The High Places Page 11

  She spoke with kindness and authority, as if she had never stepped out of our kitchen and left us alone with Frank. We followed her, and no one saw us go.

  * * *

  The pond was gold in the late light, the colour of good wheat. Edith took us there, I suppose, because she was used to praying at the pond, a place of wet and joyous rebirth. Her footing over the sloping banks was uneasy but she maintained her constant bird chatter to God on the subjects of rescue and redemption. She held her tiny arms out like airplane wings to steady herself over the mossy rocks. And in her effort, praying and balancing, she didn’t notice what we did.

  The American floated above the pond, his feet partially submerged, greenish with weed and his parachute. I don’t know how he got there, or how they had missed him. The trees had caught him and hung him by his strings on the edge of the bush and the war. He had a scratched face and only one arm, whiskey breath, and the fish that swam at his booted feet were silver as tinfoil. Seeing his face was the very worst of our luck, Nora’s and mine. But as I tell our husbands, it didn’t last. We grew up, didn’t we. We left Merrigool, Nora first, me later, and found our husbands. We instructed our half-siblings on methods of escape and eventually they did, to lives that rarely involved us. We made telephone calls to our mother, and when Frank answered he never spoke to us for long.

  Our mother died, and then Frank, and we returned to the house to clear it out. We walked to the pond, dry in the drought and empty of ducks. Once again, we heard Edith praying with her face to the late sky. We heard Frank calling our names, his voice soft as leather, only this time we didn’t go to him. And the American still floated above the water, turning in the wind, and the wind smelled of dinner.

  Rose Bay

  Susan telephoned Rose at work to say she’d decided, finally, to accept her in-laws’ offer to visit California, and would be in Sydney for three days before the ship sailed – it sailed on the Monday, but there was shopping to do, the children had never been to the city, and there was no need for Rose to put them up, oh, but if she could, if it was no trouble, well, that would be lovely, and no, of course, a little flat would be more than big enough for the three of them, they would take up no space, almost none at all. Rose agreed to everything. The thought of her sister being in Sydney filled her with curiosity. Here was an opportunity to be kind to Susan, who was after all a widow. Rose said she would meet them off the train at Central, but Susan wanted to double-check her address and, as usual, laughed when she heard it.

  ‘Isn’t that just like you,’ she said. ‘To live in a place called Rose Bay.’

  Rose laughed too. She made an effort, always, to be pleasant. Her boss referred to her as ‘particularly pleasant’; she had heard him. Her instinct to please people, without being over-eager, came from a dislike of disagreement. She knew Susan considered it immodest of her to live in a place that shared her name; it was the sort of thing Rose did in order to draw attention to herself.

  ‘It’s lovely there by the water, that’s all,’ Rose said, as she had before. ‘The name is just a coincidence.’

  The name was not entirely a coincidence. Robert, the man who paid the rent on her flat, liked the idea of her living there. But walking home from the tram that night, Rose suspected her bay. It was too lovely. It was fragrant streets and bright water, schoolgirls in grey uniforms, nodding nuns, a golf course above the harbour. Flying boats landing on the bay and rising again, heading out for Lord Howe and Singapore. From her flat Rose looked over low rooftops and lower gardens onto the water, and the world was lamplit, lavender, particularly pleasant, and she belonged here, and was neither sad nor lonely. But her sister coming made her wonder, and she saw the lights on the other side of the harbour and understood that she was not entirely content, and not always quiet. Still, not sad. Not lonely.

  A few days before Susan’s arrival, Rose went to the theatre with Robert to see an American dance company on tour in Australia. This company was very fashionable, according to the girls in the office, and very modern, full of Americans with illustrious pedigrees and Jewish refugees who’d danced their way out of the war. Tickets had sold out almost immediately; the girls wanted to know how Rose had come by one, but she couldn’t tell them because Robert was a partner in the firm, and married. Rose had her hair set and wore a new grey dress. She was interested in the Americanness of the dancers because Susan’s husband, Jonathan, had been American. Rose used to enjoy listening to his unanticipated voice, never knowing where it would rise or fall, but the rest of her family – even Susan – imitated him in his absence. Rose assumed they’d stopped after he died. She hadn’t been to see them in over a year, not since the funeral. They lived hours inland, in the kind of town this dance company would never visit.

