembered enough about travel outside
the cities in Australia to know that to eat well, one had to be gastronomically self-reliant.

  In Sydney she’d bought fresh fruit, leg ham, English mustard, Bodalla cheese—which she had yearned for in Geneva—and bread, albeit of doubtful quality.

  She poured herself a small cognac from her flask to aid the digestion.

  She had Lawrence’s Kangaroo on her lap—the first chance she’d had to read it.

  The disloyalty of her thinking about the bush registered. What sort of falsely superior person had she become, what dreadful snobbish disloyalty had moved through her mind, causing her to dislike the bush? It was not an aesthetic judgement. She knew that much.

  As Vittoz would say, she was projecting something onto the bush. She was using it as a screen on which she was saying something about herself. She pushed the messy awareness down and then, obeying Vittoz, allowed it back again.

  She had to confess to whatever lay behind her powerful revulsion to the bush, admit it to her mind and examine it.

  What was it about the bush? She stared back at it, trying to stare it down.

  It seemed that there was no way into it, no invitation coming from the bush suggesting that a person might walk in it. It was sullen, closed and resistant. And it was dull in colouring and dreary in shape.

  She turned back to Lawrence. It was all very well for Lawrence to describe it as an ‘… invisible beauty somehow lurking beyond the range of our “white vision” ’.

  What, may one ask, is ‘invisible beauty’?

  She smirked. Lawrence was struggling to find something, anything, to say about it. ‘For the landscape is so unimpressive, like a face with little or no features, a dark face.’ Yes, he was struggling to find something nice to say, like a polite English visitor.

  She agreed with the character Harriet in Kangaroo that the landscape did feel as if ‘no one had ever loved it’.

  She thought then of her friend—former suitor?—George McDowell burning a gumleaf when he visited her in Geneva years back and remembered the genie-like fragrance coming up from the ashtray in the ambiance of the fine restaurant in Geneva that night.

  The smell of the burning leaf had made her gag.

  It was on that visit that he told her that her mother was dying. The smell of eucalyptus had been welded to the death of her mother.

  Just off the ship, strolling in the botanical gardens, she had crushed a gumleaf, and the smell of eucalyptus had reminded her of death.

  There in the railway carriage she was suddenly in fear for her self, her placement in the world.

  It was more than death that the eucalyptus brought to her, it was, as she had earlier observed, that no invitation came from the bush. Was there no way in to Australia for her now?

  Australia felt closed to her.

  She looked away from the train window.

  Or did it mean something more dastardly? That she had abandoned her country of birth?

  How could she not react to the Australian bush with sentiment? Where were her sentiments? What had she done with them?

  I’ll be shot, she thought, that’s for sure.

  She consumed what remained of her picnic, wrapped the food, and wiped her hands on the napkin provided by the NSW Railways Refreshment Service. She had accepted that.

  I will not resile. I will own my feelings—the bush was grim and the bush was dull to the eye. And dangerous.

  She let her antipathy rampage.

  It wasn’t gothic, it was grim. It wasn’t gothic in the way of the European forest. It wasn’t grim in that rather exotic and shivering sense.

  It was grim in its barren repetition.

  Yes, yes, she knew from childhood play in the bush that each tree was different. And yes, the pine forests and birch forests of Europe were sometimes repetitious but, on the whole, there was more colour and contrast.

  She and her brother had played in the bush throughout their childhoods. It did not scare her. She’d even had her favourite trees. She’d even given them names, although her brother didn’t believe in naming the trees. She’d also learned their scientific names. He hadn’t done even that. In her bossy way, she’d told him that naming was a way of seeing. He’d said angrily that naming was the wrong way of seeing. Now that she’d forgotten the names, she began to see what he meant.

  Still, looking back, the trees—regardless of names—were not her friends, never had been her friends—they had been dull, hot and dumb to her affection. And even then she’d been disloyal to them, been disloyal to the bush when at night, reading her Girls’ Own Annual and studying the botanical plates of oaks, elms, chestnuts, conifers and birches, she’d yearned to have such trees as her friends.

  The Australian bush did not emphasise its difference but sat stolid in its sameness. She recalled how sharp, brittle, gnarled and dry it really was. It had always been difficult to find a comfortable place to sit in the bush. And then there were the aggressive insects. As a child the insect kingdom had almost defeated her.

  The European forests, though, were comfortable and comforting. There was a cool softness about the European forests.

