by Alex Miller
She said, ‘It’s just Lena and me now, Robert.’ She paused, allowing a moment for the significance of her statement to establish itself with him.
Lena said, ‘Oh, Mum. Don’t, please!’
‘Three months ago we were a family,’ Mrs Soren went on, still holding his gaze. She had blue eyes, pale and clear, and he saw how they had reddened slightly now, tears glistening in the corners. ‘A year ago Keith and my son, Erik, were both here.’ She was making an effort to control her emotions. ‘We were a family of four. Now it is just the two of us. Erik’s working in London. He never writes.’
Lena reached over and laid her hand on her mother’s hand. ‘It’s all right, Mum.’
Robert murmured, ‘I’m very sorry for your loss.’
‘I’m not trying to impress you with my loss,’ Mrs Soren said. She was impatient with herself and dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. ‘I just want you to know, if Lena and I sometimes seem…’ She searched about but couldn’t think of a word that would do. ‘We’re struggling. That’s all I meant.’
Was she asking him if he was a man who could be relied on to do the right thing by her daughter in her vulnerable state?
‘I just wanted you to know our situation. Lena has probably told you she’s in her first year as a social worker at Prince Henry’s Hospital. Our lives are not what they were this time last year. We are dealing with a great many changes.’ She held his gaze. ‘It is a difficult time for us. I hope you do understand. Lena and I both need time to adjust to what has happened.’ She stood up abruptly and began to gather their plates. Lena got up and took the plates from her. ‘Sit down, Mum. I’ll get the sweets. Talk to Robert.’
There was a sudden rumbling and thumping out in the driveway. The glass in a narrow window above the built-in bookcase next to the fireplace trembled. Mrs Soren sat down, her hand going to her mouth. She was looking at Lena. In a dismayed voice, as if she was expecting to be told off by her daughter, she said, ‘George has brought the blocks. I forgot to cancel him!’
Lena said, ‘It’s not the end of the world, Mum. It’s just firewood.’ She turned to Robert. ‘It’s our regular winter wood supply. Dad always organised it for the autumn. Dad liked to be prepared.’
They all went out and stood in the driveway and looked at the impressive pile of red gum blocks. The blocks were giving off the smell of fresh-sawn wood. The delivery man was roaring off down the road in his truck, an old green Fargo, leaving a smell of half-burned diesel fumes in the air.
As if she was talking about a terrible catastrophe for which there was no remedy, Mrs Soren said, ‘I won’t be able to get the Renault out! I’ll need it in the morning.’
Lena said, ‘Robert will stack it.’ She looked at him. ‘Won’t you?’
‘I’d love to do it,’ he said. ‘Have you got a wheelbarrow?’
Lena’s mother said, ‘We can’t possibly expect you to do this. I’ll get George to come back. He’ll put the wood in the shed on Monday. He won’t mind. I’ll get a taxi in the morning.’
Lena said, ‘Mum means she’d be very happy for you to do it. Come on, I’ll show you where Dad keeps his barrow.’
Robert looked at Mrs Soren and smiled. ‘It’s okay. Really.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
He felt sorry for her. He wanted to help her.
Lena said, ‘He’s a cowboy, Mum. Stacking wood is nothing to him.’
Mrs Soren touched his arm. He thought she was going to cry but she held it back. ‘Thank you,’ she said again, and she turned and walked back down the drive to the front.
Robert and Lena clambered over the pile of wood blocks and went into the back garden through the side gate. A weatherboard shed was built onto the back of the brick garage. The door of the shed was held closed with an old-fashioned iron hasp. Lena lifted the hasp and opened the door. They went into the dark interior. She turned around and they kissed. ‘Alone in the garden shed with my cowboy lover,’ she said.
He held her away from him. ‘You know what a cowboy is on the cattle stations up north? He’s a no-hoper who milks the station cows and cleans out their shit and does odd jobs around the place. He’s not what you think. I was a ringer, not a cowboy.’
