At first the hare-lipped Miss Cowan didn’t speak to them at all. She sat by herself in the bus, staring out of the window, clutching her handbag. When she did at last speak it was on their tour of the wineries when they were all tasting different wines.
‘You could spend all your days doing this,’ said Miss Casey delightedly. ‘I’m sure there must be some people who do it.’ She sipped appreciatively. ‘What do you think of this one?’ she asked Miss Cowan, and Miss Cowan in words that one could hardly understand because of her harelip, answered, ‘It’s sweet.’
As a matter of fact Daphne disliked deformity of any kind; but that had been a hilarious day, seven wineries in one day, and the driver had smiled when they had asked him, ‘Are you sure you can drive after all this?’ Imagine it though, seven wineries in one day, it wasn’t the sort of thing that Geoffrey would have approved of. Bad organisation he would have said, surely they could have organised the trip better than that! A whole day wasted at wineries! But even Miss Cowan blossomed and was in fact slightly tipsy on that blue marvellous day, and Miss Casey had been very animated.
Daphne enjoyed herself immensely though she was sorry for Miss Cowan. To think that she could hardly be understood by anyone! No wonder she kept silent, no wonder she withdrew from them all. It must be awful to try and speak and come out with these awful strangulated sounds.
Eventually there were five of them that went about together, herself, Miss Casey, Miss Cowan, and that ex-policeman from Glasgow, Mr Wilson, and his wife. He was a squat energetic interesting man who had served so he had said in Borneo before coming to Australia; his wife was quiet, slim, fair-haired. He was determined to enjoy his trip.
And so they sailed on the Murray River, and had a look in the museum at Echuca where Prince Philip in upright glassy splendour was to be seen among more macabre exhibits. Echuca was slummier than she had expected, the rag-end of a once prosperous town, though the paddle steamers were quaint and romantic and ponderous.
‘Did you hear this one?’ said Mr Wilson. ‘There were these two Glasgow football supporters and they went to Italy and they went into a pub and one of them said,
‘ “What do you sell here?”
‘And the barman said, “Chianti.”
‘ “Whit’s that?” said one of them. “We’ll take a pint.”
‘ And they took a pint each and they got very drunk and as they were staggering along one of them said to the other,
‘ “No wonder they carry the Pope about in a chair.” ’
They had all laughed, Miss Casey in short concentrated bursts like machine-gun fire, Daphne more decorously. Then she felt constrained to tell some of her own stories, for she felt that the Wilsons weren’t sure of her, thought of her as a Southern English type.
She felt awkward beginning her story. ‘It was one day,’ she said, and then casually, ‘My husband Geoff is an officer. And this general’s wife came to visit us. This was in Australia. I had tried to talk to her, usual stuff I thought you should talk about to generals’ wives, and she sat there, a big woman, and then after a while she got up and said,
‘ “See you later.”
‘ And I thought,’ she began to laugh, ‘and I thought she was going to come back that same day. And when Geoff came home I was in a panic. I told him that I had gone out to buy a new dress because I didn’t want the general’s wife to see me in the same dress twice in the one day. And Geoff said,
‘ “Don’t you know that saying, ‘See you later’ is like saying ‘Cheerio’.”
‘But I had actually gone out to buy a new dress. Actually.’
And Miss Casey laughed and said, ‘Of course you were not expected to know that.’ She herself went on to cap the story with another one.
‘There was this friend of mine who was staying in London. And she caught a cold and stayed in bed. A friend of hers, English, phoned her up and asked her to come and visit her. “No,” she said, “I can’t, I’m in bed with a wog.” You see “wog” in Australia means a “germ”.’
They had all dissolved in hysterical laughter though it seemed to Daphne that some of the others had heard the story before. Miss Cowan making odd guttural noises, her moustache trembling at her lip.
‘What she must have thought,’ said Daphne, ‘what she must have thought.’ And she saw this proper woman in bed in a London hotel with a wog stretched at her side. ‘Wog’ was the very word that Geoffrey might have used about the Australians.
The bus crossed the border into Victoria which was much greener than the area from which they had come. It looked exactly like England, with its green fertile land; she could imagine a private school set here among the fruit trees.
