Joan Makes History (8 page)

Poor Mary, I saw how pale she was under her veil, even watching from the shadowy side door of the church where I took up my position I could see that: I watched her walk with her father down the aisle towards Knightley, who had pilfered her maidenhead, and from where I stood feeling the stone strike chill through my boots, father and daughter had the look of prisoner and warder, the hand of Mr Cassell gripping his daughter's arm like a piece of wood and steering it towards its destiny. He was a man who did not care about any amount of rasping lace or the wilting flowers sweating in his daughter's hands, the gawky bridesmaid or the shadowy man standing waiting to receive his daughter, but he cared about one thing: that no grandchild of his would be born a bastard.

Miss Mary walked with her head bowed so that the blossom
all but fell off her bonnet, and even those who did not know what I did must have seen she was in no hurry to take this one last walk of her unmarried life. She was of course not yet visible to any eye but that of a washerwoman who knew what was what, and perhaps that of her mother, weeping—from joy, the ignorant would assume—into a handkerchief laundered and starched and ironed by my good self, and now receiving a mother's bitter tears. The dress, all that blinding white, was of an old-fashioned cut, surprising in such a modern young lady as Miss Mary, but those nodding matrons in their ruffles would have agreed the loose high-waisted fashions were more romantic and more modestly becoming to a young girl than the nipped waists and pert bosoms of the latest mode.

There was the bride in her lace, and all around her was family, blocking every exit from what was about to happen to her: there were the sad plain bridesmaids trying to look optimistic (and if only they had known how all too easy it could be, and how after a certain moment there was no turning back!), clutching their bunches of flowers, there were the matron of honour, the pageboy, the flower girl, the best man, all those smiling people for whom Miss Mary's big day was an excuse for best clothes, too much laughing, and later (for that matron of honour and best man, and some of those desperate bridesmaids), a glass or two to celebrate another life tied up, the knots made fast for ever.

The organ boomed and squealed, silk and taffeta rustled as all the ladies craned to see the bride, and she walked as slowly as if in a dream. I was in the shadows beside the western door, wide open on the sunlit afternoon, and perhaps from my spot there I was the only one to see her falter, stumble, be free for a
moment of her father's grip on her arm: saw her look up and out of the door with a wild look under her veil, as if she was about to fling aside her blooms and run, veil streaming out behind her, through that doorway into some different kind of future that did not include Knightley. I saw her moment of choice, but someone else had seen it too: Knightley had sprung down from where he stood with his warder beside him at the altar, and in the moment that his bride glanced out into the afternoon, he had taken her hand in his, not with the grasp of ownership, or the determination not to be made a fool of by any blushing foolish bride: he took her hand in his and tucked it up under his arm as if to cherish it, and they stood like that for a moment while the church was stilled by surprise.

When they turned and took the last few steps up to the altar they were already a couple, their skins warming each other, their flesh connected through palms, and I watched them standing close. The shallow words they spoke while Mr Skinner held his book and prayed over them were not their wedding: they had joined themselves together in that moment when their blood had spoken together through their palms and made its own kind of promise, better than any their mouths were making.

Duncan had promised it would be dry, and it was: it was all as dry as a dream, and sounds vanished into this indifferent air. I looked for trees, for grass, for flowers, even for weeds, and found none of them: I looked for faces I could speak to, and charm in the way I knew, with my conspiratorial smiles and sympathy, and found only faces like dark gnarled wood in the shadow of thick hats, and women like the fat floury scones they were so proud of.

I saw now that the dryness of sandy Duncan, which had been exotic to me in the steamy fleshiness of the city, was what was normal in this place, and his lankiness and his freckled lizard qualities fitted in here, where the air was so thin and dry there was hardly enough of it to breathe, and it made me dizzy with its buzzing nothingness. Duncan, suddenly substantial, was no stranger, but he seemed strange to me, here in his world where I was the one who did not seem to fit. But he was no stranger to me in the nights, in the gigantic bed we were allowed now that our knot had been tied.

Joanie, can I make you happy?
Duncan asked, one night when we sprawled, sated, under a sticky sheet, and the question surprised me into silence, because I thought my pleasure had been obvious.
In fact I had wondered, in those silent nights with only stars and space outside, how far my cries of bliss might be carrying, perhaps to the outbuilding full of those men in hats who did things with bits of wire and horses, or perhaps even as far as the dry river bank where the black folk lived. Did they all wink at each other by their fires, and did those skinny-shanked black women laugh so their loose breasts shook, hearing the excesses of pleasure to which their boss was inciting his sallow wife?

