T
he summer grass was cool against Sabiha’s bare feet. She sat in the broken shadows under the willow tree. The great old tree leaned far out over the river. It formed a canopy of restless shade on the water, the water glinting and delayed in its smooth run against the bank, the ducks looking about as they sailed upstream. John Patterner lay on his back behind her, his big hands clasped under his head. He was looking at her, his eyes half closed. She was watching the vivid green weeds trailing in the water, imagining them to be the long tails of exotic fish. She broke another piece from the remains of the baguette and crumbled the soft bread between her palms. She tossed the crumbs out onto the sparkling water. The two adult ducks with their five chicks paddled after the crumbs. Sabiha hugged her knees and watched the ducks feeding on
her offering. The river’s breath was cold, metallic in the shade of the tree, as if the water carried the approaching evening. She hugged her knees tighter to her chest.
John Patterner’s voice came from behind her softly. ‘I love you.’
She turned and looked at him. ‘You mustn’t keep saying that. You can’t love someone you’ve known for less than a day.’
‘I’ve known you forever.’
She smiled at the idea, knowing it carried its own mysterious truth for them. It
was
forever. This morning on the train was a faraway time. Those two people sitting beside each other in the carriage like awkward strangers this morning were not these two people lying under the willows by the river. And at the door of the cathedral, when he stopped her as they were about to enter and said solemnly, ‘Through this portal is the way to eternal life.’ Not yet certain of him, she asked, ‘Are you religious?’ His mother, he said, had been brought up Catholic, but had not bothered with religion after she met his father. ‘And you?’ he asked her. She told him proudly of her father’s hopes for the people, and of his devout atheism. ‘I’ve never been inside a mosque.’
‘You’re glowing in this light,’ he said.
She lifted her head and pushed back her hair with both hands, and she closed her eyes and declaimed in
her mother tongue, ‘I am the colour of the sands of the desert at evening.’
He was awed by her, enchanted by the mysterious sound of her language. ‘That’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘What does it mean?’
She told him the meaning of the words. ‘That is their meaning and it is
not
their meaning,’ she said. ‘Their meaning is in the Arabic only. It is not in the French. In French these words mean something else. Something less.’ It was from her grandmother she had received these words, from her mother’s mother. The opening line of an antique song. She felt his admiration like sunlight on her body and she wanted to sing for him, but she was too shy.
‘I’ll always love only you,’ he said seriously.
She laughed at him. ‘How do you know that? You might meet a beautiful woman one day who will seduce you.’
‘Don’t joke about it,’ he said. He reached and gently pulled her down beside him.
She was unresisting and lay back on the grass with him. ‘I’ll sing my songs for you one day.’
He took her in his arms. ‘I’ll learn your language,’ he said. ‘So that I will understand them.’
She loved the feeling of his strong body against her.
‘My language is too difficult for you. You will never understand it,’ she said. ‘It is better not to try.’
They were silent in each other’s arms, the whispering of the breeze in the branches of willow overhead.
‘There will never be anyone else, Sabiha,’ he said. ‘That’s my pledge to you.’
She said nothing to his earnestness, his desire to impress her with his belief, his urgent need to acknowledge between them a binding commitment. She was thrilled to hear it on his lips. But it was too much. It was too soon. It weighed her down. She wanted to hear it and she didn’t want to hear it. What she wanted was to laugh with him. To run and play and hide with him, the way children play and hide and tease each other. ‘Your eyes are the colour of Tolstoy’s eyes,’ she said.
He laughed at this and took her hand in his and kissed her fingertips. ‘So how do you know what colour Tolstoy’s eyes were?’
‘You can take a look for yourself later,’ she said. ‘He’s our landlord’s old wolfhound. His eyes have seen into vast distances, like yours. His ancestors hunted wolves on the steppes of Russia.’ She kissed him quickly on the cheek and said, ‘Is that one of the things you can turn your hand to, Monsieur Patterner—hunting wolves on the steppes of Australia?’
He bent his head to her and their lips met in a long, gentle kiss. Afterwards they lay side by side on the grass holding hands.
She removed her hand from his and raised herself on her elbow and looked down at him. ‘You didn’t tell me yet why you wanted to go to Scotland?’ Would he still go? she wondered. Or had he really changed all his plans now?
He opened his eyes. The hanging willows moved in the breeze above her head, back and forth, like the emerald weed in the river. ‘We could stay here forever,’ he said. ‘We could disappear from our old lives and live here together. Just you and me, till the end of our days.’
‘Houria would be upset. She’d miss me.’ She stroked his cheek. It was rough and unshaved. ‘You didn’t shave this morning before you came to see me,’ she said, playfully reproving him.
‘I was in a hurry. Do you mind?’
