Читать книгу The Last Candles of the Night - Ian Bedford - Страница 9

1

When Philip emerged from the back bedroom in Rockdale – this could be at any time of the morning – he would stand for a moment in the passage, striving to gauge by ear what was in store for him in the further rooms. ‘Back’ and ‘front’ were reversed in this house. The room he now occupied in fact looked over the street. There was a street door, but only tradesmen ever knocked at that door. Ever since Philip was a child, growing up in this house, so much of the daily action was concentrated in the ‘table’ room, the kitchen, the yard and the walled verandah (not to speak of the ‘geyser’ or bathroom which opened off the kitchen) that he had never doubted where the ‘front’ lay and would retain this orientation for all houses till his dying day, warped for life. Jenny, when she was brought to the house, having escaped this conditioning, did not make the same mistake. The two sometimes quarrelled about it.

Once he had learned, by overhearing, what to expect, Philip advanced from the passage through a dark room, which in his childhood had professed only two functions: ‘listening to the cricket’, pre-War, when the Ashes tests were on, and home entertainment on Saturday evenings. The men (and a cricket-mad aunt, the closest Philip had to a parent) retreated here for their dedicated purpose in summer, the only time this room was ever in use in daylight. When it all became too much for them they would adjoin to the yard, aunt included, to bat and bowl. His grandfather bowled slow lobs; he could leg-break a tennis ball. This room had contained armchairs, a radio and an upright piano. Every member of the household, Philip too, played and sang at the piano. They did so by family custom. His mother, who died with his father in a car-crash when Philip was two, was said to have been a gifted musician. Philip had nothing of that. He had taken lessons, but could not remember ‘practising’ the piano in this house.

His bedroom gave onto the passage. Two more, Jenny’s and a third, opened off the darkened room. The boy Philip had slept in the third – sharing it some of the time with an unmarried uncle. That room had held tall, glass-paned bookcases with his mother’s books. Now it was ‘Jim’s room’.

Philip proceeded to the ‘front’ area of the house. His hand rested on the doorknob. He was listening – one last precaution – for his daughter Nora’s voice. Some days she arrived early. When he could be sure the coast was clear, he turned the knob slowly and advanced into the room.

Jenny was seated at the polished-wood, hexagonal table with her back to him. Her visitors looked up before she did. What she now occupied was his grandfather’s place, not that she knew it – for the old, deal table was gone – facing the yard. Today’s circle of friends were ‘hospital’. Jenny was in no sense a hostess or home entertainer, but friends dropped in on her – often in the mornings, to avoid family, to avoid Nora, whose demands on her mother were exclusive. Here were her former workmates at the Kogarah Bay public hospital: the beloved former head nurse, and two much younger than Jenny, a nurse and an administrator who still worked there. In her mid-thirties, Jenny had been appointed Deputy Registrar at a wing of the hospital, and she became Registrar. For want of medical training she rose no higher, but she toured the wards, and became a facilitator to nurses, canny in her knowledge of trifles of unspent funds and unused equipment, willing to beard specialists and senior doctors. It was said of Jenny in admiration that to make herself more useful, she took Nursing as a TAFE course. This was untrue. But to cast her as useful was profoundly true.

The women greeted Philip sincerely, though without exuberance. He was, to them, a well-mannered, rather distinguished-looking man of seventy-six, still a husband – for Jenny had never spoken of any divorce. Jenny, in fact, had barely spoken to them at all about Philip. Here he was: not fully a member of the household, as they all knew. But they knew it had been his house. They smiled and looked up.

“Kate’s returning to work,” said Jenny. “She can’t stand to be retired. They’ve had the retirement party, now it’s the back-to-work party.”

“All finger-food, Monte Carlos and instant coffee,” said the retired head nurse.

“No, we won’t hold it at the hospital. We’ll hold it at the Sailing Club. Dance music.”

“And men,” said the younger nurse, who could not have been more than thirty. No-one laughed, no-one cheered. There was a silence, which allowed Philip to put in, “I’m sure men would turn up.” His wife stared lightly over the yard where Patch, the fox-terrier, had once dug for bones.

“Too true. Good for men. I’m not agin men,” said the retired head nurse, in her level tones. “Men would be all the rage, along with the biscuits, at a back-to-work party.”

2

Another occasion. Again the passage door opened, and Philip emerged from within the house. Jenny looked up. He did not know these people, and she wanted him to learn how things stood.

