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Authors: Gail Jones
An exquisite new novel by one of Australia's most gifted contemporary novelists.
In the remote outback of Western Australia during World War II, English anthropologist Nicholas Keene and his wife, Stella, raise a lonely child, Perdita. Her upbringing is far from ordinary: in a shack in the wilderness, with a distant father burying himself in books and an unstable mother whose knowledge of Shakespeare forms the backbone of the girl's limited education.
Emotionally adrift, Perdita becomes friends with a deaf and mute boy, Billy, and an Aboriginal girl, Mary. Perdita and Mary come to call one another sister and to share a very special bond. They are content with life in this remote corner of the globe, until a terrible event lays waste to their lives.
Through this exquisite story of Perdita's troubled childhood, Gail Jones explores the values of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice with a brilliance that has already earned her numerous accolades for her previous novels,
Dreams Of Speaking
and
Sixty Lights
.
for Veronica Brady
ANTIGONUS
: ⦠thy mother
Appeared to me last night; for ne'er was dream
So like a waking. To me comes a creature,
Sometimes her head on one side, some another â
I never saw a vessel of like sorrow,
So filled and so becoming â¦
The Winter's Tale
III
. iii
A whisper: sssshh. The thinnest vehicle of breath.
This is a story that can only be told in a whisper.
There is a hush to difficult forms of knowing, an abashment, a sorrow, an inclination towards silence. My throat is misshapen with all it now carries. My heart is a sour, indolent fruit. I think the muzzle of time has made me thus, has deformed my mouth, my voice, my wanting to say. At first there was just this single image: her dress, the particular blue of hydrangeas, spattered with the purple of my father's blood. She rose up from the floor into this lucid figure, unseemly, but oh! vivacious with gore. I remember I clung to her, that we were alert and knowing. There might have been a snake in the house, for all our watchful attention.
âDon't tell them,' she said. That was all:
don't tell them.
Her eyes held my face, a fleck in watery darkness. Then we both wept; she washed me away. And when for comfort we held hands, overlapping, as girls do, in riddled ways, in secret understandings and unspoken allegiances, the sticky stuff of my father's life bound us like sisters. Outside, at the screen door, our kelpie scratched and whimpered, demanding admittance. Mary and I ignored him. The scale and meaning to things at that moment was obdurately human.
How to gather, quietly and honourably, all that is now scattered? How to reanimate the dead as if they were human after all, not symbols, or functions that I must somehow deal with, not flimsy puppet cut-outs trimmed to my purpose?
When I was born, two years after my parents' marriage, my mother was thirty-eight, my father thirty-six. Neither had expected children; indeed, both were accustomed to self-enclosure and habituated to types of loneliness their partnership did not quite alleviate. I was a mistake, a slightly embarrassing intervention, and knew this melancholy status from earliest childhood. Predictably, both treated me as a smallish adult, arranging a regimen of behaviour, insisting on rules and repression, talking in stern, pedagogical tones. Neither thought it necessary to express affection, nor to offer any physical affirmations of our bond. I was, in consequence, a beseeching child, grumpy, insecure, anxious for their approval, but also wilfully emphatic in ways that I knew would test and annoy them. In the battle between us, there were only losses. If it had not been for the Aboriginal women who raised me, I would never have known what it is like to lie against a breast, to sense skin as a gift, to feel the throb of a low pulse at the base of the neck, to listen, in intimate and sweet propinquity, to air entering and leaving a resting body.
I was born in 1930; part of my childhood was in war-time. My father, who had served as a young captain in the First World War, carried fragments of shrapnel deep in his back and therefore walked with an awkward, halting tilt. He had hated being invalided out of the army â a vague shame attached to his incapacitation â and when war came again he was doubly shamed to be refused a commission. He had become stubborn and mean-spirited, but also intent on proving his manhood. By 1928 he already had the weary eyes of someone disappointed by life, and married my mother, I think, as some obscure, even
unnameable, compensation. It was certainly not love; love makes itself manifest, love is a tangible tenderness. It was an assertion against loss, a form of acquisition.
