A Distant Land

by Alison Booth

  She will go to pieces in a moment, George thought, and so will I. Nodding to Ilona, he took Eileen’s arm and led her out the side entrance of the hall.

  Chapter 20

  Zidra, watching the smooth breakers from the dunes behind Jingera Beach, felt that the architecture of her future had been destroyed. All that was beautiful existed no more and she was left only with a bare structure in which to live an infinity of minutes, of days. The awful enormity of this struck her like a blow. Rolling onto her stomach, she clutched at the strands of silvery grass binding the sand dunes, as if they might attach her too to the spinning earth.

  How she regretted all their lost days. ‘You were much too young to begin a serious entanglement,’ Jim had written. ‘Too young for permanency. We were both too young for that.’ And because of that stupid good sense they’d never been together.

  She pictured his face the last time they’d met, outside the front door at Ferndale, the pine trees sighing around them, her mother playing Shostakovich in the living room and his skin drained of all colour by the moonlight. And later that night his telephone call. ‘We didn’t really have a chance to say goodbye . . . Goodnight, Zidra. It’s been terrific seeing you again.’

  The last words he’d ever spoken to her.

  Clinging to the grass, she cried for all that she’d lost, the physical closeness they’d never known and the tender friendship that had lasted over half her lifetime. Learning what Jim would make of everything was no longer an option. There’d be no more talking. No more rehearsing of what she might tell him. No more letters. No more fantasies.

  No future.

  She was on her own now.

  Unless you counted Hank, who’d been phoning her for days, leaving messages that she would never return.

  But she didn’t want to think of that. Instead she concentrated on the pounding of the breakers, the ocean muffling all other sounds as it pushed and pulled insistently at the sand, never letting the shoreline alone.

  Later she lay exhausted, face resting on the sand dampened by the tide of her tears. The sun continued to beat relentlessly down and she burnt, how she burnt. Sitting up at last, she brushed the grains from her face and neck, and found an inadequate handkerchief in her handbag. After pulling together what remained of herself, she walked uncertainly towards the footbridge. On the step facing the beach, she sat down to brush off the last grains of sand from her feet before wriggling them into the impossibly frivolous sandals she’d bought to go with her dress. The black linen dress had become funereal and she would never wear it again, or the sandals.

  ‘Dizzy, you’re here!’ Lorna stood silhouetted above her. She sat down at Zidra’s side and brushed a few specks of sand from her bare shoulders.

  If Zidra’s tears hadn’t already been spent, she might have wept at the tenderness of her touch. Instead, she said, ‘Has it finished?’

  ‘People are beginning to go. There’ll still be a few hardy souls hanging on though, working around the caterers in order to finish the beer.’

  ‘Did anything else happen after I left?’

  ‘Well, Rod Bigelow, the bloke from the Burford Advertiser, turned up. Late, fortunately, and without a camera. He wasn’t there for the service, which was a good thing. Mrs Cadwallader’s obsessed by what she did in the church but at least that’s taken her mind off her loss. Your mother’s fantastic. All the time moving around smoothing down feathers and quashing gossip, the odd word here and there – you know how well she does it.’

  ‘I’ll see the Cadwalladers before we head back to Ferndale.’

  ‘Go on your own though, Dizzy. They’ll be home by now, I reckon. It’ll be good for you to talk to them without me. I’ll sit on the dunes for half an hour – I could do with a bit of staring at the waves – and then I’ll meet you back at the car.’

  Slowly Zidra trudged over the footbridge spanning the lagoon. On the town side, a waterbird with spindly legs and a curved black beak cocked its head at her approach and sauntered away along the sand, as if that had been its intention all along. She sighed. Her memories of Jim were firmly attached to her past here – and to her childhood. Jingera was Jim’s as well as hers and there was a connection there. Yet that connection ended today with the service celebrating his life.

