The Submerged Cathedral Read online

  ‘They have told me to have another child.’

  Jocelyn nods. ‘They told me you should, too.’

  ‘I didn’t tell them about Thomas.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  They look at one another for a second, then at the things in the room. Green Jacquard bedspread with BLUE

  MOUNTAINS DISTRICT HOSPITAL printed down the middle of the bed. The bunch of late roses Jocelyn has brought, their bright heads too heavy for the stems. A few swollen rosehips.

  ‘Where is Sandra?’

  Every day she asks Jocelyn this.

  ‘At school. She’s all right. I took her there. I will pick her up this afternoon.’

  Ellen nods, slowly. She has not asked about Martin since the first day.

  ‘Do you know what I thought last night?’ Ellen says. She’s looking at Jocelyn with glassy eyes. She does look like a child, Jocelyn thinks, with her pale face and her hair brushed by someone else – a nurse?

  ‘I was thinking about the babies at the end of the corridor.’

  There is a room beyond the nursery, for the illegitimate children, waiting for the adoption people to collect them.

  ‘I thought,’ Ellen’s eyes fill again, ‘I thought, I could just go and pick up one of those babies out of his cot, and we could all go home.’

  Jocelyn says nothing. Then, softly, ‘Yes.’

  From the hallway the crying of a baby is getting louder, and they hear through the curtain a nurse’s raised voice over the cries, bringing the baby in to its mother.

  ‘Here you are, she’s a greedy little thing,’ the nurse calls over the shrieking breaths of the baby. The mother’s voice says something, and then the baby’s gasps stop suddenly, and there’s a sucking noise.

  Ellen’s curtain rips open. The metal rings make a scraping sound along the bar. A nurse stands there with a thermometer, and Jocelyn has to make room for her to move over next to Ellen. The nurse says nothing while Ellen opens her mouth for the thermometer and lifts her wrist to have her pulse taken. The nurse presses her fingers over the veins in Ellen’s wrist and cups in her other hand the small clock dangling from a chain at her breast. Ellen sits with her mouth pursed around the thermometer, staring at the cream-painted iron bar of the bedstead.

  Jocelyn does not know how much longer she can stand to come here.

  The nurse looks across at her, the sister. Says nothing, but moves to the bottom of the bed and writes something on a chart, then bustles past Jocelyn again to begin tidying the magazines and pushing the vase of flowers to the back of the cabinet. A rose softly collapses, scattering petals across the floor. The nurse sighs loudly and bends to gather them up. She looks at Jocelyn as she rises.

  ‘Hello,’ says Jocelyn evenly.

  ‘She’ll be going home tomorrow. She’s perfectly all right,’ the nurse says, and tosses the red petals into the paper bag taped to the side of Ellen’s cabinet.

  After she has gone Jocelyn stares into the bag, at the red glow of the petals against the white paper.

  Ellen says, quietly, ‘It seems you’re to be punished as well.’

  The next morning, as they leave the ward, a nurse hands Ellen an envelope. She does not open it until she is in the car, sitting beside Jocelyn while they ease backwards, out from the parking space. She reads the piece of paper, then folds it back into its envelope as they drive out along the town’s streets with the autumn trees red against the sky, the closed fibro houses white behind their brick fences. ‘It’s a bill,’ she says. She stares ahead at the road. ‘For the burial.’

  When they get home the red roses are bright against the house. Ellen, moving slowly, pushes past them into the hallway, walks up the stairs to her bedroom and shuts the door behind her.

  Sandra is at school, Martin in Sydney. Jocelyn lights a match to the newspaper and kindling bundle in the living-room fireplace, but it won’t catch. The air is damp, and the house is cold. When she thinks of Martin, she can only picture him as if in a reduced photograph, very small and far away. The damp newspaper curls at its cindered edge, but won’t flame. Jocelyn stands up to go into the kitchen for drier paper, and to light the oven. But when she stands she is overcome by the weight of her own limbs, and she sits down in the old red armchair. Ellen’s small overnight suitcase is by the living-room door. Jocelyn knows it is full of baby clothes.