You know you make me happy, Duncan,
I said at last, in a suggestive way, and squeezed his bump of nipple. He lay silent, and I wondered then if I had misunderstood, or what more it was that he somehow wanted.
Do I not make you happy, Duncan?
I enquired at last, but felt a pulse of indignation at having to ask, for was it not I, Joan, whom Duncan possessed: Joan, charmer, sensualist, wit, woman of destiny? What kind of dullard would it take, not to be made happy by such a person?
Yes, Joanie,
Duncan said on a sigh, and took hold of the hand playing in the vicinity of his tool.
Yes, but that is not quite what I meant.

I lay feeling rebuffed and wanted to cry out:
What else is there to mean? What else can there be but skins together?
But around the edges of my being there was a fringe of chill, and for the first time I began to doubt myself, and to wonder if there might be something I did not know about, that this simple man Duncan understood, something to do with happiness, something beyond skins that I had no inkling of. I was dismayed: I had always thought myself whole, more whole than most others in fact, but I was recognising now that there was something that I, Joan, might be lacking: I did not know quite what it was, but I could feel it, a hollow or pocket within my being, full of void.

But I was born to make history,
I tried to remind myself. Duncan
lay now with the sheet round his cheeks like a nun, smiling in his sleep in a way that could have softened me, if I had watched too long. He was a sweet sleeper, full of innocence and heavy trusting warmth, and I lay awake beside him often while he slept, because my destiny worried me in the long nights when I felt it sliding away from me, out here in this empty land that could swallow any amount of human ambition.

In the morning, Duncan woke to serenity: his eyes smiled when they opened and saw me there beside him, and his arm, still heavy with sleep, held me tightly even before he was fully awake.
I never thought to be so much in love,
he whispered with his eyes soft on me.
I would have thought it was just words.
I knew I would never again meet with a love like his.

How could I tell him that I was in a foreign country under his arm and eyes, not close at all, but hemispheres apart from him? Even I, Joan, had never been able to watch myself as I slept, and I hoped that Duncan never had, for I had a suspicion that my face creased into discontent, and frowned at all the images of my sleep, all my anxieties at history not yet made, and all the unhappiness or boredom: because in the mornings I felt myself as cross and crumpled as paper, lying stiffly beside my husband.

Deception ran deep in my nature like seepage, and it hardly crossed my mind that I could share my thoughts with Duncan. I could live in his country, and even sometimes love the way the leaves hung in bunches from their branches and the way the dappled shade in the glare of midday made everyone smile. But I could never belong to it in the way he did, although I had to pretend to: I could never shed my carapace of deception. I had to wait passively while another creature fed on my own blood, and had to fight myself not to be stifled by panic, the panic of
having had my destiny nipped in its bud, and of having had my history prematurely snatched away from me by this tiny thief within.

I was a prisoner of the tadpole inside me. I tried to see this life as my destiny, this history as the one I would make, and to be pleased with being Duncan's wife, and the mother of a tadpole. But I knew in my heart that I could not accept such a place, in the suburbs and far-flung colonies of history.

There were times when I thought it must all be a mistake, in spite of the way my buttons would no longer do up: I could not believe in myself bringing forth a son or daughter I would have to learn to love, who would be attached to me then, by bonds of spirit, forever. I read the books that Father sent me, but did not believe that I would open asunder and force out that alien person from my body. As for all the rest, the fiddly paraphernalia of bootees and tiny garments and nappies; I spent my days in a stupor of refusing to think about such things, and when Mother and others sent such bits and pieces I put them in a drawer and did not look at them again. I did not hate the person within, but as far as my imagination could go, there was no such person.

At other times it seemed terribly real, and I was panicked. Buttons and belts, and strange flutterings, and overweening cravings for fresh strawberries, told me that it was all in fact happening. I was overcome with confusion and wanted to exclaim
Stop! It is all going too quick and I am not ready yet!
and I had a mad feeling that if only I could step out of time and place for a short spell, and collect my thoughts, it would be all right, but I was being bundled headlong and all awkward and unready into this thing.

Letters arrived sometimes: Father wrote regularly to tell me
a few facts about cattle and what good prospects there were in them. How he loved the names of cows, never knowing or caring that, out here in what seemed desert, most of the fat-uddered milky beasts he read of would crumple and die within a day.
Santa Gertrudis,
he would write, his elaborate European writing making the names exotic.
Aberdeen Angus, Belted Galloway, Blonde d'Aquitane.
Pouring over the glossy coloured pictures in his books on cows, he would not have believed these skinny wild creatures, that did not amble over grassy fields as he imagined, but galloped, lean of shank, over acres of dust and a few desiccated drab bushes.

