You might recite it in Elocution class, but could hardly have it in English Poetry. It was as if the poet had deliberately taken the losing, and Australian, side. He had grasped the nettle. But a nettle grasped remains a nettle, and grasping it an unnatural act. What was natural was hedgerows, hawthorn, skylarks, the chaffinch on the orchard bough. You had never seen these but believed in them with perfect faith. As you believed, also, in the damp, deciduous, and rightful seasons of English literature and in lawns of emerald velours, or in flowers that could only be grown in Australia when the drought broke and with top-dressing. Literature had not simply made these things true. It had placed Australia in perpetual, flagrant violation of reality.
Little girls sang, singsong:
Involving themselves in a journey of ten thousand miles. For a punishment you might, after school, write one hundred times:
The little girls licked nibs of tin and fingered pigtails, preparing for sovereign power.
History was the folding colored view of the Coronation that had been tacked on the classroom wall—the scene in the Abbey, with the names printed beneath. The Duke of Connaught, the Earl of Athlone, the slender King in ermine. You could buy a coronation mug at Woolworths: Long May They Reign. That was History, all of a piece with the Black Prince and the Wars of the Roses. Children were allowed to stay up one summer night to hear the Abdication crackle over the shortwave. Something you’ll remember always.
Australian History, given once a week only, was easily contained in a small book dun colored as the scenes described. Presided over at its briefly pristine birth by Captain Cook (gold-laced, white-wigged, and back to back in the illustrations with Sir Joseph Banks), Australia’s history soon terminated in unsuccess. Was engulfed in a dark stench of nameless prisoners whose only prominent activity was to have built, for their own incarceration, the stone gaols, now empty monuments, that little girls might tour for Sunday outings: these are the cells for solitary confinement, here is where they. Australian History dwindled into the expeditions of doomed explorers, journeys without revelation or encounter endured by fleshless men whose portraits already gloomed, beforehand, with a wasted, unlucky look—the eyes fiercely shining from sockets that were already bone.
That was the shrivelled chronicle—meagre, shameful, uninspired; swiftly passed over by teachers impatient to return to the service at the Abbey. The burden of a slatternly continent was too heavy for any child to shift. History itself proceeded, gorgeous, spiritualized, without a downward glance at Australia. Greater than Nature, inevitable as the language of morning prayers: O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom.
Sentiments of a magnitude to which only a very affected, bold, or departing Australian might aspire.
In the true, and northern, hemisphere, beyond the Equator that equalized nothing, even bathwater wound out in the opposite direction. Perhaps even the records gyrating on the gramophone. Australians could only pretend to be part of all that and hope no one would spot the truth.
Once in a while, or all the time, there was the sense of something supreme and obvious waiting to be announced. Like the day the boys at the Junction were tormenting the swaggie and a man from nowhere told them, “E’s a yooming being.”
Grace and Caroline Bell were having, all things considered, a happy childhood, when their parents drowned in a capsized ferry. They were living in a house with a tower and a view of the Heads. They had embroidered chairs, crystal dishes that chimed when flicked with a fingernail, and a fragment of oak from Nelson’s flagship in a small velvet box. At school Caro was up to the Spanish Armada and the sad heart of Ruth, when the ferry called the Benbow turned over in Sydney harbor and hideously sank. Grace was on a blue chair in the kindergarten and still had Miss McLeod, who had come out after the Great War and would be superannuated at Christmas.
Miss McLeod played the organ for the school at morning prayers. Hush’d Was the Evening Hymn, For All the Saints, and, in season, Once in Royal David’s City. Everyone was C. of E. or something like it, except Myfanwy Burns and the Cohen girl. Religion was the baby in the manger, the boy with the slingshot, the coat of many colors.
Caro and Grace knew what had happened to them was drastic. They could tell by flattering new attentions that had nothing to do with incredulous, persistent loss. They were slow to give up hope of miraculous reversal, and each morning woke disbelieving to the weather of death. It would have been hard to have weather appropriate or consoling, but this heat did not seem neutral.
Full fathom five thy father lies. They were now in the care of their half sister, Dora. Mrs. Horniman, in the house with the English lawn, said there was nothing she would not do. And on Christmas Day they sweltered beside the Hornimans’ celluloid tree while a bushfire broke out over at Clontarf. Grace got a threepenny bit in the plum pudding, but afternoon grew awful. The children were forbidden to swim because of the turkey, and Athol Horniman hit Caro with a cricket ball.
