Swords and Crowns and Rings (32 page)

‘Stop, stop!' cried Cushie.

‘Can't stop here, darl,' said the driver. ‘Use your loaf, dear.'

But he slowed down, creeping towards the kerb. Craning through the rear window, Cushie saw that Virgie was tacking up Elizabeth Street. For a moment she thought that she must insist that the driver turn somehow, go back, so that she could warn Claudie and Iris. But what good would that do? Virgie was not her problem. She began to shake. She could not afford to go through another dreadful scene; she had to get away while she was strong enough to do so.

‘Come on, miss,' cried the driver, jumping in his seat with impatience. ‘What you want to do?'

‘Just drive on,' said Cushie. ‘I think I made a mistake.'

4

Jackie Hanna 1924–1929

Maida and Jackie were married in a church full of angry light from a western window. There was a parson with a face of iron, a smell of sodden dust. The witnesses were the parson's downy-chinned sister and a woman who had been scrubbing the church. The latter could not take her eyes off Jackie, and at the end of the ceremony she shot out her swollen paw and touched him lightly on the back of the neck. Blind Hof, who had stood like a statue behind the bride and groom, struck her hand away.

‘They say it's lucky,' she mumbled, and, frightened by the inhuman jerk of his dead eye, did not look at any of them again.

Hof had booked the young couple in at the Royal Hotel, which stood like a spectre on the waterfront. He himself had taken a room in a boarding-house somewhere.

‘Leaving at first light,' he said. ‘It'll be all the old lorry can manage to get me there in time for the funeral. So I'll say good-bye now.'

Maida said wistfully, ‘Won't you just have tea with us, Hof? Seems funny, you going off like this by yourself.'

But he wouldn't. He stood there a moment, the huge gaunt man, as though wishing to say something but having no words for it. The opaque lavender eye twitched.

‘Maida, you do the right thing now,' he said. ‘You're lucky, you are.' Maida bowed her head. Tears glinted in her eyes, and Jackie realised that the girl, too, had left all that was familiar to her, was at his mercy, as the old woman was at the mercy of her brutal wheelwright and his brutal sons.

He said, ‘I'm sorry about your grandfather, Hof. He was a good old man.'

Hof nodded abruptly and strode away. Jackie turned and took Maida's cold hand.

‘We'll make a go of it, Maida,' he said.

She smiled. ‘I know we will. It's just that—I hope Ellie will be all right, when my father gets there, I mean. He couldn't stand up to him if—' She stopped, seemed to gain control of herself. ‘Well, that's all behind me now. It's just you and me, Jackie, from now on.'

The bar and front parlour of the Royal Hotel were full of people peering through the windows at the pale girl and the queer little dwarf who stood out front. Greedily they pointed out to each other the fading bruises on Maida's face, the youth of her husband.

‘But you can't tell,' said the knowing. ‘Them dwarves look the same for years. He might be thirty, forty; there's no being sure.'

‘Don't you think he looks knocked-about, too?' asked another.

‘Been in a fight prob'ly. They got fiendish tempers.'

Most of these Duchess Bay people had never seen a dwarf before and were brazen in their curiosity. Jackie was used to stares, but the concentration of the Royal Hotel's habitués made him squeeze Maida's hand as they entered through the corner door, under the ceiling of embossed tin, and saw the heads sticking out the doors.

‘Don't mind,' he said.

Maida's face flushed crimson. She lifted her head abruptly and gave the poking faces a searing stare, so that they retreated with subdued chatter.

She looked down at Jackie. ‘Never you say that again,' she said. A certain power glistened suddenly in her sad eyes, and with amazement Jackie recognised it as anger.

The bedroom was a queer shape, with cut-off corners and deep recesses containing tallboys and wardrobes with wedges of yellow newspaper under their corners, and doors and drawers that wouldn't open. There was highly polished oilcloth with no pattern left, and an extremely narrow strip of dirty Turkey carpet. The bed was covered with a thin white honeycomb quilt, the blankets worn and harsh.

‘I wish I could have brought you to a better place,' said Jackie, wistfully.

His wife sat down before the window, took the pins from her hair. Slowly she brushed it, it meanwhile turning deep yellow and ruddy in the ominous light from the west. To Jackie she looked strange and very beautiful, and he crossed to her and pressed his cheek against her cool one.

