The Submerged Cathedral Read online

  About the book

  ‘Set me as a seal on your heart, for love is stronger than death.’

  Spanning many years, travelling across Australia’s vast continent and through some of Europe’s great cities, The Submerged Cathedral is a beguiling, heartbreaking story of paradise and the fall, of sacrifice and atonement, and of sisterly love and rivalry. Most of all, however, it is about an enduring and sacred love-a love stronger than death-and the journeys undertaken in its name.

  Written in spare, haunting prose, this novel is a work of the highest literary merit, as well as a timeless love story that will enthrall readers. The release of Charlotte Wood’s acclaimed first novel, Pieces of a Girl, marked her as a young writer of great promise; The Submerged Cathedral thrillingly confirms that promise with astonishing assurance and lyricism.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  PART TWO

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  PART THREE

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  About the Author

  Praise for Pieces of a Girl

  Copyright

  More at Random House Australia

  For my parents, John and Felicia,

  whose love story inspired this one

  and for Sean,

  with gratitude for ours

  In my turn I showed him a postcard of my country … He studied it carefully. At last he turned his currant-coloured eyes to me and said,

  ‘Les arbres sont rouges?’ Are the trees red?

  Helen Garner, Postcards from Surfers

  Some private Eden shadows every garden.

  Michael Pollan, Second Nature

  ONE MORE WEEK and he is waiting, his heart faltering, on her front step. In his hands he holds a fish.

  She smokes slowly in the bath, and the slight scent of it fills the house.

  Later, she will tell him how impressively the bath-water holds sound, how in her underwater ears his door knock is suspended for a second, stilled time. This afternoon her half-closed eye has spiked the bathroom light globe into a yellow grevilleal star, and she is all watery conductor of the senses. So when the flyscreen judders and his knuckles strike the frosted glass, the sound of it moves through the fibres of glass and wood and plaster and iron bath claw and water, and it enters her body like a note struck on a bell.

  Her hair is wet down her back when she finds him there on her doorstep with electricity rising in him, and holding out to her a fish.

  Martin has been home for the weekend. He has caught the small bream with his line on the Pittwater beach in the early morning, pulled it flipping and sliding from the water. Has driven it, wrapped in newspaper in a polystyrene icebox on the seat beside him, through the late morning city and then all through the afternoon, climbing the mountain roads to her door.

  But now she is standing there and he knows he is only some stranger on her doorstep, yammering and gaping with the open mouth of the uncertain, the mad.

  He holds out to her the newspaper and this shining platinum flower from the sea.

  And all he knows is Please take this fish from my hands. His heart in spasm: please keep standing there, hand on doorframe and dripping hair and green dress casting its light on your skin, please open out your hands for this simple offered thing.

  PART ONE

  Martin & Jocelyn

  1963

  One

  JOCELYN HOLDS OPEN her front door in the fading afternoon, water dripping on her neck, fabric sticking to her skin. It is the doctor.

  She had first seen him in the grocer’s, across the rows of potato and celery. As she strolled among the shelves and crates, shopping bag over her arm, she had idly pulled a couple of grapes from a bunch and popped them into her mouth.

  Then she heard a little snort, and looked up to see a man watching her.

  He raised an eyebrow in mock disapproval. ‘I saw that,’ he whispered, accusing. He wore a green jacket, was tall with pale wisps of hair. There was something about the way he stared at her, trying not to laugh.

  She reddened, then leaned a little towards him. ‘Your word against mine,’ she whispered back. He chuckled quietly, from the other side of the wooden boxes, weighing potatoes in his hands. She laughed too and moved away. She saw him at the edge of her vision: an angular man in a canvas jacket, moving easily in a roomful of women.

  Then at the counter he was behind her as the grocer weighed apples and pears and lifted her bunch of grapes onto the scale. She turned around. The man nodded at the grapes and opened his mouth to speak – but Jocelyn locked her eyes on his, and put an index finger to her lips.

  He laughed again, and she left him there with his arms full of apples and potatoes and pumpkin in the dark shop, and she tried to stop herself smiling as she walked out into the bright street.

  At a dinner in the town she saw him again, standing by a table and a chair with her blue jacket over its arm.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ he said, holding out his hand. His name was Martin, he was the new locum. He stood, slightly built and upright, smiling at her. As she stepped forward to shake his hand he said, ‘Jocelyn, I have a confession to make.’

  Her skin cooled at the way he spoke her name.

  ‘I’ve stolen one of your cigarettes,’ he said, and grinned again. ‘I thought you wouldn’t object to a little petty theft.’