When they met, my father was in his final year reading anthropology at Cambridge; my mother worked as what was then still known as a âlady's companion'. My father, Nicholas Keene, had money enough: his father owned four haberdashery stores in London, which he had invited his son to manage. In any case, they promised an independent yearly income. But the sight of mannequins in windows filled Nicholas with dread. He could not have told anyone why he felt swindled by the life his father offered him, and why, when he gazed into the shop windows he would eventually inherit, he felt a dull quiver of morbid trepidation. The garments hanging on lifeless bodies reminded him of the war. He saw before him again the ghastly carnage of 1918, the ruin of mud-caked men, discoloured khaki with death, lying there, gone. His own surprised aliveness had made him feel special, one of the elect, a survivor, a lucky man, even when he was blasted from behind and found his back torn open. He could not have stood behind a counter, dealing with body-shapes of clothing, the arms flapping loose on coat-hangers, the slack torso of any shirt. An anguish he did not recognise made him think of this often â bodies blown to kingdom come, the muck of it, the flesh. He would spend his life negotiating a dangerous contradiction, wanting both to remember and to forget the war.
Nicholas met Stella, my mother, in a shadowy little teashop opposite King's College in Cambridge. As he pushed past a customer, looking sideways for a cosy booth on a freezing day, the tea on Nicholas's tray toppled and splashed someone sitting to his left. My mother called out, sprang to her feet, and with agitated gestures began to whip away the scalding liquid. Apologising, my father bent to wipe her. The stain that spread
in her lap was what Stella will later remember: she will describe to her favourite sister, Margaret, how shocking it seemed, how implicitly sexual. Nicholas and Stella sat together, each uncomfortable, but obliged, and realised a tenuous, incipient attraction.
Nicholas saw in Stella a plain woman who would not say no if he pursued her, a woman who would no doubt be flattered by his attentions; she saw in him an obscure sign of damage, guessing immediately from the way he moved when he entered the teashop â the little bell above the door made her look up with each entrance â that he had been wounded in the war and was shy and vulnerable. He would be flattered, she thought, if she agreed to walk out with him. In this oscillation of estimations both somehow converged, and agreed, almost without discussion, to meet in the same teashop the following day.
It was not an ardent courtship or an impassioned connection, merely the magnification of an accident and its spreading stain. If there was any romantic grandeur at all, it existed in the looming façade of King's, mauve in the winter light, majestic, austere, that Stella glanced at nervously during their stilted conversations.
On their second meeting she wore her very best hat, a cloche in grey felt adorned by a peacock feather eye, but realised that Nicholas seemed not to notice at all. He was a man who was blankly unmoved by the details of the world; he was given to abstraction in all things, including people. There would be no endearments or simple sweet gestures, no love notes, or flowers or remarks on her looks. Both were given, by long practice, to attitudes of compromise. Both recomposed into the formal shape that would become a marriage, shrank themselves into the half-lives to which they had been subtending.
After his discharge from the army, Nicholas had worked for
several years as a clerk in the Bank of England, until he found it intolerable and decided to return to his university studies, interrupted long ago by the declaration of war. But after only a few months studying the law, he changed his course to anthropology. It had the odd grandeur, somehow, of an uncompleted discipline and the challenging allure of frontier encounters.
Having repudiated his father, he decided he must uncover the mystery of what he liked to call âelemental man'. His theories on human development and the diversity of cultures were imperial and arrogant. He thought tribal peoples base, unintelligent and equivalent to children, but also that they held in their behaviour and beliefs the origins of sex, aggression and identity. He believed in the British Empire, in its right of governance. The few papers he later wrote, during his time in Western Australia, indicate too that he believed in universalising myths; specificity was less interesting to him than grand design.
According to Margaret, Stella Grant had been an interesting child. The eldest of three sisters (the third was Iris), she developed an early, inexplicable obsession with Shakespeare. Her father was a baker, her mother a housewife; there was nothing in her education or home life that would have predicted a literary infatuation.
She committed to memory a small selection of plays and almost fifty sonnets; she found in Shakespearean language the extravagance and elaboration, a betokening glory, that was lacking in her own much-too-common life.
