The Submerged Cathedral Page 18

  She doubtless had grandchildren now.

  He coughed, this time into his handkerchief, a large gob of phlegm.

  The school bell rang, slowly, clumsily. He could hear each touch of the bell’s tongue against its metal. It was a marvel how instantly the shouts and wails subsided, moving in a wave to the other end of the playground.

  Her calves and her nurse’s shoes, her quick stride around the ward.

  Martin came out. He began to smoke not long after they came to the house. He stood on the doorstep watching out to sea.

  We are all lonely, brother.

  When Anthony was a boy he would swing on a gate down by the sheep yards. His father would watch him from the shed, hand over his eyes, then move back into the black square of dark. Anthony was eight, he liked the feel of his boot-heels over the first rung of the gate, the upper rung tucked into his armpits.

  At dinner his father said, ‘What are you doing, swinging on the gate like that?’

  Anthony could not tell him. Stared at his plate, chewing on the fatty lump of meat.

  His mother said, ‘Leave him alone, there’s no crime in swinging on a gate.’

  He could not tell her either.

  But his father watched him from the shed, the way his youngest son first hunched forward on the closing of the gate, then turned and leaned out with an arm and leg, out over the gravel, touching the gate only with one foot and one hand. Then to the other side again.

  Years later, when he told his parents he was leaving to find out how to live with God, his father looked at him again. His mother stood at the sink, wiping tears from her eyes. But his father coughed and said, ‘I remember how you used to swing on that gate. You always were an odd one.’

  And still he could not tell them about it, how he learned the gate’s whines and high creaks, and learned with his moving body to make them into songs, so that when his father watched him from the black dark of the shed that was what Anthony was doing; making the gate sing out across the farm.

  Forty-Four

  THE PAIN IN Anthony’s stomach grows worse. At first he tried to hide the fact that he could not eat. He would go to the bathroom and run both taps to hide the sound of his vomiting. He still pushes the food about the plate, but Martin counts the vegetable pieces as he throws them in the bin.

  Martin remembers Mr Ho, back in those days when he had thought medicine was only about the living, when he thought there was nothing more for him to do.

  And he remembers that day in the infirmary, when Anthony had whispered, I am here, and held his hands, and given him love for nothing.

  In the quiet of his room Martin kneels, he prays.

  Anthony had not ever gone back to the farm, not even when his father had died. He had sat with Ignatius and wept into his arms when the letter came, but he did not go back. Instead he made the monastery’s years into his own farm. He learned to make the Psalms into prayers and, like his eight-year-old self, to make his prayers sing out across the paddocks.

  He grows thinner, thinner.

  In the end he looks at Martin from his daybed on the verandah, from underneath his blanket.

  He says, ‘I want to go back.’

  They both know which part of the monastery is in his mind.

  Forty-Five

  MARTIN TURNS ANTHONY over in the bed, cleans the shit from between his skinny buttocks, tosses the toilet paper into a bucket. The smell is foul, shit and piss combined. And there is the increasingly sour smell of Anthony’s skin, as his illness slowly fills the air around him. Martin empties the bucket and the piss from the catheter bag into the toilet, squirts disinfectant into the bucket, washes it out again.

  Anthony’s hand on his head as he kneels, exhausted, at the old man’s bedside to whisper the Psalms. With the morphine, Anthony’s body grows heavier and more difficult to wake.

  It is four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon in the bright sunlight when Martin opens the passenger door of the car. He has pushed back the seat as far as possible, pushed in pillows and blankets and cushions to make a bed comfortable for the sleeping. He returns to the house, then stands in the doorway facing the sea, Anthony’s wasted body in his arms. Straining a little, he carries his friend to the car, lowers him into the cushiony bed.

  Anthony holds Martin’s arms tightly, stares out of his watery eyes, breathes.

  Martin starts the car, letting it idle while he checks again the vials of morphine, the oxygen bottle on the floor. He will stop the car every four hours to readminister the morphine. He has taped the cannula more firmly over the old man’s fish-thin skin, the thick rivulets of his veins. Then Martin eases the car from the driveway. It is hot, a seagull dips in the air, and the afternoon light falls over the ocean.

