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  PRAISE FOR JESSICA ANDERSON AND TIRRA LIRRA BY THE RIVER

  “Finely honed structurally and tightly textured, [Tirra Lirra by the River is] a wry, romantic story that should make Anderson’s American reputation and create a demand for her other work.”

  —THE WASHINGTON POST

  “In Jessica Anderson’s … acclaimed novel Tirra Lirra by the River, a single, singular voice brilliantly narrated the story of a woman’s escape from an intolerable life—instant gratification for the reader.”

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “There may be a better novel than Tirra Lirra by the River this year, but I doubt it.”

  —THE PLAIN DEALER (CLEVELAND)

  “Anderson writes some of the best English in the language right now, and any mode she turns to is of interest … [Taking Shelter is] a beguiling juggling-act of attitudes, new realities, and faultless style.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “Subtle, rich, and seductive, this beautifully written novel [Tirra Lirra by the River] casts a spell of delight upon the reader.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “[Tirra Lirra by the River] has an unpretentious elegance, an individual quality so different from the realistic documentary that still dominates the field in Australian novels.”

  —BEATRICE DAVIS, JUDGE, MILES FRANKLIN AWARD

  “[Tirra Lirra by the River] is beautifully constructed, sensitive, evocative, nostalgic and yet witty, entertaining and even suspenseful.”

  —THE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S WEEKLY

  “Through Miss Anderson’s artistry, her gifts for observation, insight and humor, each character comes to life and proves essential to the complex story … The characters in The Only Daughter are often startled by their own behavior, delighting or distressing one another and themselves. For the reader, there’s the satisfaction of their ‘roundness,’ as defined by E. M. Forster—they’re very ‘capable of surprising in a convincing way.’ ”

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “Anderson conveys this heartwarming story [Taking Shelter] in an oblique but witty style, scattering insights and surprises throughout.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “[The Only Daughter] is an exquisite novel of unforced volume and graceful, easy tempo … Anderson’s great care in judging none of the characters makes them all vivid and completely believable … The arc of the novel is never stiff, always pliable, moving shrewdly back and forth between comic realism and social analysis. A strong, loose-jointed family novel altogether—totally convincing in its canny ear for the rhythms and tones of domestic alliance/warfare.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  TIRRA LIRRA BY THE RIVER

  JESSICA ANDERSON (1916–2010), née Queale, was born in Brisbane, the youngest of four children. Her mother was a part of the Queensland Labour Movement, and her father, a former farmer, worked in Brisbane teaching farmers how to treat disease in stock and crops. As a child she was mocked by her schoolmates for a speech impediment, and she left school at sixteen upon the death of her father. At eighteen, she moved to Sydney and labored at various odd jobs, including working in factories and designing electric signs; it was a time in her life she later characterized as “very poor but very free.” She eventually met Ross McGill, a painter, and they moved together to London. There, Anderson worked as a typist and magazine researcher. She later claimed to have written articles, as well, under numerous pen names, but she remained highly secretive about those publications. After marrying McGill in 1940, she returned with him to Sydney, where she worked as a fruit picker in the Australian Women’s Land Army. They had a child together—Laura—but she divorced McGill in 1955 and married Leonard Anderson, whose wealth permitted her to quit working and spend more time writing. Her first novel, An Ordinary Lunacy, was published in 1968, when she was forty-seven, to rave reviews. She would subsequently go on to capture numerous prizes for her work, including twice winning Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award: in 1978 for Tirra Lirra by the River, and in 1981 for The Impersonators. Anderson died in Sydney at the age of ninety-three.

  ANNA FUNDER is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and awarded writers. In 2012, her novel All That I Am won Australia’s most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin Prize, along with seven other literary prizes. Funder’s nonfiction book Stasiland, hailed as “a classic,” won the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize. Both books have been international bestsellers and are published in twenty countries. Funder lives with her husband and three children in New York City.

  THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

  I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much. —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET

  TIRRA LIRRA BY THE RIVER

  Originally published by Macmillan Company of Australia Pty Ltd, 1978

  Copyright © 1978 by Jessica Anderson

  Afterword copyright © 2014 by Anna Funder

  First Melville House printing: October 2014

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Mitchell Library, the State Library of NSW, in Sydney, Australia, and to librarian Richard Neville, for his assistance with this edition.

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

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  Library of Congress

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Anderson, Jessica, 1916–2010.

  Tirra Lirra by the river : a novel / by Jessica Anderson.

  pages cm

  ISBN: 978-1-61219-388-5 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 978-1-61219-389-2 (ebook)

  1. Women—Australia—Sydney (N.S.W.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9619.3.A57T5 2014

  823’.914—dc23

  2014002830

  Design by Christopher King

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  The Neversink Library

  Title Page

  Copyright

  First Page

  Afterword: ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’: By Anna Funder

  The characters in this story are imaginative constructions.