And then there was the day they stopped at the Chinese cemetery. There was Chinese writing on the tombstones, indecipherable among the wild grass.
Miss Casey gazed at the cemetery in amazement. ‘It’s like seeing restaurants,’ she said. ‘Restaurants of dead people.’ And Tom Wilson shouted, ‘Made in Hong Kong,’ while his wife looked on disapprovingly. Daphne thought Mrs Wilson didn’t like her, fearing that Tom might get off with her, for she was young and girlish and upper class. Daphne didn’t think that the Wilsons were well off though Tom was incredibly generous, insisting on paying for the drinks whenever they stopped at a hotel.
They wandered through the graveyard, Daphne saying to Miss Cowan, ‘They don’t look after their graveyards very well here, do they?’ (thinking of the ranked stone doors of English graveyards), and Miss Cowan made her usual strangulated noises, like a radio not quite tuned to a station, and Daphne thought she heard her say that Australians moved on a great deal, wouldn’t stay long in one place.
‘I will tell you what happened here,’ said Miss Casey, as if she were teaching the class from the centre of the overgrown graveyard. ‘There was a lot of Chinese labour here at one time, and it was treated abominably. That is why this graveyard is so large. Look,’ she said, ‘this is where they made their offerings to the dead.’ Miss Cowan in her dumb way bent down to interrogate the indecipherable language on the stones. Daphne briefly remembered her walk through the Chinese quarter of Vancouver and the Chinese signs on the telephone kiosks.
They stood silently in the graveyard among the wild overgrown grass, the sun hot on their heads like a burning helmet in the sky. We are all gathered here, thought Daphne, me from my leafy school, the Wilsons from Glasgow, Miss Casey the schoolmistress from Sydney, and Miss Cowan from I don’t know where. All I know about her is that she has an invalid sister and that she goes on a bus trip once a year, with her harelip and her moustache.
And the sky was blue above them, and there were some brightly coloured birds flying from branch to branch, and the signs on the stones were inscrutably Chinese. The poor labouring foreigners came to this land, toiled and died, and were buried in a country which did not know enough to interpret their epitaphs. The Chinese had died indecipherably among the stones.
It was in silence that they went back to the bus but the silence didn’t last long for Tom Wilson began to imitate their driver who also acted as their guide.
‘And there straight ahead of us is Bare Hill,’ he said. ‘It is called Bare Hill because there is nothing on top of it. Once there was a winery but it fell into disuse over the years. On your left you can see Goat Hill because it was once inhabited by goats. You will notice that it has the shape of a big cheese.’ And they all thought the commentary hysterically funny, Tom imitated the driver so well, he was so jolly, he drew new ideas and sights out of the air around him, out of this Australia which she was beginning to love so much. And already she had forgotten about the Chinese labourers and the cemetery. O how young she felt, how happy, how glad she had come: she felt so diaphanous and clean and leafy. And she could have waved a hand to make Miss Cowan speak. But Miss Cowan couldn’t speak properly, you had to listen very patiently to her to understand her, it was as if she was trying continually to move a step up the evolutionary scale, like those animals and bird
s halted in their upward drive, these freaks, these speechless beings.
And on a night with a hard metallic moon in the sky like a yellow medal they played one-up with coins in a Club after the Anzac Day military parade. And Miss Casey played the gambling machines and won. So that back in the hotel that night, after they had seen the aged veterans marching, they had not wanted to go to bed. And miracle of miracles they had found a piano in the big hotel dining-room and Tom had bought them schooners of beer, and Miss Cowan had played for them. Such talent too! Who could have foreseen that Miss Cowan would be such a pianist. But she had been, and she had known all the songs, and Tom had sung ‘Loch Lomond’, while pretending he was wearing a kilt and in that Australian world with its images of Gallipoli they had listened to him singing of his country with sweetness and power. Then Daphne had been asked to sing and she couldn’t bring herself to do so, with all her English reticence, that final barrier which she hadn’t broken. Even Mrs Wilson, though reluctantly, had sung, though she herself hadn’t dared to. Once she thought of singing ‘Greensleeves’ but considered it somehow unsuitable. She regretted that very much. But Miss Casey had flung her skirt about and had sung ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and finally they had a huge concert going in that big bare dining-room whose seats had been cleared to the sides, with Anzac veterans there, and Miss Cowan had tirelessly played the piano, and had been kissed by a large Australian with a fat belly and a lot of medals on his chest. Miss Cowan was really glowing, not having to speak at all, the centre of attention, a queen whose harelip had been forgotten. It was like a fairy story.