  Each day she wakes, afraid of the length of the day ahead. She sees it as a broad, greyish mass. Pushes it from her mind and focuses on the immediate tasks. Get up, get Sandra up, shower, make the coffee. Make the bed. She falls back to sleep and dreams of walking in a vast desert, there is an undertow of fear but all around her the pinks and blues and oranges of porous stone hold her vision. She is alone.

  Sandra begins to wet the bed, so each morning Jocelyn’s ritual now is to wake her, send her to her bath, and then bend and straighten over the bed, gathering up the damp sheets and Sandra’s nightie, to carry them downstairs to the laundry. The nightie still faintly warm with the smell of her urine and her sleeping body.

  Ellen wakes earlier than any of them, despite the sedatives. Jocelyn’s other job is to go into her sister’s room and draw her curtains. When she opens the door Ellen is always alert, her head still on her pillow, her expression taut for bad news. Jocelyn’s unspoken duty is the ritual of letting her sister know with routine and silence that Sandra has not also died in the night. With the opening of the curtains, every morning Ellen’s face relaxes back into emptiness, and she closes her eyes. They exchange no words until later in the morning.

  When Martin comes up from the city Jocelyn watches him pull himself out of the car, and stand for a moment facing the garden. If someone else saw him they would think here was a man returning from the city, stepping into the cool release of his home. But she sees him from behind the window glass, delaying his walk up the drive, observes him wishing he could disappear, wishing he did not have to arrive at their front door. She feels it every day herself.

  On this first evening she tries not to notice his slowness, tries to wind up some goodwill towards him, staying an instant longer when she kisses him.

  They eat at the dining table with Ellen. Jocelyn heaves the conversation along, asks Martin about the drive here, about work, tells them about something funny Sandra said on a walk to school, asks Ellen about some memory when they were children. They answer in monosyllables, and shortly Jocelyn too falls silent, pushing the food across her plate.

  After the dinner dishes are cleared Jocelyn makes her way through the garden to the glasshouse, sits and rolls a marijuana cigarette. Twenty minutes later, Martin opens the door. The glasshouse hangs with the drug’s pungence.

  The air tenses but nothing is said. He stands at the table next to her, looking over the encyclopaedia manuscript and its ragged edges, using his hand to wipe the dust from its pages. She leans back in her chair, puts a foot on the trestle and gently rocks the kitchen chair on its back legs while she takes her time unfolding the second tobacco paper, creasing it, sprinkling the leaf and tobacco shreds.

  He walks along beside the table, finds her old garden drawings and scraps, pulls them out and leafs through them, slowly. She can think of absolutely nothing to say. She trills the rolled cigarette in her mouth, lights it, offers it to him. He walks out.

  They spend these few evenings in separate misery. He does not go to Jocelyn’s bed in the night, and he leaves before any of the others are awake.

  Back at the Pittwater house he sits on the verandah, pushing his glass and ashtray from the previous week to the end of the table. He watches the waves and thinks of the tide, and wishes for something to save them all.

  The Chinese man who gave Martin the mud crab does not have bronchitis. Months after that first visit he had returned to the surgery, thin and still coughing, and now cancer of the lung has been confirmed in a brief letter from the respiratory specialist.

  In the surgery, Mr Ho had sat neatly on the chair, waiting. The surgery was hot, the whirring portable
fan on the filing cabinet in the corner doing little to cool the room.

  Martin spent half an hour with him, trying to explain, drawing pictures of his body. He drew the torso too large, the lungs wobbly, and afterwards the drawing was covered in small specks of pen where he had tried to explain the disease to the man.

  ‘Sick, here. Very sick.’

  ‘Ah,’ Mr Ho said. He smiled politely. He coughed again, waiting.

  ‘You need special medicine, from the hospital. To make you better. You need to go back to Doctor Bennett.’

  Mr Ho understood ‘hospital’. He smiled again, unhappily, and shook his head. ‘No hospital.’

  The room was unbearably hot. Martin stood and went to the door, called to Susan, asking for two glasses of water. He closed the door again. Mr Ho was sitting very straight in his chair. Martin cast around in his mind for a way to communicate.