  There was nothing comforting about Australian nature, nothing cool, mossy or kind which invited you to lie back and allow the pine smells and the murmuring of the breeze in the tall treetops to lull you to dozing. The bush prickled, insects nipped and flies stung, and the noise of wind in the trees was vaguely threatening. And branches sometimes fell.

  How disgustingly disloyal she really was. What was to become of a person who thought as she did? Her disloyalty was an embarrassing and gaping hole in her heart. She hoped, and supposed, that time and reacquaintance with her country would eventually mend her and that she would feel wholehearted about her habitat and her place of birth, her patrimony.

  She did have sentiments about the railway station names—an odd confusion of the Aboriginal and the European, Thirroul, Austinmer, Coalcliff, Fairy Meadow, Wollongong, Kembla Grange. She laughed. Who in God’s name thought of calling the place Fairy Meadow? There were no meadows and there were no fairies at Fairy Meadow.

  The railway stations had their neat platform gardens, the four-gallon oil drums and forty-four-gallon oil drums, painted and used as garden pots. That caused a moistening of her eyes. There—she wasn’t heartless or without sentiment. She wasn’t that detached from what she now saw as her previous life.

  The stations with their tended gardens of geraniums and daisies and roses seemed more like remote botanical forts of civilisation surrounded by the bushland screeching in fury at them and the invading train.

  The train left Gerringong and she began to gather her things—she always gathered her things too soon.

  And gathered herself for her meeting with her father.

  Her father, too sick to meet the ship, would have dragged himself to the station.

  She stood now at the door of the carriage staring out at the more English-style freestone fences of the district and the rolling green hills and the sea.

  Then Jasper’s Brush.

  There he was, on the small lonely station, leaning on a walking stick.

  Standing with another man. One car parked at the station.

  The other man, who turned out to be one of the Abernerthy boys, helped the guard unload her trunk from the guard’s van and then shouldered it himself with one superb heave.

  My, my.

  She went to her father.

  She held him in a deep and long embrace, both of them weeping, he weeping with the freedom of an old man, with no masculine reserve left or masculine pride to prove or protect.

  The train moved on, leaving them standing alone, embracing on the lonely unattended platform.

  Opening her eyes she looked out from their embrace and saw the Abernerthy boy, discreetly some distance off, leaning on the Dodge, rolling a cigarette.

  ‘I’ve missed you something dreadful, Edith,’ her father whispered hoarsely, holding to her, ‘something dreadful.’

  ‘And I you, Dadda, and I
you.’

  She looked out across the paddocks. The trees too tall, the cattle too small, the land too wide.

  She looked to her father there on the verandah.

  He was fussing over a bottle of beer, trying to get the crown seal off but his arthritic hands were failing him.

  ‘Here, Dadda, let me.’

  ‘Opener is worn out. Like me.’

  She reached over and took the opener and the bottle of beer. She levered off the top with a frothing, fizzing spurt.

  The frothing spurt pleased her. It somehow affirmed her aliveness. Womanliness. I must be in the grip of something, she thought.

  Oh yes, I am alive, she thought, as her attention went up and down her body from thighs to breasts, I am very much alive.

  In that regard, the return to her home had given her unfamiliar feelings indeed. It had made her feel that the whole country of men was hers for the asking—something she’d also felt on board the ship. Although, from tiredness, she had resisted the overtures and had not had a ship-board romance.

  She felt no intimidation from men here in Australia, but she hoped she had sufficient respectable reserve not to run amok.

  She felt no fear of the working-men either, but they were more beyond her than ever before. They appeared to her as a different breed, as it were, and they did not affect her or draw her to them or offer any thrall, with their laconic, familiar ways, which she knew from the old days simply masked their shy fears.

  The well-spoken men were very much in thrall to her, both on the ship and in the few instances since landing, and a very strange feeling of power had invested itself in her.

  It came not only from her age and the sense of being in full bloom—for she had to acknowledge that she was no longer the debutante. No, indeed, not a debutante. A married woman—of sorts. And more.

  ‘Shouldn’t have to open bottles, being the guest of honour,’ her father said.

  ‘Indeed, I shouldn’t.’ She poured the two glasses. ‘Dadda, your good health.’

  ‘What’s left of it. And to your return, daughter, to your one and only native home.’

  Halfway to a speech. She smiled. They toasted with the beer.