A Few Days in the Country (3 page)

Oh, the family had a father. But he went away to be a soldier and was gone for years. When he came back, he was even more silent than before, and the mother indicated that he was of no account. He went to his mysterious work, and spent almost as much time there as he had at the war. When he returned to the house, it was only to eat and sleep. Much later, after the children were all grown up, he died. The day after the funeral, no one could remember his voice.

Meanwhile, the boys swam in attention and praise, and at an early age had had so much that they never needed it again, could afford to discard that particular life buoy and plunge out with a glossy confidence in their qualities. Alice never even learned to dog-paddle. Who would notice if she sank? The deep end was too risky for a girl whose brilliant dark-red curls could be so easily overlooked.

Now and then a teacher or an acquaintance would toss her a few friendly words. Naturally, if she hadn't needed them so badly, she could have collected ten times as many. But she had never heard of supply and demand, wasn't aware of such a thing as a seller's market, and wouldn't have applied it to her own case if she had. Like a solitary bowerbird, she hid these tiny pieces of blue glass around her nest and treasured them, though frequent inspection soon took their colour away. Alice knew only that something was not fair. Here she was—a good girl, a nice girl, pretty to look at, obedient, kind, clever at school, and with beautiful hair—yet none of it was
good enough
. While the boys were somehow perfect. And not because they didn't try but because they never had to. They were welcome when they arrived.

Because Alice's deepest attention, you might even say her soul, was busy looking back, over its shoulder, she had few acquaintances and no friends. For many years her duties toward the boys, and her strivings to please her mother, took up her whole life. And all this time the mother stayed about the same age; the boys were permanently young, since that was their mother's desire. Only Alice and her father grew old.

One of the boys played the mouth organ and went shooting; the other sketched and painted, and in the interest of his muscles trained at the local gymnasium with a group of amateur boxers. There were photographs of him, gloves raised, head lowered, forehead threateningly wrinkled. There were photographs of football teams in which both boys were illuminated, among all the other hefty thighs and striped jumpers, by their saintly blond heads. On Saturdays and Sundays, they went surfing at the local beaches, taking their girlfriends.

Alice had none of these occupations. She would have liked to take piano lessons, but these were the Depression years, whatever that meant. It was the Depression that made everyone unhappy. Quite possibly her mother might have valued her greatly if it weren't for that. Who knows? (Yet her mother was not unhappy, being herself.) Alice baked little cakes for the boys' picnics, as her mother told her to. Though she never complained, she did feel resentful, baking in the summer heat. Temperatures outside in the shade went over the hundred mark; the heat in the kitchen, with the oven on, was not investigated. Alice fainted sometimes.

The house was always busy with people—‘that little Robinson woman' or ‘that little Fenwick man'—coming to see her mother. They sat upright on the big leather sofa or on the edge of one of the chairs, while her mother marched to and fro hypnotising them with her enormous effrontery, her energy, her noisy laughter. If the visitors wanted advice of any description, she never hesitated. She was the most positive person any of them had ever come across. Though her opinions were based on nothing but inspiration, and were wrong as often as the law of averages allows, she had the virtue of being certain of everything in uncertain times. The relief of it! The little men and women went away livelier, diverted from their troubles, forgetting to sigh for whole blocks as they walked home through the flat suburban streets. (Only the stars were wonderful in that place, but because they were always there they were never noticed.)

Alice's mother told her little men and women about the Old Country. She told them about snow. They had never seen snow, but they were willing to try to picture it. With incredulous half-smiles, they listened to her account of the stuff—so pure, so clean, so cold, the very opposite of everything here. Did it exist? Was there really an Old Country? Their eyes were wistful. They knew it was true. It was just that they couldn't quite believe it.

If the father came in while they were there, he walked straight through the room without a word or a look. Everyone was used to this and thought nothing of it. The mother's vehement talk, her triumphant shouts of laughter, continued without interruption.