‘I like it. Isn’t there someone who’d be upset if you disappeared?’
He thought about it. ‘My mother. Dad too, for sure. And I suppose my sister. And one particular friend. I don’t think anyone else would notice.’
‘You are so serious,’ she said. ‘So why did you leave your home and go so far away if they miss you?
Why did you want to go to Scotland? You haven’t told me anything yet.’
He laughed. How could he tell her of his need to get away from Australia? His feeling of being stifled by everything. His French wasn’t good enough for it. His longing just to
be
somewhere else. How could he make sense of that for her? Taking himself halfway around the world. ‘Everybody does it,’ he said. ‘It’s what Australians do.’ He had been getting away from himself as much as going to Scotland. She might think he was subject to sudden irrational changes of heart if he told her this. ‘I’ve got a good friend who was born in Glasgow,’ he said. ‘Harold Robinson. Harold was the librarian at my school. He’s an old man. Harold’s always been an old man. Ever since I met him. He collects books on Scotland and lives in Melbourne these days. He’s been retired for ages. He told me all about Scotland when I was a boy. We’ve been friends since I was thirteen. I wanted to see the place he came from.’
She ran her fingers lightly over his lips, then leaned down and brushed her own lips against his, then withdrew, teasing him. ‘I wish we could just stay here all night. Not forever. Just for tonight. And watch the moon come up.’ She touched his lips with her fingers, then his unshaved cheeks and his forehead, and ran
her forefinger along the bridge of his nose. ‘You’ve got a beautiful nose, John Patterner,’ she said. ‘It’s strong and confident. Are you sure you’re not one of us?’
He took her in his arms and kissed her.
There was a fluttering in her belly and she thought of the child waiting inside her. She gasped and, suddenly, she could not hold back her tears.
He drew away. ‘What is it? What’s wrong? What did I do? I’m sorry, Sabiha.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not you. It’s nothing.’ She wiped at her tears. ‘I’m just happy. I often cry. Mostly I don’t know why I cry.’ Was this man to be the father of her child? Did her body know something already? She felt a sudden sharp fear that she would lose him. A shift of his desire, a failure of the mood between them, and he would be gone, off on his travelling, and they would never see each other again. She pulled him against her strongly and ran her hands along his flanks. ‘You are so beautiful, John Patterner!’ She kissed him hard on the mouth, then drew away, releasing him abruptly, abashed by her clumsiness.
He smiled and touched her cheek. ‘You’re crazy,’ he said gently. ‘I love you being crazy.’
‘Am I? Do you?’
‘I love you.’ He kissed her lips. ‘Come on! We’ll miss the train,’ he said. ‘You’d better get your shoes on.
I promised your aunt I’d get you home before dark.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’ve got seven minutes to get to the station.’
She wanted to be meek now, obedient and under his command if that was what he wanted from her. She sat up and put on her shoes. She wanted it to be real between them, not just a dream.
He stood up and held out his hand and she took it and he helped her up.
‘We’ve got the rest of our lives,’ he said.
They held hands and hurried across the bridge. ‘What will we do?’ she asked him. So they had made their pledge to each other after all. It frightened her and moved her all at once. ‘I’m happy,’ she said, hoping it was true, and she kissed him on the cheek.
‘We’ll have a wonderful life,’ he said. ‘Whatever we do. I just know we will. It doesn’t matter what we do.’
They walked through the town and around the bottom of the hill to the railway station; breaking into a run, their laughter floating up the hill behind them.
As she saw them coming through the door of the café Houria said to herself with satisfaction, John Patterner is a man to be relied on. And that is how John came
to be there in Chez Dom for their first Saturday night, proving himself a useful man to have about the place, rearranging tables and chairs and serving coffee and wine and taking the initiative with this and that as he saw a need for it. He was at ease with the men, his manner polite and respectful, making them smile with his peculiar French. And Houria and Sabiha were glad to have his help, for more men turned up for the evening meal than the dining room of Chez Dom could comfortably accommodate. Houria had to send him next door to André's to borrow two folding tables and some extra chairs, leaving him to find a way to squeeze them all in somehow, which he did.
After the last customer had gone home and the three of them had finished cleaning up, they sat in the little sitting room under the stairs and drank coffee with a drop of brandy in it and laughed about the mad rush of the evening and how it had all gone so well, the three of them working together like a practised team. Houria counted the money and offered to pay John for his time. But he refused it and would not hear any more about it from her. She saw he was offended by the offer of the money and she was pleased. By the time John finally got up off the couch to return to Madame du Bartas’s boarding house, it was after one o’clock in the morning. At the front door Houria squeezed his arm
and told him to be sure to come back for his breakfast in the morning. ‘But don’t be too early,’ she said.