  He turns onto the highway and drives west.

  They travel through the dark streets of the town, its surfaces shining from an earlier rainstorm. They have been driving for twelve hours. Anthony’s breathing is changing now, becoming less laboured. He sends a fog shadow up the glass of the window with each breath. He has slipped into unconsciousness.

  Now Martin turns the steering wheel, brings the car onto the dirt road south. The moon is high and full, and the country rolls out around them, glistening.

  The headlights stop on the white gateway, the old bus shelter.

  So much time has passed. Martin recalls the bushfire report from years ago, but if it was here he can see no trace of it. Even so, the track looks somehow different from his memory. Martin checks Anthony’s pillows, pulls the blanket up over him and pushes a cushion further in beneath to keep him stable, then opens his own door and steps out onto the gravel to open the gate. Its loop under his fingers, the gate’s swing on its hinges is easier than he remembers.

  Disoriented, he gets back into the car; he’s exhausted but adrenaline starts its surge. He is beginning to feel more urgent. Though he knows Anthony won’t feel much, he drives carefully, the wheels rising and falling over the ruts and corrugations in the track. He keeps his window wound down as they grind over this old short road. At the end of the track, at the crest of the rise, he stops the car. He glances over at Anthony once more, at his sunken, unconscious face.

  When he gets out again the air is still, and scented with eucalyptus. He is standing, somehow, in an unremembered corridor of high flowering gums.

  He moves to the other side of the car and opens the door, sliding his arms under Anthony’s half-alive featherweight body, lifting him, his child’s gangling limbs. Martin stands, holding his brother, on this old but unfamiliar ground. He starts to walk.

  Anthony’s breathing against Martin’s shoulder loses its rhythm. His own breath begins to match it.

  What is this recreated place?

  He carries his friend slowly along the moonlit eucalypt corridor, through a garden that was not here before. In the dark are the pale shapes of flowers, and a pathway glints before him.

  A pathway?

  He begins to recognise something as he carries Anthony down this mosaic trail … through the native herbs, the tiny orchids, the violets. At last through the cloister’s tiled entrance.

  And then.

  He stares. He is beginning to cry now, in rhythm with the deep staccato breaths coming out of Anthony like the last of love, and he carries him, kissing the forehead cradled at his shoulder, along the coloured map of his own old paradise beneath his feet.

  And then he feels through his arms, through Anthony’s wet face opened up newborn to his, through the sound of his own crying – he feels the last breath, the soft weight of his brother’s life rising up among the opened florets of a hundred globed red waratahs. Shifting, and waiting, in the dark and holy air.

  IN THE DIM rising light, when Martin has shovelled the last of the earth over Anthony’s grave next to Ignatius in the cemetery, he lifts his head to see her in the corner with her hand on the gate, watching.

  Under the whitening sky the cockatoos and the currawongs sweep high above them, two people standing
in a graveyard, with their fingers feathering over and over one another in the new language of a prayer they have always known.

  Acknowledgements

  My great thanks to the following:

  For time and peace, Varuna – The Writers’ House and the Bundanon Trust, and the Dark and Boyd families for these generous and important gifts. For the tremendous help of a new work grant, thanks to the Australia Council.

  For welcoming me to Tarrawarra Abbey and telling me about my father’s time there, my heartfelt thanks to Father David Tomlins and the monks of Tarrawarra.

  For their generous help with my research, great thanks to Dr Louise Harrison, Dr Kirsten Black, and the doctors on the National Divisions of General Practice email list with whom I briefly corresponded, especially Dr Greg Markey. Any errors of fact are mine.

  For conversation, space in their houses, advice, books and other gifts towards the writing of this novel, special thanks to the Wright family, Peter Simpson, Jane Johnson and Brian Murphy, Andrew Harrison, Silas Clifford-Smith, Bill Johnson and Ali Manning, Helen Garner, Tegan Daylight, Caroline Baum, Inez Brewer and Maree and Mark Tredinnick. Thanks also to my colleagues Graham Smith, Janet Grist and Chris Brooker for their understanding, and to my beautiful family for their steadfast, unquestioning encouragement.

