1915 (5 page)

“Thanks.”

He was close enough to feel the puff of breath that formed the word, a sweet-smelling association of saliva and warmed air. “That was kind of you,” she said in the next breath, while his heart pounded.

“Oh, I'm stiff,” Mrs Stinson spoke from her corner, “and freezing cold.” She thumped herself into a new position. The tail-end of Frances's gaze disappeared into a secret hiding place that closed over. “Nobody will sleep now that I'm awake,” commanded the old lady. She revealed a florid capability that had not been visible the night before, pointing to her hamper on the luggage rack and directing Walter to fetch it down. “Let's have breakfast!” The giggle of her youth had aged to a hum of glee.

They picnicked.

Walter displayed a vast appetite.

Mrs Stinson talked. All she did was babble about the district and town, yet with little thrusts of comment she accentuated their differing backgrounds: commercial and pastoral, Catholic and Protestant (though here Frances revealed that she wasn't a “real” Catholic, it was her father), their difference in age, their geographical separation. Her talk of marriages made Frances seem more desirable but remoter than ever. Walter's gloomy disposition wove a meaning that for the old lady was not there at all. “Men are never what you expect,” she finished, “it's the best and worst thing about 'em.” Walter remembered afterwards how Frances had looked at him then. But no rescue was possible — the grey dawn nailed his isolation down in unadventurous light as the train slid through Redfern.

What should he say to Frances? “I'm sorry I ate so much,” he said, and immediately cursed himself. “I enjoyed the trip.”

“Thanks for keeping us company,” she smiled.

“Perhaps we could — ?” Walter heard himself talking through cotton wool. He wanted to say something about the Christmas holidays, but at Central a tall nun with half a dozen St Catherine's girls swept along the platform. What could be said that would not take minutes even to get started on? The girls carried her away.

“The Duke was a bore.”

“Fran!”

“I'm all for excitement and impulse.” Frances tied the belt of her seventeenth birthday present, a kimono, and perched on a stool.

“So am I. But Antonio, how could you have liked him?” Diana consulted her
Twelfth Night
programme, “A sea-captain.” Through the dressing table mirror she watched Frances uncap a jar of Mrs Reilly's face cream, then pegged her flannelette nightdress out like a tent and collapsed inside it. “I'm all for the mind.”

She flopped on her back and bicycled somewhat stocky calves. “I can see through you, Franny. It was just the actor, you babbled about him all the way to the ferry.”

“Harcourt Beatty is an artist.”

“Would you really run off with — Antonio?”

“For a night or two.”

“Fran!”

“I'm old enough.” And Diana squeaked again.

While spreading clots of face cream Frances asked: “How old is the Maharanee of Tikari?”

“The same as you. No, a year younger.”

“The Maharanee of Tikari,” Frances read from the folded
Herald
, “danced a cakewalk with her father and then with her bright engaging Indian secretary Miss Knighton.”

“I say.”

“But,” Frances's all-white face looked ghastly as she turned to raise a finger, “finally she danced with Mr Niblo.”

“Mr Niblo.”

“Upstairs,” dared Frances, masked and reckless.

“Stop!”

“
In bed
.” That was the finish.

Later when the lights were out they talked again.

“Fran? Do you know what they do?”

“Niblos and Maharanees? Oh, Di. I thought you were all for the mind?”

“I am.” A longer silence, then: “Remember when Olivia says wilt-though-go-to-bed-Malvolio? I know what happens.”

So Frances breathlessly asked the ceiling: “How?”

Her father, a captain at Victoria Barracks, and her mother, Diana explained, were just mad some nights about getting to bed early. She and her brother could see everything through the big iron keyhole. Some of these things Frances had guessed. How could it be otherwise? But the tangled clash of anatomy, the fever, the uncouth cries, the extension and the parting of skin and the mounting clamour of ecstasy — she felt tumbled and tossed in the same process, for Diana had spared nothing, shocking them both to silence.

When the clock below chimed midnight Diana said, “Fran? Are you awake?”

Frances had been thinking of candid modern girls in books. How astonishing that Diana, not Frances herself, might be like them.

“Fran? Are we still friends?”

In the morning they ate a late breakfast while Mrs Reilly went to church with Harry Crowell.

“I'll bet Adeline Genée's got a lover,” stated Diana.

“She's impossibly dedicated — she says.” Frances scraped her chair, curtsied, and danced Genée's part around the sunlit kitchen: first to fifth positions, pointing in first and second positions, fourth position on the points, adagio, watching or seeing (“Where's Mum and Harry?”), listening pose (“What's Harry saying to Mum now?”), fingers to eyes, fingers to ears. How silly!

“That's your future!” clapped Diana.