  Halfway up the hill, she glanced back and saw that Lorna was standing on the footbridge looking in her direction. Her friend mimed blowing kisses, her gestures exaggerated, arms extended. So leaden had Zidra’s limbs become it was an effort to wave back. And an effort to carry on plodding up the steep road, when she knew she had to face the Cadwalladers’ grief again. Avoiding the war memorial in the centre of the square, she turned left into the narrow street leading to their house.

  Mr Cadwallader was standing in his front garden smoking a cigarette. ‘I’d given up these things,’ he said. ‘But it looks like I’m going to have to give up all over again.’ He stubbed the cigarette out on the brick paving and stowed the butt in the pocket of his suit. ‘Come in, Zidra. Eileen was hoping you’d drop by, and so was I.’

  She followed him along the path to the front door, and he held open the screen door to let her pass. ‘Eileen, Zidra’s here,’ he called.

  Mrs Cadwallader was standing in the doorway to her bedroom, in her stockinged feet and her too loose dress. ‘Thanks for coming, Zidra,’ she said. ‘You read that poem beautifully. It was a bit too intellectual for me, but that was Jim for you. Perhaps you’ll let me have a copy.’

  ‘Sure. You can have this.’ Zidra pulled out the folded piece of paper on which she’d copied the poem and handed it to Mrs Cadwallader.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ With unseeing eyes Mrs Cadwallader looked at the paper before slipping it into her pocket. ‘George’s just made a pot.’

  Zidra followed her into the kitchen and accepted what she was offered. For a few seconds they sat in a silence that was punctuated only by the sipping of tea. The scent of lilies, in a cut-glass vase on the table, filled the air. My least favourite flower, Zidra decided and put her hand over her nose.

  ‘Those lilies are too much,’ George said. He picked them up and took them out to the back verandah, before shutting the door and resuming his place at the table.

  ‘There’s something I wanted to ask you,’ Mrs Cadwallader said at last.

  Zidra braced herself against the chair back. ‘What’s that?’ she said, trying to sound relaxed.

  ‘What was in Jim’s last letter apart from the poem?’

  ‘It was a love letter.’ Zidra wanted to make this clear. She wanted to make something concrete out of this, something she could hold on to. Yet at the same time she didn’t want to be asked to show it. The words were too private, although their intent was not.

  ‘We never had a letter after he left here.’

  ‘He wrote it on the plane, on the flight to Saigon. He and I never had a chance to say goodbye properly.’

  ‘None of us did. No one ever does.’

  ‘He asked me to marry him.’ The futility of revealing this hit her hard, but at the same time it was something that she was proud of. She looked at the swirling patterns of the green and brown linoleum floor, not wanting to see the reaction of this couple who might have been her parents-in-law. ‘I would have said yes.’

  ‘He didn’t tell us,’ Mrs Cadwallader said.

  ‘She’s told us now, Eileen.’

  Mrs Cadwallader looked worn out and Zidra could see that this extra news, though not necessarily unwelcome, was almost too much for her to bear. Zidra stood up. Mrs Cadwallader rose at the same time and leant forward to kiss her cheek. ‘You’ll keep in touch, won’t you, dear?’

  ‘Of course I will, Mrs Cadwallader.’

  ‘Oh, by the way, Zidra, there’s something else I wanted to say.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Don’t cal
l me Mrs Cadwallader any more, dear. It’s Eileen.’

  ‘Goodbye, Eileen.’ Zidra put her arms around her and felt how thin she had become.

  ‘And now George will show you out,’ Eileen said, as if it were a mansion in which they were living and Zidra might not be able to find the exit on her own.

  On the front verandah George hesitated, as if uncertain of where he was or what was expected of him. Zidra’s heart turned over as she looked at him, the father of the man she’d loved. She gave him a quick hug before kissing him on the cheek and bolting down the path. At the front gate she turned. He was smiling at her now. She was glad that she’d dropped in, and even gladder that she’d told them she’d intended to marry their son.

  Zidra stood at the dormer window of her bedroom at Ferndale. Not the one facing west; she couldn’t bear that outlook any more and had moved the desk away so she wouldn’t be reminded of Jim’s last visit. A wave of exhaustion swept over her. She could easily become irritable.

