The Submerged Cathedral Read online

  So that when he touches his patients’ skin … other possibilities begin to form themselves.

  The first night they had slept together, Martin had said, staring at Jocelyn’s body, ‘I dreamed your skin would be like this.’

  His certainty falls over her like rain. And when she is not with him Martin hovers at all times behind her concentration; she feels him like breath.

  But there are times when she is alone in the night and the wind sounds like an ocean outside her window, and she lies in her bed, thinking, What am I doing?

  The wind heaves and though she knows it is the sound of branches, in the dark she can picture nothing but black water swelling and contracting. An approaching wave that could drown her.

  It is still cold here in the mountains, in the early spring. George is coming back to the surgery in a week and Martin must return to Sydney, to his house at the beach. The three months gone in a moment. One night when he is visiting her house he takes a breath to say something.

  They are setting the fire together, kneeling among the bits of kindling and newspaper.

  ‘That’s pathetic,’ she says, pulling his crumpled bits of paper from the cold ash. She pushes up her sleeves, irons paper flat on the floor with her hand.

  ‘I will show you,’ she says, flourishing a page dramatically, ‘how to fold the Standard British Firelighter.’ He makes a face. His pulse jittering, waiting for the moment.

  ‘I was in the Brownies, you know,’ she says. He snorts, crosses his arms, and as she folds the paper he sees on it a photograph of a crumpled black-and-white wedding party, hats and flowers and patent leather shoes, a glum bride.

  Then, triumphant, she holds up the origami shape for him – ‘Now that’s a firelighter a girl can be proud of’ – and leans into the fireplace.

  ‘I’m sure Brown Cow would be very pleased,’ he says, covering up his waiting, making her chuckle as she pokes the paper under kindling.

  He puts a hand to the bare skin at the base of her spine, watches her skin pricking under his fingers. She strikes a match, and he takes his breath.

  ‘Let’s get married.’

  She sits up, and stares at him.

  ‘What?’

  He meets her eye, keeps going. ‘I think we should get married. And you can come back with me to Pittwater.’ Watching her face.

  It is late September. Through the window her mother’s garden is in raging flower. Azaleas, wisteria, forget-menots in balloons around the trunks of apple and peach trees. Irises, daffodils, rosemary. All winter the garden is washed out and grey, and then in spring it explodes into colour. By midsummer it is leached dry again, but all through the childhoods of Jocelyn and her sister their mother had loved this eight weeks of English bloom. Jocelyn now leaves it barely tended.

  Her pulse is all through her body and Martin is waiting for her to speak. She stares into the fireplace, the damp paper smouldering. She holds her left hand in her right, fingering the knuckles. The skin of her hands is dry, her mouth is dry.

  Martin cannot wait this out. ‘What do you think?’

  Jocelyn takes his hand in hers, stares out of the window again at her mother’s flowers. She can’t say, There was a ring. She can’t say, I couldn’t get it off.

  ‘I can’t get married,’ she says quietly.

  Oh, his beautiful face. He is staring at the floor, rubbing his lips, very gently, with two fingers.

  ‘But I will come back with you. To live.’ She says it fast.

  He looks up at her now. It is 1963. They both know what she is offering: to hurl her reputation, and his with it, over the precipice of those sandstone cliffs below this mountain house.

  He can’t believe what she is saying. ‘Why?’

  The azaleas waver at the window. She is ashamed, she picks at the hem of her skirt. There is silence. ‘Because marriage is ordinary,’ she whispers then.

  She lifts her head, steady, and meets his gaze.

  He takes her hand. ‘But what about the neighbours?’

  ‘I don’t care what they think. If you don’t.’ Her voice small.

  ‘What about your job?’ He is stroking her hand as if to comfort her.

  She sits back, crosses her legs in front of her, lights a cigarette. She is fighting the urge to cry. ‘I’ll make sure they don’t know. It’s miles from the city, isn’t it? I can have the post redirected, tell people I’m spending a summer by the sea. People do that, don’t they?’

  A hand of flame leaps as the folded paper beneath the kindling catches. The wedding party shrinks and shrivels, the bride’s veil aflame.

  Jocelyn exhales, watches the smoke plume to the ceiling. She cannot say anything more. It is her turn to wait, and breathe, chewing the inside of her lip. Please.

  Then Martin moves slowly on his knees towards her, pulls her close till she climbs onto his lap, and he wraps her around himself, his arms round her waist.

  They are clung together on the edge of the cliff. They jump.

  ‘Yes,’ says Martin. ‘Yes.’

  Three

  THE WORLD’S LARGEST and most famous coral formation is the Great Barrier Reef, off the coast of Queensland. She holds her pencil above the line of words, over those underwater sunrises lining the continent’s northeastern coast.

  Proofreading this part of the manuscript is easy during these first Pittwater days; here it is easy to remember that the whole country is bordered by blue ocean. She works in the shade of the verandah while Martin spends his days in the city.

  It is early October, but the air is hot and bright.

  Coming here that first day, when she stepped onto the ferry at Palm Beach, she crossed more than that strip of green-black water. Martin was already on board, holding out his hand to her, her luggage waiting on the boat’s wooden deck behind him.

