Tirra Lirra by the River Read online

  ‘No trouble. No trouble at all. What kind of a job do you reckon they made of the cleaning?’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘It was one of those cleaning teams did it.’ He bends with his hands on his knees and looks at the legs of a chair. ‘Bit of dust there. But generally speaking, they didn’t make too bad a fist of it. Not too bad at all. Peter rang, you know. He rang STD and asked me to get one of those professional teams in. So I did.’

  Peter is Peter Chiddy, my nephew in Sydney. I wish I could recall the name of this man, but I am too tired, and too ashamed of my discourtesy in having forgotten it, to ask him to repeat it. I don’t even know why he met me at the railway station. In the meantime I shall just have to assume that all these services were arranged by my nephew. I can’t be bothered reconciling them with his written instructions (lost) to take a taxi to such and such a number in the old street, where I would find this good neighbour (named in the lost instructions) who had the keys, and would let me in.

  Now he is saying, ‘Oh, and before I forget, the wife thought, the wife said, would you like to come along tonight, and have a bite to eat with us?’

  I manage to smile. ‘So kind, and do thank her. But I’m much too tired.’

  ‘Fair enough. She thought you might be. So she left a bit of tucker in the kitchen, just in case. And she said she’ll be along in the morning to say hello.’

  ‘That will be lovely. And now, what I would like most in the world is a big warm bath.’

  ‘Fair enough. I’ll just get that airlines bag, and those books and things, then I’ll push off.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr …’ And now I am forced to say, ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’

  ‘Cust.’

  ‘Cust. Well, thank you, Mr Cust.’

  But now he says, ‘You don’t remember me, do you, Mrs Porteous?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘You don’t remember the Custs at all?’ he asks incredulously. ‘The Custs, in the corner house, the big white one, with the poinciana trees?’

  And now, remembering, I look fixedly at the wall beyond his head. ‘There were some Custs,’ I say with difficulty, like a medium at a séance, ‘who had the newsagency.’

  ‘That’s me! That’s us!’ Then he says, ‘Or was.’

  Still in my trance, I say, ‘I worked there for a few months.’

  ‘Right. I was only a little chap then, of course.’

  ‘You used to practise piano scales in the room above the shop.’

  He begins to speak, but such trances must not be interrupted. I raise a hand. ‘Wait. I have just remembered your maiden name. I mean,’ I continue without a blink, ‘your Christian name. Jack.’

  ‘Yes, Jack.’

  And now he has thrust his head forward and is looking at me closely. I hate being looked at closely. My husband used to do it. Suddenly I am furious with this man Jack Cust, furious with him for his cushiony obtuseness and even for his kindness. I shut my eyes tight. His voice sounds very close.

  ‘Mrs Porteous, you’re done in, aren’t you?’

  I can only nod.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Standing gasbagging! I’ll get those odds and ends up and then I’ll really push off.’

  As soon as he goes I sit down hard in the straight-backed chair by the window. It goes without saying that never, never in my life, have I chosen the right clothes for a journey. I am hot in all my silly wool. As I take off my jacket Jack Cust comes back, almost running this time, and looking at me anxiously, as if I may be going to beat him.

  ‘Where do you want them, Mrs Porteous?’

  ‘Just there, thank you, Mr Cust.’

  His anxiety changes to indignation. ‘But the front bedroom’s all fixed up for you.’

  ‘Then please, put everything in there.’

  He does. He does that. And at last he goes.

  It is wonderful to be able to stop smiling. I feel that ever since setting foot in Australia I have been smiling, and saying, ‘Thank you’ and ‘So kind’. I have one rather contemptible characteristic. In fact, I have many. But never mind the others now. The one I am talking about is my tendency to be a bit of a toady. Whenever I am in an insecure position, that is what happens. I massage the smile from my face by pressing the flesh with my fingertips, over and over again, as I used to do when I had that facelift, all those years ago. I long more than ever for that hot bath, but am too tired to move. I am troubled, too, by guilt, because I was irritable with Jack Cust, who was so kind. I shut my eyes, and when, after a few minutes, I open them again, I find myself looking through the glass on to a miniature landscape of mountains and valleys with a tiny castle, weird and ruined, set on one slope.

