Tirra Lirra by the River (3 page)

I wish I had recalled the incident earlier. I should have liked to have recounted it at number six. It would have had to be told
at a time when Fred was not there. Fred had that horror of what he called ‘fuggy female talk’, and although he made a great comedy of it, we all knew that those exaggerated sour mouths, and all that hissing and head-ducking, covered a real detestation, and so we were careful to spare him. No, I should never have recounted the incident in his presence. It would have been told when he was out, or downstairs, and we three were gossiping in Liza’s quarters, perhaps, before her new electric fire. And after I had finished, I know what Hilda and Liza would have said. I can hear Liza’s voice, with its touch of dogmatism.

‘Of course, Nora, you were looking for a lover.’

And Hilda. ‘But of course! As girls did in those days, without even knowing it.’

And I would probably have said, yes, of course, because in these times, when sexuality is so very fashionable, it is easy to believe that it underlies all our actions. But really, though I am quite aware of the sexual nature of the incident, I don’t believe I was looking for a lover. Or not only for a lover. I believe I was also trying to match that region of my mind, Camelot.

If that sounds laughable, do consider that this was a long time ago, and that I was a backward and innocent girl, living in a backward and unworldly place. And consider, too, that the very repression of sex, though it produced so much that was warped and ugly and cruel, let loose for some natures, briefly, a luminosity, a glow, that I expect is unimaginable now, and that for those natures, it was possible to love and value that glow far beyond the fire that was its origin.

I am going to put down a strange word. Beauty. I was in love with beauty. I carried my pale face, my dropped flag of ashen hair, my abstracted eyes, my damp concealed body, along the rough roads and streets, and across the paddocks and vacant lots and playing fields, of a raw ugly sprawling suburb on the outskirts of a raw but genteel town. I walked everywhere,
oppressed, moody, yet patient too. Our suburb merged with farms, and by day, overtaken by a farmer’s cart, I would see the whip flick the horse’s rump and the shadow of the cart draw away from a shining pile of excrement. On certain hot nights scents and stench would mingle—frangipani and lantana with the wake of the nightcart. I walked and walked, sometimes with an objective—a friend’s house, a shop, the church or school—but mostly at random, to outrun oppression.

I had a pinkish skin that always looked damp and often was. In the swampy summers I sweated dreadfully. I changed my dress-shields three or four times a day and washed them secretly. Most of my friends were dry-skinned girls with suntanned hands and electrical energy. I remember how Olive Partridge would break suddenly into a run, then as suddenly stop and clack her boots together sideways. But though Olive did things like that when she and I were alone, she was dignified in groups and would not play games. She was never present at those tennis afternoons (called ‘the tennis’), when the girls staggered from the court and flopped panting on to the grass, and the boys flopped down beside them and splashed their faces with water from the canvas bags. Ashamed of my sweat, I sat alone in the tennis shed. The girls laughed and shrieked, and I could hear the swishing of cloth as they kicked their legs in their skirts and petticoats. My laughter at the antics of the girls was strained, but in a longing for solidarity I eagerly unhooked the water bag and passed it to the boys. My first touch of toadiness?

On Sundays Grace’s voice would rout me out of my hiding places.

‘Nor-ah! Chur-urch! Church, Nora.’

Our clergyman was a tired man of mechanical piety, and on hot days our little timber church smelled of coconut oil and the petrol used to clean serge suits. Even so, some were devout. Grace was. But not me—I could not worship there. I was no
longer a schoolgirl. I walked home from church in a group of girls followed by boys who would lag behind at first, and then, in a sudden burst, run to overtake us. They would jeer and guffaw as they passed, and bump us as if by accident. Some of the girls would send after them shouts of derision mingled with disappointment, and the rest would giggle. Between the guffaw and the giggle there is little to choose, but the guffaw is louder, and to me it carried a threat of cruelty.

Four of these boys formed a regular group. At our houses on singing nights, these four were stiff and proper in their blue serge suits, and polite and shy with our parents, and if we girls encountered one of them alone, he would be much the same, clumsy and shy and anxious to escape. But when these four were together, waiting for us in the dark under the camphor laurels west of the school, though they were awkward at first (apart from the guffaws that broke startlingly out), if they could entice or trick one of us away from the others, they would grab us and throw us to the ground. They would try to pull down our pants one minute and abjectly beg the next. As we made our escape they would villify us horribly.