No one in that town could have ambitions beyond not being hungry, not being in debt, not being unemployed. Later in life, Alice never found anyone who shared her impressions of her youth and that time. Either she moved in different circles from those she had known then or the others more easily forgot. She remembered everything: crowds of men going nowhere in army-surplus sandshoes and khaki overcoats, men with swags of dead rabbits for sale, men with small suitcases full of useless items (no more than an excuse to talk), like those small bottles of startling green and red dye that her mother bought. For years, they stood in the pantry. No one knew what they were supposed to be for. Years later still, some of the boys' children found and drank them, watered down, as a test of courage. They didn't die.

Head bent, polishing the boys' shoes or occupied with some other mother-pleasing chore, Alice listened to the travelling men, knowing only that they absolutely could not be turned away. It was her mother's nature to give; she was expansive and generous, though her tongue must often have poisoned the food she distributed so willingly at the back door. No charge could be laid against Alice's mother. She was only herself. The men's pride? Alice's feelings? A good dose of castor oil was what they all needed.

Alice had a little job somewhere. Thin, pale, she ate a banana in the midday heat, thinking of the Old Country and the clean cold. The buildings
there
had stood for generations.
Here
was an enormous expanse on the map but a small black hot place in reality. Four flat black miles in a tram to the coast, through weeds and tumbledown one- and two-storey buildings. The people, her mother often said contemptuously, were like Gypsies. But they were not imaginative or gay, as Alice thought Gypsies might be, only temporary-seeming, accidental, huddling about the masses of steelworks and hotel bars.

And Alice in the midst of this. If her mother could not like her or notice her ever, how terrible! How terrible! Sometimes people made the opening gestures of friendship in the rough style of the district, but often Alice missed them entirely, as a tired person might, for was her mother not holding the floor, making speeches about ‘my sons, my boys'? At other times, Alice treasured any overture.

‘Mr Wade said to me…'

‘Sally Grey wants me to go…'

No one heard. If she persisted until her mother was forced to listen, her mother's eyes went blank. Or she was actually listening to the races on the radio three rooms away. Or she would talk Alice down with instructions and demands. Because her mother was her mother, and there was no one else, Alice thought she was marvellous.

One day, Alice said, ‘Eric Lane wants to take me to—'

For the first time, her mother attended, standing still.

Eric was brought to the house, and Eric and Alice were married before there was time to say ‘knife'. How did it happen? She tried to trace it back. She was watching her mother performing for Eric, and then (she always paused here in her mind), somehow, she woke up married and in another house.

Eric was all right, but he was almost as young as she was and knew no more about the world. In fact, he knew less, because this was his birthplace. He had no snowy memories, no castles, no wild cherry trees, no sound stone houses with polished brass and roaring fires, no Halloween, no ghosts or witches, no legends of his own going back to the morning of the world, no proper accent, like the people
there
. At home. Poor Eric had only this empty place where no one belonged, and the Depression, and swimming in the sea with sharks, and sinking and drowning because who would notice
here
? He liked her hair—but still her mother didn't care.

So Alice was with Eric, being a wife. Since Eric was an ordinary boy, and she had these extraordinary memories and her extraordinary mother, Alice was sometimes lively and highhanded with him. He told her that girls with her hair colour had quick tempers. Alice found a sparky temper. For short periods, she planned a flower garden, or worried about her cooking, or sang. But there was no money, except to pay the rent and buy food. There were no books. There was no person to talk to who understood anything more of the world than she and Eric did. There were only rumours, legends about it. The world sounded like such a strange place. They felt shy.

‘We were closer to the Middle Ages than to people now,' she said, years later. But that was not it. In those days, only someone like Julius Caesar could have been compared with her mother.

After two or three years, Eric's work took him into the country, where there was no accommodation for wives. And Alice's mother said that she hoped he didn't think any girl of hers was going to rough it in the Australian bush because he was too lazy to get work in town. Gosh! Gosh! Speaking up for Alice! But Eric didn't hold it against her. He thought she was a card, Alice's mother.