  Then he took her packet from the table, offered her a cigarette from it and lit a match. He cupped his hands around the flame and she hoped he could not see the slight tremor in her fingers as she held the cigarette to her lips, pushing her face into his bouquet of tiny fire.

  And now he is here, standing on her red concrete step in the afternoon with something in his hands. He has slender arms and wears a blue shirt. Behind him the dark pine trees creak, and time slows and forms a circle. She sees this doctor standing before her as a school child with a satchel, as an adolescent boy with medical ideas, she sees him one day old and dying.

  But here in this moment he is a young man offering her a fish on her own front doorstep. She holds out her hands for the newspaper flower. She is twenty-six, and she can feel the faintly shining fabric of her
dress lying over her like a marine creature’s skin. Her hair still wet, black.

  She leads him through the house to the dark kitchen, and they stand there on the cool linoleum.

  This is how Jocelyn comes to be cooking a fish in her kitchen for Martin, whom she barely knows. She stands in bare feet at the sink and scales the fish, and the translucent tiny skins attach themselves to her fingers, wrist, the backs of her hands as she grasps its tail. And Martin sits and listens to her talk, and feels his heart slowing in his chest. Watching her moving there in the early evening light through the window, until she is sequinned with it, turning and blinking, her moving hands braceleted with the silver skins of his gift.

  Much later, his wrist trails over her hip and they smoke cigarettes while he tells her about the anatomy of the human hand – ‘twenty-seven individual bones’ – and relaxes his own long pale one to fall back hingewise from his wrist. He shows her how a hand at rest will always curl. He peels the skin for her, describes the moist red poetry of tendons, ligaments, their connections to the muscle and bone.

  He has unfurled the skin of cadavers to see this. Drawn it back from the flesh like turning up a sleeve. And has been reverent, ever since, in every glance at his own hands; remains struck by a lasting (he thinks profound) awareness that it is the intricate construction of his own hands and finger bones which allowed him to witness the intricate construction of those finger bones, that palm, those elegant veins.

  Now he holds her hand up and presses his against it, the larger one echoing hers, finger to finger, palm to palm.

  Of all his boyhood, he says, he can recall mostly his hands: tucked beneath his head in sleep, or curved around a railing, a pencil, ball, shoelace. Then the realisation, at five, of his fingers’ particular dexterity, and that understanding falling like a stone into water, and the lip of possibility forming in slow motion, pluming outwards. The radiating certainty of a future brought into being by his hands.

  At five he had lifted a quivering pigeon from where it lay scouring a circle beneath his father’s car with its wrongly bent wing. Reminding him of a stepped-on cardboard box. He held its jittering body away from his own, terrified of its smell and its plasticky beak. Then held it closer and pulled the bent wing gently outwards. The bird now only stared, perfectly still, the feathers oily between his finger and thumb.

  And then a tiny jolt, and then – this is the moment, over and over again, the moment he cannot ever fall away from, like the first leaping flame in the memory of an arsonist – he felt the weight of the thing shift in his hands and then the creature shot up, arced, righted itself and flew a clear straight break into the suburban air. The last thing the child Martin saw was that wing spanned out above the street, and in his mind now he sees every bladed feather of that silver oar, dipping and rowing the rippling air.

  He knows it is ridiculous, knows it to be a matter of an animal’s shock and recovery, or a mild dislocation righted. But each time he’s remembered it over the years, his five-year-old’s shock and reverence returns. He is planted beneath a white sky on a suburban driveway, in his school jumper, his feet inside his grey socks and his shoes. Holding his hands out before him, fingers stretched, these instruments of the supernatural.

  Two

  THE LATEST PARCEL of galley pages is opened, and they cover the dining-room table. She sorts the pages daily, but they shuffle and spill from their piles. Almost halfway through her contract and she’s up to volume six of this job, The Complete Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Australia.

  Her proofreader’s marks are looking tired, but even after all these months she’s still drawn to it, to this sense of the continent spilling out over her dining room. Of the Simpson Desert between the dictionary and the telephone, opal mines under the coffee cup.

  In the weeks since Martin arrived at her door there has been a sense of dormant things coming alive. One day in the garden, they crouched over a bucket.

  ‘Did you grow that?’ Martin asked, peering into the bucket in which the white star of a water lily was prising itself open.

  ‘It grew itself,’ she said. ‘I just threw a lump of wood into the water.’

  ‘Then it’s a gift,’ he said, smiling.

