The Submerged Cathedral Page 5

  A week later Jocelyn is trimming quail in the kitchen, and Sandra comes to stand beside her, watching the cleaver come down to crush and snap the thin birdy bones. The halved, pink-fleshed bodies lie slumped in a heap to one side. ‘Out of the way, Sandra, I don’t want to hurt you,’ Jocelyn says. It is the violence she does not want the girl to see. She tries to cut more quietly, but the bones won’t break, so she returns to the sharp, heavy dropping of the cleaver, trying to put her body between Sandra and the bones. But Sandra moves to get a better view, concentrating, interested. After a time she says, in a casual, adult’s voice, ‘Is that lobster?’

  Jocelyn almost drops the knife, but is careful not even to smile.

  ‘No, sweetheart, it’s quail. Little birds, like chickens.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Sandra, disappointed. She pushes hair from her eyes and then wanders outside to find the dog.

  The mind of a child, the endless acceptance of new, unthinkable things. Like finding yourself on the other side of the world in a land where the bark of the trees is red and you have been let go by a father who swore you were his most loved thing.

  Sandra carries everywhere with her now a feeble picture book Jocelyn had bought for her during their first days here when Sandra had hardly spoken. The story involves a kangaroo’s joey lost in an unfamiliar part of the bush where it doesn’t belong, and finding its way home by asking for help from other tedious national symbols: koala, echidna, wombat, lyrebird. All first hostile at the junior outsider’s intrusions and too busy to help, what with their sleeping, digging, snuffling and tail-spreading to do, but then charmed into taking pity in the dark bush on the poor, lost, child marsupial. Even a cranky-then-kindly brown snake – somehow perching up like a rattlesnake in the illustration – hisses some advice. In the final scene the joey leaps across two pages into its mother’s waiting pouch.

  After hearing Ellen read it aloud Jocelyn remembers the lost-child rumours from the encyclopaedia, and the buried baby. Something about it makes her want to rip the book from her niece’s hands. She is worried about the ideas she has begun to plant in her, of being lost, of foreignness. But Sandra, glossy head bent, pores over the thing constantly in corners of the house and garden, murmuring the names of these alien animals quietly to herself.

  ‘It’s only a book, Joss,’ Ellen soothes. ‘She loves it.’

  Jocelyn watches Ellen through the days, hears her sharp voice ordering Sandra about. Now and then Ellen puts two hands on her swelling belly. Jocelyn begins to feel consumed by anxiety for these new lost children, born and unborn.

  Martin helps Jocelyn in the vegetable garden, tying the slender stems of tomatoes to wooden stakes. It is two weeks since Ellen and Sandra arrived.

  Martin has something to say. He takes a breath: ‘I’m not sure about Ellen’s injuries.’

  It’s the first truly hot midday of summer, and there is no shade in this treeless part of the garden. Jocelyn looks up at him, still tying the string. ‘What do you mean?’

  He is holding a green bevelled stem to the stake while she knots the string. He doesn’t answer, standing there behind the plant, holding it like a line between himself and her.

  She straightens, brushes hair from her hot face.

  ‘Are you saying you don’t believe her?’

  He breathes in, fingers still on the whetstone silk of the stem. ‘No, it’s completely possible that he’s hurt her. But I’m just not sure the particular things she’s told me are completely accurate. She’s emphasising things I just can’t see, that would be more evident. And –’ he pauses, watching her – ‘what she said to you about miscarriages. Injury during pregnancy, unless it’s late term and a really major blow, like a car accident, actually rarely results in miscarriage.’

  He waits, then says, ‘What I mean is, perhaps she’s just making things slightly more dramatic, that’s all. It’s understandable.’

  Jocelyn stares at him. This cool doctor’s voice she has never heard. Used like a scalpel: the slight, easy pressure, drawing a fine red incision into Ellen’s life. Melodramatic. Something violent in her flashes.

  ‘You sound like Thomas.’ She spits the words.

  Martin closes his eyes. ‘Look –’

  ‘And don’t you dare say to me, “that’s all”.’ Her rage stuns her.

  Martin says nothing now, only holds her gaze across the green lines.