“Philip” – no mention of ‘husband’ – “this is Father Mercer. Father Mercer, Philip. Deirdre, this is Philip. Philip, Deirdre. Milo, Philip. Philip, Milo. Milo is the church organist. Deirdre looks after the children’s services.”

He won’t remember them, so I’ll stop at that. Jenny left several people unintroduced. There were too many for the hexagonal table, and no chair for Philip.

She watched him intently, willing him to be on his way. Philip scrutinised the faces for kindness – eight altogether. He decided on Milo. “You’re the organist.”

“Yes, I am.”

“What do you play? Hymns, mostly?”

“Hymns. Interludes. Processionals – for the service.”

Jenny said brightly, “But your window is safe,” and Father Mercer spoke up, on cue, “It’s a fine window. We had to take it down, but it’s stored on a shelf of its own, in the lumber room. When we negotiated for the building, we forged an understanding with the Uniting Church that nothing would happen to your grandparents’ window. That’s not in writing, but we’ll keep to it.”

“You took it down,” said Philip. “Why was that? Was it theologically inappropriate?” He spoke with a levity which freed them to pass on to other topics. Philip stayed. He fetched an armchair from inside – which meant a struggle – and propped it in the doorway he had just opened. Ignoring Father Mercer, he befriended Deirdre, then relapsed into silence.

Jenny cleared the tea things to the kitchen, signalling that she required no help. In her mind she composed a fierce eulogy to the Catholic Church, and to the people who took her in without attempting (except at the beginning) to convert her to their faith, to their sense of their faith. She was, and remained, a Hindu, as anyone could see (though no-one did see) who penetrated the house to her bedroom and beheld the shrine to the goddess Parvati in one corner of the room. Not Jim, not Vinta, not her daughter, followed Jenny to her own bedroom. Her attachment was secret. In the ‘table’ room, where they sat, there were no holy pictures or calendars, Hindu or Catholic, no bleeding hearts, meek and mild Jesuses or plump baby Krishnas – she set no store by such things. That must be why she had taken so readily, forty-odd years ago, to the Uniting Church. Were Philip to enter Jenny’s room (as if that could happen!) he would find, all the same, something of upper-caste India: a formal, well-dusted room with too many elaborate wood chairs, wall furniture and the shrine, of course. Her Parvati would surprise him, but so would the chairs.

3

The passage door opened and Philip emerged, gradual as always. He found Jenny alone. The room was empty of callers. The indelibly stained tablecloth was back in place, the carpet was worn and the sideboard within reach. Jenny this time was more wary and vigilant than her former husband, scooping flyers and booklets from the table-top and burying them in a drawer. Her composure was breached.

Philip prepared his breakfast under her eyes. He had bought wrapped parathas from the Fijian Indian store in Merrylands. He greased two pans in the kitchen, frying the parathas in one and an egg in the other. “Was Jim here?”

“You’ve spent a long night in your room. If you’d come through earlier, you could have talked with him.”

“I’ll talk with you.”

“Hasn’t it all been said?” Jenny sat without moving at the queen table in the house that was hers. Let him talk – not any old talk, but talk that meant something. Home for good. What did that mean?

“Fresh start, today,” he said. “New people, new suburbs. Sydney is all new suburbs. Or new suburbs is where the Indians live.”

“More Indians. Didn’t you leave India to escape them?”

“I find one right here.”

“Is Indian what I am? That does me some credit. After all these years in Australia,” she said, “if I’m still an Indian, I’m a very determined one.”

“After all those years in India,” countered Philip, “I’m still an Australian, which is why I came home.”

This, precisely this, kind of thing, she meant to discourage. Words that spoke themselves. Home, home in Australia, because I’m an Australian. Home because of the whistle-y-bob. That would make as much sense. Her roving eye had fallen on one object from Philip’s era that remained in the house, not because Philip prized it but because the girls, who grew up in the house, had prized it, and her grandchildren knew it for what it was: the whistle-y-bob. When callers remarked on this strange, festive object, a kind of wire cage padded with wool (long since discoloured) and dangling strips of cotton, Jenny would say, without further explanation, “That’s the whistle-y-bob.”

Using the egg-slice for both pans, Philip assembled his meal, took the first bite standing up, in the kitchen, then, like a delinquent facing the music, carried his plate to Jenny’s table. He repeated the journey there and back, returning with a glazed scenic table-mat of cows in a field. She watched him eat. “You talk with Jim a lot. All about India, I suppose.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Which days in India?”

