The Submerged Cathedral Read online

  Over tea and marmalade on the living-room floor they unwrap the presents, Jocelyn and Ellen still in their dressing gowns. It is Sandra’s job to hand out the gifts, which she does solemnly, concentrating, only screeching when Martin takes his present from her politely and then, in contrast to the sisters who have been folding the discarded wrappings carefully, rips at his Christmas paper with a huge sweep of his arm.

  The present is from Jocelyn. It is a framed pastel drawing of Pittwater. The headlands and bays are geometric blocks of colour, curving in blackened greens to the grey-blue sea. She had kept it on her dressing table for a week after she bought it, staring into it each morning and night. Inside the cool, layered colours is their abandoned summer by the water. She had left it there until the last possible minute before wrapping it.

  Now Martin holds the drawing up, not speaking. On the back she has written: For Martin, Christmas 1963. With all my love.

  His eyes shine, he wipes them with his fingers. He steps across the carpet and kisses her, and sits on the arm of the couch, his hand on her shoulder. He props the picture against the bookshelf, and keeps turning his head to look at it through the morning.

  Then Ellen and Jocelyn begin the cooking. Blowflies knock lazily against the kitchen window, and the garden beyond is bleached white with heat and lack of rain. The temperature in the kitchen rises, and steam mists the windows.

  After lunch Ellen takes Sandra with her for a sleep, and Martin and Jocelyn wash the dishes in the haze of the kitchen heat and lunchtime wine. He stands close to her, says, ‘I love my present.’ She turns to him, puts her arms around his neck. Then, hearing Ellen’s voice in the hallway, they separate.

  Jocelyn opens the door –

  And finds Ellen sitting with the telephone in her hand, biting her lip, nodding, tilting a smile into the receiver while she listens to Thomas’s voice from across the continents.

  When Ellen finally comes into the living room and sees Jocelyn she says coolly that she booked the trunk call weeks ago. She adds, tapping a cigarette end on the packet in her hand, ‘It’s all right, I’ll pay for it.’

  Then Jocelyn’s rage, grabbing Ellen by the shoulders, shouting Why?, calling her stupid, shouting, Have you ever thought – and Martin calling after her to calm down.

  Ellen puts out her own hands and elegantly removes Jocelyn’s from her shoulders.

  ‘It’s Christmas. He has a right to know about his baby,’ she says, cold-faced and tearless. Jocelyn stares at her, and has the blank realisation that she is outclassed, that Ellen is an old hand in the face of rage. And in the art of deception, writing back to Thomas on blue airmail paper all this time.

  Eleven

  IN THE FOLLOWING days, when Martin has gone back to the city, silence fills the house.

  There is a rat in the kitchen, or rats. Jocelyn rummages through low cupboards in the laundry for traps, shuddering. She couldn’t tell Ellen that when she reached into the fruit bowl on the sideboard this morning her hand landed on a half-eaten peach. She saw the combed tooth marks as she tossed it into the rubbish, and then quickly brushed the rat’s droppings away as Ellen came in with the newspaper and took a peach in passing. And now, because Jocelyn let her eat the peach, she cannot tell her about the rat.

  The only sound in the house is Sandra, shouting somewhere upstairs, with Ellen’s voice a quiet, firm murmur against her yells. Ellen’s self-control sends a surge of anger through Jocelyn.

  She finds two greasy, fluffed traps at the back of a cupboard and drops them into the sink. Their size alone disgusts her. She pours boiling water over them to dislodge the fluff and wash from them the other nameless grease she doesn’t want to think about, not caring at the foolishness of washing a rat trap before setting it.

  Sandra has stopped shouting and slams a door. Jocelyn remembers it from childhood, her own hysteria and Ellen’s smiling silence, the raised eyebrow, her folded arms.

  She lifts the traps out by their corners with fingers and thumb and leaves them on the windowsill. Let Ellen see them, let her know she’s shared a peach with a rodent’s claws.

  They haven’t spoken again about the phone call to Thomas. Jocelyn hates Ellen for speaking to him, hates her own revived suspicion. She listens to Sandra still throwing things against a door, and tries not to think about Ellen and provocation and violence.

