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  Then they’re climbing the stairs together, sharing the light. He can’t quite believe in her willingness. It seems too soon, a sort of despair. She surveys the strewn clothes and sheets on his floor, strides over them to the bed and wrestles the mattress back into position. He watches her step on the back of her boot to remove it without bending, sees her kick it off with the laces still tied. And then the other. He snuffs the candle.

  In darkness there is licence. Interrupting her methodical undressing, he holds her to him thigh to thigh. Wants her to feel him pushing at her stomach. He hoists the greasy fabric of her factory skirt, gathering it up several times before he can uncover the bare skin of her buttocks. He grasps with splayed hands and outstretched fingers, thinking, ‘To have and to hold . . . ’

  It begins with abhorrence and disgust, hunting for the congealed relics of the soldier’s phlegm, and progresses into a belated spring cleaning. They are most thorough in her room, less so in his. The rest of the Cordier kingdom isn’t their concern. Even then the work occupies an entire Sunday morning.

  First they discover that by spot-scrubbing the slates in the kitchen they have created little galaxies of cleanliness, and that the universe is still untouched. Down they go again on hands and knees with brushes, scouring every inch of bare stone. He finds this satisfying, but reminiscent of the bleak days after his mother’s funeral. Aunt Mary in her seventy-fifth year drove in from Albion, rolled up her sleeves and, speaking sweetly of a woman she’d detested for fifty years, wore the varnish off the boards in Sarah’s room. Maggie lit the copper and boiled the bedding and curtains. There was no talk of contagion, or of virulent germs lurking in the woodwork. Everyone knew her heart had stopped. They scrubbed her things to get rid of the odour, and to feel better in themselves.

  When the floor is wet and shining black like a sea-swept rock Colombe spies a pink gob adhering to the wall above the door. He watches her throat contract, her mouth go angular. Moments later she has mounted an unsteady chair and is rubbing at the plaster. And once again the little patch she has cleared of grime offends her sense of completeness. She has him bring the bucket so she can dip her rag. Then she attacks the filth in great sweeping arcs, the chair squeaking and wobbling beneath her so that he must wrap an arm about her hip as a support. He pushes his face against her side, smelling her dusty blouse and her body. He feels her muscles straining. Soon she will have to move along to reach the next section. Where will she draw the line? A matter of judgement, knowing how much of the world to keep habitable, what to give up as lost.

  twenty-three

  His mother did not die with a wise prescience of the event, cleanly and with dignity, as he believed great personalities should, but with a prelude of sour vomiting. The sound hit him with a slap, jerking him awake. He found her still in bed, lying on her side, straining to keep from subsiding into a lake of stinking fish – the famous Minnows Broughtonaise. She was unfamiliar, younger, the slack and pendulous parts somehow reabsorbed into her face.

  ‘Don’t fret, Ma, it’s only a little mess. Come and we’ll get you out of it.’

  But when he went around the far side of the bed she convulsed and roared again. A fresh torrent slapped onto the sheet.

  ‘Should I go for the doctor?’

  Nothing doing.

  ‘What if I run you a bath? Do you feel up to a bath? Then while you’re there I can clean this lot. Yes or no, Ma? Do you want a bath?’

  Decisive words, as if things could be done. Gagging at the smell, he construed a slight movement as a nod and went off to run the water. When he returned he was relieved to see her sitting upright on the side of the bed, feet on the floor.

  ‘Are you up to walking? Can you go under your own steam?’

  ‘I’ll not have you carry me.’

  ‘Of course not. You come on your own two legs. But let me help. We’ll go together. That’s the way. I’ve got you. Heave ho! That’s the way!’

  Like a pantomime mule they were. He felt her strong fingers gripping the muscle of his shoulder. The pressure was reassuring. She took her own weight, relied on him only once – when her limbs jerked too suddenly and she threatened to buckle. In the bathroom he eased her down onto a chair and brought a clean nightgown and two towels. Then back to her bedroom where he swabbed her vomit into a bucket, stripped the bed and rolled everything – sheets, blankets, eiderdown, spread – all up into a bundle. To blow away the smell he lifted the window and let in the chilly air. Later he called to her through the bathroom door: ‘You haven’t gone to the bottom, Ma? Lost without trace?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Her voice was husky and acid-bitten, but unhesitating.

