The Submerged Cathedral Read online

At Ellen’s wedding Jocelyn had danced with Thomas. His fingers had touched her waist, though until then their most intimate closeness had been to sit beside each other in a car, or to pass a cup or dish across a table.

  But Jocelyn mostly remembers Thomas as the West Wyalong sheep farmer’s boy who had seduced Ellen away from home to Sydney. Ellen would tell her, on visits home, how on the night he proposed Thomas took her to a jazz bar, leading her through the smoky sunken room to dance. How, on that blue night she said she would remember always, when the hollow trumpet note swooped clean above their heads to the ceiling beams, and Thomas had his hands on her hips, and the moon hung over the oily harbour, she said she knew it was time to take a step into her future and reach out her hand for what lay there. And she leapt for it.

  Ellen’s stories were always about the leaping, about the thrill of risk.

  Thomas had a quick ear for music and a hankering for the unknowable things that might lie across the oceans, across the spinning globe’s blue pleats, away from the sheep and the mutterings of his brother and father beneath the flattening sun. And he had rocked Ellen’s body safely against his on the ship all across that wide sea to Southampton.

  But once, before they were married, when Jocelyn visited Sydney, Thomas had given her a marijuana cigarette and sat back watching while she winced and hiccupped. Then they had giggled, sniggering together on the couch while Ellen sat apart, smoothly watching them now and again from her book.

  At the wedding, though, they were all formality again, they were groom and bridesmaid, and Ellen sat smoothly watching them from the bridal table, surrounded by glassware and cousins.

  In the evenings Martin trudges up the beach to fish for an hour before dinner. Jocelyn watches him walk on the sand, in one hand a small newspaper parcel of bait, in the other the rod pointing ahead of him, its end lifting and falling on the offbeat of each step. Sometimes in the movement of his body, holding tightly to the parcel and the rod, in his careful walk she can see him as that five-year-old boy who knew for certain that he’d cured a bird.

  The sea is flat, and across the quiet water Lion Island looms.

  Four

  WHEN ELLEN’S BABY was born Jocelyn had visited England. They had wheeled the pram along the grey Thames, Ellen pointing and explaining, and Jocelyn had longed for the hard light of home.

  Ellen was the guide, the one who knew.

  Once, aged five and eight, they were walking home from the shops. Ellen said, ‘We’ll go a new way.’ They were stopped on a corner, a stone ledge covered in pigface beside them. From here it was always two blocks until they turned left, and one block further until their white letterbox, stark against the hedge. But now Ellen stood in the sun, gesturing up an unknown street, her dress red against the fleshy fingers of the pigface and the grey stones.

  Jocelyn looked up the street, shook her head. This corner was as familiar to her as her own shoes: the two houses, their lawns and wire fences. But beyond this spot, the street was another world. It stretched forever uphill, houses pale with strangeness on either side. Over the crest of that hill could be anything. Ocean, jungle, desert.

  She turned back to Ellen, already feeling the moistness on her scalp.

  ‘We’ll get lost,’ she said.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Ellen, shaking her head, pity in her voice.

  They were not allowed to swear. But Ellen’s dress shouted, her plaits were straight, she was tall there in the bright afternoon and she swore. She stared at Jocelyn, her hands on her hips. Jocelyn felt her own wrong body, her thin legs, her brown boy’s hair prickling at her neck. She looked up the street again, squinting into the sun towards the crest of the hill.

  Ellen wanted oceans, jungles. ‘You’re so weak,’ she said. ‘I’m going this way.’

  And she turned and walked up the hill, unafraid, past the new houses, past their windows flashing.

  Jocelyn’s face was hot, her head hurt with trying not to cry as the panic rose, as Ellen walked away up that hill to her new life in the jungle.

  ‘Please,’ she called. But Ellen’s plaits swung and grew smaller until she disappeared over the hill.

  Jocelyn sat in the pigface on the ledge, trying to breathe. But a noise, a door opening in the house above sent her starting off the ledge. Her feet stepped.

  You know the way, she repeated in her head as she took each familiar step.

  She walked. Past the starry tree with its usual red leaves. Past the dark green letterbox, past the roses. As always she crossed the next road, heart pounding, looking wildly for cars. She reached the house with the painted red driveway, began to breathe easier. One and a half blocks. You know the way.