  That is what I was looking for. But it is not richly green, as it used to be in the queer drenched golden light after the January rains, when these distortions in the cheap thick glass gave me my first intimation of a country as beautiful as those in my childhood books. I would kneel on a chair by this window, and after finding the required angle of vision, such as I found just now by accident, I would keep very still, afraid to move lest I lose it. I was deeply engrossed by those miniature landscapes, green, wet, romantic, with silver serpentine rivulets, and flashing lakes, and castles moulded out of any old stick or stone. I believe they enchanted me. Kneeling on that chair, I was scarcely present at all. My other landscape had absorbed me. And later, when I was mad about poetry, and I read The Idylls of the King and The Lady of Shalott, and so on and so forth, I already had my Camelot. I no longer looked through the glass. I no longer needed to. In fact, to do so would have broken rather than sustained the spell, because that landscape had become a region of my mind, where infinite expansion was possible, and where no obtrusion, such as the discomfort of knees imprinted by the cane of a chair, or a magpie alighting on the grass and shattering the miniature scale, could prevent the emergence of Sir Lancelot.

  From underneath his helmet flowed

  His coal-black curls as on he rode,

  As he rode down to Camelot.

  From the bank and from the river

  He flashed into the crystal mirror,

  ‘Tirra lirra,’ by the river

  Sang Sir Lancelot.

  The book was one of my father’s. It used to open at the right page because I had marked the place with a twist of silkworm flops, a limp and elongated figure-of-eight. Many readings must have been necessary to drive it into my mind so that I still retain it, because I was—am—a person of undisciplined mind, and in spite of the passion I had for poetry, I could seldom hold more than a few consecutive lines in my head. The poetry in my head was like a jumble of broken jewellery. Couplets, fragments, bits of bright alliteration, and some dark assonance. These, like Sir Lancelot’s helmet and his helmet feather, burned like one burning flame together. Often, I used to walk by the river, the real river half a mile from the house. It was broad, brown, and strong, and as I walked beside it I hardly saw it, and never used it as a location for my dreams. Sometimes it overran its banks, and when the flood water receded, mud would be left in all the broad hollows and narrow clefts of the river flats. As soon as this mud became firm, short soft thick tender grass would appear on its surface, making on the green paddocks streaks and ovals of a richer green. One moonlit night, coming home across the paddocks from Olive Partridge’s house, I threw down my music case, dropped to the ground, and let myself roll into one of these clefts. I unbuttoned my blouse, unlaced my bodice, and rolled over and over in the sweet grass. I lay on my back and looked first at the moon, then down my cheeks at the peaks of my breasts. My breasts did not have (nor did they ever develop) obtrusive nipples, but the moon was so bright that I could clearly distinguish the two pink discs that surmounted them. I fell into a prolonged trance. I heard the sound of trampling and tearing, but it seemed to come from a long way off. I was astonished when I saw the horse moving along the edge of the cleft. I see him now, a big bay, walking slowly and pulling grass with thievish and
desperate-looking jerks of his head. When he had passed I jumped to my feet and quickly laced my bodice. I buttoned my blouse and tucked it into my skirt. My brown hair ribbon lay shining on the grass where my head had been. It was before I put my hair up. I must have been less than sixteen.

  I wish I had recalled the incident earlier. I should have liked to have recounted it at number six. It would have had to be told at a time when Fred was not there. Fred had that horror of what he called ‘fuggy female talk’, and although he made a great comedy of it, we all knew that those exaggerated sour mouths, and all that hissing and head-ducking, covered a real detestation, and so we were careful to spare him. No, I should never have recounted the incident in his presence. It would have been told when he was out, or downstairs, and we three were gossiping in Liza’s quarters, perhaps, before her new electric fire. And after I had finished, I know what Hilda and Liza would have said. I can hear Liza’s voice, with its touch of dogmatism.

  ‘Of course, Nora, you were looking for a lover.’

  And Hilda. ‘But of course! As girls did in those days, without even knowing it.’