Stella loved the rumoured universe in which people spoke in rhyming couplets or found intoxicant sentences and daring expressions. Apart from the stories themselves â inevitably of murderous or magical love â there was this flaunted language, this rude excess. So much existed in the declaimed desires and
fates of others, in the magnitude of what speeches might form and express. In a life in which so much was hidden or unsaid, in which âpass the butter' was the only dinner-time utterance (since her father, when he was there, believed children should be seen-and-not-heard), in a life governed by complaint, boredom and tedious attentions to domestic niceties, this world was utterly hers; she was clad in private satisfactions. And although Stella did not believe, like Hamlet, that there was âa divinity that shapes our ends', she admired his questioning misery and made it her own.
At night, after lights-off, she lay in bed, softly reciting. Margaret remembers this was the chant she and Iris fell asleep to. She remembers her sister's whispery sibilance and the bewildering quality of words and ideas she did not yet understand. Her voice, Margaret would say, still returns to me sometimes; it returns only in the darkness, just before sleeping. Only in the darkness, my sister, Stella.
When Stella left school she worked for a time in a confectionery store, wreathed by the scent of sugar she would come to find cloying and repulsive. She served spotty brats and their indulgent mothers, and each time she tipped a mound of bull's-eyes or twisted a paper bag, she felt diminished. She hated her meaningless life, marked out by pennies' worth of boiled sweets, gaudily striped, and the click of purses opened and closed, and the counting of small copper change, and the daily, infuriating, condescension.
Stella learned of a position as a lady's companion, and found that it included the task of reading aloud. She decided that this would be a new captivity she might better endure. The lady, a Mrs Whiticombe, was a widow from the Great War who, as it happened, did not require much companionship. Stella was at liberty for at least half the day and developed over time a moony passivity, a sort of easy, wandering, dreamy suspen
sion. She lost sight of her own life as a separate thing, and one day woke to discover she had been a âcompanion' for almost twenty years and that the old woman before her, now in her eighties, was withering away.
When she met Nicholas Keene in the teashop Stella saw her escape, and Mrs Whiticombe obligingly died three weeks after the incident of spilled tea. Nothing was left to Stella in Mrs Whiticombe's will. Despite her years of service this seemed somehow explicable; she had more or less, after all, ceased to exist. There was a convenience, therefore, on both sides in her marriage, although Australia was not mentioned, not even once, and she would never forgive Nicholas his presumption in dragging her, unconsulted, to the dark other-side of the planet.
At their wedding in the registry office Nicholas's father cried. He removed his spectacles and dabbed his eyes in a manner those assembled found embarrassing. Of his three sons this was the only one still alive, and he could finally imagine grandchildren and the continuation of his name, the gold signs of âKeene & Sons' granted perpetuity. Stella's parents were also there, as well as her sisters, Margaret's husband and her daughter and two sons. Margaret said that Nicholas did not once encircle her sister's waist, and that both groom and bride appeared throughout to be having second thoughts.
Stella wore a sprig of cloth violets pinned to her collar; she fiddled restlessly, she appeared preoccupied. Mr Keene senior arranged a fancy supper at the local hotel (roast pork and beer, with afterwards a rich plum trifle); but he was the only one, the family decided, who thoroughly enjoyed himself.
It was a grey, gloomy day, with the threat of rain. There was no dancing and Nicholas drank too much. Among the practical wedding gifts â pots and pans, a Swiss clock, a set of Irish linen â lay, neatly folded, a Spanish shawl. Margaret had
ordered it from Cadiz for her sister. This shawl, black and tasselled and embroidered with looped patterns of scarlet poppies, became for Stella the sad emblem of all her lost dreams, of all that was unShakespearean about her life.
This Spanish shawl is the only garment of my mother's I still possess. When I wear it I think of her, all those years ago, a brand-new bride, peering ahead at the dim unknowable future, still untouched by my father's embrace and still so uncertain. I wrap myself in what I imagine to be her unspoken misgivings, her sense of fatalism, her staunch opinions. The feel of it soothes me. It is soft and enveloping as memory. And now, a lifetime later, this shawl returns the shape of Stella's shoulders and the particular inclination of her head. From the dark and backward abysm of time, a lift of the chin and a profile against the light.