‘Maida, everything will be all right, you'll see,' he said. ‘We're young; we'll make a go of it.'

She undid her blouse, and put his hand on her breast. It was already swollen a little, warm and lush, waiting for the child. But Jackie felt a child himself, bereft of all he knew, desolate, and for the first time in his life afraid of the future.

As they went down for their evening meal, the cheerful male burr of voices from the bar faltered and stopped, and they were aware that thrilled eyes were noting every detail of their appearance. But in the cold, cabbage-smelling dining-room, the other guests, few, aged, and vague-looking, studiously stared at their plates. The waitress dithered, her eyes constantly straying from her notebook to rest greedily on Jackie's face and form. And although he had been through this ordeal many times before he realised that he cared more this time, for Maida's sake.

Ah, it was not only for Maida's sake! With doleful certainty the sensation the Linz Brothers had aroused in him—that his outer skin had been taken away, and he was vulnerable to the closest and most satiric observation—returned. He felt the eyes, the mutters, the smiles sharp as knives, and cold shock swept over him. Had it always been like this: the personality so lovingly nurtured by his mother and the Nun so frail and brittle that it could not last away from his familiar environment? He straightened up, ate his soup carefully, aware of the resentful stare Maida returned to their audience.

‘Don't give them the satisfaction,' he murmured, and Maida nodded.

‘Clods,' she said. ‘A new dog in the town would be a sensation to them.'

That night, in their chill, disinfectant-smelling bed, she took him with silent passion, and he accepted it as silently, with humble joy. Yet he could not sleep, and after Maida had turned away into slumber he got up and went to the windows, which opened onto a small balcony littered with leaves and bird-dirt. The moonlight held all in bond, bleached and austere. Jackie could hear, far away, the flat sea plodding in and out, dragging its pebbles after it.

He tried to raise his spirits by telling himself he was at last near the ocean; but all the knowledge did was to bring back the last hour he had spent with Cushie, so long ago, it seemed.

‘You know I've never seen the sea,' he had mumbled into her neck. ‘I often dream of it, the sea,' he had said.

Once again Jackie saw, clear as a picture, those dreams where the water ran in long convolutions of mica upon wide sands that no one ever trod, not even ocean birds.

‘We'll live beside it some day, won't we, Jackie? All by ourselves.'

‘Yes, we will.'

There were a million things to tell Cushie. Even now he wanted to tell her about the Linzes, about Maida.

Though he had not seen her that fatal day on Ghinni station, his knowledge of Cushie was so complete that his imagination was as clear as a memory. As though he had indeed seen it, he could imagine her face looking out of the express window, borne away, growing smaller, vanishing. The puzzlement, the disappointment on that face! And as he realised that very probably he would never see Cushie Moy again a pure and particularised pain went through him. It was the pain of bereavement, of deepest loss, not only of Cushie but of his entire life until now; for both consciously and unconsciously it had been woven in and out of hers.

His eyes prickled; he felt as if his entire being were breaking up.

He clung to the railing, his little hands on the top bar, his forehead pressed against the second. The lights of a home-going car discovered him, and he saw down below on the street a man and woman patiently waiting, hoping for a glimpse of him, and now richly satisfied that they had caught him spread-eagled against the balcony rails like a monkey.

His mother and stepfather had taught him to be a person superior to misfortune, but it did not seem as though he were. The circumstances of the past few months had bundled him away from his desired pattern of life with the utmost ease, as though he were a child, or a helpless animal. Panic filled him. It struck him suddenly that all the delights of his past had likewise been imaginary.

But Cushie had loved him, there was no denying that. She had always loved him, and perhaps loved him still. Sooner or later she would find out that he had married, and at the thought of the pain and bewilderment inflicted on her defenceless heart his eyes filled with tears.

All his life he had taken her beauty for granted, her docility and kindness as though they were his due. But nothing was his due. Anything good that life ever gave him was a gift, and nothing else.

‘But at the last I knew, Cushie,' he thought in bitter pain. ‘I was beginning to know.'

Maida's shadow fell across the moonlight.

‘Jackie, come to bed now.'