  The star of the troupe was a dancer called Adelaide Turner: diminutive, sprightly, with long expressive arms and a broad doll-face. She was famous even in Sydney, so many thousands of miles from the city she was born in, the name of which – Chicago – might as well have been the name of a fruit Rose had never tried, or an animal she’d never seen. Adelaide would dance that week in Sydney, the end of the company’s Australian tour, then sail home on the Coral Sea. The same ship was to carry Susan and the children to California to meet the other half of their family, which seemed to be full of healthy, sunlit cousins, expectant grandparents, and many uncles and aunts. It may have been for this reason – the shared ship – that Rose felt connected to Adelaide Turner; her face, too, reminded Rose a little of Susan’s. Jonathan had laughed at Rose once for seeing in famous people she admired a resemblance to someone she knew. But when Adelaide first came onstage, dressed as a girlish clown in a black smock covered with stars and red circles on her cheeks, Rose felt a funny tug at her own limbs. As Adelaide moved, left and right, above the lights and below them, her arms flying, her feet, Rose moved imperceptibly along with her – left, right, above, below. Her arms, her feet.

  Afterward, walking through the night-time city, Rose noticed how many gulls hung in the light above office buildings and street lamps. Bats crossed overhead, quieter. Robert talked about the music and staging, but Adelaide Turner had made an impression on Rose that was too tender for discussion. She was filled with a longing she knew would occupy her for days, then disappear suddenly, as if cured. Rose was conscious of her body in the warm air. She enjoyed the movement of her arms by her side, and the muscles of her legs felt new and within her power. She listened to Robert and thought, I’m much younger than you are. Later that night, lying beside him, she felt her body lift from the bed and hang, for just a moment, in the half-lit room. Not long after, Robert got out of bed to wash and dress and leave for home; Rose lay still and pretended to be sleeping. The next morning, in her empty flat, she cut Adelaide’s picture from the programme and propped it on the mantelpiece.

  * * *

  Rose met Susan and the children off the train on Thursday evening and was relieved to be happy to see them. Lizzie and Alex were mute with the movement, the lights, and the station’s domed ceilings. They were nervous of their aunt and stumbled among the cases and bags. There was a great deal of luggage. It accumulated around their feet as they embraced and enquired and smiled. Then the effort of gathering it and directing Susan and the children and stepping into Rose’s city, into Rose’s life, as if this were natural and easy.

  It was dark by the time they reached Rose Bay. Susan was a tourist peering into the small, lit rooms of Rose’s flat.

  ‘Well, this is very comfortable,’ she said. ‘What do you think, little ones? Isn’t Aunt Rose’s house nice? Isn’t it, Lizzie?’

  The children’s tired, formal faces looked up at Rose.

  ‘It’s smaller than our house,’ said Lizzie. ‘It’s prettier, but we don’t have to climb steps.’

  Susan made the children eggs and toast for supper while Rose moved bags into bedrooms under the surveillance of her niece and nephew. They were more distinct here than they had been at the funeral. Lizzie, the elder,
seemed clear-headed and observant. Alex was more uncertain. His upper lip was puffy and folded to a sweet point in the middle, which gave him the look of a stiff cupid. Rose thought they were delightful and perhaps a little dull. She searched for their father’s likeness in their faces and failed to find it. Perhaps later, as they grew, they’d acquire Jonathan’s looks, the furrow between thick eyebrows she’d mistaken for good judgement. Upon being shown where he would be sleeping, Alex became raucous and insisted on displaying his navel to Rose.

  ‘This is my button,’ he announced, over and over, although his sister told him to stop. He lay on the bed, flexing his plump stomach, watching his navel and checking, every so often, that Rose was too.

  ‘My button!’ he cried.

  ‘Stop it,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Rose.

  Lizzie ignored her. ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘can’t you see Julia would like to make the bed?’

  Alex froze on the bedcovers. Rose wasn’t sure how to remind her niece that her name wasn’t Julia.

  ‘Julia doesn’t need to make the bed,’ said Alex. ‘Aunty Rose made the bed already.’