  ‘Don’t let it go cold on you. It wouldn’t be good to lay there too long. I’m getting fresh linen. Five minutes and I’ll have your bed done. How are you managing your hair? Be sure to wash your hair.’

  ‘I thought I might let it set like this.’

  Well, if her sarcasm had returned she must be all right. And he could hear her sloshing, probably lathering her scalp at the moment.

  He cut roses from the back verandah and arranged them in a vase – to mask the smell, and to comfort her. He was no more than five minutes. But by the time he went past again, telling her that he was nearly done, she had abandoned him.

  ‘Ma!’

  There was a glacial silence.

  ‘Ma!’

  Still he hesitated, constrained by the thought of her nakedness. But if she were to slip under and drown . . .

  ‘Ma, answer me!’

  One heave and the door whacked against the tub. She didn’t object, lying there in the steaming bath with her head pillowed by a folded flannel, mouth open, a little bubble of spit still intact on her tea-stained teeth. Almost immediately he understood what this meant, but was nonetheless astonished. Unavoidably, he observed her leather-bag breasts. If he was inclined to weep, it was because of this reminder that he had once been new-born. It was a state he could only imagine. He had no memory of being small and dependent on breast milk. The idea was grotesque. He preferred to think of his growing years, when she had sustained and shaped him with words and smiles and touch. Of all the blind millions of faces in existence one had lit up for Harry Lambert. She had loved him. He couldn’t conceive of anything so intense being repeated. Gratitude would come later, but for now his grief was selfish, unconcerned with who or what she’d been. He resented her for leaving him alone. For the first time he wished he’d married and had a family so his feelings might have been more evenly spread. Surely the future would not have seemed so empty and funereal.

  twenty-four

  Richard Lambert,

  Lot 33 Clegg Road,

  Wandin North,

  Victoria,

  September 1, 1968

  Dear Julie,

  I’m obliged for your kind offer of a car ride to and from the November function. Provided my health stands up, I would very much like to be there. Your desire to publish a few notes about Uncle Harry does you credit. It would be a useful keepsake and memorial. I shall contribute what I can, although being the oldest of the old, the last one standing, doesn’t necessarily mean I am a repository of witty tales and anecdotes. The best I can do is clear away some of the nonsense, although by now you probably have his service records and don’t need me to tell you that Harry didn’t come within cooee of Gallipoli. Little Sylvie has probably confused him with one of her mother’s brothers, or perhaps with myself, since I was three years in Palestine and twice wounded. I cannot, however, recollect that I drowned to death. Nor I promise you did Harry.

  As you have discovered, there was a great deal of bunkum talked about him after the war, some of it continuing to this day. I remember as late as 1935 hearing it said that he died during the defence of Amiens. Some clever noodle had him killed at Villers-Bretonneux. Then it was Albert. Name a French town and that’
s where Harry Lambert fell. I also met a lady, a cousin on my mother’s side, who said he had been posthumously promoted to captain for bravery. Pure fantasy. Both you and I know he was discharged alive and well, still a humble private, in 1919, but when a fellow doesn’t come home, when he doesn’t show his face in the street for people to see, there’s scope for all sorts of invention.

  On the other side of the ledger, there are those scurrilous stories about him shooting through. Look in his record. Where does it say he shot through? I remember old Lew Broughton speaking out in the Express. ‘Those who malign the heroes of the nation, etc. etc.’ He laid it on thick but the sentiment was proper. Lew might have been too fond of his own pronouncements, but didn’t he stick by the Lamberts! He put a deal of effort into tracing Harry. He thought that perhaps he was dead after all and that his particulars had been lost. He harped at the War Graves people to do a thorough search. Nothing came of it. Then the man himself, the same Phantom Harry we’d all been worrying about and mourning for, deigned to write a letter to my Aunt Maggie saying he would be delayed in France. No clear explanation, just delayed. Well I suppose delayed is right. We never saw him again.