  He knew nothing of China. He had a friend who went to Bangkok once, on his way back from Europe. A man from the hotel hired a boat and they travelled for an hour along the coffee-brown river, beside the houses curving and tilting on their stilts. Most houses had at least one room collapsing into the water, Martin’s friend had said, the floors curling down like paper. Martin has been to Chinatown in Sydney several times, has walked along the streets looking through the butchers’ windows at the bright red carcasses dangling. None of this was useful here.

  ‘Can you bring a friend who speaks English? Your daughter?’ he asked. He was aware of his voice becoming louder.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Ho, politely.

  Martin decided to try to find someone who spoke Chinese.

  ‘Come back to see me in one week, all right? Yes? You come back on Monday? Bring your daughter?’

  Mr Ho coughed, brightened. ‘Yes! Goodbye, Doctor.’ At the door he turned suddenly. ‘You like crab?’

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ Martin had forgotten about the mud crab. ‘Yes! Bad cook, but yes!’

  They laughed and shook hands, and then Mr Ho walked away. He turned out through the glass door and stepped down, delicately, into the city.

  Martin knew he would not see Mr Ho again. He wished the Chinese doctors in their shops with the walls of jars good luck.

  He went back to his office, sat for a minute with his hands in his lap. He could still, he imagined, feel the warmth of Mr Ho’s hand in his. He stared at his own hands, but they were only creased skin and veiny ridges, only flesh and cartilage and bone.

  Eighteen

  WHEN SANDRA IS at school Jocelyn tries to work on the proofreading, that sprawling mess of words and pictures. It has become an anvil, its pile of manila folders always in the corner of her vision where she has carried it from room to room.

  Alf twitches in his sleep on the couch, a charcoal map of the world on the soft pink skin of his belly. He has taken to scrabbling heavily up onto the furniture, and nobody stops him. In the grey light from the living-room window Jocelyn sees the slackness in his skin, his slow, heavy breath. He is the only sound sleeper in the house.

  Once, in the kitchen, Ellen says quietly to the window over the sink, ‘I wish I was dead.’ At the table behind her, Sandra puts a piece of toast into her mouth and watches out at her mother’s world, as if they are both trapped in an iron boat beneath the sea.

  Jocelyn sits in George Blewitt’s office. He has anatomical diagrams on the walls. The lungs, the spine, coloured pink and white. The doctor leans forward, writing on his prescription pad. The human hand has twenty-seven individual bones. He sits up then, and puts down his pen. He smells of breakfast foods when he talks to her, and she is nauseated. ‘Now,’ he says. Trying to be kind. ‘How are you today.’ It is not a question. He says it like a gentle sigh. He knows Martin has refused to treat any of them any longer.

  She looks at him. She tries to be kind as well. She does not know what that word means; knows people want it but it has only the sound of teeth and mouths to her.

  ‘How is your sister?’ he says to the arm of her chair.

  She can answer this. ‘Terrible. Not sleeping. She hears cries now.’

  George is upset. She knows she upsets him, is sorry in a way.

  That first time, Ellen had sat up in bed when Jocelyn went in. ‘I can’t help it, Joss,’ she’d said and looked down at the eiderdown. ‘I’ve been hearing it cry all morning. I got out of bed, early. I thought it was coming from the kitchen.’ She stared at her sister, glass-eyed, pale. ‘I think I’m going mad.’ She breathed the words out, pinching and unpinching the yellow flowers of the eiderdown between her fingers, staring up at Jocelyn. Who only moved her head, slowly, who could not say anything.

  Who cannot say anything now to the doctor, lets him tell her this is normal, that her sister must not be allowed to stay in bed for too long, that she will perhaps have another child soon. That these things are not fathomable, that some people think they are the will of God – but he sees her face and stops.

  ‘And do you have something to occupy you?’ he asks.

  Cooking, cleaning, throwing food out, sleeping, shitting, proofreading, washing Sandra’s clothes, washing Sandra, feeding Sandra, washing Ellen’s clothes, feeding Ellen, washing Ellen’s hair. Washing her own clothes, they should be the cleanest women in the country, washing the floors, sweeping.

  ‘No,’ he says, very gently. ‘I mean, what do you enjoy doing?’