  But then a dog came running: a mud-coloured streak from the side of her vision, and the air cracking; its strained eyes and a fleck of spit landing warm on her cheek. The squeaks of the wire straining, the dog hurling itself to break through the fence as she ran, the animal beside her along the fence-line, snarling, the air turning bloody with what it would do to her, her own shrieks sucked into all the murderous noise. And over it a man’s voice shouting, ‘RUN, RUN!’ and cackling. The fence straining – the teeth – she felt the animal’s breath. Sobbing, running and running along the streets until the white flag of the letterbox was there to save her.

  Her breathing wild, snot running, howling in through the gate. And at the kitchen steps there was Ellen sitting, sucking an ice-block. She stood up when she saw Jocelyn, held out her arms. Jocelyn ran into them and Ellen held her while she sobbed out the dog and its rage. Ellen said nothing, sucking on her ice-block over Jocelyn’s shoulder.

  Then she said, ‘I told you to come my way. I knew that dog was there.’

  And she held out the colourless stump of her ice-block to Jocelyn.

  Jocelyn held the ice dripping in her fingers, and listened to Ellen banging the flywire door into the kitchen, and she understood for the first time that Ellen knew the way, and that a decision without Ellen meant the world held no safe place.

  From her daily walks in the bush now Jocelyn brings back twigs and sprigs and leaves, spreading them along the kitchen bench. In the manuscript she finds the flora maps with their swatches of colour, poring over them when she should be marking up the copy.

  After dinner one night they drink brandy and she begins to talk to Martin about this country’s plants, their shapes and habitats. He listens, exhales a long feather of cigarette smoke. When she pauses, he taps ash, nods for more. ‘Keep going.’

  In her mild intoxication the lacework of her thinking loosens; his nods make her brave. So she starts to tell him, almost whispering now, of an idea she’s had lingering in her mind: a huge, elaborate garden of wild Australian plants. Not yet even half-imagined, but still this ludicrous ambition has begun to stay with her through her days. She is not a gardener, knows nothing of plants. She cannot believe she is voicing any part of this subliminal, impossible idea she has not even let herself properly think. But Martin keeps nodding, and she keeps talking.

  He listens, watching her face, imagining with her this spiky, flowering place. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he says, looking not at her now but out to the sea where she is planting Gymea lilies, the crimson Doryanthes excelsa, whose first flower appears when it’s a decade old.

  She’s telling him things he doesn’t know, but there’s something familiar in her halting words – and then he recognises it. The notion of the garden. It’s his own five-year-old’s epiphany, and the root of his connection to her: they both can see beyond what is.

  She repeats the plant names like prayers. Eucalyptus macrocarpa. Acacia longifolia. Telopea speciosissima, Doryphora sassafras, Banksia spinulosa. They look out at the black sea and he listens to her laying down the bones of her half-formed, holy, fantastical plan.

  That night they both dream in plants, of her fingers becoming green runners and her blood turning chlorophyllic.

  The next evening he hands her a heavy parcel from Dymocks. She unwraps the paper and hol
ds the enormous book in her two hands. Botanica Australis. Plants of Australia.

  ‘For your garden,’ he says.

  And in this moment she knows he is the only one.

  In the morning she is up before him, reading the book on the verandah as he kisses her and leaves for work. She looks up and can see him at the jetty, stepping onto the ferry, black bag dangling. He is always the last to get on board, and once there makes his way to the back as the ferry turns around, churning water. He stands in the sun and she can see him leaning over the railing, looking across the silver water to the shore. She watches until he blurs and the ferry disappears from view.

  The manuscript lies open on the table, but she pushes it away to make room for the book. She spends the day turning its pages, staring at the photographs, reading, reading.

  But before Martin comes home that afternoon a letter has arrived, addressed in Ellen’s scrawly blue hand.

  Jocelyn sits on the verandah watching the Barrenjoey headland in the fading light.

  Martin swings his bag on his walk along the sandy track, up the steps, sees her face.

  ‘Ellen is coming home,’ she says.

  He leans on the verandah rail, waiting to understand her small voice.