  It’s not her fault, thinking of Thomas and his hands, and Ellen’s cool, cool face, watching him explode. It’s not her fault. But the alternative edges at her.

  The wireless in the living room is talking of the yacht race, which began three days ago in the sunlight ricocheting off Sydney Harbour. Now the rescue crews are leaving and returning to the Eden wharf, and the bodies of at least seven men are brought back, four boats still lost. She imagines those walls of sea curving over a tiny upturned white hull. What impulse is it that makes us throw ourselves into the sea?

  It takes a week of baits and traps to catch the rat. Ellen has been oblivious, the whole time, of its scrabbling behind the kitchen dresser, and once Jocelyn saw it flashing through the crockery, its soft body elongating and yielding to the curves of the soup bowls. She had washed the entire cupboard’s contents in boiling water that night after Ellen had gone to bed, then dried and replaced everything. Knowing as she climbed the stairs that the animal was probably already skittering through the shelves again.

  One Sunday night Jocelyn thinks she hears Martin saying to her, almost inaudible in the dark, ‘It will be all right.’ She thinks he has whispered it, and listens hard, in the silence, to his breath. If he has said it she wants to believe it, to step away from this nameless fear she has been treading down daily.

  In the morning she comes down to find the stiffened body of the rat in the trap, its head squashed awkwardly beneath the wire, and the base sticky with blood. Then she hears Ellen’s bedroom door open above her and she bolts outside with it. Its glazed eye catches hers as she hurls it, still in the trap, behind the woodshed. She hurries back to clean the dark smudge from the linoleum with bleach before the others come down for breakfast.

  When Martin comes in, scratching his cheek, sleepy and silent at the table beneath Sandra’s chatter as he drinks his tea, Jocelyn watches him and wonders if he did whisper in the night. Sometimes these days it is difficult to recognise him.

  School begins again, and when they resume their walks past the scrap yard a bronze crocodile has joined the animals. Sandra runs her fingers along its ridged skin. She seems to like going to school now, and talks about new friends, Elizabeth and Janet, who live in modern houses.

  One day she says at home, ‘Elizabeth hit me with a stick.’ She lifts her skirt to show her thigh where a large red welt, a day later, is just subsiding.

  ‘Never mind,’ says Ellen, and pats her skirt down again. ‘If it happens again you can tell the teacher.’

  Once Sandra is in bed Jocelyn asks, ‘Why don’t you do anything about her being hit?’

  Ellen laughs. ‘Heavens, Joss, it wasn’t like that.’ She lifts her head to meet Jocelyn’s eyes. ‘They’re just children. She’s fine.’ She takes a sip of water, waiting.

  ‘No. She’s not,’ says Jocelyn, thinking of Ellen standing in a bedroom, waiting again for Thomas’s raised hand to fall.

  Alf shifts and yawns under the table. Jocelyn says, ‘She needs to learn to stand up for herself. She needs to learn that if someone hits you, you don’t just take it and wait for the next time. Or the next time or the next time.’

  She hears the tremor in her own voice, her face is hot. She sees Ellen’s open mouth, her shocked eyes. And still she gets up from her chair and leaves the room, leaving her sister sitting at the dining-room table, alone with those unsaid words. You deserved it.

  After that night Jocelyn spends more and more time in the glasshouse working on the manuscript. The galleys keep arriving in the post; she has begun volume eight. She gets into the glasshouse early, opening the doors and windows to let out the heat that has already ri
sen. Martin has begun to stay in Pittwater some weekends. Ellen annoys him more and more, Jocelyn knows.

  As Ellen’s belly grows larger her voice grows louder, she complains of an aching back, indigestion, headaches, she can’t lift things, she’s tired all the time. Wants Martin to check the baby’s heartbeat constantly.

  But Martin and Jocelyn do not talk about his staying away; it is a dangerous conversation they cannot have, they each know that Ellen’s duplicity is the cliff over which they both might go hurtling.

  In the glasshouse Jocelyn wills the pregnancy on, promises kindness towards Ellen. The baby will have brown eyes and lots of hair.

  Flowers Rich and Strange.

  The manuscript seems never-ending. She drags herself back to it; it’s difficult to believe the contract will finally finish in a few months, a few more volumes.