  And then Sandra is walking down the path between the lettuces towards them. It is the first time she has come near the two of them alone, without her mother. They both stay silent, keep still, so as not to scare away this new small creature in the garden.

  Jocelyn breathes. ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ she murmurs.

  Sandra stops, gapes at her as if at something fearful and ugly, and Jocelyn instantly regrets her familiarity.

  Sandra puts a fingernail between her teeth. Martin starts working again, lifting the bowed tomato vine. Jocelyn instinctively follows him, tying the plant where he holds it, each of them careful, quiet. The sun is high. Sandra stands watching them as they work. They hear the click of her teeth on the fingernail, and she takes the torn sliver from her tongue like a hair, examines it, her dark, fine head bent in the sun. Then her voice comes, high and English among the vegetables.

  ‘Mummy says can you please come in for lunch.’

  She doesn’t wait for a reply, but turns away, and they watch her stolid, rocking walk back up the path, her small legs too pale, too pale for this country’s hard-hearted sun.

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ Jocelyn calls, and moves to follow her.

  Martin whispers, ‘Hang on,’ and catches her arm. She stops but says, not looking at him, ‘You’re wrong. You don’t understand anything about Ellen.’

  He pauses, and then nods slowly. He takes her hand and holds it tight as they walk out of the garden.

  Ellen has set the dining table for a proper meal. Ordinarily Jocelyn and Martin would have made a sandwich at the kitchen bench and eaten it outside on the lawn, reading or talking, uncut sandwiches spilling bits into the grass.

  But today there is an ironed tablecloth, diced salad in bowls, a loaf of bread precisely sawn, rare roast beef in thin slices, mustard in little dishes. There are wine glasses, and water glasses.

  ‘This is lovely,’ Jocelyn says into the hollow room when they are seated around the table. Ellen picks up dishes and puts down her fork and swallows and talks and laughs.

  Sandra has a serviette tucked in at her neck like a board and eats a sandwich in jigsaw pieces, sniffing, looking only at her plate.

  Ellen is asking about Sydney, about shopping. She winks at Martin and says she’s sure Jocelyn won’t know where the decent shops are. In small, underneath moments Jocelyn sees Martin quietly including Sandra. He makes her smile once, is not pushy.

  And all the time Ellen tinkles, tinkles across the table.

  Eight

  THE EUCALYPT IS EVERYWHERE. The pungent foliage of Australia’s eucalyptus trees – more than 600 species in all – create the country’s most evocative aroma. The eucalypts range in size from 10 to 300 feet high, and grow everywhere from swamp to stony desert to tropical rainforest.

  Her pencil hovers over the line of type, but she can think of no words to convey that blade to the senses, that incision of the air when a gum leaf is torn. The explosive thread of scent that will one day have her heaving with homesickness.

  Ellen sips cordial in the garden.

  ‘They say you can inherit it,’ she says. ‘Violence, I mean.’

  They are watching Sandra play with the old brown dog. Ellen’s voice is smooth and unremarking. She drinks from a glass embossed with red and gold curlicues, elegant in her hand. She is made for Australian light, sitting here in the wicker garden chair, stroking her turquoise paisley blouse over her belly and setting the glass on the table. Watching her daughter, she idly twists the rose-gold wedding band on her finger.

  Jocelyn sits there in the same accepting silence with which she has greeted Elle
n’s statements since childhood. Ladies wear stockings. Dogs give you rabies.

  Ellen stretches out, arms backwards over her head, her narrow hips and growing belly rising to the fading sky. The blouse rides up to reveal a panel of taut, creamy skin above the shirring of her black trousers.

  Sandra whoops at Alf down by the fence, flailing her arms and stepping back, making him leap higher, higher each time. The old dog, unused to such wild attention, is eager, jumping determinedly on his lumpen legs, eyes fixed on the ball in Sandra’s hand, tongue lolling. A once-skilled old boxer enticed back inside the ring.

  Ellen turns in her seat to follow the low flight of a magpie.

  ‘You don’t realise how much you miss these until you come back,’ she says.

  It is the time of the afternoon when Jocelyn used to sit out here alone, bracing herself against the birds as they gathered in the high branches of the gums. They would plummet in diagonals around her, scudding at knee height then shooting vertical to the tree, squawking and squealing as they flew. It was difficult not to take personally those carefully aimed sideswipes just above her, behind her head.

