Tirra Lirra by the River (12 page)

I went back and sat on the sofa again. ‘I
think
she may be able to get an address,’ said Olive.

‘I shan’t persuade you to ask her,’ I said. ‘I should hate you to go to gaol.’

‘You sound sarcastic,’ said Olive.

‘I don’t mean to.’

‘Off-hand, then. I don’t quite know how to take you these days, Nora. I hardly ever know whether you’re joking or not. You say everything in such an off-hand way.’

‘I’ll try not to,’ I said.

Olive chewed her lip again, and I waited again. Then she
said with sudden resolution, ‘I’ll ask this woman, of course. It’s only that it’s so frightfully embarrassing. She’ll think it’s for me.’

I was amazed that she should care. Here was another problem of reconciliation. Her novels were so worldly, her ‘approved’ characters so far above the current moral laws.

‘Olive,’ I said, ‘what do your characters use?’

‘Use?’

‘What contraceptives? They have affairs, so they must use something, unless the men are sterile or the women barren. And they’re not, because they have children, or talk of having them. And what about Aldous Huxley’s characters? And Noel Coward’s? And D. H. Lawrence’s? Yes, his. What do they use?’

‘You had better ask them,’ said Olive.

‘I can’t. But I can ask you. What do yours use?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Contraception—the avoidance of pregnancy—simply is not part of my theme.’

‘What is your theme?’

‘I suppose,’ said Olive, sounding shyer still, ‘the delicate nuances of feeling, you know, between a man and a woman in that position. I mean,’ she amended quickly, ‘in that relationship.’

‘But wouldn’t those delicate nuances be affected by what they use? You can’t tell me it isn’t a nuance all of its own if a man has to stop to put something
on
, or a woman has to stop to put something
in.’

But now Olive gave a laughing shriek and put both hands over her ears. And as I watched her laughing, and shaking her imprisoned head from side to side, I began to laugh myself. I could hardly believe that I should be shocking her (of all people!) in exactly the same way that the first lot of artists used to shock me at Bomera.

‘I know what your characters do,’ I said in the consciously ‘tough’ tone of the artists. ‘They get pregnant, and have abortions, and I bet you get addresses for them.’

She got the address in a few days. She rang me at my lodgings
in Torrington Square, but ‘thought it better not to say anything on the phone’.

We met next day in Oxford Street. ‘I’m sure she thought it was for me,’ said Olive.

We went to an A.B.C. cafe. ‘Jean—that’s what we’ll call the friend who gave it to me—Jean said he charged her a hundred and fifty pounds.’

I clapped a hand to my cheek. ‘A hundred and fif—’

‘Ssshhh!’ We waited until a waitress had passed, then she leaned across the table and whispered, ‘And she said to make up a good story, so he’ll have an excuse for doing it.’

‘An excuse
as well!
’

The doctor was a short thin sallow man with little faded eyes set in huge blue sockets. He wore a black jacket and striped pants, and after confirming my pregnancy he sat with his hands folded and questioned me severely about my motives. How I longed for Doctor So-and-so and his abortion car. Trying not to sound off-hand, I told him there was madness in my family, and after pursing his mouth, and hooding his eyes, and pretending to consider, he rose and said, ‘Very well, come tomorrow morning at ten, and bring three hundred pounds.’

I said to Olive, ‘
Three hun
—’

‘Ssshhh!’ We were in a cafe again. ‘It’s those clothes,’ said Olive.

‘Three hundred,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll have to find someone else.’

But I was almost twelve weeks pregnant, and ‘Jean’, when telephoned, told Olive that there was no time to find anyone else. Olive offered to come with me, but she was in such a state of nerves that for her sake I refused. She bravely insisted, however, and the next day we went together to the doctor’s rooms.

We had been waiting for five minutes when I saw that she
had turned a sickly white and that sweat had collected on her upper lip. She turned miserable eyes to mine.

‘I wish I were anywhere but here.’

I thought she would faint. ‘Then you should not be here,’ I said curtly. ‘You had better go.’

‘I would never forgive myself.’ She took out a handkerchief and dabbed her lips. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Wonderful.’

‘How could you?’

‘It’s the madness in my family.’