And so they had gone to bed very late and she had been restless and had stood at the window and seen through it a moon like a shrunken aboriginal bone, shining in the sky. And she had undressed and stood there white and pearly, thinking of green England, with Geoffrey standing at attention on a green field and herself about to play hockey, watched by a schoolmistress with short grey hair who was blowing a whistle for the game to begin. O Lord how beautiful this is, she thought, these lovely Scottish songs, these high roads and low roads, these ghostly soldiers, as Tom had explained them. And she was angry with herself because she hadn’t sung ‘Greensleeves’ as she had intended to, for after all it was a beautiful song too. Her not singing it had been a betrayal!
And the moon hung there like a curved bone, ancient, aboriginal, the bone from which the world had been made, as if it were a continual interrogation, but really speechless and blank, the shape of Miss Cowan’s mouth, but with no harelip on it. Miss Cowan who had played the piano so well; Daphne could play the piano too, and had been taught to do so, though she had left Miss Cowan to her triumph that night in her speechless glow. And somewhere not far away the Wilsons were sleeping and Geoffrey too was sleeping in his cold military bed and Miss Casey was dreaming of her pupils.
In the morning she was up bright and early and waiting for the bus. She felt a constraint in the atmosphere as if the Wilsons had been quarrelling during the night, as if Mrs Wilson had been saying to Tom, ‘I don’t like the way you talk so much to the snooty Daphne. Don’t you realise that you are making a fool of yourself ? She doesn’t belong to our class. She is only amusing herself. And she wouldn’t even sing, pretending that she didn’t know the words.’
And in this atmosphere of constraint the bus made its way towards Beechworth, Ned Kelly country. From the bag in which she kept the koala bear she had bought for Shirley, her little daughter, she took the reproductions by Nolan and studied them while Mrs Wilson stared out of the window and Tom was unusually silent, a bearlike hulk which had been stood in a corner. How funny these paintings were, Ned Kelly with his box-like mask peering from between slim green tree trunks. And the funniest of all was the policeman, head down in a hole, only his legs, straight and blue, to be seen, while a quizzical bird perched on a precarious branch looking at him. The box-like mask was like a television-set. The butt of a rifle stuck in the ground had fingers at the end of it. Funny old surrealistic paintings. And Ned Kelly, the bandit, the anarchic chaotic Irishman, the one whom Geoffrey would have hunted down remorselessly, if he had been living at the time, Geoffrey like that policeman upside down in the hole, still so correct in his blue uniform. And perhaps Miss Casey herself had Irish ancestry with her love of gambling, her uncaring innocence, Miss Casey who had loved her pupils all her childlike life.
And Beechworth when they arrived at it was like an Old Wild West frontier town. And they saw the Rock Cavern with its glittering gems and minerals, a fairyland of colour. And the gold vault where the dummy with white shirt and black waistcoat weighed gold on a scales while behind him there was a green safe. Oh, it was really like another world, a world now of order which had once been anarchic. Why had it all disappeared? Why had the men in tight blue cloth destroyed the green anarchic Irishry?