  Jocelyn thinks she has lost her understanding of language; perhaps this is what happens when a person starts to die from the inside out.

  ‘What did you used to enjoy?’ he says, coaching her.

  She cannot answer. Thinks of Martin; and the imaginary garden comes into her head. They both seem very far away.

  ‘Work,’ she says.

  He smiles, picks up his piece of paper and passes it to her. ‘Then you should try to get back into your work. To get back into things.’

  Later she takes the little brown bottles from her handbag, putting one on Ellen’s bedside table and taking the other to her bathroom cabinet. When she puts the pill in her mouth after lunch she remembers the doctor and looks out the window at the garden. The dogwood has died.

  The Valium makes a garden in her blood, she thinks. That is enough.

  It is seven weeks since the baby.

  She is into the second-last volume of the encyclopaedia now, forcing herself through it daily, page by page, noting, scribbling, punctuating. Only this evening has she once more begun to properly read the words.

  In the rainforests of Carnarvon Gorge, inland Queensland, is the largest native rock art site in the country. The ochre hand-prints are testament to the primitive presence of the Aborigine.

  This morning in the kitchen Ellen told her she was going back to London.

  Jocelyn stared at her, silent, then said, ‘You can’t take Sandra back there.’

  Then Ellen had said, her voice tainted with disgust – the first evidence of emotion in seven weeks – ‘What, you’ll look after her?’

  They faced each other. Neither woman any longer felt the urge to cry. Ellen walked into the living room to the telephone.

  Jocelyn stood on the green linoleum staring into the kitchen sink, listening to Ellen’s voice talking to the travel agent. Staring at the small digs and dints in the white enamel, Jocelyn stood.

  When she heard Ellen speak again she went in and touched her arm: ‘I’m coming with you.’

  Ellen narrowed her eyes for an instant, then shrugged. Turning her gaze back to the faded pink flowers of the carpet, she said into the receiver, ‘Actually, it’s three seats.’

  Afterwards Jocelyn returned to the manuscript, to the hand-prints of Carnarvon Gorge. High on the rock face, those perfect outlined hand-prints, of men, mothers, children. Families. The pale red hand its own silent language, there among the glittering green and the squawks of the birds dropped down from the air.

  At nine o’clock in the evening it is her turn for the telephone.

  In Pittwater the ringing carries out and out, across the black lap
ping water. Martin answers at last; then, after she tells him, they listen to the clicks and hisses of the telephone wire, each holding tight to the receiver, the black plastic, like driftwood for the drowning.

  PART TWO

  Martin

  1964

  Nineteen

  ANTHONY STANDS AT his counter and dries a water glass with a cloth. Through the window he watches the new one – quiet, not so young – moving between the buildings. Walking with slow steps the path around the cloister (such as it is, more school quadrangle than holy place).

  They are all scrubbed clean of their stories by the time they get here. At first they had been mostly pale, slow Irish boys whose families had delivered them from Dublin streets to Dublin brothers. One son a parish priest, the other a Trappist – but never suspecting their boy might be torn from his country like that, not understanding that a promise to a monastery meant to go where you were sent, agree to be dragged across oceans to the bottom of the earth, towards God.

  Anthony was the first Australian boy to come. And through the decades since his own arrival, the infirmarian has watched the same shock play out across their faces in the first weeks. The real shock of being woken in the dark, breathless with a pounding heart, the waking they would never get used to. The shock of walking on gravel under the cold stars for Vigils and then Lauds in the dawn. And the screeching, screaming white birds with wingspans like arms that circle the black trees beyond their dormitory rooms.

  It’s the shock of bending not to a soft dark kneeler hollowed by the centuries of other men’s knees, but to new-hewn wood that even after twenty years still splinters the skin and smells of the strange gaseous trees of this land. The shock of a monastery’s prayer only held together by clapboard, and of the blinding sun on baking earth outside.

  And nothing to contemplate out there but the bone-yellow Australian plains, the flat, bleached blue sky, the sound of mattock thudding into tussock, or striking iron stone and juddering in their hands. And they try to suppose that Christ could live here, though it horrors their hearts to think of it.