‘Don’t spoil the story!’ she said dismissively. ‘You’re my cowboy.’ She looked at him seriously. ‘I was amazed at Mum talking to you about Dad. She never admits she’s hurting. She keeps it locked up inside. She tells her sisters and brother she’s fine and refuses their help. She likes you.’ She took his hand and they stood looking at the remains of last winter’s firewood. Her hand was warm and soft in his, like a tiny trusting kitten he had once held. There was the sound of the back door opening followed by a short silence, then her mother’s anxious call, ‘Are you there, Lena? Don’t forget you haven’t done any practice yet.’
Lena said quietly, ‘Yes, Mum. I’m in the shed and Robert is insisting on having sex with me again.’ She closed her eyes and called in an innocent girlish voice, ‘Coming, Mum.’ To Robert she said, ‘I’d better go and do my practice before she has a fit.’ Her expression became serious. ‘She’s a textbook study, isn’t she? Honest, upright and credulous. She’s in a cage and she’d like me to be content to stay in the cage with her.’ She let go of his hand and went out into the garden. A moment later he heard the back door close.
He took her father’s wheelbarrow around to the woodpile in the drive and chucked the blocks of red gum into it. He wheeled the loaded barrow through the side gate and into the back garden and he stacked the blocks in the shed. It felt good to be on his own doing something physical. He paid a lot of attention to the way he built the stack. There was no electric light in the shed but there was an old-fashioned hurricane lamp of the kind they had used in the cow byre on Warren’s farm on dark winter mornings. He lit the lamp and it filled the shed with a soft yellow light, the old familiar smell of lighting kerosene filling the air with a feeling of intimacy and work. He enjoyed building the wood stack, keeping the walls straight and tying in the corners the way brick walls are tied in. When he’d finished carting and stacking the blocks he decided to split some of them, as there were only a few pieces of split wood left and Mrs Soren would need to split more herself when the cold weather came. He could imagine her doing it, swinging the axe and thinking of her dead husband, tears running down her rosy cheeks. She was a relief to him. He had seen that she was a woman without the pretensions of the middle class. It was easy for him to like her. The barrier he had expected wasn’t there.
The late afternoon was quiet and still, just the smack of his axe driving into the wood and the distant barking of someone’s lonely dog. He disdained the use of the heavy splitter Keith had left beside the block. He knew just how to catch the grain at the right angle to open up the tight-bound red gum blocks. In his old life it was a skill that had been taken for granted among all useful men and women. Lena’s dad’s axe was correctly ground and had kept its edge. His tools were clean and arranged in order against the wall, axes and saws and rakes and spades and forks and hoes. They were all there: a bench with a vice and files and the other familiar paraphernalia that every useful man requires. Robert had only glimpsed the inside of Keith Soren’s study when Lena was showing him around the house and he was curious to give the room a closer inspection. Mrs Soren couldn’t bear to go in there herself and kept the door closed. Lena had only half opened the door; ‘Dad’s study.’ Robert’s glimpse had been enough to give him the impression that it was where the real clutter of their lives was hoarded. A desk covered in papers and open books, piles of papers and books on the floor, photos and drawings on the walls, journals and newspapers stacked in corners.
When Mrs Soren spoke from the doorway of the shed he jumped. ‘You’ve done enough,’ she said. ‘We’re going to have a cup of tea.’
He realised she must have been standing there watching him in silence for some time. He set the edge of the blade into the chopping block as he’d found it, and straightened up. Hi
s body was glowing.
‘You’ve stacked it just the way Keith did,’ she said. She stepped into the shed and stood beside him, admiring the neat wall of blocks. ‘I think Keith used to resent having to take it down again and burn it in the winter.’ She looked at Robert and waited for him to respond.
He said, ‘His tools are all in good nick.’
They stood together in the mellow light of the kerosene lamp looking at the neatly ordered interior of her dead husband’s shed. Robert said, ‘Were your people from the country?’