A few days later Dora told them, “It is 1939.”
Dora struck them both as unfamiliar. They scarcely recognized her from before, when she had been part of a family of five. The present Dora seemed not to have shared in the life before the Benbow. There was only one thing—a memory, not yet defined as such, of Dora shrieking beyond a closed door and Father saying, “Look what a daughter.”
It was hard to think where Dora might have been, for instance, on mornings of the great past when Grace and Caro were driven into town for new school clothes. Father dropped them off, the mother and two girls, in the important haze where metallic smells of town flowed along with the cars, sluggish between narrow ranks of buildings. A toast-rack tram, discolored yellow, rocked them on wooden benches glossed with human passage. There were office girls with rolled hair and sailor hats of felt or straw; but there was no Dora, surely. The men sat in the open compartments at each end of the tram, their heavy waistcoats unbuttoned in the heat; flinging tobacco butts on slatted floors and leaning out to spit. In the rain, a canvas blind drew down for them on a rod. In the inside compartment Grace stood between her mother’s knees and Caro swayed against an assortment of standing thighs. One and two halves, like the fare; and no Dora.
Dora’s own mother had died when she was born, as happened in stories. Dora was twenty-one, but had given up Teachers College.
Where they got down from the tram there were windows brilliant with colored gloves and handbags and silk shoes, and shopping arcades lit like rainbows. The women passing along Pitt Street or Castlereagh had cooler, paler faces and wore hats of violets or rosebuds, with little veils. Kegs of ale were nonetheless drawn on drays right past the best shops by pairs or teams of Clydesdales: chestnut necks straining in collars of sweated leather, great hooves under ruffs of streaked horsehair. And the driver collarless, frayed waistcoat open, no jacket, with his leather face and stained mop of horsehair mustache. Manure underfoot, and bruised smell of dropped cabbage trodden by blinkered ponies harnessed to vegetable carts. Along the curb, barrows of Jaffas and navels, or tasmanian apples. All this, raffish and rural, at the fashionable conjunction of Market and Castlereagh Streets.
At the same corner they would come upon the spectres dreaded by Caro and by Grace; and, from the looking and the looking away, by all who passed there. Apparitions of the terrible kind were dispersed throughout the city and might be expected at any shopping center of the suburbs. For dead and atrocious certainty they awaited you at this particular and affluent corner, which for that reason seemed not to be a street at all but a pit or arena.
Some of them stood, including those with only the one leg. The legless would be on the ground, against shop-windows. The blinded would have a sign, to that effect, around the neck—perhaps adding SUVLA or GALLIPOLI. Similarly, on the placard GASSED that hung beside pinned medals might appear the further information YPRES or ARRAS. Or the sign might say MESOPOTAMIA, quite simply, as you might write HELL.
They took up separate places, perhaps having a dog with them or a child, or a gaunt woman silently holding out the cap. More usually, each alone. Who or what they had singly been, however, was sunk in the delved sameness of the eyes. Nothing more could be done to them, but their unsurpassable worst would be sustained forever and ever. Stillness was on the eyes even of the blind, closed on God knew what last sighting.
What music they made, and how they sang, that ghastly orchestra in lopped and shiny serge, with unstrung fiddles and wheezing concertinas and the rusted mouth organ grasped in the remaining and inexpert hand; the voices out of tune with everything but pitched extremity. How cruelly they wracked, for Depression pennies, an unwilling audience with their excruciating songs—The Rose of No Man’s Land, and The Roses of Picardy, and The Rose of Tralee, and Oh my, I don’t want to die, I want to go home. The war of the roses, roses, and smile, smile, smile.
Even children—children who had not yet experienced virtue and might be ruthless in tormenting playfellows—were struck adult in pity: the Great War being deeply known to them, learned before memory, as infants know the macabre from dreams. Nothing would have truly surprised them, not if they had been explicitly told of the exploded horses, exploded men, the decomposing gestures of the dead, the trench foot, trench mouth, the star shells, the terror. The bully of a sergeant major howling about clay piping to those as good as dead, the visiting statesman jocose behind the lines. They knew about Wipers and Plug Street and the Line. They had found it all out somehow from the speechless instruction at street corners and the songs of the roses and inky-pinky parlay-voo. Uncovered it in defiance of the brittle brown wreaths at cenotaphs, two minutes’ silence, and the pools of remembrance where beer bottles lolled, and the monuments to war’s sweetest symbols—the soldier, bronze rifle rested, supporting his decorously felled comrade, the marshal cleanly victorious on his flawless mare.
