Black Diamonds (42 page)

 

DANIEL

Hysterical doesn't say it, not by any stretch. Mim is actually in some kind of shock when she tells me Clem Foley has written to her with
a view to forming an acquaintanceship.
I would be too, I suppose, just at the breathtaking formality and gentleness of that turn of phrase.

But that's what he's like, where women are concerned at least. If he was any
nicer
he'd make you sick. I only ever saw Clem become anything but once, and that was when we'd stopped in a little cafe–bar type place on the road south of Albert, to try to scrounge a feed with real food in it, or at least something missing woodchip bickies and tinned dog. There were a couple of blokes there more interested in the red wine when we walked in, and they were harassing the girl behind the counter. She was alone: in a room full of Australians, Kiwis and French Canadians, all of them apparently ignoring the fact that she was distressed and didn't want to serve the two idiots in front of her. She clearly didn't speak much English, and the idiots could barely speak anything approaching any language, they were that out of line. It was when one of them reached over and grabbed her by the arm that Foley went off. I took a second to watch his hand meet the back of the bloke's collar before I followed him outside but he didn't need help; and the other idiot wasn't going to take me on, especially since a couple of Maoris had started crossing the road for a gander. Clem went back inside and apologised to the girl, in French. She shrugged in reply; you have to love the French.

As for the rest of the duration, I don't know how he coped; he says he didn't, but obviously he did. Enough to get home anyway, with his quiet sense of humour and loud sense of chivalry intact.

I say to Mim: ‘Well, are you going to write back?'

She says: ‘You don't leave a letter like that unanswered, do you.'

No.

She turns away to take the kettle off the stove, pours the water into the pot, sits down at the table to plait Isobella's hair: last kid left at home. I've come round to Mum's with Charlie and Harry, who've just taken the rest of their million sisters off on the walk to school. I only stopped in to finally pick up those boxes of Dad's old records, to shift them to the Wattle where they belong, but I've forgotten all about that as I watch Mim, wondering what's going through her mind. She could plait hair in her sleep; she looks up at me and says: ‘How's he stayed a bachelor so long?'

I say, and I think it's probably as true as anything is: ‘He might have been a bit shy once. Maybe he's not so much now.'

‘Well,' she says, and my sister's never been known for shy but here she is: speechless and full of amazement. Good. She deserves every breath of that. I get a glimpse of what Clem must see in her; you don't really see your sister that way until it's suddenly important: she is very beautiful. Some women would be wrecked after going through all that; she's not.

The hysteria doesn't come until November, when Clem writes to tell her he's coming up for a visit, and bringing an extra horse because he'd like to teach her to ride,
with a view to us teaching the children eventually.

Mim and France flap about as if he's going to walk in in the next five minutes. What's she going to wear to go riding, what will they make for lunch. They both look and sound about fifteen. Mum's sitting there, arms crossed on the table, laughing at them. Better than a show in town, this is. I've never seen this kind of female carry-on before: it's fascinating.

About to leave, I finally remember the boxes and tell Mum. I follow her into her bedroom to get them. Haven't been inside this room since the day I got married and came in here to look myself over in Mum's mirror. Today, the first thing I see is Dad's comb and razor still on the dressing table, toothbrush in the cup behind. Like he's about to wake up and need them. We might be that odd mob who lives round the end of Dell, but we do a good line in devotion, all of us, in one way or another.

Mum says, bending down, pulling out one of the boxes: ‘What are you going to do with them?'

‘Just keep them where they should be, and keep it going, you know.' Make a note of how and why each time someone's injured, sick, sacked, retired and hopefully never killed on the job. No other mines that I know of keep official records of these things, it's always up to the union to bother, but the Wattle will.

‘You're going to write up records yourself?' She looks round at me.

‘Yes.' And tell me why not.

‘No one will be able to read them.'

Thanks Mum. I tell her: ‘Since you can read my writing, you can make a neater copy of my scribble if you like.'

‘All right, I will.'

‘Good.'

She laughs: at me. I love her too.

 

FRANCINE

Armistice Day, the eleventh of November. Daniel signs a hefty cheque for the Returned League, for the widows' fund, and will post it tomorrow. No note. Reminds me of Father, the way he'd send off yearly cheques to the Society of St Vincent de Paul, not out of penance, I don't think, but because he agreed on principle with the
good works
, if not the holy doctrine attached.