  The flora of Australia, often oddly named, reflect the harsh diversity of the continent. While much of the country might be described as drab, some of its wild flowers are shockingly brightly coloured. Consider the Sturt Desert Pea – low-growing, bright red and large-petalled, with one bulbous black eye – that bursts into bloom from seed after desert rains.

  The tone of the manuscript irritates her now, with its constant exclamations about the strangeness of Australia. In it she hears the voices of Ellen’s London girlfriends, sees their flashed up-and-down glances at her own clothes, hears the unspoken word, ‘colonial’.

  In a corner of the glasshouse, under a pile of books at the far end of the trestle, are her drawings, the notes she made at Pittwater, the collected specimens, the coloured swatches. And the beautiful book. She remembers that evening now as if it were a decade ago, the night she told Martin about her garden and felt something inside herself spark.

  She turns back to the manuscript, leaving the garden to lie where it is, buried beneath the weight of her days.

  On the next trip to the swimming pool Sandra lowers herself into the water.

  Every week until now she has sat on the edge, feet in the water, refusing to get in. Jocelyn chats into Sandra’s silence, about the coming baby, about school. Summer is nearing an end and the pool is quieter; only two mothers with children play in the other end, splashing and squawking.

  Jocelyn lies on her back in the water with her eyes closed, the sun warm on her face and neck. Then, beneath the splashes and shrieks of the other children, she hears a low plonking. She opens her eyes to see Sandra standing in the water, waist deep, arms out from her sides, taking small gasping breaths.

  Staring across the liquid surface to the tiled opposite wall, shivering, her face terrified and determined, Sandra begins to walk on the slick floor towards the steps at the end. The water deepens, rises higher up her stomach, her chest. She still holds her arms high out of the water.

  Jocelyn sits, not moving. She wants to glide over, to guide her, but stays where she is, holding her breath. Then Sandra reaches the steps and hauls herself out to stand shivering on the edge. Jocelyn wants to jump up and scream, but doesn’t want to turn the heads of the other swimmers. Instead she wades through the shallows to the edge where Sandra stands, and she sinks to her knees in the water, planting three flourishing kisses on the toes of her niece standing, dripping and grinning down at her, on the tiles.

  Twelve

  ELLEN’S BELLY CURVES outwards now and Jocelyn begins to rest her own hand over it when she is near her. From talk of the baby has emerged a kind of peace between them, and when they stand in the small kitchen facing one another it is as though the child belongs to both of them, is growing between them.

  They do not mention Thomas; they still have not spoken of him since Christmas Day, and somehow Jocelyn tells herself Ellen has stopped writing to him. But as the birth of his child draws near, his presence here is as taut as a trip-wire.

  Sandra now leans into Jocelyn when she is near. When Sandra sits in her lap to be read to, Jocelyn rests her cheek on her niece’s head, turns herself concave to accommodate her, to draw closer around her skinny angles and soft skin.

  The swimming lessons have taken on a zealous air since the day Sandra got into the water. They both run out of the house on swimming day now, clutching towels, racing each other to the car. At the pool Sandra jumps in, still straining to keep her head out of the water, but allowing herself to begin to enjoy the splash and chaos.

  Then one day she puts her head under and comes up spluttering, hair streaming and eyelashes dripping, clutching Jocelyn’s arm under the water. Jocelyn screams, dives down to lift Sandra shrieking from the water, and they fall back in together laughing, Sandra’s arms and legs wrapped around Jocelyn. The small, cold, wet face next to her aunt’s, the little limbs hard and angular, and Jocelyn thinks, This is how you love a child.

  Afterwards they sit on the hot cement eating ice-blocks, and Jocelyn says, ‘Did you know you’re a brave, strong girl?’

  Sandra, sitting in the bright nest of her blue towel, holds the red ice-block sideways, dips her head to suck it, her damp hair in scraggly tails. She lifts her face, meets Jocelyn’s eyes. ‘Yes,’ she grins. ‘I knew.’

  The three of them spend hours choosing baby names. Sandra has a long list, either flamboyant or dull, all traceable to some particular place in her small world. Alf, Elizabeth, Marion Barrow from the author’s name on the cover of one of her books, with its pictures of fairies and English wood-nymphs. ‘Thomas,’ she says once. Ellen and Jocelyn avoid each other’s glances over her head.