How long they were, how immensely long: the four years that would go on forever.
On Anzac or Armistice Day, Grace and Caroline Bell had been let through the crowd to watch thin-faced men by thousands walk in rows, in the decent suit if they had one, pinstripe, with scraps of braid aligned in small rainbows on the breast, the poppy of red paper in the lapel, the sprig of rosemary. Being little children, Caroline and Grace Bell had been brought to the front of the crowd to see this, as having the greater need.
In the wringing of their hearts, knowledge had entered. Knowledge stood formidable and helpless in their small rib cages as, glancing aside, they dropped tuppence in the extended cap, or ground the rosemary to death between their fingers for the smell.
The house to which they now moved with Dora was smaller, with camellia trees on the lawn but too many hydrangeas. At the back it was buffalo grass and spiked shrubs, and a rockery hewn from the sandstone slope. Indoors, the responsive crystal, the splinter of the true cross from H.M.S. Victory had become museum pieces, relics of another life. At each side of their own brief horizontal, the long streets dropped to the sea. They might almost, had they known it, have been at Rio or Valparaiso. Night followed night, nights of oceanic silence not even broken now by the screams of bandicoots in traps on the Hornimans’ English lawn.
In the slit of two headlands the Pacific rolled, a blue toy between paws. The scalloped harbor was itself a country, familiar as the archipelago a child governs among the rocks: it hardly seemed the open sea could offer more. Yet, passing into that slit Pacific, ocean liners took the fortunate to England. You went to the Quay to see them off, the Broadhursts or Fifields. There was lunch on board, which Dora did not enjoy because of a small fishbone caught in her throat. Sirens were blown, and kisses; streamers and tempers snapped. And the Strathaird, or Orion, was hugely away. You could be home in time to see her go through the Heads, and Caro could read out the name on the stern or bow. Even Dora was subdued at witnessing so incontrovertible an escape.
Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to Heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no one returned the same.
Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway’s Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did not generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney: momentous objects, beings, and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books. Sydney could never take for granted, as did the very meanest town in Europe, that a poet might be born there or a great painter walk beneath its windows. The likelihood did not arise, they did not feel they had deserved it. That was the measure of resentful obscurity: that they could not imagine a person who might expose or exalt it.
There was the harbor, and the open sea. It was an atmosphere in which a sunset might be comfortably admired, but not much else. Any more private joy—in light or dark, in leaf or gatepost—savored of revelation and was uncountenanced; even in wisteria or wattle on mornings newer, surely, than anywhere else could by now achieve. There was a stillness on certain evenings, or a cast to rocks, or a design of languid branch against the sky that might be announcing glory. Though it could hardly be right to relish where Dora was aggrieved, the girls put their smooth faces to gardenias, inhaling December for a lifetime.
Inland was the Bush, the very name a scorched and sapless blur. Inland was a drought, a parched unvisited mystery, a forlorn horizon strung on a strand of slack barbed wire. Dora would not drive farther than Gosford, and none of them had ever seen an Abo. At Easter, the Whittles took them to Bulli Pass, where the radiator boiled over and they all stood by the side of the road after rolling up stones to the rear tires. Getting out to push, plump Mr. Whittle reminded of a growing infant whose first impulse is to trundle the perambulator in which he has been wheeled. Returning home, Dora sat in an unaccustomed chair and said, “You will not get me to do that again.”
Like a vast inland of their own littoral, Dora was becoming an afflicted region, a source of abrupt conflagration. Compliant with her every mood, they wondered that her life should be, as she told and told them, subjugated to theirs. There was some misunderstanding here. Deep trouble was having its way with Dora, as the girls were the first to know. She might still take them into her arms—but vehemently, as if few such embraces might be left to them, and without providing sanctuary. Dora’s state was coming on them like nightfall, while they still affected to discern the shapes and colors of normal day. Keeping up emotional appearances, they were learning to appease and watch out for her. Dora’s flaring responses to error might now be feared, or any kindling of her enchafed spirit. The bruises of a fall must be concealed from Dora’s shrill ado, and so with other falls and bruises.