  ‘I have to go back to the mountains,’ she says. He can hardly hear her.

  On the table the letter lies open like something on fire. Ellen is coming home, bringing her small daughter, leaving her husband, and three months pregnant.

  Five

  MR HO STANDS in his singlet, leaning slightly, breathing heavily while Martin listens to his lungs. The man’s shoulders and arms are hard-muscled from years of fast and flaming work in Chinatown kitchens. Uncomplaining, but never quite comprehending Martin’s words, Mr Ho has watched, then followed Martin’s gestures to stand, remove his shirt, bare his back, take a deep breath, exhale, then again.

  Under the stethoscope his breathing is almost normal, a little crackled. As if for luck, Martin rests his hands on Mr Ho’s tawny skin for a moment while he thinks, then pulls the man’s white singlet down for him. Something is not right.

  Mr Ho dresses, moves to sit again, coughing into his chest.

  Martin chats brightly as he writes the prescription. ‘Bronchitis. Bad chest,’ he says, patting his own chest. Mr Ho nods slowly at each syllable, takes the paper from Martin.

  Once he has left Martin’s doorway there’s a yelp from the receptionist, Susan, a young woman who wears black eyeliner and her blonde hair piled high on her head. Martin steps through to see Mr Ho holding out a wooden box to Susan.

  That evening as Martin drives through the city, across the bridges and north along the coast road, he knows suddenly it is not bronchitis that has hold of Mr Ho’s breathing. He wants to turn the car around immediately. The wheeze, and that uneasy space in his own certainty when he lifted his hands from Mr Ho’s skin, have moved and wavered in the back of his mind since, and now the pattern has cleared. Tomorrow he will get Susan to write to Mr Ho and call him back in, order an X-ray. It is early enough. Not all omens are bad ones.

  His headlights wash the road pale, and the eucalyptus leaves glitter as he drives.

  Tomorrow Jocelyn is leaving Pittwater for the mountains.

  They have argued about it. Ellen was a grown woman, could surely look after herself, he’d said. And Jocelyn was a grown woman too, not a servant.

  ‘But she’s my sister,’ Jocelyn said, looking out of the window to the sea.

  And then he had said (so stupid, he knows it), ‘If we were married I could forbid you.’ Hated himself even as the words came out, as he stood by the mantelpiece picking at the paint with his fingernail. But they were there, in the air.

  Jocelyn stood up, and met his eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Perhaps that’s why we’re not.’ And she went into the bedroom to begin packing her things.

  An animal’s eyes flash from the undergrowth in his headlights. He jams the brakes, but it disappears.

  It is not forever, she said more than once, after his apologies. So. He will travel up to the mountains as he has before, on weekends. Will talk to George about more locum work.

  Not all omens are bad.

  When he reaches home he leads her, covering her eyes, to the kitchen, and then uncovers them to see the live mud crab, stunned and shifting against the sides of the sink. Two hand-spans across, bronze, slow and prehistoric. It was in Mr Ho’s newspaper-lined apple box on the back seat of the car all the way back from the city, its great pincers bound tightly to itself with brown string, the wiry antennae searching and bending. Then on the ferry, the odd other passenger coming to stare into the box beside him and give a little shriek at the moving dark mass.

  Now in the kitchen he and Jocelyn drink riesling while he tells, laughing, about Mr Ho trying to give the crab to Susan, the man’s bewilderment at her horrified squeal. Mr Ho told him how to cook it, gestured how to kill it first, with chopsticks, but Martin thinks the knife steel will do it. The animal shunts in the sink. Martin talks on, how the pincers could break your fingers, how the crabs are caught with poles in the oozing suck and pop of the mangroves.

  Neither of them says anything about tomorrow.

  Jocelyn walks out to the sand’s edge to watch the last ferry come in while he crashes about in the kitchen, swearing. She goes back in once during the procedure; the great creature has a bunch of tea towel viced in one pincer. Martin hoists the towel and the crab hangs there, unmoving. Martin’s giggle is unconvincing. He holds a long kitchen knife in his other hand. Jocelyn goes back out to the porch and watches the ferry passengers wheel-barrowing their supplies through the moonlight away from the beach, torches bobbing. The ferry heaves away from the wharf, whirling water.

