The Submerged Cathedral Read online

  ‘Shit,’ murmured Thomas, ‘we’re in for it.’

  None of them spoke in the car on the way home. Ellen was totally silent, staring out at the road ahead while Jocelyn sat in the back, patting at Cassandra under the blankets wound tightly around her in the carry cot, her small red face whitening across the nose as she screamed. Until, eventually exhausted, she fell into sleep, still breathing now and again with a deep shudder.

  On this Pittwater morning the beach is rimmed with a lace of crushed white shell. Martin lifts her suitcase from the jetty into the room of the boat and they board together. The other passengers don’t look, careful to turn their gaze anywhere but at the doctor’s woman leaving. Jocelyn and Martin watch their house and the beach moving away. She watches Lion Island as Martin tells her again that he will see her in a couple of weeks.

  After he’s helped load her things into her car – the manuscript in its rubber-banded parcels on the front seat – they kiss there in the gravel car park. His hands rest on her hips until the ferry horn sounds for its return trip. Only then does he walk across the gravel to his car. She starts her engine and then he turns his own key, and they each sit, waiting for the engines to warm, watching the ferry in its lumbering turn towards their beach, their summer.

  It moves away over that now uncrossable swathe of water.

  Six

  SHE WALKS THROUGH the cold house in the mountains, drawing back the heavy curtains, trying to imagine the baby Cassandra now a child.

  She drags furniture into the old glasshouse, their father’s private pottering place. In the evening light the air is pale green.

  The glasshouse walls are cement as high as the waist, glass panes above. At the base of the window a wooden shelf a foot wide runs the length of all four walls, lined with terracotta pots, buckets, knives. Under the shelf, against the concrete wall, are the water pipes once mildly heated from a wood stove at the back of the building. A stool has been dragged up to a potting table. She’s installed a battered kerosene heater nearby; garden tools are piled in a corner. Down the centre of the glasshouse is a long trestle table, piled with other paraphernalia: seed trays, a trowel, cardboard pieces, a pen, dirty ice-cream sticks, wire, a sack of old fertiliser.

  She sets out her reference books and the manuscript on the desk which she has dragged out from the house, then lugs in the box of books she’s brought back from Pittwater, and the other things, the pressed plant cuttings from the bush, their sticky-tape labels. Some small rough drawings that might be part of a garden, the wad of dried sea kelp and the bucket of shells. On one of the glass walls she sticks pictures of plants, drawings, botanical illustrations from magazines and books. In front of this wall of buckling paper she piles other things. She pushes in the broken office chair, its back swung sideways on the metal frame.

  She lifts out the book Martin gave her, puts it on the trestle table, making a place for herself for when Ellen arrives.

  When they were children Ellen would drag the tangled coils of the garden hose to the front lawn and position the sprinkler and its triangular upward fan of water. Then she would stand a little way off, holding a length of hose and bending it hard to cut off the water supply to the sprinkler. Then she started the countdown, and at nought Jocelyn would sprint from the corner near the fence, diagonally across the grass, to the opposite corner. Her leap over the sprinkler was Ellen’s cue – she would snap the hose straight and send the water shooting up again. Then it was Jocelyn’s turn to hold the hose; whoever remained driest at the end of the game was the victor.

  Jocelyn was the quicker, more accurate judge of the movement of water in the plastic hose, and in the first minutes of the game Ellen dripped while Jocelyn’s clothes were almost completely dry. Ellen’s face began to darken after each slippery grass landing, pushing back wet hair from her face. Not squealing after the first three turns, just concentrating hard when it was her turn for the hose in her hand, as Jocelyn began her run-up.

  And Jocelyn knew the unspoken rules as well.

  So from then on she made a silent game of her own. She timed her leap to match Ellen’s releasing of the hose, calibrating the movement in her legs as she had done with the hose in her hand, slowing or speeding at the last second, never taking her eyes from Ellen’s fingers. Awarding herself points at each of Ellen’s triumphant shrieks and crows, giving herself a star for every perfect soaking.

  She won her secret game every time, and Ellen hooted with delight at her sister’s dripping hair and her footprints on the porch as they went inside for lunch.