They were losing their mother a second time.
Caro was coming round to the fact of unhappiness: to a realization that Dora created unhappiness and that she was bound to Dora. No one would now appear offering rescue; it was too late for that. In growing, Caro was beginning rather than outstripping her long task. At least for the present, Caro was stronger than Grace, and was assuming Dora as moral obligation. Dora herself was strongest of all, in her power to accuse, to judge, to cause pain: in her sovereign power Dora’s skilled suspicion would reach unerringly into your soul, bring out your worst thoughts and flourish them for all to see; but never brought to light the simple good. It was as if Dora knew of your inner, rational, protesting truth and tried to provoke you into displaying it, like treason. On the one hand it was Dora seeking havoc, and, on the other, the sisters continually attempting to thwart or divert.
The girls heard it said that Dora was raising them. Yet it was more like sinking, and always trying to rise. In these children a vein of instinct sanity opened and flowed: a warning that every lie must be redeemed in the end. An aversion to emotion was engendered, and the belief that those who do not see themselves as victims accept the greater stress.
In their esteem for dispassion they began to yearn, perverse and unknowing, toward some strength that would, in its turn, sweep them to higher ground.
Like other children, they stopped on the way home from school to pull at socks or pick at scabs or stare up a garden path at some opalescent entry. Grace with a satchel and pale jiggling ringlets, Caro tilted to a loaded briefcase. At school both were clever, which was attributed to the maturing effects of their tragedy—just as, had they lagged, obtuseness would have been ascribed to the arresting trauma. They sought each other in the playground and were known to be aberrant, a pair.
The classrooms had rough sallow walls. The children were reading “The Merchant of Venice” under the specked reproduction of Lord Leighton’s “Wedded,” and the watercolor of Ormiston Gorge. The classrooms were windows on the bay. Tendrils of morning glory crawled on wooden sills. It was always summer—and was afternoon more often than not, hot with smells of chalk and gym shoes and perhaps the banana uneaten in someone’s satchel. Fatigued as businessmen, the girls carved names into desk tops in expectation of the bell.
Caro and Grace walked home uphill in raging heat. Brick houses were symmetric with red, yellow, or purple respectability: low garden walls, wide verandas, recurrent clumps of frangipani and hibiscus, of banksia and bottle brush; perhaps a summerhouse, perhaps a flagpole. Never a sign of washing or even of people: such evidence must be sought inside, or at the back. Caro was beginning to wonder about the inside and the back, and whether every house concealed a Dora. Whether in every life there was a Benbow that heeled over and sank.
You felt that the walls of such houses might topple inward, that they would crush but not reveal.
Refinement was maintained on the razor’s edge of an abyss. To appear without gloves or in other ways suggest the flesh, to so much as show unguarded love, was to be pitchforked into brutish, bottomless Australia, all the way back to primitive man. Refinement was a frail construction continually dashed by waves of a raw, reminding humanity: the six-o’clock shambles outside the pubs, men struggling in vomit and broken glass; the group of wharfies on their smoke-oh, squatting round a flipped coin near the Quay and caning out in angry lust to women passing. There were raucous families who bought on the lay-by, if at all, and whose children were bruised from blows or misshapen by rickets—this subtler threat contained in terrace houses whose sombre grime was a contagion from the British Isles, a Midlands darkness. Britain had shared its squalor readily enough with far Australia, though withholding the Abbey and the Swan of Avon.
Concussed by these realities and worse, refinement shuddered and turned away.
The two girls walked home hand in hand, not so much like lovers as like an elderly couple, grave with information and responsibility. Coming home was to a Dora of outraged quiet, of which some cause must, sooner rather than later, be explosively made known. Or to Dora disfigured by tears from the affront of some neighbor, now marked down for life. Meaning was acoustical, ringing out, shaping inflections, filling silences. Grievance was statistical: “They only invited me once in two years,” “I was there to tea exactly twice.” Any crisis of classroom or playground, inadvertently disclosed, might set Dora to shrieking, “Peace! I want peace!”—the house resounding to cries of “Peace!” long after the girls were in their beds.
Dora could always die, so she said. I CAN ALWAYS DIE, as if this were a solution to which she might repeatedly resort. She told them that death was not the worst, as if she had had the opportunity of testing. She said she could do away with herself. Or she could disappear. Who would care, what would it matter. They flung themselves on her in terror, Dora don’t die, Dora don’t disappear. No, she was adamant: it was the only way.