And they had wandered through the museum looking at the Ned Kelly stuff, the frail looking armour and guns. Why had she thought the armour would be more solid than it was? But imagine a man thinking of that, wearing armour. It took Irish imagination to think of that. It was so medieval and romantic among these spiky flowers so far from Westminster Abbey, and for that matter from Buckingham Palace in which bright aluminium-coloured armour still concealed Her Majesty’s soldiers. But the frail armour of Ned Kelly was like a holed leaf with the rot of autumn in it. That frail armour, those horses, in the middle of Australia so long ago. So that she had stood beside Miss Cowan who was looking at the armour, the mask, with a strange longing, and suddenly quite out of the blue she had been startled by the thought,
That is what she wants, that armour. She has taught no pupils as Miss Casey has done, she has never married like Mrs Wilson and me, she doesn’t have the armour to protect and conceal herself from the world. She wants to be secretive and hidden like myself long ago in those leafy woods round my private school, in my green leafy uniform and speaking my Latin; like Tom Wilson behind the sweetness of ‘Loch Lomond’. Perhaps Tom doesn’t like being in Australia, she thought, perhaps he really wants to go home, perhaps he will have to stay here forever, perhaps too his wife hates being here, for she often talks about her mother on some council estate in Glasgow, dying there, not to be seen again, among these stones with the indecipherable writing on them; perhaps she wants to be home with her, before she is laid to rest in that stony windy jungle. We are all exiles, frightened of the world. But she wasn’t frightened of the world, she loved Australia, she loved its wildness, its strangeness, its unranked foliage. And she loved Geoffrey too though sometimes she couldn’t stand his correctness and stiffness, she thought him comic in his uprightness, in his meticulousness, she saw him upside down in the hole, in his tight uniform while the mocking TV box stared at him from behind a tall green tree trunk, and the military abrasive kookaburra glared at him like the general’s wife. And she thought of the emu she had seen in the zoo to which the driver had taken them and which was an albino and had to be kept apart from the other emus for they would have killed it because of its strangeness, like Miss Cowan, the separate one, the one who did not belong. And at that moment she touched Miss Cowan lightly as the latter stared at the mask and it was as if something in her own breast, her womb, overflowed, as if it were water, tears.
And they walked back in silence to the bus through the calm serene air of Beechworth, the Wilsons still not speaking to each other, Miss Casey lost in a dream of her own.
Oh, except that she did buy a towel for Miss Cowan on which were written the words of ‘Amazing Grace’ and Miss Cowan’s gratitude was so excessive that she felt ashamed. To be going on bus trips year after year in order to rest for a while from the demands made on her by her invalid sister, but at least taking back with her this time memories of her hours at the piano, of Tom Wilson’s horseplay, of the funny commentary, of the wineries, of the sail on Murray River, of the towel with its religious words, a gift freely given. The possible grace of speech that Miss Cowan took away from her enchanted stare at the mask set in the middle of the
tamed town!
And that was the high part of the tour, that visit to the once wild land where Ned Kelly and his Irishry had taken on the establishment. The road unspooled through the evening: it was as if they all really wanted to go home now, exchanging addresses at the back of the bus. ‘You must visit us,’ said Daphne to her four friends, though she wasn’t sure whether they would or not, whether they thought she really meant the invitation seriously. Rank was closing in on them like the evening. Imagine if Miss Cowan visited them and Geoffrey said,
‘Why did you bring that woman here? Where on earth did you find her?’
And she would try to explain to him how longingly Miss Cowan had gazed at the armour. But of course he wouldn’t be able to understand, ever. How could he be what he was, and also understand?
And Miss Casey who was now exhausted slept and the Wilsons were not speaking to each other and she expected that Geoffrey would say,
‘Well, where did you go? Where did you sleep? Whom did you meet? Don’t tell me that you didn’t meet anyone. It was a stupid idea to go on that bus tour anyway. No one else but you would have done it. Could you not have waited till I got some leave?’ No, the thought of the generals and the generals’ wives stifled her, with their military kookaburra faces. She wanted to be a kangaroo, to take huge unexpected leaps into the blue. And Miss Casey slept and looked quite old in the dim light of the bus. And Mrs Wilson, she knew, was hostile to her, her secret though smiling enemy. She was keeping Tom from the real joy of his nature. The bars and gratings were everywhere.
The bus travelled on through the evening. The milestones were like little tombstones. Oh how she loved Australia with its mysterious femininity, not at all masculine as she had feared, as she had been led to expect. No, not at all, rather yearning to be itself, as Miss Cowan yearned for articulate speech, as Tom Wilson, large and bearish and funny, yearned to be the person that he really was.
The Black Halo Page 51