Daniel's too busy to post it this morning, or pause to observe the two minutes' silence. He's got me standing by the far windows in the room off the verandah, in the sun, trying to match the colour of my hair, says it's darkened slightly and he just can't get it right. Tells me for the umpteenth time that I am a very bad wife for cutting it. Still, every painting of me is true: short hair. Except for one: I'm eighteen, leaning around the pole of the lean-to at the back of Sarah's, with the gully behind me, a wayward strand floating over my shoulder in the breeze. I don't know what he's going to do with this ever-growing monument to his uxoriousness. He says he can't send any of these ones to Doctor Adinov, and they're too big and too me to hang in the house, so they sit stacked in this room; seventeen of them now: don't stop. Sometimes, I think this run on Francine is funny for everything it says about his indulgence, but mostly I think what a treasure it is that I can see how he sees me, how much of me he sees. I'm not particularly pretty, in a conventional sense, too many angles and freckles; but he makes me beautiful, in the shapes, the colours of me. I think he's a genius, of course: I would.

We're at it again on the last Sunday of the year, except that I'm standing here completely naked. The children are still at Sarah's; we'll pick them up later. Daniel told her: ‘I want to see her skin in that light. See you round five.' You have to wonder how many sons say that to their mothers after lunch.

I want him to paint my expression of desire right now, but he's busy doing whatever it is he's doing with the white, a splotch of which is dribbling down one knee. He is a picture in himself, in his summer painting attire, which consists of an old bespattered shirt, cut-off trousers and those always everyday boots, no socks today, though. It gets very hot in this room with the afternoon sun.

Busy, busy, busy. So busy, we've been lately, that we didn't even manage to vote in the federal election two weeks ago. Hughes has been returned, of course, and there was simply no one else to vote for who could win or who wasn't clangouring for The White Australia Policy. An idea it appears the labour movement dreamed up to protect the Aussie worker from treacherously cheap Chinese
blow-ins
a generation or so ago, but which now is our new Galvanising National Fear: Fight the Yellow Peril! It would seem absurd if it hadn't been so effective at the polls. Not that the National Party needed it when they hold the trump card: the delicate economic situation requiring the steady management of the government that saw us through the war and put the country in the red by some three hundred million pounds, a figure we're to be chuffed about: a war bill greater than that of New Zealand, Canada and South Africa put together. Now, if you want to live here, you have to be prepared to work for a subsistence wage or less, so the Chinese would be mad to come here anyway, wouldn't they.

Those who do live here are fed on jingo-jangle still: chests outthrust now that we're a little empire in ourselves, having been apportioned the entire former German colony of New Guinea, as a lookout post against the Yellow Peril perhaps, and now that we're a fully paid-up-in-blood member of the soon to be inaugurated League of Nations. I can still see the Troll's words swimming before my eyes after his triumphant return from the Paris Peace Conference:
Paradise is there for those who are willing to enter in. Let us not range ourselves under the banner of intolerance. Men have gone into the pit of hell to save for us the title deeds of Australia and of liberty. Australia is free and will remain free.
Too many mines of hypocrisy in that snippet of mind-boggling cant. While his signature is on documents that say Germany should be pulverised into poverty and humiliation with reparations and embargos and occupation forever and ever amen; not a very tolerant way to treat the vanquished. Why should every German have to pay for the sins of a few? While their kaiser's skipped off to stay with friends in Holland, to recover from his embarrassment. Hear, hear to the stripping of arms, but it's only the losers who've been stripped. While winners strut: just look at Joe Cook —
Sir
Joe Cook these days, thank you very much. Not bad for a Lithgow coal worker.

Look at mine, and smile up through my centre: no slavery going on here in our paradise, is there, except for the endeavours of this little muse to please her master. I'd do anything, absolutely anything for you. Just as well it's a reciprocal arrangement. He flashes back a grin before he's busy again.

I stare out at the orchard: the apple trees are a little droopy in the heat. I imagine for a moment that they are sorrowful, gazing as they do at Odysseus's prow, sailing away from Calypso, who'll wait there forever, for all the justice that never comes. What did she want from the gods? If you can stay awake through Homer and Critical Studies to find her you'd think she was a temptress, a sorceress, a shallow device to keep the hero from his destiny; but I think she simply didn't want the father of her children to return to war and the world of men. I can understand that; I can hear her say:
Aren't I enough to stay at home for? Stay safe for?
Use all my magic to make it so; and fail. I don't have to ask why Sarah calls this place Calypso. Bereft in acquiescence but still defiant.