How often, often, she drew upon this inexhaustible reserve of her own death, regenerated over and over by the horror she inspired by showing others the very brink. It was from their ashen fear that she rose, every time, a phoenix. Each such borrowing from death gave her a new lease on life.
Not that Dora was tolerant of the afflicted or of those who had gone under. “We could all give in,” she said, when told that Miss Garside the librarian had completely dropped her bundle. The maimed or blinded were an incursion on pity that was Dora’s by right: Dora’s cry for help must drown out all others. She was quite taken up with her own disappearance, which loomed the largest presence in their lives.
The girls’ early legends were all of the time that Dora. The time that Dora stood up to the tax man, the time Dora took no nonsense from the minister. “For once spoke out.” Dora taking exception, umbrage, or the huff. Dora lashing out, Dora pitching into, Dora breaking down. Dora giving the dreaded news: “I had a good row.” A good cry, good row, a good set-to. Dora was, furthermore, convinced that if she pressed on kind intentions hard enough they would disclose their limitations; and in this, time after time, had proved herself right.
Dora had a vermilion dress with black buttons that she wore for housework. The child Grace was asking, “Why are you always angry in that dress?”
Dora scarcely knew how to flare. “In this dress—I’m always busy. Not angry, busy.”
Grace disbelieved.
“I don’t care to be told I’m angry all the time. I certainly am not angry.” Dora was very angry.
Grace trembled. “I’m sorry.”
“Do you have any, do you have the slightest notion how hard I work for you. I am never done.” It was true; the women were slaves. “Then I get this flung at me, I am told I’m angry. Well let me tell you.”
Grace went outside to cry.
Dora was twenty-two and had dark sloping eyes and, despite an addiction to boiled sweets, perfect little teeth. Caro wondered when Dora would be old enough for tranquillity. Old people were serene. You simply had to be serene, for instance, at seventy. Even Dora must be, if they could only wait.
Yet Dora was daily life. Dora shopped, and paid bills out of their small inheritance; and spoke with trustees about debentures. Dora took back “The Citadel” to the lending library and returned with “The Rains Came;” played bridge at Pymble, and had a wealthy cousin at Point Piper. Dora went to tea, and wrote thank-you notes on her blue deckle-edged. She wore a smart silk frock of the color known as teal, and had her long dark hair waved and rolled. On prize-giving night Dora exulted over the girls’ bound anthologies and the silver cup Grace won for Piano; and shed true tears for Caro’s gold medal in French. It was this that set Caro to wondering about the backs of houses, and whether Dora was in some form inevitable to every household.
Supremely confusing was the Dora, all loving normality, who followed the release of the good row. At those intervals the girls became, for an evening or a day, young again. It was of course a confounding of all they knew for sure, through the certainty of suffering. But, like others in the clutch of absolute authority, they settled for the brief respite. It seemed easier to lie—to Dora, to oneself, to God—than willfully to precipitate the other Dora.
Into these hostilities came war. One year it was statesmen shrieking “Peace! Peace!” while marshalling, like Dora, for a holocaust. The next it was Poland, the Siegfried Line, the Graf Spee. A family from Vienna, Jews, took the house next door, and Dora reported, “He’s an engineer, she’s a children’s doctor. Supposedly.” Because a professional woman aroused mistrust. The boys, Ernst without the second “e” and Rudolf with “f,” mooned on the lawn. Their father, slim and gray, pondered a row of freesias that in October had forced itself through from the far side of the earth.
The following June, the greengrocers’ windows were smashed because of being Italian. Manganelli’s at the Junction put out a sign: “WE ARE GREEKS.” Once again the men set sail for History, in darkness and without streamers. France fell. There was the Blitz, the R.A.F., and Mr. Churchill. Caro’s class put aside the War of the Spanish Succession to read a book about London, the buildings standing out like heroes—the Guildhall, the Mansion House—which every night the flames consumed on the seven-o’clock news. Dora seethed under rationing but yearned to be where bombs were falling. She took the conflict personally, frenzied by Mr. Churchill. It was Dora’s war.
The neap tide of history had, as usual, left them high and dry.