“You're just saying it.” Frances was puffed. “Anyway — I want to be — more serious.” She sat again at the table.

“What's this?”

“More serious.” Frances saw herself as she spoke: flushed, sounding false. “Even Genée, I know she's supposed to be a great artist, but she's not, is she? That's only what the papers say.”

“She says it too.”

“The trouble is I can't
do
anything. Look at my dance.” She flapped a hand dismissively. “Why is Genée spending all this time in Australia if she really is great? I should stick to the piano.”

Diana floated her pink face over the shattered egg-shells and stared: “Do you ever feel, vaguely, that you're
bound
to do something in the end? Fated?”

“Why, yes.”

“Do you ever feel, whatever comes, that bad things are going to happen to other people, but not to you?”

“Yes I do.” She looked at Diana respectfully. Then with suspicion.

“That you're special. Really special?”

“Mmm. Now for the catch.”

“There isn't one. It's just that everyone feels like that, up to a point. We might or we mightn't,
you
might or you mightn't. Nature wants us to try. It's one of the tricks of evolution.”

“What do you think personally? About me.”

Diana peered into her tea leaves: “I see a man, a handsome squatter from the western plains, broad verandas — wait! — here he comes, leather leggings, moustache — crikey, that's bad — he's not even taking them off.”

“What?”

“The leggings.”

“This started seriously.”

Diana lowered the cup. “I'll be someone's governess, or a nun, eh?” She smiled sourly. “Sister Bernadette thought I was plain enough to be a nun.”

“They wanted that for all of us. Anyway you're not plain.”

“You'll be a wife, Fran.”

Sometimes Diana was too disappointingly realistic. Yet in all this Frances saw her friend's defences: the moats and walls of an intelligent girl who considered herself unattractive, though she wasn't.

“Let's go for a walk,” Frances suggested. Arm in arm, their diverging destinies reunited. Both wore button-up boots, long dark skirts, wide sleeved cotton blouses and straw hats with the brims tipped back: they might have been sisters. In the park Frances ran ahead to untangle a small boy's kite from a bush, becoming friendly enough in the end to send him off with a kiss — at which Diana laughed. When two young men passed and lifted their hats (but really, they seemed more interested in each other: some men were), Frances
muttered “smile, smile” through a tortured mouth while Diana reddened. After a while they settled themselves on a bench near the water and listened to the smack of wavelets.

“I love it here,” said Frances, conscious of using the same phrase every time she came. She believed Sydney Harbour to be a concentration of desirable — or bearable — Australianness: grand houses among gum trees, the glittering antipodean sunlight on desperately deep green water, all within sight of art galleries, theatres, institutes of music, literature, and languages. Here the freight of Europe was unloaded and displayed for the first time: hats and gowns, books, plays, dances, songs. And ideas. Diana, who was “all mind” no longer, had first interested her in talking about imponderables.

“Di,” she heard herself saying, “aren't we fools?”

“Speak for yourself.” Diana the botanist scrutinized a tuft of banksia blossom.

“Do you think we're just meant for men?”

“In natural respects, yes. Or them for us.” Down corkscrewed the blossom.

“What a complication other people are.”

“Oh, yes.” Now Diana sighed, seeing her multitude of eagerly pursued scientific rules float into society where they lost their power. In this resided a bitter magic. She cursed the way underlying rules were no help in dealing with the phenomena they sprang from.

“I think Harry likes Mum.”

“It's plain.”

“How pathetic. He's reached the age, Mum says, when people feel sorry for a man.”

“He's kind of sapless.” They giggled, and glanced back through the park because church was well and truly over.

“Boccaccio! Boccaccio!” sang Frances, alluding to the Mosman Musical Society's production, in which Harry had played a stockinged, floppy-hatted, rather wet Leonetto, despite his muscular torso.

“
Nulli Secundus!
” boomed Diana, the motto of the Alexander School of Arms and Physical Culture where Harry “toned up”. They had rendezvoused with him at its door the night of
The Devil's Disciple
, Harry rougered from a vapour bath, and he had spoken of the atmosphere of “airy persiflage” with which his “fellow-scholars of Hercules” tackled their tasks. Frances had tripped along behind holding her nose, while her mother and Diana flanked and flattered him.

 

Walking back to the house Frances suddenly thought of Walter Gilchrist. Diana knew all about Billy and the attempted kiss, she'd known right from the start of term; and she knew about Walter too. “He's respectful,” Frances had said, “but dull.”

“Oh gosh,” now in the middle of everything Frances jerked to a stop and bit her fingers. “He was there!”

“Where? Who?”

“Walter Gilchrist was at the play.” She saw again the frizzy-headed youth who had twice turned and stared at her during the brief interval before the last act.