  An hour and a half later they sit, with large dinner plates and the nutcracker, at the porch table in the lamplight to eat. Martin is flush-faced, and insects tap in quiet circles against the house.

  The moon is up. The white humps of the upturned boats glow violet in the sand at the edges of the lawns and the water moves like oil, slapping at the beach. In the bedroom Jocelyn’s suitcase lies packed, Botanica Australis wrapped in a petticoat underneath her clothes.

  Before eating, they talk about her trip back to her sister, as if it’s a weekend away. They speak brightly about the road, how the neighbours who had reluctantly accepted the dog will be happy to give him back, about airing out the house. But as Martin listens to her voice as she talks about Ellen he feels some part of her confidence faltering, some child’s timidity emerging in her.

  They sit in the lamplight, eating. After the first exclamations and overworked smiles – Jocelyn toasts Martin and his crab in a too-loud voice – they fall into silence and eat doggedly, passing utensils back and forth, the cracking of the creature’s skin sounding out across the sand and the waves.

  On Jocelyn’s second weekend of the long-ago visit to England the sun had come out.

  They had driven to Cambridge through the summer morning, and Jocelyn had never felt such soft light on her skin. The three of them stood on the bridge, leaning over, looking down at the punts. The water glimmered and there was quiet laughter and the knock of poles against the wooden boats.

  ‘Let’s have a go,’ Thomas had said. Ellen rolled her eyes.

  Jocelyn held out her arms for the baby. ‘You two go, I’ll take Cassandra. It’ll be romantic.’

  But Ellen shook her head. ‘It’ll be time to feed her, she’ll scream.’ She paused, watching Jocelyn and Thomas, then said, ‘You two go.’

  Jocelyn began to say no, but Thomas said to Ellen, ‘You’ll be all right, won’t you? Come on, Joss,’ and was down the stairs talking to one of the boater-hatted attendants.

  The attendant held Jocelyn’s arm while she stepped into the flat-bottomed boat. Ellen watched from the bridge, and Jocelyn waved to her and the baby.

  Thomas clambered in, took the pole from the man.

  ‘Let’s show these bloody poms how it’s done then, eh Joss,’ he said, hi
s voice unchanged but suddenly so Australian, and he flexed a bicep, and they both laughed when he leaned heavily on the pole and groaned, barely moving the boat an inch from the pontoon.

  ‘Jesus bloody Christ,’ he said through gritted teeth as the punt edged away in the wrong direction. Jocelyn turned to wave again at Ellen, and laugh with her at Thomas’s wobbling and grunting.

  Then the boat turned, Thomas managed a good shove, and they moved smoothly towards the arched bridge. He looked up, blew a kiss to Ellen and the baby, and called out, ‘Half an hour.’

  Ahead of them downstream, clutches of students lounged in the boats as if they lived in them. One punt glided past, two pale girls lying back sleepily on cushions and blankets, sipping champagne. A young man in a green shirt rested his weight on one hip at the end of the boat, pole in one hand, steering effortlessly through the willow-shadowed water.

  Thomas, swearing and grunting, managed with great effort to begin using the pole as a rudder. ‘How do those bastards do it and look like that?’ he grunted, scowling.

  Jocelyn smiled. ‘Do you want me to help?’

  ‘Of course not. I was a frigging surf life-saver, remember.’

  They both snorted, both knowing he had not been, and Jocelyn turned and lounged, watching the other boats drift, or occasionally circle clumsily like theirs, stuck against one another under one of the narrow stone bridges.

  On either side of the stone embankments stretched the vast, luminous lawns.

  Then Thomas had the hang of it and manoeuvred the boat without looking, and Jocelyn watched him through half-closed eyes, a silhouette of beauty against that river of green.

  Suddenly at a bend in the river, Kings College rose into view, all pale stone grandeur. It loomed higher and higher until it was right in front of them, and Jocelyn knew she would never forget this moment, this gliding by England’s dreaming architecture under her pale-blue summer sky.

  Fifty minutes later they could hear the baby’s wails before they reached the last bridge, and scrambling from the boat onto the pontoon they saw Ellen, walking up and down the bridge, jostling and jogging the baby.