Poor Mother did not often write, knowing as she did that, although my tongue remembered a few rusty phrases of her language, my eyes could make no sense of it on the page. It was grief to her, I knew, but only part of the larger grief of life, that she had somehow never been able to learn the ways of the new land, and had had to watch her daughter grow up a stranger to her. Mother sent me postcards, patriotic ones of ships flying the Australian flag, or various sepia Sydney monuments: St James's Church, the Customs House, Central Railway.
I hopes you are good,
she would print carefully on the back.
Joan, do not do no runing. Also too much in the bed.

Lilian surprised me by finding me and sending long scrawled letters.
I am in the loony bin,
she wrote,
and think of you often, Joan. Tell me, do you have a lot of sky there?
I showed poor loony Lil's letter to Duncan, and he frowned and was silent.
There was something up there,
he said at last.
Something went cockeyed for Lil, it is a bad thing, and she is no more loony than you or me.

But Lilian's problems and griefs, her looniness or sanity, were too far away, although I sometimes wondered what would have
happened if it had been within large Lil rather than lean Joan that Duncan's tiny wriggler had buried itself.

There was nothing here to help me believe or make sense, no one who could take me by the hand, look me in the eye, and make me believe that this was my destiny. Here there was nothing to penetrate my stupor. There were mornings when I awoke in panic, my heart thudding, my fists clenched, and I leaned over the big globe in Duncan's study, spinning it with my palm, faster and faster until Peru and Australia and Yorkshire all blurred together.
World!
I muttered.
You could have been mine!
Or with Duncan's magnifying glass I pored over it, searching out the most obscure place on the globe, on which mine would have been the first foot to tread, or gazed at the wide spaces of empty ocean, speculating on undiscovered lands there, awaiting a voyager such as myself.
I could have had you in the palm of my hand!
And what of those places where there was nothing left to discover: London, Paris, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, places I had never been to, and would never see now, or not as a footloose woman of destiny, but (if at all) as a wife and mother, bowed down with details of socks and Benger's, boiled water and woollies! What pain it would be to see Samarkand as a housewife, unable to turn into that dark alleyway, that mysterious shopfront, to sit down beside the swarthy gentleman with the bewitching eyes! Oh, better, almost, not to see it at all!

So I whirled that globe till I was dizzy, until it ran like liquid or gas under my eyes, until Duncan found me there and tried to cajole me with promises of
Grand Tours,
and
All the sights,
and
What about the pyramids, Joanie?
I restrained myself, but wished to cry out:
Duncan, you are dear, but to your eyes one country is the same as another!
And I knew that no dark alleys or even bewitching
eyes would ever tempt him: Duncan's life was entirely and blissfully a part of this particular bit of the globe, and all others were nothing but tall tales for him.

But oh, mine was not! For me, there was nothing here but dust and monotonous sun, and the drone of flies against screens along every hour of the endless silent afternoons. Those afternoons, how heavy they weighed on me! I could hope for so little from them: just a giggle or two in the kitchen with the girls over our brick-like scones, or the tiny drama of a snake discovered under the water tank, or the flurry when a bit of iron was torn off the roof in a sandstorm. These were the greatest excitements I could hope for here under the glaring blue sky, and of such things I did not think history could be made.

As the endless afternoons wore on towards night, even the black folk fell silent, having slipped away from the white man's meaningless tasks of cleaning things that would become dusty again, and tidying things whose nature was to remain in disarray. When they had vanished down to their river bed for the afternoon, I wandered from room to room, touching things that did not tell me anything, and breathing the lifeless air. I was stifled with the dullness of it, the way my life was passing and history was still waiting to be made.

In the long nights, when things hummed beyond the screens—stars or mosquitoes, I could not tell—there seemed no way to believe the sun would ever rise out of the darkness. And even when that red ball did tear itself up out of the horizon and begin pouring down heat, how would it help? No sunrise offered me much here.

But dawn was my time of dreaming: I dreamed of the destinies I would miss out on if I spent my life here, desiccating like
Duncan under this vast sky. I sat on the verandah in the wicker chair that was threatening to take on my shape from so much dreaming going on in it, and watched the luminous east. There was comfort in the inevitability of sunrise, but horror, too, in the way it reminded me of other inevitabilities. I would have liked the drama of doubt, would have liked to go on moulding the wicker chair hour after hour while the sky failed to split open and the sun failed to rise.