“Remember?”

“Me? Why should I?”

Frances again reviewed the train trip. He could have been — was! — handsome. On the train he had seemed boyish, angular, unformed. But his stare at the theatre really had cut through her. She had felt it as the steely
investigation of a stranger. No words, no polite concessions: a cut so deep that only now, twelve hours later, did it arrive on her nerves.

“Piffle,” said Diana at the gate.

Frances creaked the hinges back and forth. “Mrs Stinson wanted me to like him.”

“Is that important?” Diana disliked Mrs Stinson. The old lady had too much time for Frances. “Franny, you blow so hot and cold I can't keep up.”

 

“Here's the remarkable pair!” beamed Harry as Frances and Diana burst through the door. The girls quizzed him, why “remarkable”? one on either side, elbows on table, faces mockingly up-close, while Mrs Reilly dispensed cold meat and tomatoes, relish, bread, butter, and thick-lipped teacups. She bubbled, a thin woman, brown, still with her daughter's very black hair: “Yes Harry, you'll have to tell them.”

“Why, you'll take on anyone, gods and kings.” For a moment his chair rocked backwards as he withdrew from their gaze.

“Tell us about your God, Harry.”

“Frances,” warned her mother from the pantry, but without force.

“Describe him,” urged Diana.

“How could I? He's more, you know, everywhere.”

“Like the wind? You're one of us!”

“A pantheist,” said Diana.

“If I could put my finger on it I'd tell you.”

“Has he ever spoken to you?”

“Or you to him?”

Diana giggled, spraying flecks of pink tomato on her white plate.

Mrs Reilly cleared her throat. “Harry's God lives in England, eh Harry?” She meant to be kind.

“Now that's unfair.” He pointed his knife, not miffed but welcoming mature debate. “I've a great admiration for the English. Which of us here isn't scrubbed by John Bull's brush, heh?”

“We're Irish,” Frances asserted, choosing her father's side of the family.

“We're — Italian!” announced Diana, choosing her great-grandfather's.

“Seriously,” asked Frances after a break. “Why is England superior?” She believed it herself, everyone did, but resented Harry's bumbling arguments.

“You ask me?” Now, excitedly, the pointing knife swung in his own direction. Butter smeared his waistcoat. “Without England, all of this” — he indicated the harbour which glittered through three of six windows — “might be French or German or Chinese!”

During the baked custard Harry suddenly stopped eating. “You girls don't like me, do you.” He held up a hand against their protests, “No” — folding his napkin, “Mrs Reilly” — scraping his chair and stiffly bowing, “I'd better be off, what-ho?” — making a last brave exit which Mrs Reilly pursued.

They were ages at the gate. When Mrs Reilly came back she sat the girls down.

“The world is full of Harrys. He means well, but you can't expect him to be — intellectual.”

Her choice of word flattered them.

“What can't stand must give way.” Frances used Diana's phrase (from Evolution), though Diana wouldn't have dared it herself, not at the moment.

“No —” Diana wanted peace. She stirred the pages of an encyclopaedia, head down.

“He's mushy as wet bread.”

“That's Franny's cruel streak,” said her mother, dealing coolly with a fact.

Standing with her back to the room Frances looked at the harbour; Diana sat stranded between the forces of loyalty and those of politeness; Mrs Reilly, after her pronouncement, toyed with objects in the room — examined a painted glass vase, straightened a picture, plumped cushions. Then she raised the heavy shell of the piano lid and pounded (to Diana's ears) a set of heavy scales. “Schubert,” she smiled. At first the notes seemed of the same length, firmness, colour, but they altered as they ascended, reaching a point where the lunch and its aftermath were taken care of — shaved flat, shaped anew, and distributed to the floor, the walls, the ceilings of a house made over again, bearing no trace of dissension.

Hearing her mother play reconciled Frances to their differences. One mother retreated, the cloudy one, another advanced, the beautiful one: clear as her vases. The familiar Schubert impromptus did this, with their hesitations, their rollicking advances. And then the way Mum started again, Schubert started again — art started again! — swirling the tiny coloured pieces of the world's vast jigsaw-puzzle into their correct positions. A cloud here, there the churned wake of a ferry — but soon the notes alone inhabited Frances's head and she stopped thinking. She bobbed on a phrase, then stroked elatedly up harbour-reaches of sound to a place where emotion needed no object to fix on, but simply was.

At four thirty Amos Hart came, a man more to their taste: solid as cedar, and intelligent under his uncomplicated manner. Monday being a holiday Diana was to stay on. Music had transformed their inner clashes, and seemed effective on the world as well: the late afternoon glowed deep as a domed jelly, now with lime and lemon, later with raspberry and the sunken port wine colours of evening.