She and Sabiha stood at the door and watched him walking down the deserted street until he reached the empty square. He turned under the light and looked back and waved, and they waved to him. Houria said, ‘It doesn’t seem right to be sending him off into the night on his own like this.’
When he’d gone they went back inside the café and closed the door. Houria turned to Sabiha and they hugged each other. ‘He’s a lovely man,’ she said. ‘It was good to have a man about the place again.’ And then both of them shed a few tears, for they were overtired and rather excited. And anyway it was nice to have a cry. It had been a very long day.
There was just the one little thing clouding the perfection of all this for Sabiha. On the landing at the top of the stairs, after she’d said goodnight to Houria, she paused at the door of her bedroom and, with considerable concern in her voice, said, ‘I just don’t know what we’re going to do.’
Houria smiled and told her, ‘Don’t try sorting out the rest of your life tonight, darling. You’ll see, it’ll all work out in the most unexpected ways.’
And so they went off to bed in their separate rooms and both of them lay awake thinking about everything
for a very long time. Houria was the first to go to sleep—Sabiha heard her snoring through the door. Then Sabiha herself went to sleep. She dreamed she was at home in El Djem in her own bed, her sister Zahira sleeping in the bed next to her. She was comforted by the crack of light coming under the door just the way it used to when she was a little girl, knowing it signified that her dear father was sitting up late composing one of his pamphlets for the movement. She wanted to get up and go out to him and put her arms around his shoulders and kiss him on his unshaved cheek and tell him she was happy. But she couldn’t move.
A
bitterly cold January morning, two and a half years after Sabiha and John had spent their day together in Chartres. Sabiha was holding the back door of the café open for John. It was still dark outside, the light from the kitchen spilling into the laneway. A blast of frigid air drove down the lane and Sabiha drew back, almost losing her grip on the door.
John leaned down and kissed her on the cheek as he went past, raising his voice against the wind. ‘See you later, darling.’ He stepped out into the lane, turning his head aside from the needles of sleet whipping against his cheeks. His overcoat collar was turned up and he was wearing a green woollen scarf around his neck and a black cap on his head, the shiny peak of the cap catching the light like a startled eye as he went by her. John had not shaved and he looked older, a man with
cares and responsibilities that did not sit easily with him just at this moment. He bent forward and hurried across to the van, carrying the last tray of the day’s orders, the white cloth lifting and flapping, pinned at two corners by his thumbs.
Sabiha watched him struggling to slide the tray into the back of the van. The runners he had made to take the trays were not perfectly square and there was always a bit of jiggling to be done to get the trays to slide in. He was forever promising to take the runners out and realign them. But he never did. His skill at carpentry, it had turned out, was more make-do than pretty good. He knocked things together and declared them near enough. His heart wasn’t in it. It was all temporary for him. Not part of a life’s work, but measures for the time being. He stood back and closed the van doors, turned and gave her a wave, then went around to the driver’s side. He yanked the door open and climbed in. His tall frame was too big for the tiny cabin and he had to hunch himself up to fit in.
Crouched in the cab, John was evidently a man in some kind of diving bell about to descend into the solitary depths. His mother, had she been able to see him at this moment, would have laughed at him; her laughter fond, loving, good-natured, amused and pained by the lanky fool her boy had turned into.
‘Look at yourself, John!’ she would have shouted at him. As she often had. ‘Look at yourself!’ So he did, seeing himself through his mother’s eyes more readily than through his own—and laughed, too, at the man he was, the man he had
become.
A puzzle not only to his mother but to himself as well. His mother had seen herself in him and encouraged him to travel, imagining the remedy might lie in seeing the world: ‘Get out and see the world or you’ll end up like your father, stuck here in the back blocks for the rest of your days.’ His father grinned to hear her say such things. His father loved the farm. His father was a contented man and had no need of the great world; it was enough for Jim Patterner to have his thirty breeders and a good bull and to grow his crops of pumpkins and tomatoes on the narrow acres of the creek flats. They had been happy, the pair of them, giving each other a hard time for the fun of it, believing all sound friendships improve for a good rubbishing. She would have loved to see the world herself. It was she who had bought the cartons of old
National Geographics
from the Salvos’ op shop in Moruya. When John was teaching in Melbourne she sent him cuttings from them, pictures of Patagonian glaciers and bird-eating spiders in the Brazilian jungle, just to encourage in her son the pursuit of the exotic. ‘Off you go then!’ she cried, delighted when he came
home for Christmas and told them he was going to Scotland. Glasgow wasn’t Patagonia, but it was a start. ‘Don’t you worry about me and your father. We’ll be right as rain.’