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘We’re all Melbourne. Keith’s grandparents came from Sweden.’ She considered him. ‘You must have met with hardships and loneliness coming out here on your own as a boy, not knowing anybody and being so young.’
‘I’ve never thought of it like that,’ he said. ‘I was lucky. I met good people. And I enjoyed my work.’
A sound in the woodpile, a settling of the blocks, a shifting in the back of the shed, as if a rat or a possum had decided it was time to leave.
‘Your mother must miss you,’ she said. ‘I hope you write to her often.’ She waited a moment, and when he didn’t respond she said carefully, ‘Did you leave home for a reason?’
‘I needed to get out on my own and have an adventure. That’s all. I’m lucky my parents gave me their blessing.’
He opened the lamp and blew out the flame. They left the shed. Mrs Soren snapped shut the hasp on the door and they went across into the house. Lena was playing the piano. Mrs Soren turned to him in the hall. ‘You’ll have to get used to Lena’s moods. It’s nothing to do with you. I’ve put a fresh towel in the blue room for you if you’d like to have a shower.’ She took him up to the front of the house and opened the last door. ‘We always called it the blue room. We had it painted blue when we bought the house just after we were married.’
They stood looking in at the bedroom. It was large and comfortably furnished, soft grey-blue carpet and a great bow window like the one he’d noticed in the sitting room, a double bed with a blue flowered cover, lamps on the side tables. There was an air of emptiness about the room, as if the door was seldom opened onto the stillness of its silent interior. Mrs Soren went off to make the tea.
The bathroom was next door to the blue room. Shiny green tiles, green toilet, green bath. He was drying himself when he heard angry voices. He stood and listened, but couldn’t make out what was being said. When he went out, Mrs Soren was sitting on the bench in the kitchen alcove, the teapot and the milk and sugar and three cups and saucers on the table in front of her. There was a plate of Anzac biscuits. He surprised her and she looked up at him quickly as he came into the kitchen. He saw in her eyes the exposed wound of her grief, the brutal pain of her loss. He thought then that the life that was left to her to live must seem to her to be too short for the wound she had suffered to ever heal.
Their eyes met. His heart went out to her, but he didn’t have the words for it. When he was a small child he and his sister used to gaze into each other’s eyes and eventually one of them would ask the question of the other: So what is it really like to be you? And they knew, even then as little children, that they could never know the answer to this question and they felt the terrible reality of their solitariness. It was a frightening game to play and so they played it often, sitting on the bunk in the air-raid shelter, the whistling bombs screaming down and the guns blazing away from the rail yards, gazing into each other’s eyes in the candlelight, the ground heaving when a bomb exploded.
Going down the street later to the train station, Lena took his arm and pressed herself against his side. ‘I don’t want you to go. Can’t you just stay with us?’
He said, ‘What was the row with your mum about?’
‘It wasn’t about you. Don’t worry, she likes you. She thinks I don’t focus properly with my piano practice. It’s stupid. We could easily kill each other about it. She’s always dreamed I’d become a famous concert pianist one day. Don’t worry; it sounds worse than it is. We’ve been screaming at each other since I was five.’
They waited together on the station platform, her arm firmly in his, her shoulder pressed against him.
When the train was pulling away and he looked out the window for a last wave, she was standing there alone on the platform in her neat white blouse and skirt, and she seemed to him in that moment to be vulnerable and even afraid. There was something like a confusion of anger and anxiety in her eyes. He wanted to go back and reassure her.
He sat watching the backyards flicking by. He had been overwhelmed by the way she had claimed him. He was glad to be away from the heavy gloom of her mother’s house. He closed his eyes and a vivid image of Lena’s perfect skin and lovely breasts came into his mind, the salty taste of seawater on her lips in the bathing box, the intense, intimate taste of her on his tongue.