  That night Martin’s voice is lively on the telephone, talking about a lorry driver with a death wish on the road home from the city. Jocelyn twists the black plastic coil around her fingers and pictures him in the house, folded into the cherry-coloured armchair with his long legs dangling over its side, rubbing his forehead as he speaks. She wants to walk past and touch his pale, fine hair.

  She tells him about the new letter from Ellen. She will arrive on the third, did not answer Jocelyn’s questions. I’ll tell you everything when I get there, Ellen had written. Ellen still decides the rules.

  Jocelyn hangs up, returns to the lamplit glasshouse and the manuscript, to Lake Eyre, the inland sea. At the edge of three deserts in the middle of the continent, it is the lowest point of Australia’s geography. She reads that the place is itself another low desert, where only once in the past century the enormous lake has formed, the rising water nine times as salty as the ocean. Once or twice a century the earth liquefies, shimmering, spreading outwards into the stillness. The gravitational pull of the moon forms tides on the water, and life begins to flicker and slide and crawl and stagger from the shallows. And from thousands and thousands of miles away, the birds come. Over the water, the budgerigar and the cockatiel: a vast, brilliant sheet of screaming air.

  Jocelyn spends the next days working on the manuscript, tidying the yard, cleaning the house, setting out rat traps in the laundry. Ellen is leaving Thomas, will not say why. In the evenings Jocelyn writes to or telephones Martin. One night she takes a page and scribbles a glimpse of an imaginary garden.

  She cleans spider webs and hauls mouldy blankets out from the old kennel for Alf, who is bewildered but happily home again after the months with a neighbour. He stomps the perimeter of the garden, sniffing and pissing.

  Jocelyn makes up the bed for Cassandra in Ellen’s childhood room, sticking coloured pictures on the walls and collecting their old toys from boxes and cupboards, washing them, combing the dolls’ matted hair, sitting them on the bed in welcome. But when she passes by the door she sees them there, leached of their colours, the ragged bears and the dolls cracked, tired out from all the years.

  And as Jocelyn shops for food – avoiding the glances of people she knows have heard about her going away with Martin – and hangs meat in the meat house, arranges for firewood to be delivered, chops kindling, it is as though she is still their father’s maid, as though he had not died years ago, as though she had never left.

  Or as though she is their mother, in those years before she died, constantly moving through the house, mapping it with her dusting rags, or on her knees scrubbing, as if she could scour her marriage clean. The more their father stayed away from home, the more their mother scrubbed and starched and ironed. When he came back it was worse, his infidelities carried in the air around him like the cling of tobacco smoke. Jocelyn remembers the taut dinners, the sound of crockery knocking in the sink, her mother bent over it, holding dishes under the water as if to drown them. She remembers Ellen, at sixteen, shouting at their mother in a distant room – Why do you put UP with it!

  Once, after Jocelyn gave the engagement ring back to the boy, her mother accused her in the hallway: ‘A marriage doesn’t have to be perfect. You make the best of things.’

  Jocelyn rakes leaves in the garden, cuts the grass, sweeps the verandah, and tries to remember how Martin stood on this front step and changed everything.

  Martin switches
the porch light on before he closes the front door behind him in the mornings now. He cannot stand the darkness of the house across the sand when he gets off the ferry. After he reads Jocelyn’s letters, or speaks to her, he takes a fishing rod and his cigarettes and goes to sit in the dark on the jetty. Sometimes he stays there until the morning.

  Seven

  AND NOW SUDDENLY one new November morning it is Ellen standing on that step, saying, ‘Of course, I thought you knew.’

  Arriving from the train station, suitcase in one hand and a small girl’s white hand in the other. The stylish cut of Ellen’s bone-coloured jacket over her shoulders there on the porch, her perfectly polished, unscuffed shoes. And Cassandra, a tiny, puppy-fat version of her mother, in navy trousers and a cream viyella blouse, the two of them emotionless against the hard sunlight and the gash of red azalea.

  Thomas has always hit her, Ellen says. ‘Especially during pregnancies.’