Nobody was raped. Escape was optional, and for me, in spite of my sexual excitement, imperative. I hated being pulled about and roughly handled. It made me bored and grieved and angry.

‘What did you come for then?’

I saw sense in the question, and stopped going. Those girls who continued to go began to treat me with enmity, and for the first time I took note of an ominous growled-out question.

‘Who does she think
she
is?’

My retreat took me into another group of boys, friends of my brother Peter, who was older than I but younger than Grace. These were always spoken of as ‘thoroughly decent lads’, and with them, as I stitched on their cricket pockets or helped to sort their stamp collections, I found boredom of a different
sort—plain, you might say, instead of a bit fancy. I withdrew still further. Except for Olive Partridge, who shared my passion for reading, and whose mother looked at me with a kind of quizzical understanding, all my friends became acquaintances. Like almost everybody in those days, I spent a great deal of time in making things with my hands. I made drawings of flowers, and of thin ladies and gentlemen in medieval garments. I did crochet work, embroidery, and made all my own clothes. I read much poetry, and prose of the bejewelled sort. And I walked. I walked. Indeed if all the marks of my walking feet had been left inscribed on the paddocks and roads and playing fields of that suburb, you would have seen lines, arcs, ovals, rectangles, figures-of-eight, and any other shape you might care to name, all imposed and impinging on one another so thickly that it would have been impossible to trace a single journey.

Often, on these walks, I would meet Dorothy Irey. She was a friend of Grace’s, six years older than I, and was said to have Polynesian blood. She did not walk fast like I did, but stepped out very absently and gently, her neck stretched high, her head turning this way and that, and her fingertips, meeting at waist level, moving and nibbling together. She was so slender and narrow-hipped, and the rounded mass of her hair, surmounted by a ‘mushroom’ hat, made her head look so disproportionately big, that in the distance she made me think of a poppy, a nodding, advancing poppy. She would smile at me when we were still a long way apart, and as we drew nearer her smile would gradually grow wide and she would call with sing-song condescension, ‘Hello, Nora.’ And as I replied we would look with appreciation, with secret sharp recognition, at each other’s clothes. The effect she gave, of darkness, freshness, and white lace, left me incredulous. She was rare and beautiful, and she was twenty-three. So why did she stay? My own patience was explained by my underlying conviction that
I
was going. I never
for one moment doubted it. ‘Why does Dorothy Irey stay here?’ I asked Grace. But Grace turned on me in a fury. ‘We don’t all think we’re too good for this place, Lady Muck.’

And then we were in one of our quarrels.

‘Mother, don’t let Grace call me Lady Muck.’

‘Now, girls.’

‘Then why is Nora always running the place down?’

‘Why is Grace always running
me
down?’

‘Girls, girls.’

‘Mother, tell Nora that one day she will be punished for her scorn.’

‘It is not scorn. It is not scorn at all.’

My mother considered her knitting. Was the wool khaki? Was it war-time? I think so.

‘Well, Nora, scorn is what it sounds like.’

My mother didn’t like me much. I first realized it when I was about six, and had started school, and had seen other children with their mothers. ‘You don’t like me much, do you?’ I asked one afternoon.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, child. The very idea! Never, never let me hear you say that again.’

It must have been hard on her, having to pretend. I can’t remember feeling deprived, as they say today, or holding it against her. To tell the truth, I didn’t like her much either. Our natures were antipathetic. It happens more often than is admitted.

I continued to wait, but in my obsessive patient walking I no longer met Dorothy Irey. She was about to become Dorothy Rainbow, having engaged herself to marry Bruce Rainbow, who worked in the Rural Bank, but who was now off to the war. I looked from her to him, and asked myself, ‘But why?’ I didn’t dare ask Grace, but at the wedding party I whispered to Olive Partridge, ‘But why?’

Olive shrugged. ‘He seems quite nice.’

‘But to marry? Would you?’

Olive looked round the room. ‘I wouldn’t marry any of them. I doubt if I’ll marry at all.’

Olive was to come into three hundred pounds a year when she was twenty-five. ‘And that very minute,’ she would say, ‘I’m off.’