  His neighbours, seated with their city shopping bags on their laps, turned their heads to watch the arrival of the doctor’s mistress. She saw them watching, and her breath went shallow. And then she saw Martin’s open, steady hand, and he beamed at her. She held out her own hand and put it into his, and he held it fast, and as she stepped across that gap she knew her childhood was finished.

  He held her hand all the way across the water to the little jetty at his beach, and she tried not to feel her fingers quivering under his. She lifted her head to face a woman looking at her across the decking boards. Jocelyn forced herself to smile, and the woman looked away.

  They were the first to alight, and the people watched them walk the length of the jetty, Jocelyn’s suitcase between them, before they began to gather their own bags and make their way to their homes.

  Jocelyn had to raise a hand to shade her eyes from the hard white light as they walked towards the line of new houses strung along the beach.

  Martin had nodded – ‘There’ – at one of the newest. Its iron porch railing was wound with Neptune’s necklace, the beaded seaweed he sometimes brings back to the house to garland the verandah with until it stiffens and shrivels, to be tossed over the rail into the garden in the morning when they sit out drinking coffee.

  Jocelyn puts down her pencil and gets up from the table. Her back aches. She stretches, bends down to touch her toes. As her fingertips brush the floorboards she thinks of Martin on his way to work, his long drive through the bush and the beaches running alongside the road.

  Since her arrival, the people from the older cottages, small buildings subdued by passionfruit vine and overgrown kikuyu, stare fixedly at the track as they walk past this verandah to swim, or fish. Occasionally one will grunt a greeting, but mostly they walk with heads down, shamed at these young people who will sit so exposed with their breakfast outside, at this bare house set almost amongst the waves, its doors and its windows always open to the gulls and the fish and the sea.

  The mass of bush in the hills behind the houses meets the city’s northwestern outskirts not so many miles away. But here there are no roads and they can travel only by boat or the public ferry from Palm
Beach, making their small headland an island.

  Each morning they wake with the sun blaring. They lie in bed, and Jocelyn listens to Martin waking up. She hears his breath change from slow to sharp as he first leaves sleep. She hears his yawn, feels the slump of his body become alert, his movement behind her as he stretches, arching his back. She lies, eyes closed, half-awake, half-waiting. And then, each time, his heavy hand comes to her shoulder, or hip, and he kisses her through the blankets while he thinks she is asleep, and then he rolls away and heaves himself upright.

  Once she feels his hand resting on her, that moment’s stillness, she falls easily back into sleep.

  Whenever Martin leaves the house he is in the wash of this thing, this tide. On the drive to the city he thinks about past women, the times he thought he was in love; those imitated feelings, the flowers and the chocolates. No woman has imprinted herself on him like this.

  He had offered her a gold ring that morning before they stepped onto the boat, to protect her from the locals’ gawking. Before they reached the jetty he pulled the pawnshop wedding ring from his pocket. She had held it a moment, and given it back to him.

  ‘I do not need a ring on my finger,’ she had said. ‘I am not ashamed.’

  But he could feel the gut depth of her fear, and when she stepped onto that boat, when she smiled into those staring faces, it was the work of a death-defyer, an acrobat.

  He thinks of her working at the house now, head bent over the paper, chewing a pen. And then his car rounds the Bilgola bends and the sun blares over that curved sheet of ocean, and all the risk explodes like fireworks in the shimmering blue air.

  Morning and night every closure of his eyes attracts her, their every opening challenges her. In the past Jocelyn has shaken her head at women like the one she has now become. Who would risk all their future, who were called harlots, who bore this shame in place of marriage. Their stupidity, their masochism, astonished her.

  But she is worse; she has chosen this disgrace herself.

  She straightens, goes to the bedroom to find her bathing suit.

  She thinks of her mother, her father, glad they are not alive to hear the rumours she knows will already be flying about the mountains town. She has not told Ellen, safely married in London, about Martin yet. Again she remembers her sister’s face, her mother’s, at that broken engagement years ago, their disbelief. She heard them talking in the kitchen, and then Ellen cornered her in the laundry. ‘You know there’s something wrong with you, don’t you?’ Ellen had said it slowly, pity in her voice. Jocelyn could only finger the rounded concrete edge of the laundry trough. ‘Yes,’ she had murmured. She knew.

  Even when her father held her hand briefly in the garden, and patted it, and said, ‘Never mind’, she knew that it was shameful, this want in her for more than she was offered.

  But now, as she pulls the green swimsuit over her breasts and feels the flick of elastic on her skin, she has no shame, for she knows something else is happening to her. There is some opening up of possibility not to do with Martin, but because of him.

  Sometimes, after three hours’ work and only twelve pages of her proofing-marks, the frustration of this labour infuriates her, this plodding through someone else’s laziness. She feels like a scullery maid, scrubbing the stains from someone else’s clothes, picking up their mess. She flicks the pencil across the table, listens to it roll.

  She walks through the house, down the front steps, across the lawn and the sandy track. Sometimes she suspects it is this early private summer, it is the sun and the water causing this planetary shift of her world. But she knows it is not the sun and the water.