She started to laugh, but I tapped her shoulder and pointed to the inner-communicating door. Behind the glass panel the shadow of a head and shoulders had appeared.

I think if there was madness in anyone’s family, it was in his. He spoke with an almost wild contempt. ‘Take off your pants. Get up there. Do this. Do that.’ There was no anaesthetic of any kind. He strapped my ankles to his contraption and began. ‘Stop that noise. Don’t tell me it hurts. Of course it hurts. You were willing enough to have the fun, weren’t you? Oh, yes! But now you’re groaning because it hurts. Hurts! You women. You make me sick, the whole rotten lot of you. There’s only one sure way to avoid pregnancy, but oh no, you haven’t the decency for that …’

When he unstrapped me, and I got down, he didn’t look at me, but turned to wash his hands and said in the same venomous tone, ‘Don’t come back here if anything goes wrong. Go to a public hospital. And mention no names.’

In the waiting room Olive whispered, ‘Was it terrible?’

She was wide-eyed, and appeared impressed. ‘No,’ I said angrily, ‘it was perfectly all right.’

‘When I saw him I thought …’

‘He was quite all right. He was very nice, very kind.’

‘You’ve got mascara all over your cheeks.’

I turned my back to her and removed the mascara with spittle on a handkerchief. We went in silence down the narrow stairs into Charing Cross Road, from where we took a taxi to Olive’s flat. I didn’t feel in the least faint or ill, but having been told to rest for a few days, I lay on the sofa.

‘I bet I know what he used,’ I said in my ‘tough’ voice. ‘One of those wire pot cleaners.’

Olive gave a cry and clapped both hands to her ears.

I stayed in her flat, bleeding, for four days. Given her real fear, it was good of her to have me there. When she went out, which she often did, I grew melancholy, but in her presence I was talkative and blithe.

‘With what money I have left,’ I said one day, ‘I think I’ll go to a dressmaking school, the best in London, for as long as it takes to become a real professional. Then I’ll get a job, and save up until I have enough money to go back to Sydney and work there.’

She nodded approvingly. ‘Yes. Go back.’

‘What about you?’

She shook her head.

‘Why not?’

‘I like to live in a country of importance.’

In the mornings, in a rusty-black dressing gown, she would put on her spectacles and worry over various newspapers and periodicals. This was in the second year—or was it the first?—of the Spanish Civil War. ‘While you’re reading that bit,’ I would say, ‘give me the clothes bit.’

One morning she said, ‘How can you care so much about clothes, Nora, when all
this
is happening?’

‘Professional interest.’

‘More like sheer gloating.’

‘Can’t I care about that
and
clothes.’

‘Not about this and
so much
about clothes.’

‘I didn’t know you were a political woman.’

‘This isn’t political. It is simply,’ she said impressively, ‘human caring. But in fact,’ she added in a lesser tone, ‘I happen to be a communist.’

‘Really? Lots of people seem to be, nowadays. One is always reading about it. It seems to be quite the thing. But I couldn’t, I simply couldn’t. Whenever I think of communism I see something grey.’

‘That’s what you once said about the books I used to read.’

‘Grey and flat. Wool, probably, with no weave showing, and a bit bunchy where the sleeves are set in.’

She laughed, but was cross. ‘You do it on purpose.’

Again she surprised me; of course I did it on purpose. ‘Oh, come on, Ol,’ I said. She hated being called Ol. ‘Give me the clothes bit.’

She gave it to me with fastidious fingers. ‘You’re hopelessly frivolous.’

‘You sound like Grace.’

‘Grace?’ She raised her face from her newspaper. ‘Your sister,’ she said reflectively. ‘How
is
Grace?’

‘Trying to be religious.’

‘That’s interesting. What form does it take?’

‘Just a sort of churchy Anglican. What’s interesting about that?’

‘I have a theory that the Protestant tradition in Australia is so tepid that most Australian Protestants lapse into a sort of pantheism. Don’t you agree?’

‘I might,’ I said, ‘if I knew what pantheism was.’

In my tone was an echo (I heard it with dismay) of the old growled-out question ‘Who does she think
she
is?’

The third day, Saturday, Olive went to one of her meetings. I was dozing when I heard the sound of tennis in the square.
At first I thought the thud of balls must be the remnant of a dream, but when I opened my eyes it still persisted. I went to the window and saw through the trees those moving fragments of white. I shut the window, went back to the sofa, and put a cushion over my head. But I could hear it still.

