Dark Palace (27 page)

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

He had assumed the role of next of kin.

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

She kissed him and held him.

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

‘It is a beautiful thing,' she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was simply an affirming of an uncommon connection.

An expression of an exquisite form of loving.

Australia 1936.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The smell of the burning leaf had made her gag.

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

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

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

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

Australia felt closed to her.

She looked away from the train window.

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

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

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

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

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

She let her antipathy rampage.

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

It was grim in its barren repetition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And gathered herself for her meeting with her father.

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

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

Then Jasper's Brush.

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

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

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

My, my.

She went to her father.

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

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

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

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

‘And I you, Dadda, and I you.'

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

She looked to her father there on the verandah.

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

‘Here, Dadda, let me.'

‘Opener is worn out. Like me.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She hoped that he would relax and stop fussing about her with his bumbling concern.

She saw that he surreptitiously wiped away another tear.

The flies gathered around the beer bottle and she kept shooing them away.

The flies, always a few inside despite the flyscreen. Flies, of course, bred inside the house as well as outside the house. She, the one-time scientist, knew that much about flies.

‘Where's Robert. How's that all working out? You seem to have gone quiet about him in the letters. And I see you aren't wearing your wedding ring.'

Her father did not beat around the bush.

The wedding ring. ‘You wouldn't believe it—but I took it off because of some skin problem and in the rush to leave for the ship, forgot it …'

She wondered if he had appraised her figure, half-expecting her to be with child. Maybe hoping that she'd come home to have her child in Australia.

She had been vague in the letters. She smiled at him. ‘He's in Ethiopia, covering the war. What's left of it.'

‘I read that Haile Selassie has fled to England. The Italians seem to have won.'

‘We heard the news on the ship. Sanctions came too late.'

She couldn't bear to think about it.

‘Looks as if I am not going to get a grandchild,' her father said.

‘Come on, Dad, there's still time. I'm not over the hill yet. But, yes, it doesn't look promising, I grant you that. Unless brother Fred comes good. Robert and I have no immediate plans.'

Was there still time?

She sometimes wondered what would happen if she accidentally fell pregnant to Robert after one of his visits. Diaphragms were not 100 percent.

‘I wouldn't bank my money on Fred. Doesn't look like we can expect any progeny from your brother.' And then added, without bitterness now, as a kindly humour, ‘Never have been able to expect anything from him.'

‘Do you hear from him?'

‘Once a year. As I presume you do.'

‘What's he doing?'