  Now, at the table, she reads, The banksia germinates only after fire. It is one of the many tricks Australian plants must play to survive the harshness of the climate – the years of waiting in the earth, and then after the fire has raged overhead and pieces of leaf-shaped ash still fall in distant towns, the pale fist unfurls there in the dark. And then a season passes, and then the banksia’s red candles shout from the bush like another kind of flame.

  At university Martin’s classmates watched him examine a patient as though they were at the theatre. They watched him at the hospital bedside of a schoolgirl, his fingers pressed lightly at her neck behind her jaw, her eyes dark in her pale face, gaze steady on his while he touched her. They listened to his low voice, her whispered answers, and they raced their own thoughts with his.

  But then he tucked the schoolgirl in, and smoothed her small hand before putting it gently beneath the sheet, and stood. As he walked away, when they heard him murmur – meningitis – it was instant, magic. What was invisible a second before they could now see clear as day. His professors had tried to talk him into surgery, or another speciality, telling him his talent would be wasted in general practice.

  In bed one morning he says to her, ‘When’s your birthday?’

  She lies back, arms above her head, knuckles against the cool wall. He has the sheet pulled to his chin, his large pale feet sticking out at the other end.

  ‘August the first.’

  For some reason it is the date racehorses’ ages are changed. The horses’ birthday.

  His eyebrows rise, and he chortles, turning to her, lifting on his elbow. She can see a swatch of freckles on the pale inside of his upper arm. He leans in to kiss her, still laughing. ‘Giddy-up,’ he says.

  When she was eighteen a boy the same age had asked her to dance. She had stood up from the folding wooden chair against the wall in her stiff yellow dress, feeling sick. The dress pinched at her waist and her armpits, and on her feet she wore white shoes with heels so high she had to hold fast to the boy’s arm to keep herself from toppling.

  He was a farm boy she had never met in this town, nor heard of. Who said the names of Sydney boarding schools as though they should be familiar to her, and who never let go her hand as they danced, and as long as they were touching she knew she could move without falling.

  One night in the car the boy gave her a box with a ring inside it.

  She did not know what to do, when you are eighteen and there is a ring. She took it from the box and held it in her fingers. He watched, and while she tried to find words she began to slide it onto a finger of her right hand there in the dark, their breath steaming in the cold. But he stopped her and took her other hand, and then it was both of them with the too-small ring, pushing it onto her finger, grazing her knuckle. She still had no words, but the ring glinted and shone like something definite. So she put her hand to the boy’s face.

  When she was with him people exclaimed at the ring, grabbing her hand and turning it to catch the light. When she was with him the light sparked off the blue stone like electricity.

  But when she was alone the ring pinched and its sharp edges scratched and caught on things. She sometimes woke in the morning with a tiny thread of blood on her face. Sometimes she would twist it so the stone dug into her palm, leaving only the silver band showing.

  Her sister, Ellen, made her turn it out again. ‘You are so lucky,’ she said, holding out her own small diamond, fingers splayed, for emphasis.

  When Jocelyn was nineteen the boy would sometimes look her up and down before they went out. On hot summer days the ring tightened so she could no longer even twist it.

  When she was nineteen and a half she watched him dancing with her friend, and saw the girl giggling with her chin tilted upwards, and she rememb
ered what it was like, that warm hand on the small of her back, and she knew.

  That night she stood in the green bathroom, scrubbing at the ring with soap under cool running water for half an hour. The silver dragged across her knuckle like a razorblade, and her joints cracked. When the ring finally tinkled into the basin her finger was rubbed raw, and where the ring had been her skin was narrow, white.

  Afterwards Ellen and their mother would fold their arms at her and speak only in practicalities. Invitation printing wasted, a cake used for window display instead.

  When Martin left university and went to work, he spread his pens and things about his first desk. The little surgery smelling of old books and antiseptic was an opening world, and he smoothed the corners of the posters on the wall, and dusted with his handkerchief the base of a creamy plastic model of the joints of the knee.

  When he stepped into the waiting room to call his first patient, he had to calm his breath and stop his voice from catching.

  And in these years, from practice to practice, from locum to locum, his instincts have never failed him. Curative, perhaps talented (he resists ‘healing’), these safe hands of his. On the whole he suppresses any more mystical belief in their powers; in his mind he somehow transmutes magic into science. He has steady nerves, that is all. He is a well-trained, skilled practitioner. He listens carefully to what his patients say, and what they omit; he asks them particular questions. Is well read, keeps up with the literature, performs the proper examinations at the right times, has correctly practised their techniques.