  I shall tell you something else you mightn’t credit. I heard it from a chap I met some twenty years ago, when I settled here in the hills. He hadn’t known Harry first hand, but he was the pin in the wheel at the Lilydale RSL, and when I introduced myself he knew all the notables amongst my brothers and uncles. At the mention of Harry he grinned and hee-hawed as if we were discussing a likeable rogue. He seemed to think our Harry was a great one for the girls. News to me. I always found him a wooden sort of fellow. But get a man away from his family and who knows? I won’t tell you what they called him. It would make a young lady blush.

  If I haven’t been a mine of information, I daresay it’s because that branch of the family was more private and shut off than the rest of us. Old Uncle Sammy was jolly enough, but not Harry, and not Aunt Sarah. They kept to themselves. You never got more than a glimpse.

  I shall guard my health and write again closer to November. I have my fingers crossed,

  sincere regards,

  Richard Lambert

  PROJECT NOTES, September 7, 1968

  It never rains but it pours. Weeks of trivia then the true business arrives all in one day: Harry Lambert’s army dossier plus, as if to provide an endorsement, Uncle Dick’s letter. Rang Terry to communicate my suspicions. He says I’ve got conspiracy on the brain. Uncle Dick might be a devious old boy, but he’s not God. Nevertheless, Terry reports that he goes judiciously silent on the question of whether Uncle Harry deserted. His most decided statement is that he was a ‘weak individual’. But on Harry’s civilian afterlife he’s very free. Swears Harry married a little French girl sixteen years old. What’s more, there were children, number and genders unknown. Terry says I should be sending invitations to a horde of French Lamberts, though they might not go under that name.

  He also divulged that Harry’s nickname was ‘Pokey Lambert’. Apparently Dick regards this as a real rib-tickler. I imagine him having a good guffaw, though by today’s standards it’s hardly obscene.

  Finally, if Harry survived the war, how did he die? Dick has no hesitation. Harry Lambert died in an agricultural accident in 1929.

  Have I got something solid at last? Terry thinks so. When I complained that there was no way of checking Dick’s information he got a little sore, as if he thought I was ungrateful.

  Also, he has cooled on the idea of coming to the reunion. I told him I needed support. He says a room full of Lamberts is more than he could bear. ‘All those noisy uncles saying what heroes they were. Dad went right through the Ramu Valley and Bougainville. He saw his fair share of Nips. Never heard him skiting!’ He says he doesn’t want to be around when they read my scribblings. They’ll smell a rat for sure. A McArdle rat.

  In fact he’s not worried in the least. Now that he’s put Uncle Harry in his box, he’s simply lost interest.

  I’ll go see Mum tomorrow after work. Not once has it entered her head that I might be holding something back. She’s satisfied with the canon, Uncle Harry as handed down the line. I’ll give her today’s mail and she can make her own adjustments. I imagine it will take two or three hours for her to absorb and grow comfortable with the new Harry. She might lament losing his battle-front death, but there is plenty of romance left. I should hold off unveiling the French Lamberts. It would be sensible to write again to Uncle Dick and ask direct questions. No doubt he will reply with direct equivocations.

  twenty-five

  The best antidote to grief, Harry decides all at once, is sex. No more pee-kay. He reorients himself with manic devotion. He develops an ability to sense the Frenchwoman’s presence in any part of the house. His belly, that great decision-maker, becomes warm and prickly at her approach. They enjoy one another in small instalments: a touch of hands, a brief embrace in the salon. They collide and pull away, grappling loosely. After a meal, or sometimes catching him in the hallway, she opens his trousers. She likes to keep him at a pitch, as if remembering an old game, recently neglected but never forgotten. She hitches her skirts so he might touch her. She sits in candid appreciation, her eyes open and inward. She huffs quietly, practising a greedy conservation of pleasure. Then she leads him urgently to her narrow bed, or they climb the stairs to his.

  Within a few days the act is as familiar as eating. They extend languid hands and nestle skin against skin. He appreciates the distinctiveness of her body. She’s one of those women whose ankles don’t taper; have probably never tapered. He has seen young girls with the same dropsical distribution of fat. Fat-fingered, fat-thighed, fat-ankled. Paradoxically, vigorous sporting girls.

