Tirra Lirra by the River (8 page)

‘It wouldn’t have occurred to most women then,’ I say, ‘though some must wish it had.’

‘Not too awful, I suppose, as long as they could travel with a man for protection. Jack and I are going over to Clayfield this morning, Nora, with some plants for our daughter-in-law. But we’ll be home in time for your lunch. And to get you up, I hope. Gordon Rainbow said he will try to get here about half past ten.’

‘And he said I could get up?’

‘He thinks so, for a while. Oh yes, and I brought you a pawpaw. I left it in the kitchen. It’s not quite ripe yet.’

At about nine o’clock Lyn Wilmot comes.

‘A pawpaw! They’re not ripe here yet. It must have been sent down to them from Cairns. People are always sending the Custs things. Not that they need it. Oh well, to them that hath! That old newsagent’s shop—you know that old newsagent’s shop they had, with the great big backyard?’

‘Yes. Somebody used to practise scales,’ I say slowly, ‘in the sitting room above the shop.’

‘I wouldn’t know. Long before my time. What I was going to say is, there’s a supermarket there now. A hundred thousand, the Custs are supposed to have got for the site. And just afterwards, Mrs Cust’s mother died, and Mrs Cust got
her
place. And what happened? Ampol bought it!’

But I am still hearing those piano scales, and am wondering why they give me a sense of uneasiness, even of danger. For what can be dangerous about the Custs, the innocent Custs? ‘Does Mr Cust play the piano?’ I ask.

‘Wouldn’t have a clue. When are you going to be let up, by the way?’

Her voice is sullen this morning, her manner incipiently aggressive. Because she is tiring of her task, she is beginning to bully me. I should be happy to be oblivious of such portents, but after my term in Una Porteous’s house, such innocence could hardly be expected of me.

Lyn Wilmot moves slowly about the room, dusting and setting things straight.

‘High time you were let up.’

‘I hope it will be today.’ And I add apologetically, ‘I didn’t dream I would be so long in bed. If I had, I would have gone to a hospital.’

‘
He
should have known. Doctor Smith would have known. I wouldn’t have Doctor Rainbow if you paid me. Doctor Smith’s good. We’ve had Doctor Smith ever since we’ve been here.’

I try to deflect her anger. ‘And how long is that, Mrs Wilmot?’

‘Best part of three years.’

‘Then you would hardly have had a chance to know my sister.’

‘Not to know her, no. She wasn’t easy to know, was she? I got on all right with her, what I saw of her, but Gary and her had a big row about her mango tree shading our vegetable bed. That big mango out the back.’

‘So the old mango tree is still there!’

‘I’ll say it’s still there! Not that it’s any good to anyone. It’s the
old sort with fibrous fruit. But never mind—she wouldn’t have parted with that mango tree for one million dollars.’

Again I am reminded of Una Porteous, who also liked to use the figure of one million for emphasis. ‘I would not see husband and wife unhappy,’ she used to say, ‘for one million pounds.’

Or happy, I used to think, for two million.

Lyn Wilmot’s resemblance to Una Porteous is becoming more remarkable by the minute. Again she is dusting with her husband’s worn singlet, and after shaking it out of the window, she stays there for a while, looking up and down the street with the same strange aimless longing with which Una Porteous used to look up and down the street from her front door. That, if anything could have, might have reconciled me to Una Porteous.

But when Lyn Wilmot turns into the room again, she resumes her dusting in a manner more slouching and sullen than ever.

‘Wouldn’t you think that with all his money your nephew would have had you live down there with him, instead of up here all alone?’

I open the drawer of my bedside table and write on my shopping list, ‘yellow duster’. Then I close the drawer and say, ‘I loathe living in other people’s houses, Mrs Wilmot. I loathe it.’

‘Yes, but when you think of it, when it comes down to tin tacks, if it wasn’t for the Custs having nothing to do with their time … what I mean to say is, it’s okay living alone as long as you’re not a burden on others.’

Also like Una Porteous, she disowns her arrow as soon as it reaches its mark. ‘Not that I mean anything by that! Oh, I hope you don’t think I
mean
 …’

I interrupt these protestations. ‘Of course you didn’t, my dear.’