  Only the houses on the point are taken from life.

  I ARRIVE AT THE HOUSE WEARING A SUIT—greyish, it doesn’t matter. It is wool because even in these subtropical places spring afternoons can be cold. I am wearing a plain felt hat with a brim, and my bi-focal spectacles with the chain attached. I am not wearing the gloves Fred gave me because I have left them behind in the car, but I don’t know that yet.

  The front stairs are just as I visualized them on the plane, fourteen planks spanning air, like a broad ladder propped against the verandah. The man who drove me here from the railway station sorts his keys as he bustles to take precedence of me. He is about sixty, tall and ponderous, with a turtle head. He introduced himself on the railway platform, but already I have forgotten his name. I am exhausted, holding myself by will-power above a b
lack area of total collapse. My nephew in Sydney warned me about the train journey. ‘Six hundred miles, Aunt Nora,’ he said. But I wouldn’t listen; I said I simply adored trains. ‘You won’t adore that one,’ said Peter. But I said of course I should; I adored all trains.

  The truth is, I was terrified to fly again.

  As I follow the man across the verandah I hear my own footsteps, like a small calf on a quaking bridge, and think of the last time I crossed it, on my confident high heels, to trip down those stairs to the taxi. Mother and Grace standing here, and myself running down the path to the yellow taxi, which waits where the man’s car stands now. Mother and Grace wave. I lean forward in the back seat of the taxi and wave back. ‘Thank heaven that’s over,’ I am saying behind my smile.

  The man is unlocking the door. I have had to talk and smile too much in his car, and as I wait I consciously rest my face.

  He throws open the door, holds it back with one arm fully extended.

  ‘After you, Mrs Roche.’

  ‘Porteous,’ I say. Not that it matters.

  ‘Porteous. Of course. Sorry.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘the big black hall-stand is still here.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘Still here.’

  I enter the hall, finding the echoes immediately familiar, and he falls in behind me, coughing rather respectfully. Through the long mirror of the big black hall stand I see a shape pass. It is the shape of an old woman who began to call herself old before she really was, partly to get in first and partly out of a fastidiousness about the word ‘elderly’, but who is now really old. She has allowed her shoulders to slump. I press back my shoulders and make first for the living room.

  Definitely, I have hopes of the living room.

  The man hurries ahead of me and throws open the door. We go in together. We both stop, and look largely around us.

  And where now are my hopes?

  ‘Well,’ says the man, ‘here you are.’

  ‘Yes, here I am.’

  By the tone of my voice, its sepulchral parody of doom, I know I have begun again to address my friends at number six. I warn myself to keep this game a private one, because I see that the man, who is looking about him with an almost liquid sentimentality, has put himself in my place, has taken upon himself the emotions of this ‘home-coming’, and I do not wish to offend him by my bitter jokes.

  ‘You have a sit-down, eh?’ he says. ‘While I start getting your ports up.’

  I speak before I can stop myself. ‘Wait!’

  ‘What,’ he says, ‘what is it?’

  ‘No. No, it’s all right. It’s nothing.’

  ‘Right-oh, then.’ And off he goes.

  Now, suppose I had said, ‘Wait, I’m not staying.’ What then? The train back to Sydney, and the plane back to London? Impossible. The household at number six is exploded. Exploded. Back only to Sydney then? No. I feel again the utter passivity, the relinquishment of the will to fate, that Hilda and Liza and I all felt on the way back to London from Coventry.

  Here I am, and here I will stay. Anything else is too much trouble.

  All the same, I admit flatly at last that if I had remembered the house better I would have found some other solution, but the passage of time so blurred and modified it that for these last ten or fifteen years it has been only a sort of squarish blob on my memory. It wasn’t until I was on the plane from London that I really saw it again. I had reached that point of sleeplessness, my eyeballs burning behind dry lids, when, without warning, I saw it imprinted on the darkness—no blob now, but it, the real house, a heavy wooden box stuck twelve feet in the air on posts. In my confusion and misery I longed painfully for my friends at number six, Hilda and Fred and Liza and poor Belle. I enfolded my right hand about the scratch on my wrist, and as I blinked to lubricate my eyeballs I became incredulously aware of myself sitting in that enormous hollow metal projectile, hemmed in by a host of propped or lolling bodies, listening to those gloomy engines and moving on and on and on through the dark sky.

  A suitcase thuds to the floor behind me.

  ‘That’s one of them up.’

  I turn round. ‘Thank you.’

  He comes into the room, knocks with a knuckle on the wall. ‘Grace,’ he says, ‘Grace, now, always reckoned this room was practically the same as when you were girls.’

  ‘Yes’.

  ‘Well, this won’t get the rest of them up, will it?’ And off he goes again.