  Yet it was far too early for bed. Downstairs her parents and Lorna were clearing away the dinner things. The meal had been subdued, in spite of the bottle of wine and Lorna’s valiant attempts to keep the conversation going. Clutching the window frame, Zidra leant out and inhaled the cool night air. It tasted salty on her lips, which meant the sea was up. To the east was the smudged horizon where the ocean met the sky, and overhead the band of stars seemed so close you could almost reach out and touch them.

  Jim had gone. She thought of the passage of the seconds, the minutes, as if they were almost tangible. Time was not suspended, but she was suspended in time, caught like an insect in amber, in a state of disbelief. She found it hard to believe, she found it difficult to accept, that she would never see Jim again.

  She gave a low moan. Even now she found it impossible to admit that her mother had been right about the risks of working as a journalist in a war zone. Only a few weeks ago she’d been envying Jim his job. ‘A lot of it’s the same old thing,’ he’d said. ‘Bits of jungle being lost and then regained. And so it goes on. Nothing conclusive. The only certainty is that it’s going to get bloodier and more deadly.’

  How right he’d been. Neither of them had mentioned at the time the fourteen journalists who had died in Cambodia and the nineteen who’d gone missing. This information had appeared in the papers again and again after his body had been found.

  But could you live your life always avoiding danger? You could but it was no way to exist. It was the way to survive but not to live. Before you decided to take some action, you worked out the probabilities of failure and of success, and proceeded based on that information. What happened afterwards could never affect that initial decision. After the event had been realised, you couldn’t turn back the clock.

  Anyway, taking risks wasn’t all there was to worry about. Getting things done, exposing what was wrong here in Australia was where she could make a contribution. Jim had been right about her job at the Sydney Morning Chronicle. It was interesting, and becoming more and more so, as she gained experience and the trust of Joe Ryan.

  She shut the window and ran downstairs. The living room was empty; she could hear the others crashing around in the kitchen still. The curtains hadn’t been drawn and a half-moon was visible through the top sash. Completely framed by one of the panes, it looked as if it were stuck there, immovable.

  It was when she was searching for the Monopoly box – Lorna had put it away the night before and it wasn’t in its usual place – that she opened the door at the far end of the sideboard. Normally she never looked there. It was where her mother’s sewing things were kept and she had no use for sewing. The Monopoly board was there all right, on top of the sewing basket. But her attention was caught by the file that lay on the shelf underneath, the file with the neat black lettering on the cover, in her mother’s writing: ‘Zidra’s press cuttings’.

  She pulled out the file and flicked through the pages. Everything she’d ever written for the Sydney Morning Chronicle was there, both the attributed and non-attributed pieces. She blinked rapidly; her damned eyes were watering again. That her mother loved her had never been in doubt. But she hadn’t guessed until now how proud her mother was of her.

  Hurriedly she put the file away. After a few moments she went to the window. She placed a hand on a pane of glass and felt its welcome coolness. The half-moon had shifted slightly. It illuminated the garden and cast deep shadows on the ragged lawn.

  At this point she heard her mother’s and Lorna’s voices approaching. She set her face into a mask. When they opened the door, she was kneeling by the coffee table, unpacking the Monopoly board.

  ‘I shall play Chopin while you girls fight over London, if my music is not too rowdy for you.’

  ‘Noisy, you mean, Ma.’

  ‘Noisy, rowdy: it is all the same.’ Already her mother was shuffling through her music and pulling out a book. ‘But that is academic, for I have decided on a quiet piece,’ she said. ‘The third movement of Chopin’s second piano sonata. It is lento. Do you remember it?’

  ‘No, you know I’m not musical.’

  ‘Of course you are musical but you do not listen.’

  Zidra smiled and Lorna snickered.

  ‘To music only I meant, for you always listen to your mama. Though sometimes with gritted teeth.’

  Lorna laughed, in that way of hers that made it impossible not to join in. When her mother started to play the Chopin piece, Zidra said to Lorna, ‘When are you seeing John again?’