In bed she took him in her arms. ‘Are your eyes red?'

Dumbly he nodded against her shoulder. ‘Things will look better tomorrow and the next day. Go to sleep, now. I'll look after you, Jackie.'

Exhausted, he sank into the warmth of her arms and slept.

Some time during that night, it seemed to Jackie afterwards, his subconscious mind accepted the fate that seemed to be his, and he awakened truly Maida's husband. He looked at her sleeping face, and thought, ‘Hof didn't tell me to do the right thing, but I will. I'll look after her and she'll never regret it.'

But he wished he were older, with more knowledge of the world, and men and women.

The morning awoke like a child, opening clear eyes that did not remember the night. Jackie watched the light falling like silk on Maida's clothes, hung on the back of a chair. He had been amazed at the coarseness of her garments, the calico bodice, black lisle stockings, a petticoat with home-made crocheted edgings. Out of these dowdy wrappings the beauty and fragility of her body had emerged—her white legs with blue veins showing, her wing-like shoulderblades, her child's elbows, a little grubby and callused on the points. These elbows, and her thin battered hands, touched Jackie.

He thought, ‘Just as soon as we get settled on the Dovey, I'll send to Sydney for an Anthony Hordern catalogue, and she can pick out some pretty duds for herself.'

At the thought of her delight, he rubbed his feet up and down her knees, and blew softly on her nose. She awoke yawning, and he told her about the catalogue. She was wide awake instantly, ecstatic.

‘Oh, Jackie, could we truly? And I could give my size and they'd send them in the colours I wanted and everything?'

He laughed. ‘Don't you know anything, you little country bumpkin?'

‘I don't think I do. You'll have to tell me everything.'

‘Right,' said Jackie. ‘Let's get up and have a look around this place.'

‘I like it when you're bossy,' she said. For an instant her bosom was supended above him. He breathed her like a flower. ‘I love you, Jack,' she said for the first time.

Now that Jackie's innate good humour had reasserted itself, the bedroom at the Hotel Royal seemed to him comical. Everything was immensely tall, and Jackie could scarcely reach a thing. He had to stand on a suitcase to wash his face at the basin. Even then he could see only the top of his rumpled hair in the age-darkened mirror.

When he sat in the armchair his legs stuck straight out and Maida had to tug him out of it.

‘It's a room for giants,' Maida said.

‘They must get a lot of giants,' he replied. Their stifled giggles disturbed the guest next door, and he banged sleepily on the wall, groaning, ‘Shurrup. Shurrup! Gaw'sakes!'

They crept down the wooden stairs, past tall palm-stands filled with grimy paper ferns, sand, and cigarette-butts. The hall below had a dado of dirty handprints. From the kitchen came the sound of crockery.

‘Early morning tea,' said Jackie. ‘Let's get out quick.'

Duchess Bay had been a popular watering-place in Edwardian times, but the new highway from Ghinni Junction had left it to die on the beach. Their footsteps echoed in the empty, sandy main street with the beat of a funeral drum. Nobody was about except a milkman who drove past and almost fell out of his cart looking back at them.

They stood above the long beach that was like an empty esplanade. The hugeness of the sea awed them.

‘I'm glad we're seeing it together for the first time,' Jackie said.

‘I never dreamed,' said Maida. ‘Not as big as this! And I thought it would be a different blue, like Theo's shaving mug.'

The waves pranced, light in their manes. They ran up to Jackie's feet and scratched at the gravel. The sound of a buoy away out near the heads was a crack in the silence, man's signpost. Weeds bellied in the water, anchored shadows.

‘If I lived here,' she said, ‘I'd be looking at it all the time. And that smell in the air!'

‘We'll come back here,' promised Jackie. ‘The baby will have to be born here, I suppose.'

Reluctantly they turned away.

‘Guess we'd better have a look at the town before the cream boat bloke comes.'

Maida was impressed by the extravagant style of the buildings, with their cupolas, fretworked porches, windows shaded with wooden awnings in faded circus colours. They were all empty, scuttled, the cupolas streaked with white dribbles from seabirds, or red runnels from rusting nails, the windows boarded up or smashed, the porches filled with stinking hillocks of garbage, broken bottles, old bicycles, and wet paper.