Caro was becoming flesh. Her hands were assuming attitudes. In shoes dull with playground dust her feet were long and shapely. The belt of her school uniform, which at the time of Dunkirk had banded a mere child, by the siege of Tobruk delineated a cotton waist. Her body showed a delicate apprehension of other change. Caro knew the sources of the Yangtze, and words like hypotenuse. Even Grace did homework now, sitting on the floor. Dora was knitting for the merchant marine, charging this calm activity with vociferous unrest.
Greece fell, Crete fell. There was a toppling, even of history.
One hot day Caro looked up Pearl Harbor in the atlas. Buses were soon painted in swamp colors. Air-raid shelters were constructed, and a boom, useless, across the harbor mouth. You kept a bucket of sand in the kitchen with a view to incendiary bombs. Mr. Whittle was an air-raid warden, and the Kirkby boys were called up. The noble rhetoric of Downing Street scarcely applied to dark streets, austerity, and standing in the queue. Colonial families arrived from the East destitute, and Singapore fell, fell. Orphans were numerous now; and the girls, in their civilian loss, no longer commanded special attention.
The school was moving to a country house, where the invading Japanese would hardly penetrate. Grace was too little to be saved by such methods; Caro would go alone. Caro would try out the fugitive state; if it came up to snuff, Grace might later be included.
Caro was installed one afternoon at the foot of the Blue Mountains. On the plain below, gum trees straggled back toward Sydney, bark was strewn like torn paper. The littlest children cried, but the parents would visit them in a fortnight if the petrol held up and the Japs did not arrive. There was also an ancient train as far as Penrith, but after that you were on your own. They knew about Penrith, a weather-board town with telegraph poles and the sort of picture house where you could hear the rain.
Grace waved out the car window: jealous, guilty, and safe.
It was Sunday. After sago pudding, they sang “Abide with Me,” and Caro went out on the upstairs veranda. Fast falls the eventide. The darkness deepened in silence more desolate for the squawk of a bird they had been shown in illustrations. Incredulous response cracked in Caroline Bell’s own throat. Smells of dry ground, of eucalyptus, and a small herd of cows gave the sense of time suspended, or slowed to a pace in which her own acceleration must absurdly spin to no purpose. The only tremor in dim foothills was the vapor of a train on its way up to Katoomba. It was insignificance that Dora had taught them to abhor, and if ever there was to be insignificance it was here. The measure of seclusion was that Penrith had become a goal Caro took herself in her own tender embrace, enclosing all that was left of the known. Caro was inland.
She had crouched into the angle formed by the balustrade and one of the high supports of the veranda. Bougainvillea was trained on the uprights; and a round plaque, cool as china, impressed her cheek. There were insects in the thorny vines, there was the scuttle of some animal in the garden below. Dora would have confirmed that death is not the worst.
In a room with six beds, all subsequently cried themselves to sleep. In the morning, Caro saw that the medallion on the balcony was blue and white, and Catholic. One of the girls told her, “Miss Holster says it’s a Dellarobbier.”
The house was at once seen to be peculiar. There was a lot to look at. It was owned by the Doctor, who was not a doctor at all but an architect; and Italian, even if on our side. He had withdrawn to a smaller building alongside—servants’ quarters was a phrase that came readily enough to them from books, or from the old stone houses built by convicts. The Doctor wore a short white cotton jacket and a little white pointed beard and, although not lame, carried a stick. According to Miss Holster, he had seen through Mussolini from the word Go.
The house had 1928 in Roman numbers on the porch; or portico. For construction, colored marbles and blond travertine had spent months at sea, fireplaces and ceilings had been dismantled outside Parma, where the ham and violets came from. And whole pavements of flowered tiles uprooted and rebedded. The dining room was said to be elliptical. All the doors, even bathrooms, were double, with panels of painted flowers, and paired handles pleasant to waggle until they dropped off. There were velvet bell ropes, intended for maids, that fell into disrepair from incessant tugging. There was also the day Joan Brinstead broke an inkpot on the white marble mantel in the music room and ammonia only made it worse. Miss Holster had a canopy over her bed; but could not say why lemon trees should be potted rather than in the ground.
These rooms enclosed loveliness—something memorable, true as literature. Events might take place, occasions, though not during the blight of their own occupancy. At evening the rooms shone, knowing and tender.