  Suddenly all Jocelyn can think of is Ellen’s immeasurable kindness in those nights when Jocelyn was four and the nightmare came again – that dark and undulating force, monster too trivial a word even then for the evil of its vast, curtainous mass. Ellen would bring her little sister into her own bed, wriggle them both so as to untangle their flannel nightgowns, and hold close around Jocelyn’s chubby waist from behind. Ellen would kiss the back of her head, wearily whisper to her to think of nice things, remember the beach? Your blue dress? And cradle her back to sleep. Daytime restored them to squabbles over hair ribbons and Ellen’s complicated rules, but at night, at seven years old, Ellen was her staunchest guardian.

  And now it is Jocelyn’s turn.

  Ellen’s matter-of-factness. ‘Did you never wonder why after all this time we only had one child? I had two miscarriages because of it.’

  Jocelyn turns from the front door, gesturing them to sit, walking through treacle to the kitchen. The leaden teapot.

  Thomas has always hit Ellen.

  When Jocelyn returns to the dining room Cassandra is staring out the window at the ragged mess of the eucalypts and the failed, patchy lawn. Ellen sits in the green leather armchair with its springs prolapsing to the floor beneath, and Jocelyn is overwhelmed by the inadequacy of anything she has to offer. She cannot stop her tears coming.

  Ellen jumps up and pulls Jocelyn to her, smoothing her spine, calming her, clucking away her shame at needing comfort when she should be offering protection. Ellen whispers, It’s all right, it’s finished, we’re home now, it’s finished. This time is different, she’s left for good, she has money, she’s home. She will have the baby here and everything will be all right.

  Jocelyn straightens and leans to touch Cassandra’s hair. The little girl, dry-eyed, does not look up, but keeps chewing the mouthful of Milk Arrowroot biscuit she’s taken from the opened packet and watches a sulphur-crested cockatoo waddle like an old white dog across the garden.

  That night Ellen tucks Sandra into bed, telling her stories about the dolls Jocelyn has put out and reading from one of their childhood fairytale books. Later Jocelyn lies in her bed across the hall, listening to Ellen unpacking in their parents’ room. Her mind fills with images of Thomas, winking at her across a dinner table, rolling his eyes about Ellen, at Cambridge. She’s so melodramatic. And then into her mind comes the other, unbearable image: on Ellen’s wrist when she took off her jacket today, a pale but definite pink line, straight as a pencil. ‘Oh, just an old scar,’ she had said, and pulled her sleeve down again.

  Martin arrives at the end of the week. As Jocelyn fills the kettle she hears Martin and Ellen talking with an ease she has never had with her own sister. They are discussing Ellen’s pregnancy.

  Jocelyn goes outside to look for Sandra, finds her squatting near the woodshed over a terracotta flower pot in which she has trapped four snails and is filling the pot with bits of grass and leaves.

  ‘Would you like a piece of cake, Sandra?’ Jocelyn asks, squatting down beside her.

  Sandra says nothing, does not look up, but shakes her head. Peering into the pot.

  Jocelyn pulls a few blades of grass from a tuft near her foot and offers it to her. ‘Is this the right sort of grass?’

  Sandra takes the little bunch, looks at it closely. ‘No,’ she says, and passes it back to Jocelyn. She takes it and tosses it aside.

  ‘How many snails have you got there?’

  Sandra meets her gaze for a second. She is dark-haired like her mother, her skin pale with Englishness. But where Ellen’s eyes are green Sandra’s are dark brown, like Jocelyn’s.

  ‘Twelve,’ she says.

  ‘I see,’ nods Jocelyn, shifting to sit cross-legged on the ground beside her. She wants to reach out and touch Sandra’s hand, but resists the urge.

  ‘This one’s called Jeremy,’ breathes Sandra, pointing with a stick at one snail stuck three-quarters up the pot’s side, slowly making for escape. Her voice has an adult clarity and volume Jocelyn has never heard in the muffled, mumbled speech of Australian children. ‘No you don’t,’ says Sandra sweetly, and wields her stick to flick Jeremy from the side and clack him roughly back into the pot.

  When Jocelyn returns to the dining room Ellen and Martin are smiling at her.

  ‘Martin’s going to deliver the baby,’ Ellen says, beaming.

  Ellen’s first check-up is ‘like playing doctors and nurses’; she giggles, making her face prim and walking haughtily. Martin is playful too, ushering her into the surgery, pretending not to know her, calling her Madam.