“Early days.”

“Why them?”

“Jim’s twenty-three,” said Philip at once, “and I was twenty-three. It’s all his doing. I keep a lot back. There was Hyderabad and, right at the beginning, there was Bastar. I don’t believe I’ve told you about Bastar.”

“Once you did.”

“No, I don’t think I did.” When Philip had eaten he washed up plate, pans and cutlery, drying them and replacing them in the wrong cupboards. Jenny merely watched. “I’ll shower, and be gone,” he said. “In a month, I’ll be out of your hair. I won’t stay in the house forever.”

“Stay as long as you like.”

“As soon as I find work, paid work – I’ll be off. I’ll still visit, of course.”

“Paid work, what does ‘paid’ matter to you? Paid or unpaid. That’s not the point, is it? You’ll just have to get used to Nora.”

“She comes every day.”

“I can’t stop her coming, she’s my daughter. And I can’t stop …” I can’t stop you staying. Jenny broke off. And Philip contrived not to notice. He had that gift.

Philip tinkered with the shower in the bathroom. The gas mechanism was antique, but he handled it like the native to the house he was. The water had to run first. When he had the jet lighted but not pointed, he emerged, still fully clothed, from the bathroom. “Who do you think she blames me for – you, or Tilly?”

“Nobody blames you for Tilly. If ever there was a girl who went her own way …”

“I was in Nagpur. Five hundred miles away.”

“And I was here. What does it matter where you were, or I was? What’s come over you? You don’t blame yourself, do you?”

“I don’t. I wondered if Nora …”

“One thing about Nora. She’ll let you know. If Nora blamed you for Tilly’s death, you’d have been told twenty years ago. What does she tell you? She wanted a father. She tells you you abandoned her here, and you abandoned me here. If Nora had been anything like Tilly, she’d have gone looking for you. But Nora is a homebody. She’s straight as a die. Things to her are black, or they’re white. Now you, and I, see all shades of charcoal and grey, but that young woman, who has never known a moment’s doubt …”

“A moment’s doubt would help,” said Philip, reflecting that his second daughter was not all that young a woman.

That autumn afternoon, about the time Nora was expected, Jenny lingered in the yard for warmth. I’ll soon be replacing the plum tree. No, Philip can replace it. There was no real garden, except for the fernery down one side, and the nasturtiums round the drain; but two trees, an apple and a plum, had stood without change, bare of fruit, lopped every year, since the boy Philip climbed in his climbing breeches. The trees put out leaves. Eternity. Let the tree stand. Why replace things? No change in the appointments for Master Philip. He’d told her of Mrs Conrick’s Jacko. When she ventured to water the ferns, she seemed to glimpse Jacko the clipped-wing magpie, stalking like a demon on the other side of the paling fence. He pecked through the fence. “Couldn’t fly,” Philip had explained, in exoneration of the malice of that long-dead creature.

Not only the yard but the entire nation was consecrated these days to the absence of change, to the ‘as before’. Its leader, John Howard, seemed resolved to push it back even further, to an era when change was undreamt of. But was there such an era? Jenny believed this was the first such era. The nation itself, the white nation, what people meant by the nation, was a hundred years old this year, 2001. Add the hundred years’ colonial rule before that. At the time Australia was ‘discovered’, as they liked to put it, Tipu Sultan, in South India, was incorporating the French Revolution into the colours of his turban. The Bengal Renaissance was under way, and the Mughal Empire, whose capital at Delhi was the seventh in a long line of dynastic capitals, all on adjacent sites, each grander than the other, was perceived to be moribund. The Marathas were at the gates, while on the faraway Kaveri the Prince of Renouncers was a child, declaiming his anthems to Lord Rama in his father’s village.

Diagonally across the mowed lawn in this backyard ran a cement path which ended at the door of his grandfather’s workshop. Along that strip cricket had been played sixty years before – with the door as backstop – and behind that door were a bench and a wood-turning lathe, which Jenny had left as they were. Sixty-year-old woodshavings: perhaps not, but there lingered the carpenter’s odour and ambience of planks and glue. Jenny kept gardening tools, a tarpaulin and an old wardrobe in that shed. Philip had poked his head in there – once – had seen things were much ‘as before’, and had emerged content, but he had no plans for it.