In a forbidden paddock below the house, a wire fence surrounded tents, tin buildings, and thirty or forty short men grotesquely military in uniforms dyed the color of wine. The Doctor’s countrymen had come to the ends of the earth to find him, for the men who dug his fields and gathered his fruit were Italian prisoners of war. At dusk they led in the cows before being themselves led behind the wire. The Doctor could be seen in the mornings moving among them, white beard, white jacket, white panama: once more the master. They learned that, like a baby, he slept in the afternoons. They had seen, or caught, one of the prisoners kissing his hand.
From the fields, or behind the wire, the prisoners waved to the schoolgirls, who never waved back. Never. It was a point of honor.
After two weeks of this, Dora came with Grace in the Marchmains’ car, which had been converted to naphtha. Dora was at her best in the drama of reunion and had brought a magnificent hamper to supplement the dreadful meals. Caro showed off to Grace with the Marchmains’ pale-pink Rosamund, her fellow-exile. They had a picnic on the banks of the Nepean, Mr. Marchmain explaining about nettles and dock leaves. Sausages were cooked on sticks over a fire the Marchmains made. The fat dripped, reeking; sausage meat obtruded from split casing. Fending for yourself on a desert island would not be like this: there would be mangoes, breadfruit, milk from coconuts, and fish from the coral reef.
Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it. The girls swam in the river, repelled by the saltless water and the ooze. They played Moses in the Bulrushes, with Grace in the title role but Caro as the princess. Across the river, the gorges began, melancholy, uninhabited. A friend of the Marchmains had once stayed up at Lapstone—for pleurisy, or so it was given out at the time. You could usually tell the real thing, though, by the hectic flush. Caro was thinking of Umbria, until yesterday a mere color in the paintbox between yellow ochre and burnt sienna; and of flat Parma where the violets came from.
Caro would have liked to reveal the house, but feared Dora’s reaction. Dora was not one to lie down under the news that a veranda was called a loggia, or a mural a fresco. Let alone villa for house. Any such divulging would somehow bring word of Caro’s secession from Dora’s rule. They walked about the corridors and looked in the oval dining room without perceiving.
“This Montyfiori,” said Mr. Marchmain, who was coarse, “appears to be a raving ratbag.”
After tea the Marchmains walked down with Rosamund to the paddock where you took turns for the pony, and Dora went to put the thermos in the car. Caro and Grace disappeared into the makeshift dormitory, where they sat side by side on a bed. They made little wracked gasps of an adult weeping that must presently be concealed. The huge heavy mechanism of their hearts dragged at their slight bodies.
Grace said, “I’ll write.”
They washed their faces in a bathroom varicose with streaked marble. The basin was shaped like one of those shells. Even the lav had a blue pattern inside, possibly Chinese.
Dora had found the matron and was reading the riot act about blankets. Marchmains were coming up the gravel. Now, authorized public tears, let grief be unconfined. Grace climbed in the car, abashed by escaping yet again. At that moment, Japs were the last thing in anyone’s mind: the entire exercise appeared pointless except for the emotions to which it was giving luxurious rein.
Caro came home in winter, with the others. The villa dissolved into gum trees even as they twisted to see it for the last time, breath steaming the cold windows of a bus that took them to the Penrith train. No one, even so, would take a chance on waving to their fellow-prisoners.
Soon their flight to the mountains was part of the fabled past, a form of war service. Not before the Doctor had brought suit, however, for irreparable damage to his house. After all that palaver about Danty and the sunset, the old ratbag was asking a thousand quid, Mr. Marchmain reported, to fix up his caricature of a home.
Caro returned, as if from abroad, to a city populated by American soldiers. Dora confirmed that these were boastful, and self-indulgent in ways unspecified. Girls who went with them were common. Caro and Grace, in school uniform, were photographed by a lanky sergeant while crossing at the Junction; and put up their hands, like the famous, to ward off intrusion. It was a pity one could not have a better class of saviour: Americans could not provide history, of which they were almost as destitute as Australians.
The sisters had never seen black men before, apart from the lascars at the Quay.
At school, Grace was studying the Stuart kings. From newspapers they learned about Stalingrad and Rostov-on-Don. Dora was part of a camouflage-netting group that met on Thursdays in Delecta Avenue and was rancorous in the extreme. In the relief of home, Caro was lenient. Once in a while she pictured to herself the Doctor’s house, and the high rooms that created expectation. If you could have had the rooms, without the misery.
These picturings might be memories—unless it was too soon for memories. The moments would not say which of them might be remembered.