  Now, spring gone into summer, with Ellen here and Sandra skidding with the dog over the lawn, the magpies meet more sedately, fluttering up and settling, dropping their double-noted calls into the air.

  Jocelyn watches them closely, listens to her sister, watches her turn the wedding ring. Since Ellen came back, nothing is as it seems.

  Martin drives the three hours from Sydney on Friday evenings, his headlights spreading the bush white on the winding roads. Spends a day at George’s surgery in the mountains on Mondays, then leaves at dawn on Tuesday to set off again for the surgery in the city, and then there is the drive back to the beach. Even though the drive here is not so much longer than the daily one between the city and the beach house, Jocelyn is riven with guilt about all his travelling, and the mountains roads are more dangerous. She has visions of his car airborne over one of those orange cliffs, but still cannot bring herself to tell him to stay home and rest: by Friday nights his calm presence is all she wants. His warm thigh next to hers at the table, his voice gentle against Ellen’s. In the dawn mists on Tuesdays she watches his car drive out into the street and tries not to feel like a visited prisoner.

  Each week Ellen grows larger, her clothes tighter across the breasts and belly. One morning after they drop Sandra at school, Ellen and Jocelyn go shopping for more maternity clothes. In the town’s one dress shop Ellen, half-naked in the dressing room, shrieks from behind the curtain, pokes her head out and dangles for Jocelyn a new, enormous white brassiere. Then she and Jocelyn bite their lips to stop from laughing as the shop woman, Mrs Berner, whom they have known since they were children, stands in front of Ellen, all serious work and frowning, pushing and lifting at Ellen’s breasts and tugging the shoulder straps so hard that Ellen sways in the little curtained room.

  Afterwards in the tea shop they snigger into their tea.

  ‘As though she was fitting a damn horse’s bridle,’ Ellen squeals, sending them both into a fresh fit of hysteria.

  Nine

  JOCELYN READS OF Coober Pedy, the underground opal-mining town of South Australia, lying in a shallow dish of clay and sandstone.

  She scribbles her notes, trying to push away thoughts of Ellen and Thomas.

  The Coober Pedy townsfolk live in dugout rooms under the earth, to keep out of the overwhelming heat. The inhabitants, the gougers, eke out a living in the narrow mineshafts, bringing up ore by the bucketful, gouging at the walls of their corridors in the dark for the elusive seam of opal. Or, less profitably, they live from ‘noodling’, sorting through the discarded stone and earth with sticks for overlooked pieces of the gem.

  Occasionally opal worth hundreds of thousands of pounds is found. But most people will never make their fortunes at Coober Pedy. Yet still they hope each day for the bright glimpse that will change their lives, watching for it as they climb down into the dark with explosives in their hands.

  Blue letters from Thomas begin to arrive. Remorseful, self-righteous. Cassandra has the right to a father, he rages. So does the other one.

  In 1963, women do not leave their husbands. Thomas is pitiful, shamed, wheedling, threatening. The letters are thirty pages long, or two lines. They are tender, nostalgic, paranoid, drunken. All on airmail paper, arriving in the letterbox daily at first, then in jerky spates.

  Jocelyn wants to tear the letters up, take them from the letterbox and toss them straight into the incinerator. She does, once, but Ellen discovers this and becomes the most animated Jocelyn has seen her, shouting that Jocelyn has no right.

  So now she hands the letters over, expressionless. Or she sees from the glasshouse – Ellen (or worse, Cassandra) reaching into the letterbox, drawing out her hand, turning the envelope over to see its handwriting. Ellen usually pockets the letter then, to read later, privately. When Jocelyn does see her reading occasionally, in the garden, something like satisfaction glimmers across her face. Sometimes it is fear. Jocelyn begins dreaming of Thomas’s arrival, hair flying, grown larger and dishevelled by grief and rage, devouring them all.

  But in Jocelyn’s bed at night Martin whispers that the man is a coward who will take no action; that whatever he’s done, he merely wants his rants. That Ellen has done the right thing, that when the baby comes she will feel safe, and Jocelyn can come back to Pittwater.