‘Oh, I could cut out my tongue.’

It is really too bad that I should be afflicted with this reincarnation of Una Porteous. But I smile, and beg her not to cut out her tongue. I turn the conversation to enquire about her two little girls. I ask their names and ages, and express interest in their schooling.

‘And are they as pretty as you?’ I ask at last.

‘I don’t know about pretty. They’re all right, I suppose.’

But her grudging tone cannot conceal her pleasure. She flicks her husband’s singlet about at a great rate. ‘I’ll just run down and bring up your newspaper before I go. Mrs Cust must’ve forgotten it. Now there’s nothing else you want?
Sure?
’

I suppose that is how I ought to have treated Una Porteous from the start, but in those days I should have been ashamed, for her as well as for myself, if I had employed such crude tactics. And so, instead of lashing out with flattery when cornered, I allowed my feelings to show, in one way or another, and by the time I had learned the defensive uses of flattery, and had deteriorated enough to enjoy the private revenge to be gained from watching it work, it was too late to heal the breach made by my initial frankness, although not too late to spread a smear of false goodwill over my relations with her. Coarse fighting would have been healthier, but I doubt if I could have kept it up for all the time I lived in her house.

Five years. Five years of waste, and worse than waste, and all unnecessary. In that famous Depression there were pockets of prosperity. Colin never lost his job, though he constantly said (and perhaps believed) that ‘for all he knew, this week would be his last.’ It was winter when we went there, and outside the window of the bedroom assigned to us stood a lemon tree heavy with fruit. I took fire from the yellow and green and asked Colin if I might make new curtains and a bedcover. I explained that when we got our own place, I would adapt them, and since both bed and windows were bare, he had to agree.

‘Better get good stout stuff though,’ he said.

I rang Lewie and told him I was coming into town, and after buying the good stout stuff I met him on Farmer’s corner. It was only a fortnight since I had seen him, and I was shocked by the change in him, his look of poverty and illness.

‘Thank God for the bourgeoisie!’ he said when he saw me.

That night I gave the bill for the material to Colin. In the train on the way home, I had had a revulsion against pretending to lose the change, and had determined to tell the truth, and face it out.

‘I lent the change to Lewie Johns,’ I said.

‘You what?’

‘He was hungry.’

‘How do you know he was hungry?’

‘He told me so when I met him.’

‘Ah,’ said Colin. Colin never lost his temper. ‘So you met him?’

‘Yes.’

‘By appointment?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you gave him, let me see,’ said Colin, consulting the bill, ‘you gave him one pound, three and sixpence, of my money.’

‘Yes.’

‘Right!’ said Colin.

I dared not challenge his ominous composure. He was the only other inhabitant of my domain. I made white curtains and a yellow bedcover, and varnished the floor black. I was fortunate in the unpapered walls—all I had to do was kalsomine them white—and as for the massive hideous wardrobe and dressing table, I simply determined not to look at that side of the room any more than I could help. Una Porteous offered me a mat with roses on it, but I, too fired by my scheme for tact, cried no, no, no, I would make a hooked one. ‘Who does she think
she
is?’
Her bridling shoulders said it as she turned away. In retrospect I can understand her offence, but at the time I hardly noticed. I polished the brass bedstead and painted a honey jar white and filled it with flowers from the garden. And I was delighted, when I had finished, because I had made it from so little.

‘It is hard and unfemin-
ine
, if you ask me,’ said Una Porteous.

‘It’s all right,’ said Colin.

My half room and my husband became my only pleasures. Lying under the yellow bedcover, I would watch Colin undress, and as he was getting into bed I would reach out, and pull him down towards me, and sigh with relief at the contact. One night he said quietly that not every man liked his wife to behave like a whore, and a few weeks later he cried in spontaneous anger, ‘Look, just lie still, will you? That’s all you have to do.’

Whether my submissiveness is ingrained or was implanted I do not know. I only know that all open aggression on my part, in whatever field, has always led me to sorrow and retreat. But beneath my renewed submission a sour rebellion lay. I was told that there was no money for fares to the city. ‘We can think ourselves lucky,’ said Colin, ‘to have a roof over our heads, and food to eat.’