  Ellen reads biblical names out loud from lists in books. Ezekiel! Isaiah! – they laugh. It is March, summer is at an end. Ellen’s skin is ripe-looking, luminous. She sways as she walks.

  Every day now when she finishes her afternoon’s work Jocelyn goes into the baby’s room they have made in the old sewing room at the end of the hall. A tiny cupboard of a room, but big enough for the narrow cradle their father had made from kitchen chairs, for Ellen, and then Jocelyn, as babies. And a small chest of drawers. Jocelyn has painted them white, painted the walls of the room as well. She leaves the window open so the paint smell will be gone by the time the baby comes.

  Sometimes Ellen dozes on the couch in the living room in the afternoons. Often, as she lies there she will lift her blouse, rest with her arms clasped behind her head on a cushion, and then she and Jocelyn and Sandra will wait, watching her skin for the subterranean movement. The first time they saw it they gasped; these days they give small cheers, calling Hello baby, calling welcome to the shape shifting and sliding beneath Ellen’s skin.

  The baby is due in six weeks. Martin examines Ellen, talking to her in George’s surgery. Jocelyn sits in the waiting room, hears them murmuring from behind the door. It is strange, this intimacy they have without her.

  The house grows quieter, and Ellen’s moodiness returns. She snaps at Sandra. Martin and Jocelyn walk quietly about the house. It is as though they are all animals, crouching, bristling, waiting for birth.

  On the Nullarbor Plain, stretching across two states, is the longest stretch of straight road in the world. The ninety-mile straight is part of the traveller’s journey across the Great Australian Bight, where the desert falls into the sea.

  The aerial photographs show it: the flat, scrubby edge of the continent broken off like a biscuit, sheer cliff walls plunging hundreds of feet into the ocean. On those high desert plains, once a sea bed, the earth is apparently scattered with tiny white shells. Another photograph shows a tourist standing suicidally close to the edge, his feet on the crumbling earth, behind him only sea and sky.

  Jocelyn puts down the manuscript and picks up the newspaper. It is Sunday, and Martin has left a day early, his car pulling out of the driveway after lunch.

  The newspaper headlines are full of a young school teacher gouged by a shark, sitting on his surfboard in the lulling water off a South Australian beach in the falling evening. From his hospital bed, where his thigh has taken eighty-seven stitches, he tells reporters about his panic, about the miraculous wave, the
big, beautiful wave that took his broken board and him, blood-visioned, ‘right to the sand’. He tells how he lay on his back in the foaming sand, holding the pages of his wound together with both his hands, watching the blood and waiting to die.

  It is the seventh reported shark attack in the country this summer: two in New South Wales, three in South Australia, one each in Western Australia and Victoria. People talk about the sharks over their dinner tables, slapping mosquitoes from their legs. They talk about the warmth of the water this year, and all the other theories as to why the sharks are coming so close to the edges of the land. They enjoy their growing knowledge of the names of the different species, they imagine each swimmer, fisherman, surfer. Shuddering, they say Poor bastard; they think of the last sight of your life being a brackish shadow and then not knowing water from pain or air. The newspapers gabble over it, The season of the sharks, feasting on it, revisiting every attack since 1934 with each new report.

  Sandra has been whining all weekend, following Ellen around. She wanted something to eat, she was bored, she had nobody to play with, she wanted to take her shoes off. With each wail Ellen grew cooler and harder, responding to her daughter less and less. Yesterday Jocelyn had tried to intervene, offering to read a story, or take her for a walk, but Sandra only stared at her for a second, and moaned, ‘I don’t want you.’ Then trailed off after her mother again. Ellen sat down in the living room and tried to read the paper under the nag of Sandra’s voice, smoking a cigarette, now and again silently twisting her arm from under Sandra’s clasping little hands. After a long silence beneath Sandra’s whines and wails, Ellen turned and clawed her daughter’s fingers from the arm of her chair. She neared her face to Sandra’s suddenly alarmed one and shouted at her:

  ‘Get out of my sight, to your room, you little shit. Go on! Go to your room.’