  ‘Your Mr Ordinary? I don’t know. I didn’t have any way to reach him before coming down here. But I expect he’ll contact me when I get back.’

  ‘What about Daisy?’

  ‘Mum’s moved her again, out west with another one of the aunties.’

  ‘You’ll phone me once you’ve seen John?’

  ‘You bet. And you can show me those photos Chris took. I’d like to know if John is the same man that you saw snapping me at the last moratorium march. Now, how about you get on with distributing the Monopoly money. You’re the banker tonight, don’t forget.’

  ‘I am. And I’m determined to stop you putting hotels on both Park Lane and Mayfair again,’ Zidra said.

  And once the game was over, she would go to bed and fall into a deep and – she hoped – oblivious sleep.

  Part IV

  Early November 1971

  Chapter 21

  Zidra woke reluctantly. Through the open window sunlight filtered, and Sunday church music from next-door’s radio. Even after eight hours’ sleep, she still felt lacerated by her encounter in Oxford Street the day before with a casual acquaintance, Michelle. Yet her words were thoughtless, nothing more, Zidra told herself.

  ‘Terrible about Jim Cadwallader,’ she’d said. ‘The awful thing about people you know dying is that it forces you to face your own mortality.’

  But that isn’t it at all, Zidra had wanted to shout. That devalues Jim’s life and reduces it to nothing! Yet she’d felt so flayed by the woman’s words she’d only mumbled some response before hurrying on, pretending she had an urgent meeting. Anything, anything to get away. Still those words lingered in her mind. She held on to them as a focus for her anger, as if they were to blame for the direction her life was taking.

  But really, she had to get a grip on things. Stand not the unshaken brave to give thee confidence? That’s what one of her secondary-school teachers often said, and the words were a small comfort. Lorna was the unshaken brave. Lorna grew in the face of adversity, and so too must she.

  After a time she got out of bed. She gathered together all her dirty clothes and stuffed them into one of the laundry bags her mother had sewn for her, from Marimekko fabric patterned with zebras and elephants. Slinging a bag over her shoulder, she ran downstairs and collected an apple from the fruit bowl in the kitchen before double-locking the front
door behind her.

  What was she doing, and where was she going? The street looked familiar but she was a stranger in it. There was hardly anyone about, just the odd jogger and a car or two. A cyclist speeding down the hill shouted a salutation, the words reaching her only after he’d passed: ‘Lovely day!’ With this, her feeling of disorientation trickled away, and she turned into the golden dazzle of the morning.

  Her walk took her past a small park that was bordered by a row of contorted plane trees. This park was frequented by the homeless, but only one at a time, a floating population of singles. Today an elderly man, possibly of southern European origin, was scrabbling about in the garbage bin. His collection of paper carrier bags was arranged on one of the concrete tables. The smallest bag rested on an ancient leopard-skin coat. After some effort, he extracted a half-eaten apple from the bin and tottered with it to the bubbler on the far side of the lawn. While he washed it under the thin stream of water, she placed her own untouched apple on the edge of the leopard-skin coat. The man didn’t appear to notice, nor did he look up as she passed by.

  Several hours later she walked down the hill again, past the serried ranks of terrace houses facing one another across the street. Some were glorified dosshouses with half a dozen names at the front door. Others were newly renovated with expensive cars parked outside. The area was becoming fashionable; where once people had wanted to shift to the suburbs as soon as they could afford to, now some were moving back to take advantage of the proximity of Paddington to the city centre, whose jagged skyline was visible to the west.

  What had attracted her to the area was its mixed population, and the luxuriant way plants grew here, even in the tiniest pockets of soil. Frangipanis, for instance, that started flowering in the late spring. You would never find those in Jingera. She put down her bags and paused for a moment next to a tree covered with creamy white flowers with delicate yellow centres. She picked up one of the blooms from the pavement and inhaled its sweet perfume before continuing down the hill. The sun seemed less unforgiving now that a gentle breeze had arisen to take the heat out of it. The park where she’d seen the elderly man earlier was deserted, although a supermarket trolley had been deposited there since she’d walked by.