14
It was a revelation for him to learn that it was the French Revolution which had introduced into Europe the idea of equality and the rights of ordinary people. Before then, throughout the entire history of the human race it seemed, the rights of ordinary working people had never been formally expressed or codified or even thought about seriously. That the French had decided everyone, including the poor, should be equal before the law was apparently a completely new idea at the time. He decided at once that this event marked the beginning of modern times. For Robert, the question of what was and what was not modern was settled. He decided he would read everything that had been written by the Enlightenment thinkers.
It was after midnight. He was reading. There was a soft knock on his door. He got up and went over to open the door. John Morris was standing there. He was wearing a black coat with a striped scarf and a suit and tie. He was dishevelled and flushed in the face. He said, ‘I thought I’d drop in and say goodbye. I’m going to London in the morning.’
‘Looks like it was a good party,’ Robert said. ‘You’d better come in.’
‘I won’t stay,’ John Morris said. ‘I just didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye to the odd bloke who lives in this room.’ He walked over and sat on the chair at Robert’s desk. He picked up the book Robert had been reading. It was Voltaire’s satire Candide, which was set for the English syllabus. He set the book down and looked up as Robert crossed the room towards him. ‘You haven’t got a cigarette, have you? I’ve run out.’
Robert said, ‘There’s some on the desk in front of you. Help yourself.’ He went over to the wardrobe and took out one of the bottles of beer he kept there, tall brown bottles from the Abbotsford Brewery, a fine burr-line around the widest part of the bottle’s shoulders, etched by the vibrations of the bottle line. He opened the bottle and passed it to John. John thanked him and said, ‘Good luck!’ He drank deeply, then wiped his mouth and gave a low belch and handed the bottle back to Robert. Robert caught a whiff of stale whisky breath from him, a touch of his own father’s late-night breath.
Robert lifted the bottle in a salute. ‘I hope London works out for you.’
John said, ‘My dad’s got cancer.’ He sat looking at his hands. ‘I’ll probably never see him again.’ He looked up at Robert and Robert saw that he was moved. ‘I was never sure if he knew or not,’ John said. ‘This time I decided he did know and had accepted it. Which I knew would have been difficult for him. When I was leaving we stood out on the verandah and we hugged each other as we always do. I love my dad. I stepped off the verandah and was about to get into my car when he called out, “Have you got a woman yet, son?” I was so fucking angry I yelled back, “I’m a fucking homosexual, Dad. Get fucking used to it.”’
Robert waited. John said no more.
John got out his handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘Sorry.’
Robert tried to imagine telling his dad he was a homosexual, but he couldn’t make the leap.
John said, ‘Why didn’t I leave him with his dream of his son intact? I yelled it at him and drove away. And that’s that, isn’t it? What difference does it fuckin
g make? The truth can be a load of shit sometimes.’
They passed the bottle a couple of times in silence.
‘So how’s it going with Lena?’ John said.
‘We saw each other last week. It was pretty intense. I haven’t heard from her since.’
‘People get ideas,’ John said, and he laughed. ‘We expect things, we believe in them, and then they don’t work out. And we realise we’re not in control.’ He squinted at Robert through the smoke of his cigarette. ‘We imagine we’re in control?’
Their eyes met. John gave Robert a small ironic smile. ‘I’m pissed. I’d better go before I say something I’ll regret in the morning. You’re a fucking attractive man, Robert Crofts. There, I’ll regret that in the morning. You scared the shit out of me that day. I’m not scared of you now. You couldn’t scare me now if you tried. I’d fight back. Okay? Do you understand that?’ He laughed. ‘I might decide to take a swing at you. So watch yourself.’
Robert said, ‘Things could easily have gone the wrong way for me without your encouragement.’
They both stood up. Robert held out his hand and John took it. ‘I have a lot to thank you for,’ Robert said.
John kept hold of Robert’s hand when Robert would have let go. ‘We don’t need to thank each other,’ John said. He swayed towards Robert and let go of his hand. ‘You’re on your way! You’ll travel. It’s in you.’ He waved his arm and took an unsteady step back. ‘You may not always thank me for introducing you to Lena Soren. She’s a troubled girl. Like a lot of us. It won’t be straightforward.’