This morning, before driving off to make his deliveries, John lit a cigarette then switched on the single headlamp of the van and looked along the faltering beam of weak yellow light, the black cobbles of the laneway glistening, the rain whipping across the beam. It was all beautiful and strange still, all of it, and he loved it in a quite painful way and wanted to hold it forever in his memory. It was sacred, to be sure, but even if he lived in this place for the rest of his life it would never be real. He could not
enter
the reality of it. It stood away from him, and he was not admitted to it. It was joy enough most times to be helping his wife and her aunt to run Chez Dom, making himself useful with the handy skills he’d learned as a boy on the farm, and even to find his anxieties subdued by the routine of it at times, but he was not getting on with his own life. His reading was falling behind and the new theories of education were passing him by. Events were going on without him. He would be thirty this year and a new generation was already coming up behind him at home and getting on with it. He could feel the deepening of his isolation, his absence, his drifting.
And at times it frightened him. His reality was waiting for him, his friends getting on with it without him. But how long would it wait? In Paris he would never be more than a transient. A man passing through. An accidental man. A man who got on the wrong train one day and fell in love. He cherished Chez Dom and his friendship with Houria, and he loved his wife, but Chez Dom and Paris were not his life. He often had the feeling he was living another man’s story. One life, he kept reminding himself. You’ve only got one life, John Patterner. For God’s sake don’t let it slip through your fingers. André, Houria’s landlord, was the only one he felt understood his predicament, and when they were fishing together at night on André's boat on the Seine he sometimes felt at liberty to confide his anxiety to the older man. And perhaps it was because André felt he’d let his own life slip through his fingers that there was this sympathy between the two of them.
John screwed himself around now, his cap pushing into the fabric of the roof, and he squinted back at the door of the café. Sabiha standing in the light waiting for him to get going, clutching her cardigan around her and watching to see him off. If only she would come home with him to Australia, his life would be perfect. Or near enough to perfect. There would still be the problem of the lack of children. He wanted children
too, but, unlike Sabiha, he was relaxed about having them, confident their children would come when they were ready to come. Whenever he thought of their children, which was more often than Sabiha gave him credit for, John imagined them running around the playground of the school he’d been teaching at before he came to Europe. He couldn’t imagine their children going to school in Paris. He had no images in his mind for schools in Paris. He didn’t know what the children of Paris did from day to day. He didn’t know their games, their slang, their secret signs. He had never been inside a school in Paris. He didn’t want his children growing up thinking they were French. France was okay. He didn’t have a problem with France or the French, but he didn’t want his kids missing out on growing up Australian. He wanted his children to be like him. If they grew up in Paris they would not understand their father’s love for Australia. Whenever he tried to explain this to Sabiha she got upset. It had reached a point recently where they couldn’t talk to each other about children without one of them getting upset. For Sabiha it wasn’t just children, it was
one
child, a daughter. ‘Why not a son as well?’ he asked her. John didn’t care what sex their children were so long as they were healthy, happy Australian kids growing up in the sun, the way he had. He wanted to
take them to the farm, and for them to know and love his mother and father and the country where he had grown up. He dreamed of showing them the fishing holes along the river, and the good swimming holes. The places where he and Kathy had swum when they were children. If his children grew up in France they would be strangers to him and to his country, and he couldn’t bear the thought of that.
In her most recent letter his mother had asked him the question which he knew she had been wanting to ask ever since he’d called her that day and yelled down the phone at her, ‘I just got married!’
‘Oh, that’s lovely, darling, that’s really lovely! What’s her name? She must be a treasure to have taken
you
on. Give her a cuddle from the pair of us.’
Now at last, almost two years on, she had brought herself to ask him the big question:
Is there any sign of a little one yet? Your father and I can’t wait to be Granny and Grandad. I don’t think your sister’s ever going to meet a man good enough for her, is she? You know what I mean. So you’re our only hope. How does that make you feel? It’s a stupid question and I shouldn’t ask it. But we do wonder, that’s all. Neither of us is getting any younger. Your father wants to put a deposit on a unit in Moruya, but I’m not keen on the idea. It feels like planning our own funeral to me. We’ve had one of our best years since you left. The
trout have come into the creek again and the eelers are coming by every night with their lamps and driving the dogs crazy. I shall hate to leave the old place when the time comes. Your father amazes me. He’s more realistic than I am. You and I always were the dreamers, darling. I hope you’re still dreaming. I know I am. Silly me.
There was something about the tone of his mother’s letter that made John wonder if everything was really going quite as well as she said it was. The idea of his mother and father living out the end of their days in an old people’s unit in Moruya, the farm in the hands of strangers, depressed him.
He engaged first gear and let out the clutch. There was a high-pitched screech and the van moved off with a jolt. He was away. The smell of his cigarette and the warm pastries in the back of the van. He took a last quick look at Sabiha in the doorway, his hand raised.