  She walks past the sidelong glance of the woman two doors down who stands watering her lawn in a chequered apron. The light is so bright she walks with half-closed eyes. Adjusting from the closely read print to the outdoor space and light, her eyes blur and reshape what they see. The maps in the encyclopaedia have begun to make her see things aerially, turn the headlands into vegetation maps, the bays and points into geometric slabs and curves.

  She bends to pick up a small turreted green shell and puts it in her pocket. Already she should go back to the house and the manuscript. She can almost recite the text waiting on the page.

  Ayers Rock, the world’s largest monolith, is six miles round, more than a mile and a half long and 1,100 feet high, rising from the flat surrounding earth.

  But she strides over the white sand to the sea’s edge in her bathing costume. She steps into the thrilling cold water. It shocks her from the ankles up, and she starts to run. The water flashes up all around her and she lifts herself to dive, and in the sun and the swing of her body she thinks an innate, almost cellular prayer: May we never lose this.

  Lying on her back in the water she looks down the beach to see how far she has come, the Rock looming in her mind, ridged and red like some mammoth sea creature’s back. In the distance the house faces the waves, white and open. She gets out of the water and walks on the sand, towards the end of the beach. In the shade she grasps a sapling trunk and pulls herself up onto the stone that marks the beginning of a steep track into the bush.

  The encyclopaedia is studded with short pieces on what the writers imagine to be separate aspects of the Australian national character, its culture. Sporting Life. The Lingo. Australia as a deck of playing cards.

  She reads of the bush and disappearance, of McCubbin’s painting, of people found in the outback by black trackers; real-life stories turned into myth. There are rumours of missing children, local newspaper reports through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tracking suspicious vanishings. And macabre discoveries – like that of a baby’s bones found in a hidden bushland grave in a remote part of western Victoria, now a monastery’s land.

  To Australians the bush is a dangerous, mysterious place, she reads.

  She passes over these pages and onto other mythologies, of bushrangers, or explorers. But the idea of an abandoned dead child, lying in the earth as if grown there, stays with her for days. And the absurdity of monks in Australia still strikes her, though she knows the country’s history is speckled with gaggles of religious men from Europe. Like those Spanish monsignors walking the highway in their black habits under the blasting West Australian sun until the Lord told them to stop, to offer sugar and Communion to the blacks, and call that raw place New Norcia.

  But the Victorian story is quieter. She cannot dislodge the image of robed men working in paddocks while up in the bush behind them is the silent, unvisited grave of a baby, lost to the bush but found by God.

  Martin, too, reads these pages where they lie over the breakfast table. He thinks of the hissing bush and the buried baby. Presumably, if the story is true, it was a farmer’s child. Perhaps an illegitimate child, a stillborn baby illicitly buried. The Catholics say it is a sin to bury a child unbaptised. On the drive to the city Martin is visited by the image of two pairs of parental arms lowering a small dead baby into the inhospitable earth. And what would they have done then, when this most intimate act was finished? Gone home and sat heavily in a hot farmhouse waiting for a kettle to boil? Or dropped to their knees and prayed to the hurtling sun, for any god must surely now be impossible.

  Something in his doctor’s self lurches at the extremity of the act, of hiding your own dead child in a secret grave. At the admission of guilt in it.

  It is so warm they have begun to live at the outdoor table, eating all their meals there, reading, smoking after dinner and watching out at the waves while the insects flit against the windows.

  Through this early summer Martin gives Jocelyn fishing lessons, rowing lessons, sea lessons, concocting stinking buckets of bait outside the shed. Under the watching eyes of the locals he teaches her about the tides, brings her back a pocketful of shells from each walk or fishing trip, collected from Pittwater’s shallow beaches. He brings limpets, kelp snails, periwinkles and pippies. She takes them in her open palms and lets them fall clattering onto the glass porch t
able, their sleek undersides catching the light. Then she sweeps them with a cupped side of her hand into a bucket she keeps by the door.

  And over the weeks Jocelyn gives Martin piano lessons. She spent a childhood in dark rooms with nuns holding a ruler above her fingers, and she seldom plays any longer. But at nights in this house she teaches him the left hand of Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1. She sits beside him on the piano stool, and slowly he plays the repeated bass line, its even, steady steps over and over, while her right hand wanders the treble notes, its lightness and movement becoming one of her walks around this island, hesitating, beginning again, losing her way and recovering it.

  Alone during the days, in breaks from her work, Jocelyn sits cross-legged on the porch, reading letters from Ellen forwarded from the mountains house. She tries to picture Ellen’s baby, now a small girl who Ellen says never stops talking. From here there is nothing so remote as the English winter, the Thames.

  Before I came here I never knew the river was so tidal, writes Ellen. It makes you think that you might be near the ocean. But never an ocean like Australia’s.

  Sometimes Cassandra just stares at me with this look. It’s not a child’s smile at all. She holds a doll dangling by the hair and our eyes meet, and she gives me this calm, superior sort of look, staring me down. Thomas, of course, thinks I’m just being dramatic.