‘And besides,’ said Una, ‘when our local shops are having such a thin time, it’s them we should deal off, and not go traipsing into town all the time.’

I didn’t have a penny. I would certainly have tried to fiddle the housekeeping money, only, Colin now gave it to Una Porteous.

‘It’s Mum’s house, after all.’

‘Yes, and I am sure Nora wouldn’t begrudge me handling the money in my own home.’

I asked for a small allowance, and Colin said he would think about it. A fortnight later I asked if he had thought about it.

‘Thought about what?’ he said to his shaving mirror.

‘My allowance.’

‘What allowance?’

‘You must remember.’

‘Must I?’ He was inclined to be humorous. ‘Well, I don’t.’

I went back to the beginning and made my request again. When I had finished he pulled his mouth awry to tauten the skin under the blade. A minute passed in silence except for the scrape of the razor. Then he leaned forward and looked intently into his own eyes.

‘But why bring that up when I am shaving?’

He was shaving, he was reading the newspaper, he was just about to turn on the wireless, he had to go out and mow the lawn, he must get his eight hours sleep.

‘Then when
can
we discuss it?’ I cried at last.

‘One day soon, don’t worry.’

But when I asked again, ‘one day soon’, he sighed heavily, folded his arms, and raised his eyes to the ceiling. In that attitude, he heard me out, and then rose and left the room without a word in reply. I lost my head, and followed him, and threw myself against his silence, railing.

‘If you’ll excuse me saying so,’ said Una Porteous, ‘you don’t know how to
handle
a man.’

Unable to entreat any longer without utter abasement, I stopped. And a little later, when I mentioned moving to a place of our own, and Colin replied with surprise, ‘But why should we move? We’re quite comfortable here,’ I knew it was the reply I had inwardly expected, and that I must speak of moving no more.

Ever since my marriage, in my letters to my mother and Grace, pride had made me pretend to a perfect tranquility, but one day, while writing to my mother, my guard crashed down and I let pour forth on the paper a long and passionate complaint. It was Grace who replied, with an exhortation to duty, unselfishness, and common sense. She remarked how strange it was that Colin, about whose virtues I was always boasting, had developed these dreadful characteristics ‘all of a sudden’. She felt she was sure that now I had had time to cool down I would be seeing things once more in their proper perspective. She said that she was ’a great believer in working with the material to hand …

‘… and not crying for the moon, which has always been your big drawback, Nora.’

She then gave a page of trifling news items, and ended with a request not to write any more letters like that, ‘because they worry poor mother’.

I tore her letter into tiny pieces, flushed them down the lavatory, and ran from the house. I went to the local shops, one by one, and asked for work. Of the people I asked, I remember nothing but their refusals. Only for the newsagent’s wife. I can still see her angry face as she replied.

‘You’ve got a nerve, Mrs Porteous. Thousands out of work, men hungry, yet here you are asking for work. You with a husband to keep you!’

I walked to the next suburb, where nobody knew me, and went from shop to shop. I would have done anything, but nobody wanted anything done. In my beautiful dress, I walked the streets like an invisible person. I went home and wrote to Lewie.

It was returned a week later, marked
Address Unknown
. I rang Ida.

‘I can’t say where he is, love. All I know is, he’s done a bunk. I think he owed so many bits of money, here and there, that in
the end it embarrassed him to see people. Even me, though I told him and told him.’

My few books, all poetry, became useless to me. My panicky mind blocked the rhythms and garbled the words, and very soon I began to wonder what I had ever seen in them. The only other books in the house were school texts, and the nearest free library was my old haunt in the city. A neighbour lent me
The Forsyte Saga
, and I still associate it so firmly with that period of my life that even the names of the characters depress me. I refused to watch it on television with Hilda and Liza and Fred.

‘Say Soames,’ said Liza, ‘and she screams.’

But in spite of the comedy I made of my marriage for my friends at number six, I see now how extremely selective I was, and how many incidents and areas of feeling I did not touch upon, or could not have touched upon, because I had forgotten them until now. I had forgotten how increasingly sly I became. Outwardly calm now, and ingratiating, I would await the opportunity to steal threepences and sixpences from Una’s purse or Colin’s trousers.