  At my nephew’s house in Sydney, they told me that when Grace took over the house from our mother, she had had many renovations done, but had never ‘got round’ to the living room. ‘All the better,’ said my nephew’s wife. ‘You’ll be able to do it yourself.’ But really, I can’t think of a thing that would help this room. It is a room of such a hopeless character that as I look about me I begin to feel a sort of satisfaction. When my worst expectations are met, I frequently find alleviation in detaching myself from the action, as it were, the better to appreciate the addition of one more right, inevitable accent to the pattern of doom, or comedy, or whatever you like to call it. But even as I look about me, and nod, and smile, and say ‘Precisely!’ I am conscious of a deepening mystification. Because where, in heaven’s name, in this room, could have been the source of the exaltation I felt last night on the train?

  In Sydney my nephew and his wife often talked of the house, but they talked of so much else, and took me about so much, and I was forced to exclaim and comment so much, that I managed to stave off all concentrated thought of it. I was happy to let it become a blob again. But in the train last night I forced myself to dwell on it, and it was then that my thoughts found a focus in this room, and I was touched by exaltation.

  Exaltation? Well, bliss. An obscure sensation, it touched me lightly, the ghost, perhaps, of some former bliss. There is certainly nothing in this room to account for it, so it must have been something outside it, but visible from it.

  I hear the thud of another suitcase. He comes in and puts his hands on his hips.

  ‘That’s number two.’

  ‘Thank you. So kind.’

  ‘Only a few odds and ends now.’

  ‘That’s good. Do you know, I hardly dare to part those curtains.’

  ‘What? Why not?’

  He is startled. I have half-shut my eyes and am waggling a finger at eyebrow level. I remind myself again that such little joking habits, fostered in the intimacy of number six, do not travel well. In Sydney my nephew’s wife and children, and occasionally even my dear nephew himself, would sometimes give me the same look that this man is giving me now. Smiling, but slightly askance, slightly embarrassed. I am beginning to see our little coterie at number six through other eyes. We would often say to each other, describing incidents that had happened ‘outside’, ‘Oh, he thought me quite mad.’ It was our happy assumption that everyone in the outside world thought us quite mad. But now I am finding that when one is really outside, and alone, it is less of a burden (and much more private) to be thought quite ordinary. Besides, I am too tired at present to insist upon my madness. So I lower my hand, and speak in a sensible and reassuring voice.

  ‘Oh, the view, you know. I’m sure it was rather nice from this room. And I’m so afraid it will have changed.’

  ‘The view? Well, there’s the cabbage-tree palm … the road … But you saw all that,’ he says, ‘as we came in.’

  ‘But not from up here.’ I go towards the window. ‘I’m sure it was better from up here.’

  I am short, he is tall. He comes quickly behind me and pulls the curtains apart. I raise the blind and look through the glass at the leaves of the palm tree. My gaze travels down its trunk, as tall and straight as the electricity poles in the street, and moves over the parched grass. There is drought here—I heard about it in the man’s car—and the grass is rather a subtle and gentle colour, a greenish-blond. But that is not what I am looking for. I look at the dusty shrubs along the fence, I watch two cars pass, then I look up, for a change,
at the perfectly plain, sky-blue sky.

  ‘You must be thinking of the flower-beds that used to be there,’ I hear him say.

  I shake my head.

  ‘Gerberas?’ he suggests enticingly. ‘Iceland poppies?’

  But no, I am not looking for gerberas or Iceland poppies.

  ‘There must have been something else there then,’ he says, ‘that stuck in your mind. A tree or something.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. There is no need for him to go on. Things are turning out so badly that I am filled again with my perverse contentment.

  ‘Something that died.’

  Naturally! If it were a source of delight it would have died! Nodding and smiling, I turn back into the room and look about me in the clearer light. On one of the little leggy tables stands a vase of yellow daisies. The vase is too big for them, and they have slipped down to water level with their poor little faces upraised, like drowning people crying for help. But all the same, someone has taken the trouble to put them there.

  I touch the vase. ‘What pretty flowers.’

  ‘The wife put them there.’

  ‘How kind. Do thank her.’

  ‘I will, Mrs Roche. Sorry, Porteous. It’s that I’m so used to hearing you called Nora Roche. Grace, now, Grace was Grace Chiddy because she went on living here after she was married. But you, round here you still go by your maiden name.’

  I have shut my eyes out of sheer weariness, and in one of my sudden severances of attention (accompanied as usual by an expansion in the head) I find myself earnestly pondering the derivation of the term ‘maiden name’. ‘The name,’ I want to say to someone, ‘I had when I was a maiden.’ I very nearly whisper the words. I open my eyes in fright. Did I in fact whisper them?

  No. The man’s face is unchanged.

  All the same, unless I have a warm bath very soon, and lie down, something regrettable is bound to happen. I take off my hat.

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘thank you very much.’ And in lieu of his name I add, ‘for everything.’