  He can’t picture her swinging a racket.

  In certain places – her calf, behind her knee – he encounters a galvanic charge, her skin rising infinitesimally up to meet his own. This might be mere imagination, because he speculates that there is an invisible substance that passes between people, a restorative, quietly penetrating and reordering their beings. When this seems too fanciful, he frames their situation in mathematical terms: two sets with only a negligible union. They barely overlap. Yet this overlapping is substantial, and more than he’s ever had.

  In the night she breathes hoarsely beside him, her whole torso rising gently in silhouette. He is loath to wake her. It would be wrong, after the hours she’s worked. An antidote to grief is one thing, but to boredom? And if he’s honest he doesn’t desire her at this moment. He’s simply coursing with energy after the idleness of his day. So he listens to the frenzied frogs. He sets himself the task of trying to unravel their calls. The count rises to over a dozen, increasing as he makes finer and finer distinctions. Then his attention leaps to a fresh sound: the faintest hammering of steam. Another train, the first for more than an hour. By the time it’s at its nearest point, making the pitcher vibrate on the washstand, he can’t lie still a second longer. He lunges for his trousers.

  At the window the night is dark but clear of clouds. The glasshouses catch a peppering of starlight, multiplying it over and over so the structures seem like pieces shed from the sky. He doesn’t bother with a shirt, going bare-chested in the close heat of the house, moving swiftly through the now-familiar salon and passages to the kitchen and back door. The outside air is sharper and he feels his chest stiffen; feels the reserves in his muscles aching to be spent. His stride is long and energetic and the fleeting grip of thorns against his skin is a spur rather than a hindrance. Soon he’s bounding through the knee-high pasture. Underfoot the soil is dry and hard, all the moisture having risen up into the feather-topped grasses he crushes with each ploughing step. Empty acres, paddock after paddock without livestock, Harry Lambert the only large and significant creature. And for the first time in weeks he goes upright and without apprehension, meeting and overcoming the resistance of his body, the knotting in his calves,
the slight giddiness brought on by the unaccustomed expansion of his lungs. When he trips in a hoof-hole and rolls over in the grass it’s an adventure, something to be welcomed and wallowed in. After which he springs up with an athleticism he has never possessed, certainly not as a boy on the sports fields of Rushburn or Melbourne. Ten minutes on he halts at a wire fence, throwing back his head and puffing and listening for the fading sounds of the train. He has an imperfect idea of where the track is, knowing only that it runs away in company with the hedge-bound Maromme road and the Seine. He straddles the top wire then pushes into a field of wheat that stands utterly still in the starlight, not a stalk wavering. It’s so uniform and featureless, and the night so dense, that the deeper he wades into it the less sure he is of its boundaries. Rather than face the problem of how he will find his way back, he strides faster, ripping the unripe heads from the wheat, which he chews, prickly awls, husks, the lot. He sucks the insipid flour and fancies that in a month he will come back here and harvest the ripe grain to make bread. True wheaten bread, to show her what he can do, to prove he has his uses in the wider world. And while he contemplates the difficulty of baking without an oven, throwing up dubious solutions and beginning again, the ground hurries on under his feet so that all at once the wheat is gone and he must jump a ditch of stagnant water that churns with life. His leap is long but not long enough and his boots fill before he can clamber up onto solid ground. He sits scratching at the grass rash on his arms and shoulders, and is amazed that he can still hear the train. Listening more attentively, he realises the hammering isn’t decreasing but building. Another train. The locomotive emerges from the darkness as a liquid smudge. It’s a long time before it has a distinct form, but eventually he can make out the halo above the funnel. The steam isn’t compact and tight as he remembers it in the cold, but a wispy grey skirt that can’t hold its form. The carriages are blacker than the land, windows shuttered, blinds drawn. He knows the frightened camaraderie that exists within, boys and men flipping cards as they career through the night. He has ridden in the sealed carriage too, supposing there was no escape. He feels sorry for them. And following the passenger cars comes a tail of trucks chattering on the rails. Repeatedly, over the racket of iron wheels and steam, he hears the bang of hooves against the interior walls. It’s the last sound to survive, the futile objections of horses that will work then die.