  Lying in the bed with Jocelyn held curved into the cave of his body, however, Martin dreams that this is what happens: a squall over the house, a pale storm starting from the far corner of the garden, moving across the months, darkening as it nears.

  Sandra swears cheerfully at the dog. ‘You bastard, Alf,’ she says in her high clear voice, lurching sideways from his raised leg, through the front door into the hallway gloom. Ellen hears her from the kitchen, calls, ‘Sandra!’

  Jocelyn is passing with an armful of books, and she and Sandra smirk at each other, then turn, screeching their disgust, to see Alf steadying himself to shit on the front step, like a circus elephant perching on a bucket. Jocelyn kicks at the screen door, yelling ‘Alf! You’re revolting! Get away!’, startling him into a stumble. He recovers, then moves awkwardly, interrupted, into the garden.

  Sandra is sent to her room, and in the dining room Ellen blames Jocelyn for her daughter’s vocabulary. Blames Martin, whom she has heard say ‘bastard’ within Sandra’s earshot. It is one of those days when Ellen’s voice fills the room, upper-class and British. Jocelyn half-listens. Through the window she can see Alf now happily straining on the lawn.

  ‘She’s a child, for God’s sake, Joss. And it’s not funny.’

  A large turd curves from the dog’s flared anus. Jocelyn feels sick. She turns to stare into her tea cup, the faint oily slick of the milk reflecting the window’s light.

  ‘Sandra has been through,’ Ellen is saying more quietly, breathing unevenly, ‘I would think, enough. And I have bloody well been through enough without seeing my sister turn my child into a sewer-mouthed brat because I’ve been stupid.’

  Oh, Ellen.

  Ellen pulls at the blue tablecloth with her pale fingernails. The skin on her face is beginning to lose its fineness.

  Jocelyn cannot speak for guilt. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, not meeting Ellen’s eyes but standing to collect her sister’s empty tea cup in the only gesture she can manage. She carries the cups from the room. As she passes the window she catches sight of Alf half-heartedly scuffing grass-dust over his shining faeces on the lawn.

  Martin brings Sandra a cane hula hoop from Woolworths in the city, and she spends Saturday morning out on the porch with it, trying to start it swinging around her waist. From the dining room over breakfast they watch her. She swings the hoop too hard and tries swivelling, hipless in her yellow frock, dropping her little body wildly from side to side before the hoop clatters again to the cement. ‘Damn,’ her small voice says.

  The dog sits on the grass watching, head nodding u
p or down at the hoop as it is lifted and dropped.

  Ellen rises from the table, appears at the porch. ‘Sandra, what did I say about language?’ Sandra looks up at her, squinting in the sun. Then Ellen says, ‘Let me show you, darling.’

  ‘I can do it,’ Sandra says, holding the hoop at her shoulder, away from her mother’s outstretched hands. Sandra catches sight of Jocelyn and Martin behind the glass of the window.

  ‘Don’t you watch me,’ she shouts at Ellen, and then glares at them through the glass. They turn back to the newspaper pages.

  But Ellen has hold of the hoop. ‘I’m just showing you,’ she says, ‘don’t be silly.’

  Sandra lets it go, steps off the porch, sullen, hands stuck into her armpits. ‘I don’t care, I don’t want to do it any more.’

  Ellen steps into the hoop. It’s a graceful movement; even pregnant, she has a dancer’s slink. She holds the cane between her fingers and with a flick starts it spinning at her hips, grinning at Sandra who has dropped her arms, still angry but watching closely.

  Ellen has her rhythm up, and raises her hands above her head, the hoop swivelling, swivelling beneath her belly, and she smiles into the sunshine. Sandra steps towards her, shouting ‘I can do it now!’ But Ellen only holds out a slim hand to keep her away, keeps moving, glances at the window where they are watching and waves, begins to giggle. Jocelyn puts down her tea cup and Martin his paper and Sandra stands, expressionless, and they all watch the sliding, off-centre rhythm of Ellen’s hips and her belly and the hoop, meeting and parting, and it’s like jazz, like a beautiful race, Ellen holding all these gazes and laughing out from the centre of it.