  Lizzie sighed with a laboured patience. She said, in a gentle, teacherly tone, ‘Julia brought a silk robe and a patchwork quilt from home to put on our bed so we’d be comfortable here and sleep quietly and you won’t get up in the middle of the night and cry.’ She tilted her fastidious head to look at Alex in a way Rose recognised as Susan’s.

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ said Alex, but he rolled off the bed.

  ‘Julia is Lizzie’s good friend,’ said Susan from the doorway. She emphasised good friend; she was benevolent and motherly, wise when it came to imaginary friendships, indulgent with her children who had lost their father. She expressed this to Rose with a significant smile. ‘Supper’s ready, darlings,’ she said, and Alex charged from the room so that his mother was forced to follow.

  Lizzie took Rose’s hand as they walked to the dining table. ‘Julia is my friend,’ she said. ‘My very best friend. She’s coming to America.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. I know you can’t see her, but she’s not a ghost. She’s not dead. She looks a bit like that lady over there.’

  Lizzie pointed to the picture of Adelaide Turner on the mantelpiece. Adelaide was in costume for her clown dance: red cheeks and starry outfit, hair plastered in two curls at her temples.

  ‘Then she’s very pretty,’ said Rose.

  Lizzie smiled as if she liked the thought of this but didn’t believe it to be true.

  * * *

  Susan’s three days in Sydney had been carefully planned. There would be, on Sunday, a trip to the zoo. On Saturday the children would go to the pictures and Susan would have her hair done; they would all shop for gifts and new clothes. On the Friday, when Rose had to work, they would come with her on the tram into the city and walk to Macquarie Street and down the hill where the white sails of the water would rise up to meet them. They would stroll in the botanical gardens and count the steps of the library and sit under palm trees eating ice-cream and reading from comics and magazines. Then they would meet Rose after work. They would all travel back to Rose Bay together, into a quiet Friday night of sleeping children and the hum of the harbour. The thought of them waiting for her at the end of the day made Rose nervous; she recognised in herself an unusual conviction that she owned something that ought to be protected.

  Rose left work with the other girls, typists and stenographers and telephonists, all trim and efficient with busy plans and singsong weekend voices. Susan and the children seemed diminished by comparison. They stood on the pavement, waiting, and Susan turned her head from left to right as if Rose might appear from anywhere except the direction she was walking from.

  The office girls enveloped the children. ‘Do you live on a farm? Do you ride ponies? How old are you? Nine! Five! Is this your first visit to Sydney?’ The children, bewildered and loving, stared up at these bright faces and forgot how to talk.

  On the tram, when asked about her day, Lizzie said, ‘Alex needed to use the toilet but we couldn’t find one and then Julia knew where they were. I saw flowers in a glasshouse that grew in the Bible.’

  ‘They were ferns,’ said Susan.

  ‘Is that old?’ asked Alex.

  Lizzie looked at him with concern. ‘Of course it is,’ she said.

  The children were restless at bedtime. Julia wanted a light left on. Rose waited with them for tiredness to come, and was delighted by the sure and sudden way it did. Once asleep, they breathed like birds. Their bodies lifted, briefly, then fell back. As Rose returned to the living room, Susan said, ‘There’s so much dust in the air. How do you keep your skin cool? And so much noise in the street. I hope they’ll sleep.’

  But the children slept long and evenly, their soft arms rigid over the sheets.

  Rose and Susan sat by a window with one lamp on and the curtains open. They looked almost identical in this pliable light. Ships sounded out on the harbour and a buoy in the bay fell and fell in the tide. Susan composed lists in the lamplight: errands, letters to write, shopping to be done. One finger was bright with her wedding ring. Rose disliked the publicity of wedding rings. Or perhaps she was only irritated that Robert was out with his wife tonight, at a fancy-dress party to which Rose had also been invited. She would have gone as a dancer, with red circles on her cheeks and her hair curled around her face. At some point during the party Robert would have placed his hand on the small of her back, but he would have left with his wife. Usually, Rose was happy to go home alone to her bay, but there were times when her envy of Robert’s wife felt like a stone resting at the base of her spine, a reminder that she was wanted, but not singly, and not enough. She remembered feeling that way about Susan, once. Maybe even now. Rose seemed to have made a career of this doubleness, as if she always came in pairs. Jonathan had listed for her all the animals that do not mate for life. Chinchillas, he said. Bison. Deer, bears, sea lions. Elephants with their old memories. Waterfowl of various kinds. He said these names lying in bed beside her in that flat and pollinated town, in those new days after Lizzie was born, and Rose, who had already decided to leave for Sydney, loved this menagerie and was made impatient by it.