  While he peels back her sleeve and wraps the black rubber cuff around her upper arm Ellen looks around and jokes there should be Van Gogh’s sunflowers, isn’t that what doctors’ rooms always have?

  Martin puffs the little ball in his hand. The band tightens on her skin. He stops, examines the dial, and then lets out the band with a sound of released air. As the air hisses he says, ‘So what exactly has happened, injury-wise?’

  She leans back for a moment, closes her eyes, then opens them. ‘Do we really have to go into this?’

  He says, merely, softly, ‘Yes.’

  So Ellen begins talking, in a shopping-list voice, sometimes lifting her blouse or standing and turning, pulling her skirt away from her back for him to see, chronicling the years of damage done to her body in another country on the other side of the world.

  Martin watches her while she speaks, and listens, and thinks about other, invisible kinds of pain.

  In the night Martin climbs out of the fold-out bed in the sun-room where he sleeps now that Sandra and Ellen are here, and goes to Jocelyn’s room. They touch each other’s skin, and whisper the news of their week into the dark.

  ‘Sandra reminds me of me when I was little,’ she says. ‘All that silence and staring.’

  He strokes her hand where he holds it flat on his chest. ‘Poor little you,’ he says.

  He has talked to George, who has given him a day’s locum work on Mondays, and the Sydney practice will let him have the extra day away.

  Jocelyn presses her fingers on her closed eyes, hard, in the dark to stop herself from crying. She knows she should be pleased. It’s an extra night. But she wants him never to leave.

  They talk softly through the hours, until they fall asleep. Jocelyn pretends she can hear the sea outside.

  Ellen plumps cushions, takes possession of the house as she moves through the rooms. ‘Thank God we had you to come home to,’ she says to Jocelyn one afternoon when the sun through the window divides the living room into quarters. Jocelyn nods, thinking of the way the sun strikes water, not glass. Thinking of Martin, of the meanings of home.

  Among the belongings Ellen puts around the house are her photographs in frames. She has several of her bridal ship journey with Thomas to England. She and Thomas in fancy-dress, a pharaoh king and queen. She had been skilful with their makeup and gold lamé. His eyes are particularly accentuated, pencilled black and sensuous into wide cat’s corners, and he has golden cardboard epaulettes on his shoulders and ma
nacles on his wrists. It sickens Jocelyn now to see the picture, but Ellen is somehow buoyed by it; she can make the distinction in time, can separate the resting power in Thomas’s hands from what happened later. Not much later, though, she says thoughtfully – the last port of call had been memorable for their first exquisite argument, his dizzying shove of her against the cabin door. She had been drunk, and therefore could see that she had perhaps brought it on herself, and they apologised to each other, crying, for days.

  In the photograph Thomas’s hands are large, his fingers curved, not threateningly, over Ellen’s honey shoulders. She wears a golden serpent coiled around her throat, and its head, having slithered up the nape of her neck and up through the high nest of her curling black hair, descends again to rest like a jewel in the centre of her forehead. She laughs now, holding the photograph. ‘It took me days and God knows how many tins of gold paint and yards of tinfoil, that wretched snake!’

  The serpent’s little malevolent eyes were a pair of marcasite earrings, a gift from Thomas.

  In other pictures from that voyage she is voluptuous and sleep-eyed under sun hats so broad they fill the frame. The photographs are black-and-white, but Jocelyn always sees her sister in red.

  Though it is early November Ellen has insisted that Sandra go to school in the town for the weeks until Christmas. She bossed the headmaster into it in a short meeting, her loud English voice sounding around his little office, and now she or Jocelyn walks Sandra to the school gates in the mornings and waits there for her again in the afternoons.

  Jocelyn took her there on the first day. Sandra held Jocelyn’s hand tightly, gripping the hard plastic handle of the brown Globite school case in her other hand. Jocelyn saw two boys turn and stare at Sandra, hands on their grey serge hips, waiting to see what she would do when Jocelyn let go her hand. Jocelyn remembered stepping onto the ferry at Palm Beach. She asked Sandra if she was all right, but the girl did not answer, only tilted her face to be kissed as Jocelyn bent down. Then she let go her aunt’s hand and walked steadily past the two staring boys, into that bright square of playground and monkey-bars and other children’s noise.