But I could only wait. I made lampshades, soldier’s socks, beaded purses, and embroidered cushion covers. From beneath my eyebrows, I watched myself raise my arms to amass my hair at the back of my head. With sidelong glances, I turned my head this way and that, but there was no one to see. I made extravagantly long scarves, and had nowhere to wear them. I still accepted the waiting, hating it, but so sure of escape that I could wait without panic. I read Keats, Shelley, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and hundreds of novels, fastening on what fed my obsessions and skimming over what didn’t. Olive Partridge tried to make me read Shaw and Wells, but I told her (she reminded me of it years later) that they were ‘too grey’.

Blue and gold were my favourite colours. Madonna blue. Metallic gold. I wrote many short poems about my own—exquisite, of course—reactions to natural phenomena. Some of these were published in the Women’s Page of the
Courier
. When Grace read them aloud at the breakfast table, I listened for sarcasm, but detected none. Engaged to marry an absent soldier and busy with Dorothy Irey’s babies, Grace had become less severe about my shortcomings. ‘Very artistic,’ was all she said. ‘Refined’ and ‘artistic’ were words often used about me. I frowned when I heard them; I aspired to something of greater intensity.

My brother was killed in the trenches in France. So was Grace’s soldier, and all four of the boys under the camphor laurel trees. Poor boys. I can say it now. Distance and death have made me generous. Dorothy Rainbow’s husband came back.
When the war was over prices rose. My father, a surveyor in the Lands Department, had died when I was six. We needed money. I went to work for Cust the newsagent.

Cust the newsagent, a tall hovering man like his son, told me twice a week that if it weren’t for my widowed mother he would not keep me on. I washed my hair twice a week and brushed it every morning and night. I made white voile dresses with lace insertions, and drew designs for my own embroideries. Self-conscious now of my lonely walking, I turned into side streets rather than meet anyone I knew. Dorothy Rainbow, busy with house and babies, I never saw, but Grace answered my enquiries by saying with the old anger that of course she was happy.

‘Why shouldn’t she be? She has all any reasonable person could want.’

I no longer thought of Sir Lancelot. The war, and the boys under the camphor laurels, had obliterated him. But perhaps not quite. At intervals all through my life, sometimes at very long intervals, there has flashed on my inner vision the step of a horse, the nod of a plume, and at those times I have been filled for a moment with a strange chaotic grief.

At the Custs’ shop one day I wept and wept. Why? I can’t remember. But I remember how the skin across my cheekbones was stinging and sore from the pressure of my wet forearms, which were spread on the clammy oilcloth of the Custs’ kitchen table. When my weeping lost momentum I heard in its pauses the vacuous up-and-down march of piano scales played with boredom, and from nearby the sound of Mrs Cust scrubbing her hands at the kitchen sink. To soothe me, she spoke soothingly to her husband about the garden at the new house, and what it was doing to her hands. It must have been when the Custs were just about to move from the rooms over the shop to the big white house on the corner. The scales stopped. Both the Custs were looking at me. The rays of their glances penetrated
my hair and made medallions of discomfort on my scalp. Did I hear the word ‘hysteria’, or was it unspoken, but in the air? It is certain that Mrs Cust said to her husband that they must get Nora to make cushions for the new house.

‘Though it’s a shame to sit on them, they’re so pretty.’

I must have thought so too. I abandoned cushion covers for wall hangings, again drawing my own designs. Sometimes I sat over these until two in the morning, and the next day dozed in the stock room of the shop. Not the Custs’ shop now, but a shop in town, where I stood behind the counter in a grey smock and sold art materials. ‘I always knew Nora would end up doing something artistic,’ people said to my mother, and at last I began to panic. I no longer bought embroidery silks or the stuff for dresses. I paid my board to Grace and saved the rest. But this way of escape, so slow, did nothing to quell my panic. Panic would rise without warning in my chest, a bird with wings so strong it seemed they must break the bone.

I still suffered greatly from the heat, and on hot bright nights I would smear my skin with citronella, take a rug, and go and lie on my back on the lawn. All ugliness and panic were then obliterated. I was amazed and enthralled by the thickness and brilliance of the stars, by the rich darkness of the sky, and the ambiguous peacefulness of the blazing moon. In an aureole of turquoise the moon sailed across the sky, and as I watched, our block of land became a raft and began to move, sailing swiftly and smoothly in one direction while the moon and clouds went off in the other. But by this time my illusions were apt to be broken by impatience or self-consciousness, and soon the magic would pall, or I would hear Grace come down from the house, stamping towards me in indignation and crying that I was to come upstairs this very minute.