  And I would probably have said, yes, of course, because in these times, when sexuality is so very fashionable, it is easy to believe that it underlies all our actions. But really, though I am quite aware of the sexual nature of the incident, I don’t believe I was looking for a lover. Or not only for a lover. I believe I was also trying to match that region of my mind, Camelot.

  If that sounds laughable, do consider that this was a long time ago, and that I was a backward and innocent girl, living in a backward and unworldly place. And consider, too, that the very repression of sex, though it produced so much that was warped and ugly and cruel, let loose for some natures, briefly, a luminosity, a glow, that I expect is unimaginable now, and that for those natures, it was possible to love and value that glow far beyond the fire that was its origin.

  I am going to put down a strange word. Beauty. I was in love with beauty. I carried my pale face, my dropped flag of ashen hair, my abstracted eyes, my damp concealed body, along the rough roads and streets, and across the paddocks and vacant lots and playing fields, of a raw ugly sprawling suburb on the outskirts of a raw but genteel town. I walked everywhere, oppressed, moody, yet patient too. Our suburb merged with farms, and by day, overtaken by a farmer’s cart, I would see the whip flick the horse’s rump and the shadow of the cart draw away from a shining pile of excrement. On certain hot nights scents and stench would mingle—frangipani and lantana with the wake of the nightcart. I walked and walked, sometimes with an objective—a friend’s house, a shop, the church or school—but mostly at random, to outrun oppression.

  I had a pinkish skin that always looked damp and often was. In the swampy summers I sweated dreadfully. I changed my dress-shields three or four times a day and washed them secretly. Most of my friends were dry-skinned girls with suntanned hands and electrical energy. I remember how Olive Partridge would break suddenly into a run, then as suddenly stop and clack her boots together sideways. But though Olive did things like that when she and I were alone, she was dignified in groups and would not play games. She was never present at those tennis afternoons (called ‘the tennis’), when the girls staggered from the court and flopped panting on to the grass, and the boys flopped down beside them and splashed their faces with water from the canvas bags. Ashamed of my sweat, I sat alone in the tennis shed. The girls laughed and shrieked, and I could hear the swishing of cloth as they kicked their legs in their skirts and petticoats. My laughter at the antics of the girls was strained, but in a longing for solidarity I eagerly unhooked the water bag and passed it to the boys. My first touch of toadiness?

  On Sundays Grace’s voice would rout me out of my hiding places.

  ‘Nor-ah! Chur-urch! Church, Nora.’

  Our clergyman was a tired man of mechanical piety, and on hot days our little timber church smelled of coconut oil and the petrol used to clean serge suits. Even so, some were devout. Grace was. But not me—I could not worship there. I was no longer a schoolgirl. I walked home from church in a group of girls followed by boys who would lag behind at first, and then, in a sudden burst, run to overtake us. They would jeer and guffaw as they passed, and bump us as if by accident. Some of the girls would send after them shouts of derision mingled with disappointment, and the rest would giggle. Between the guffaw and the giggle there is little to choose, but the guffaw is louder, and to me it carried a threat of cruelty.

  Four of these boys formed a regular group. At our houses on singing nights, these four were stiff and proper in their blue serge suits, and polite and shy with our parents, and if we girls encountered one of them alone, he would be much the same, clumsy and shy and anxious to escape. But when these four were together, waiting for us in the dark under the camphor laurels west of the school, though they were awkward at first (apart from the guffaws that broke startlingly out), if they could entice or trick one of us away from the others, they would grab us and throw us to the ground. They would try to pull down our pants one minute and abjectly beg the next. As we made our escape they would villify us horribly.

  Nobody was raped. Escape was optional, and for me, in spite of my sexual excitement, imperative. I hated being pulled about and roughly handled. It made me bored and grieved and angry.

  ‘What did you come for then?’

  I saw sense in the question, and stopped going. Those girls who continued to go began to treat me with enmity, and for the first time I took note of an ominous growled-out question.

  ‘Who does she think she is?’