Daniel says: ‘Stop frowning, France. Look at me just as you were before.'

Cracks
me: thanks Kookaburra, thanks Leprechaun, thanks everyone.

 

 

SEVEN

AUGUST 1920

 

FRANCINE

There is to be a wedding. Of course. Today, in the first week of August, as if the powers that control our destiny had to complete a six-year plan to the precise second, in accordance with the laws of romance.

Barely dawn, I wake, as I so often do, to the sound of grunting coming from the back verandah: darlingest at his morning ritual of self-administered physical punishment. Then footsteps down the hall, Clem's; he says to Achilles: ‘You're still a maniac, I see.'

Daniel says between grunts: ‘Nothing wrong with being fit.'

Clem says, in his sleepy way: ‘There's fit, mate, and then there's heart failure.'

Daniel has to stop then, to laugh. ‘You saying I've got a mental problem?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘You might be right, Foley.'

‘I am right, sir.'

‘All right, I'll come quietly. Make yourself useful and put the stove on, will you. Anyone'd think you were getting married today.'

Shoop, shoop, shoop
, razor on strop. Shave. Wash. Clean teeth. Clump,
clump
, clump,
clump
, shaking the floorboards with bare feet up the hall, with that lean to the right that Doctor Nichols thinks is heading towards a limp, could do with an X-ray, but which Daniel says just means his favourite quack is missing his best customer, and here he is, showing full benefits of Almighty Toothbrush.

He says to me, donning his collarless best: ‘What are you looking at.' And he knows very well. No time for that, though: got to get up, get four boys washed, fed, watered, combed, toothbrushed and shirts tucked in. Very special boys, all of them.

Specialest today, though, is Clem. As we pile into the Cadillac he looks as I imagine he might have done that day he dropped the roll of wire on Daniel. Setting off for the proper job, terrified. No manufactured terror going on here today; just the most terrifying thing of all: love. Whack.

Clem is a Christmas- and Easter-only Mick, and since the law says you've got to get married somewhere, it falls to Father Hurley to do the honours. He's more than a bit special too, my old friend the priest, smiling in his weary eyes at this collection of Ackerman atheists and Lewis Methodists, I suspect because he simply loves marrying people. I think he'd marry Hindus if a pair asked him to. Dodgy Catholicism aside, this pairing-up is the highest sacrament, however it's cobbled together. I wouldn't take back a second of our marriage, not even the horrible times, and you couldn't get much more cobbled together than ours; good heavens, we married the day the world declared war on itself, and we've never celebrated an anniversary. Maybe we should from now on. There's only one prayer for today, and that's that Mim and Clem have what we have for as long as they both shall live: completeness of their union; a love that's stronger than anything else.

And here she comes. I can hear Clem breathing, or trying to, steadily, from where I'm standing. I can hear his heart beating, I'm sure. She is breathtaking. She is already crying, trying not to; so am I. With this incredible blessing.

The children do not move; not a shirt needing to be tucked or a plait minus its ribbon. They are awed as they watch their mother marry this lovely gentle man who was all alone and never will be again, who is about to take them all to live in Mudgee. He's found a bigger house, with a paddock for the horses. Mudgee's not very far away, we'll see them once a month or so, but after today Harry and Charlie won't live with us and the wrench is already terrible.

Daniel's lost in the brickwork, determined not to look at anyone; clearly he feels the same way. I try to think of something funny to stop these blasted tears. Did you know that Monash, our most celebrated general — who won the war and all that — is the son of Prussian Jews? Real name:
Monasch.
Kept that quiet, didn't they. What a difference the dropping of one little letter makes. That tickles. And did you know that Matilda's real Jolly Swagman was a German shearer called Frenchy Hoffmeister who drowned himself on Dagworth Station in far-flung North Queensland? And there I'd been thinking it was all a jingly whimsy Mr Patterson wrote for the Billy Tea Company. I'd also thought that Matilda was his sweetheart — not his
swag.
And now I've got the giggles. Badly. Stop it, Francy. Think of something sobering: that's easy. The complication I'll have to tell Daniel about, soon, mental problem or not. Maybe tonight. Can't have a wedding, or any other kind of accident without a complication, can we.

Focus on Sarah, the most serene person here; what's she thinking? I think I can guess: she'll be sad to see them all go, but glad to have her peace and quiet back. Hmn.