Anxious and eager, Alice hovered about her mother's house, still helping with the boys, listening with an inward drooping to endless tales of their exploits. Yet again, she heard about their winning looks; how one of them was known locally as Smiler; how the mother had bought them these expensive garments, that extravagant gadget; how they set about acquiring what they wanted from her—flattering, teasing, kissing, asking, cuddling, demanding, making her laugh.

Alice learned to laugh, too, bitterly. If she said what she thought, her mother's retorts could leave her bleeding, and frequently did. Yet, as soon as the scars had healed, she protested again. Her mother took it that Alice begrudged the boys whatever item they had most recently conjured out of her, and would argue about a piano, or a type of car, till Alice was ready to die. She couldn't say, ‘We are not talking about pianos or cars!' because she didn't know this. Something about her mother's argument was murdering her. Ever afterward, she looked at the boys' piano and car with loathing.

From the bush, Eric sent home his money. When he had leave, he came back for a few days. A fair amount of time passed. Then the news all came out in an anonymous letter. Eric had sung a love song to a pretty girl's accompaniment. Eric had slept with the girl. The girl's father was very angry. Alice's mother was very angry. There were meetings and consultations, wild words and tears.

Finally, Alice and Eric moved away from the hideous place with the smoky skies, that hopeless place whose own inhabitants could find no good word to say for it. Now Alice was hours by train from her mother, and there was no money for journeys. Eric was chastened and listless from his joust with experience. Yes, he had sung that love song to the girl in the bush, but he had also shared Alice's snow and, in a way, owned Alice's spectacular hair. It would be nice if she would forgive him, now that they were together. They might go to a dance. He would sing songs to her, too, better songs. He appreciated her cooking. There was some indefinable thing about Alice that he liked so much. She was deep. He didn't understand her. For all these reasons, but particularly for the last, he was willing to love her forever. Oh, Alice!

Eric. He was only a familiar foreigner who looked at her expectantly. She needed to be dazzled.

He was impressed by the strength of her mysterious longings, but he was a follower, too, and two followers together are bound to lose the way. At first, he tried to walk behind Alice, assuming that she knew where they were going. How could he know that she was only trailing her mother, since there was no other leader whose approbation could mean so much? After a while, he began to feel stumped. In his dreams, they wandered hand in hand, but he was no comfort to Alice. She was always looking into the distance, farther than he could see. He was grateful to wake up. Everything was all right, really; it was just that there was a sensation in their small wooden house that, somewhere close by, someone was dying of starvation.

Now that miles of trees and railway lines divided Alice and her mother, a new element entered the world: Alice's talent for remaking reality. Her mother—what a martyr to those wicked boys, that silent husband! How free and easy with the neighbours! Anyone could turn to her. And how the boys and their wives took advantage of her good nature! Alice fumed, pale and silent.

Eric asked if she felt okay. He was rough. The way he arranged his words, awkwardly, with a natural impatience, even when cheerful, would have left marks on Alice if she had cared. Now, when he thought to compliment her in some backhanded way, she looked at him as if he hadn't spoken. As if anything
he
could say… As if
his
opinion… With no feelings even as strong as sadness or contempt, she overlooked his well-meaning efforts to encourage her. He had no idea. Nobody knew. She didn't even know herself.

It dawned on Eric that Alice had something on her mind a great deal of the time. For all he knew, having something on your mind was natural to women. In other ways, she was a good wife. He liked her hair. He even liked her temper. Once, they had had some fun. Of course, they were getting older, two or three years older. But no one had ever warned him that age could subdue you so fast, so soon.

‘The boys are all right. Don't worry about your mother. She's okay. She wants to give things to them—let her!' Secretly, he was grieved and envious not to receive a share of any bounty that was on offer. But he wore a sturdy front.