On the next day, after telling Olive that the bleeding had quite stopped, I returned to my lodgings in Torrington Square. The bleeding had increased, in fact, to the point where I feared involvement for Olive. In a few days there was a flooded bed, a partial confession to a furious and disgusted landlady, and a spoilt mattress to be paid for. Years later I learned from women’s gossip that there must have been a fragment of placenta left behind, but at the time I had no idea what was causing it. My mother had thought it indecent to speak of such matters, and in our physiology lessons at school our teacher had given the impression that the body from waist to groin was occupied only by a neatly drawn pelvic girdle, though organs abounded elsewhere. As for my adult knowledge of the reproductive organs, being gained mostly from sensation, it was woefully simplistic and imprecise.

Though very frightened in that room in Torrington Square, I was prepared to die rather than submit myself to medical examination. I mean that quite literally: I was prepared to die. But the bleeding stopped at last, and never again did I have any sexual contact, of any kind, with anyone.

This long restraint was variously interpreted by the people who knew of it or guessed it, the two most common explanations being that I was frigid or an unconscious Lesbian. I was not frigid, and I worked with too many Lesbians for any such tendency on my part to have remained unconscious. No, it was simply, at first, that I was frightened, and for that reason avoided the temptation of masculine contact. This gave me habits of stiffness and reticence which in turn deflected the
overtures which by that time I may have met. At first it mattered, and then it stopped mattering. ‘Compare us,’ Hilda used to say. ‘All my experience, and all your lack of it. Yet here we are, both old, and what difference has it made, after all?’

By the time I recovered from the abortion I did not have much money left. The first dressmaking academy in which I enrolled proved to be the wrong one, useful only as a source of the gossip that led me to the right one. At the second academy I paid my fees for a year, and then moved to a small room in Maida Vale. Olive pulled a face when she saw it.

‘Not very salubrious.’

‘Do communists care?’

‘This one does.’

‘But it’s clean. I cleaned it myself. So by salubrious you must mean respectable.’

‘I suppose I do. I got a bit of a shock when I saw those women on the ground floor. Not that I don’t pity women like that.’

‘Olive, you bewilder me.’

‘Why, Nora?’

‘You might never have left home.’

‘It’s interesting that you say that. I feel that in myself.’ She set one hand on her chest. ‘Some block, some point beyond which I can’t develop. Do try to explain what you mean.’

But I could not then express my feeling that she had brought with her the contradictions of our home society—its rawness and weak gentility, its innocence and deep deceptions—and had merely given them a slightly different form.

‘I think,’ she said, looking earnestly at some point beyond my head, ‘that I need to lose myself, sink myself.’

‘You also need to stop wearing tan shoes with a puce dress.’

‘I want to be simple, utterly simple. Like water.’

‘No chance. You’ll never be simple, and neither shall I. We both had to start disguising ourselves too early.’

She looked at me, half-frowning, half-laughing. ‘You know, Nora, you’re very intelligent.’

‘I know. Isn’t it a pity I’m so stupid?’

Of course, I underestimated Olive. If she did not arrive at simplicity in her person, she did so in her later books, whereas I never have, in anything. The different courses on which our lives were already set began to be apparent in those first weeks in London. Her seriousness was a challenge that goaded me to flippancy, and from my flippancy, she, in her turn, defended herself by a seriousness which became at each of our meetings more flat and assertive. She herself disliked it.

‘I didn’t mean to put it like that. I’m talking like an earnest school girl. But I just can’t think how else to put it.’

And nor could I think how else to put it but by my brazen levity. I remarked one day that if our characters could have been combined we may have made between us one good person. But Olive stared at me, and slowly shook her head.

‘Not in my sense of the word good.’

But we remained friends in spite of these clashes, and when she had a success with her third novel, and went to live in France, I felt very much alone. And yet, in many ways, I was glad to be alone. I had entered once more on a period of waiting. A number of the artists from Bomera, from both the first and the last lot, had drifted to London, and occasionally I would encounter one of them, and we would talk of the harbour, the sun, and the cicadas in the plane trees in Macleay Street.