  Peter Bishop, Juliana Ryan, Anna Funder, Fran Bryson, Jane Palfreyman, Jane Gleeson White, Sophie Ambrose, Rebecca Hazel, Eileen Naseby and especially Vicki Hastrich and my energetic editor Judith Lukin-Amundsen read and gave crucially insightful comments on the various drafts. I am enormously grateful too for Fran Bryson’s guidance at the business end of things and for Jane Palfreyman’s passion. Again, my deepest gratitude to Bec, Eileen and Vick for keeping this thing on the rails.

  Lastly, all my love and thanks once again to Sean McElvogue.

  Notes

  The title of this novel comes from Claude Debussy’s La Cathédrale Engloutie, from Préludes, Livre I.

  For logistical reasons I have had Marc Chagall create his mosaic a few years earlier than he did, transplanting it from 1975 to 1970.

  I drew inspiration and factual material from many sources including the following books:

  • David Bergamini and the Editors of LIFE, LIFE Nature Library – The Land and Wild-Life of Australasia, TIME Inc, 1965.

  • Josep M. Carandell and Pere Vivas, Park Guell – Gaudi’s Utopia, Triangle Postals, 1998.

  • Michael Downey, Trappist – Living in the Land of Desire, Paulist Press, 1997.

  • Gordon Ford: The Natural Australian Garden (especially Morag Fraser’s prologue), Bloomings Books, 1999.

  • Mick Hales, Monastic Gardens, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2000.

  • Colin MacInnes and the Editors of TIME-LIFE BOOKS, LIFE World Library – Australia and New Zealand, TIME Inc, 1969.

  • Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk, Lion Publishing, 1999.

  • Filippo Pizzoni, The Garden: A History in Landscape and Art, translated by Judith Landry, Aurum Press, 1999.

  • Michael Pollan, Second Nature, Bloomsbury, 1996.

  • Coralie and Leslie Rees, Australia: The Big Sky Country, Ure Smith, 1971.

  • Peter Timms ed., The Nature of Gardens, Allen & Unwin, 1999.

  Charlotte Wood was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists in 2000. Her first novel, Pieces of a Girl, was shortlisted for the 2000 Dobbie Award and commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in the same year. Pieces of a Girl also won the Jim Hamilton Award for an unpublished manuscript. Charlotte lives in Sydney.

  Praise for Pieces of a Girl:

  ‘Pieces of a Girl is a compelling read, and although the material it deals with is sometimes disturbing, it is made easier for Wood’s lyrical writing and her fascinatingly bizarre characters.’

  Australian Bookseller & Publisher

  ‘Atmospheric and stylish writing, compressed and highly focused.’

  Debra Adelaide, The Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Lean and emotive, mysterious and yet immediate.’

  Matt Condon, The Sun-Herald

  ‘Immaculately polished style and lush, inventive imagery.’

  Who Magazine

  ‘There is something unmistakably edgy about Pieces of a Girl; a moody, atmospheric tension that manages to pervade this dreamscape of a book from the very opening page … A highly recommended debut.’

  Australian Style

  ‘Haunting, memorable, highly original.’

  Adelaide Advertiser

  ‘Charlotte Wood’s debut novel marks her as a fine Australian talent … impressive in her control of mood and voice.’

  The Canberra Times

  ‘A delightfully delicate book … moving, very original and a novel to be savoured one page at a time.’

  Daily News

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  Version 1.0

  The Submerged Cathedral

  9781742747941

  Copyright © Charlotte Wood, 2004

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A Vintage book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at

  www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

  First published by Vintage in 2004

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry available through the National Library of Australia

  Wood, Charlotte, 1965–.

  The submerged cathedral.

  ISBN 978 1 74051 264 0.

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  Cover image of lily by John William Lewin, ca. 1790–1819, watercolour, State Library of New South Wales

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