  My retreat took me into another group of boys, friends of my brother Peter, who was older than I but younger than Grace. These were always spoken of as ‘thoroughly decent lads’, and with them, as I stitched on their cricket pockets or helped to sort their stamp collections, I found boredom of a different sort—plain, you might say, instead of a bit fancy. I withdrew still further. Except for Olive Partridge, who shared my passion for reading, and whose mother looked at me with a kind of quizzical understanding, all my friends became acquaintances. Like almost everybody in those days, I spent a great deal of time in making things with my hands. I made drawings of flowers, and of thin ladies and gentlemen in medieval garments. I did crochet work, embroidery, and made all my own clothes. I read much poetry, and prose of the bejewelled sort. And I walked. I walked. Indeed if all the marks of my walking feet had been left inscribed on the paddocks and roads and playing fields of that suburb, you would have seen lines, arcs, ovals, rectangles, figures-of-eight, and any other shape you might care to name, all imposed and impinging on one another so thickly that it would have been impossible to trace a single journey.

  Often, on these walks, I would meet Dorothy Irey. She was a friend of Grace’s, six years older than I, and was said to have Polynesian blood. She did not walk fast like I did, but stepped out very absently and gently, her neck stretched high, her head turning this way and that, and her fingertips, meeting at waist level, moving and nibbling together. She was so slender and narrow-hipped, and the rounded mass of her hair, surmounted by a ‘mushroom’ hat, made her head look so disproportionately big, that in the distance she made me think of a poppy, a nodding, advancing poppy. She would smile at me when we were still a long way apart, and as we drew nearer her smile would gradually grow wide and she would call with sing-song condescension, ‘Hello, Nora.’ And as I replied we would look with appreciation, with secret sharp recognition, at each other’s clothes. The effect she gave, of darkness, freshness, and white lace, left me incredulous. She was rare and beautiful, and she was twenty-three. So why did she stay? My own patience was explained by my underlying conviction that I was going. I never for one moment doubted it. ‘Why does Dorothy Irey stay here?’ I asked Grace. But Grace turned on me in a fury. ‘We don’t all think we’re too good for this place, Lady Muck.’

  And then we were in one of our quarrels.

  ‘Mother, don’t let Grace call me Lady Muck.’
r />   ‘Now, girls.’

  ‘Then why is Nora always running the place down?’

  ‘Why is Grace always running me down?’

  ‘Girls, girls.’

  ‘Mother, tell Nora that one day she will be punished for her scorn.’

  ‘It is not scorn. It is not scorn at all.’

  My mother considered her knitting. Was the wool khaki? Was it war-time? I think so.

  ‘Well, Nora, scorn is what it sounds like.’

  My mother didn’t like me much. I first realized it when I was about six, and had started school, and had seen other children with their mothers. ‘You don’t like me much, do you?’ I asked one afternoon.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, child. The very idea! Never, never let me hear you say that again.’

  It must have been hard on her, having to pretend. I can’t remember feeling deprived, as they say today, or holding it against her. To tell the truth, I didn’t like her much either. Our natures were antipathetic. It happens more often than is admitted.

  I continued to wait, but in my obsessive patient walking I no longer met Dorothy Irey. She was about to become Dorothy Rainbow, having engaged herself to marry Bruce Rainbow, who worked in the Rural Bank, but who was now off to the war. I looked from her to him, and asked myself, ‘But why?’ I didn’t dare ask Grace, but at the wedding party I whispered to Olive Partridge, ‘But why?’

  Olive shrugged. ‘He seems quite nice.’

  ‘But to marry? Would you?’

  Olive looked round the room. ‘I wouldn’t marry any of them. I doubt if I’ll marry at all.’

  Olive was to come into three hundred pounds a year when she was twenty-five. ‘And that very minute,’ she would say, ‘I’m off.’

  But I could only wait. I made lampshades, soldier’s socks, beaded purses, and embroidered cushion covers. From beneath my eyebrows, I watched myself raise my arms to amass my hair at the back of my head. With sidelong glances, I turned my head this way and that, but there was no one to see. I made extravagantly long scarves, and had nowhere to wear them. I still accepted the waiting, hating it, but so sure of escape that I could wait without panic. I read Keats, Shelley, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and hundreds of novels, fastening on what fed my obsessions and skimming over what didn’t. Olive Partridge tried to make me read Shaw and Wells, but I told her (she reminded me of it years later) that they were ‘too grey’.