When you measured five feet tall you were eligible for extra clothing coupons. She would have undone her plaits into a ponytail had it not been for Dora.
One morning a girl whose father had been in America for Munitions came to school with nibless pens that wrote both red and blue, pencils with lights attached, a machine that would emboss a name—one’s own for preference—and pencil sharpeners in clear celluloid. And much else of a similar cast. Set out on a classroom table, these silenced even Miss Holster. The girls leaned over, picking up this and that: Can I turn it on, how do you work it, I can’t get it to go back again. No one could say these objects were ugly, even the crayon with the shiny red flower, for they were spread on the varnished table like flints from an age unborn, or evidence of life on Mars. A judgment on their attractiveness did not arise: their power was conclusive, and did not appeal for praise.
It was the first encounter with calculated uselessness. No one had ever wasted anything. Even the Lalique on Aunt Edie’s sideboard, or Mum’s Balibuntl, was functional by contrast, serving an evident cause of adornment, performing the necessary, recognized role of an extravagance. The natural accoutrements of their lives were now seen to have been essentials—serviceable, workaday—in contrast to these hard, high-colored, unblinking objects that announced, though brittle enough, the indestructibility of infinite repetition.
Having felt no lack, the girls could experience no envy. They would have to be conditioned to a new acquisitiveness. Even Dora would have to adjust her methods to contend with such imperviousness.
Never did they dream, fingering those toys and even being, in a rather grownup way, amused by them, that they were handling fateful signals of the future. The trinkets were assembled with collective meaning, like exhibits in a crime, or like explosives no expert could defuse. Invention was the mother of necessity.
It was not long after this that the girls began to wave their unformed hips and to chant about Chattanooga and the San Fernando Valley. Sang, from the antipodes, about being down in Havana and down Mexico way. Down was no longer down to Kew. The power of Kew was passing like an empire.
Now Caro and Grace Bell did not go home at once after lessons, but walked along the beach below the school, getting sand in their shoes and stockings, picking up chipped shells and flinging them away. Seaweed sworled in dark, beady tangles, scalloped up by the tides, bleared by an occasional medusa. A boy or pair of boys would speak to them—boys in gray knickerbockers and striped ties. The uniforms were a guarantee: schools recognized each other like regiments.
Grace was a flower.
Caro’s hair hung heavy on her shoulders, as no child’s will do.
The sounds and smell of ocean made speech unworthy, or required a language greater than they knew. Because Dora’s intrusions had made privacy sacrosanct, they exchanged no word on the dangerous preparations their bodies were making for an unimaginable life. And, in this respect, lingered in unusual ignorance.
Dora was too sore and disturbing a subject for their circumspect afternoons. Besides, they were supposed to love her; and, more to the point, did so. They would have given anything to see her, as she wished, at peace. However, the threesome was beginning to irk them. People had to step aside as Dora marched the girls, on arms inertly linked, along streets or pushed them singly through turnstiles. They lived under supervision, a life without men. Dora knew no men. You could scarcely see how she might meet one, let alone come to know.
All women evidently longed to marry, and on leaving school held their breath, while accumulating linen and silver. There was a lot of waiting in it, and an endangering degree of emotion. Of those who were not taken, some quietly carried it off—like old Miss Fife, who came to tea with parasol and high collar, fondant silk to her calves, pointed shoes each clasped with single button: gentler than Queen Mary. There were others, unhinged, timid, or with whiskers—crushed by father, crushed by mother, or unthinkingly set aside.
In this, Dora was hard to place.
Caro was allowed into town on her own, on the ferry. There was the gangplank, creak of hawsers, casting off, smell of throttling engines and of the sea slapping at green encrustations on wooden piles. She heard the hooting approach of the City, tram bells, the jarring of a great ignition. In the cabin, office girls held up little mirrors and patted powder off their curving fronts and concave laps with small reverberations at thorax or thighs. They dabbed behind the ears, then sharply closed their handbags to signal preparedness. This was not the groundwork for a march, three abreast, through the town; but a prelude to encounters.
Alone in the city, Caro was lifting a frayed book in a shop. “How much is this?”
“Fifteen and three.”
Back on the teetering pile. The table was massed like an arsenal.
“Ah well. Let’s say, ten bob.”
Seeing it, that evening, Dora said, “You have enough books now.”
Dora knew, none better, the enemy when she saw it. ♦
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