  ‘Many whales,’ he said, ‘don’t even mate for a season. Swans, beloved by the sentimental – that’s you, Rosie – don’t even necessarily mate for a season.’

  Susan looked up from her list. ‘I hope you don’t disapprove of the way I indulge Lizzie. I mean with Julia,’ she said. ‘It’s all been so hard on her. But I thought the passage over, our time on the ship, would be a good chance to wean her off.’

  Rose said, ‘Yes, I suppose it would.’ I know nothing, she thought, about the hearts of children.

  Susan sat quietly for a moment. She was very pretty, still, and at thirty-five a widow. Then she said, looking out across the harbour, ‘Oh – America.’

  * * *

  The zoo rose out of the water on the north side of the harbour, a hillside of animals with Sydney’s best views. It pleased Rose to think that as she looked across the bay from her window there were giraffes looking back. A city with a harbour-side zoo was a happy city, in Rose’s estimation. It was a city playing a sweet joke upon itself.

  To reach the zoo on Sunday they caught a ferry from Circular Quay, that busy square of water. The wharves hovered out upon the harbour, covered over, like Japanese pavilions. The day was warm and windless. The Coral Sea was already docked in the quay. The ship was a vast wall in the water, with small windows, and it seemed ridiculous that something of this size could remain afloat over the profound Pacific.

  ‘One of those windows will be yours,’ said Rose, kneeling beside Lizzie. ‘Isn’t that exciting?’

  ‘Which one?’ said Lizzie, turning her face up to her mother. ‘Which is our window?’

  ‘We’ll find out tomorrow,’ said Susan.

  ‘And that will be Julia’s window too,’ said Lizzie.


  Susan kissed the top of Lizzie’s head. Then she said, ‘No, Julia will have her own window.’

  ‘Next to ours?’

  ‘Near ours,’ said Susan, ‘but not next to it.’

  Alex pressed against his sister’s side. He said, ‘Will the boat go fast or slow?’

  ‘Very fast,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘Soon we’ll all be flying in planes to places like California,’ said Rose, and this seemed to disgust Lizzie; she turned away from the Coral Sea.

  The zoo ferry, in comparison, was toy-small and overly bright. Alex ran toward it and had to be held back; he was thrilled and loud, as he had been about his navel. But Lizzie seemed sceptical. As they were walking across the narrow plank onto the boat, she gave a sudden cry, full of grief and fear, and people around them turned to look.

  ‘Are you frightened, Lizzie?’ said Rose. ‘Hold my hand. Don’t look down.’

  Lizzie held her hand and took small steps across the plank, all the while looking down at the water, but once she had settled into a seat on the deck she no longer seemed afraid. As the ferry moved away from the quay, Alex complained of a ‘tummy feeling’, over which Susan fussed. Rose sat quietly beside quiet Lizzie, irritated as she always was by sick people, even children. Rose herself was never sick. But she helped Susan hold Alex against the railing as he threw up into the harbour, and she loved and pitied him, this small pale boy over all that water. They returned to their seats, where Lizzie waited tense and white. Rose and Susan bent their heads over the children as the ferry rocked.

  The Sunday zoo was full of people, but Rose identified the dancers right away. There was a man she recognised with conspicuously red hair. She heard their accents and noted the surety and discipline with which they walked. Last night had been their final show and tomorrow they sailed on the Coral Sea; for now they were seeing the sights. They eddied about in same-sex groups, interacting with loud jokes and theatrical gestures. Passing aviaries on the zoo’s sloping streets, Rose saw half a dozen of them sitting among the tropical birds, coaxing them onto arms and shoulders with a trick of the posture that was, Rose knew, beyond her own shoulders, her own arms.