Silent Parts Read online

  Did I tell you about his ‘godfather’? Not his true godfather – he died years ago. Joseph got himself one of those official sponsors, an American diplomat with a cosy flat in Paris. His officer arranged it. The American sent him chocolates and good brandy. I thought a nice little ‘godmother’ would be better. All the girls at the canvas-works had their ‘godsons’. They had a glorious time when they got to see their boys face to face. Gabrielle Imbert had three. She was just a tiny little thing, a child, but she could pull those big machines down like a man. She had clever fingers. I was never as good as her. I had the strength but not the cleverness. One of her ‘godsons’ gave her a baby. I wanted my son to have a girl like that, someone to fuss over him.

  Instead he had the foreigner promising the sun and the moon. Anything for the boys at the front. At that time Joseph was in Dijon for training, and hadn’t been near the front. We knew it couldn’t last. I told him what to write. We asked for warm underwear and potted herrings. The herrings were pure cheek. He sent chocolates and brandy. He thought my son was a child to be bribed with sweets. Sweets and a shot of courage. Then two months later Joseph was pulled out of Dijon. They’d picked out some nasty place for him on the Marne. He didn’t tell me. He must have been terrified, because he ran away in Paris between trains. He knew no one there. Not a soul. So he asked directions to his ‘godfather’s’ flat. My poor boy had no brains at all. I brought him up all wrong. I taught him to trust people. You know he went there thinking he would get help. A godfather is supposed to help isn’t he? You mightn’t believe me, but that’s what I saw in the Australian. Never mind his big horsy face. I saw innocence. Or immaturity. Call it what you will. He was like my son – half-asleep, trusting in providence. So many times I wanted to kick him to wake him up, for his own good. Well, he came to the right door. Joseph went to the wrong door. Good luck and bad luck. The American listened without a word. He fed him and gave him a bed and sent for the police. For his troubles my son lost two teeth and three months’ pay. Then off to the Marne to be killed. A good deal. Beaten and betrayed and his life slowly bled out of him in some stinking hole – all before his twenty-second birthday.

  I went to see his ‘godfather’. I couldn’t resist. The concierge wouldn’t let me in. I hung about but it did no good. His housekeeper said he was at his club. His club! I imagined them all sitting there, all those old men stuffing themselves on goose and chicken and pork and saying wise things about the war. I had a train to catch. I went back to Rouen. I sent him a gift – a nice box of horseshit tied up with a ribbon. He knew who sent it. He must have.

  eleven

  Sunday. Sunday because the bells ring in Rouen, and in Maromme, and in Montigny, and in several other unseen villages. (For confirmation he counts back to the evening he deserted.) Yes, Sunday, a morning too bright and far advanced for his liking. He has overslept, or he would have heard her release him. Sunday because she hasn’t left for work and can be heard bustling in the kitchen as he descends the stairs.

  He treads heavily to announce his presence, and she shouts an inquiry, or even an invitation, judging by her upward inflection. Still, he can’t be sure, and he approaches tentatively. Without ceremony she indicates a stool by the fire, and for a time they sit together peering into a pot. Three big white goose eggs rattle against the metal as the water begins to boil. A grey froth forms on the surface. He has his doubts about goose eggs. But she has bread too, the usual heavy stuff, and that at least is safe. Clasping the cob to her chest, she saws methodically, thin slices, brittle. They toast these on short forks, and while she seems quite insensitive to the heat, he scorches one hand then the other and is sure he can smell his knuckle hairs being frizzled to the follicles. The bread emerges from the exercise quite unchanged in appearance, simply hotter, and he drops it on an enamel plate. By now the eggs are battering against the base of the pot and in danger of cracking. She plunges her bread into the fire for one last blasting then knocks it from the fork. With an off-hand gesture, she sends him to the table with the plate. She herself tackles the bubbling pot, hooking a finger under the hot handle and lifting it without a whimper. He sits at the table, which, as a crude concession to formality, she has set with an oil-cloth and two wine glasses. The prospect of alcohol at breakfast turns his stomach, but when he sees her hasten to the table juggling a fuming egg he understands that the glasses are make-do eggcups and holds one steady for her. Back she goes and retrieves another egg from the saucepan. It jumps and spins between her fingers, only briefly touching her skin. Having lobbed it into the glass, she sits and beheads it with one swift swipe of the breadknife. She sniffs the yolk then offers him the knife. He doubts he can dispatch his egg so expertly, but gives it a firm knock with the blade. The shell holds firm. Another knock, quite as hard as hers. But the egg remains intact, isn’t dented in the least. He looks up with a shrug of helplessness and vague astonishment. Head bowed, she continues to gnaw at her toast, feeding it into the side of her mouth. When she does deign to look at him, cocking an overgrown eyebrow, it’s with an expression of humourless pity, as if he’s some sort of sad case who will never know the simplest things. Stung, he addresses his egg once more, golf-style, a gentle tap, a little preparatory swing, then whack! The egg jumps clean out the glass, skims the table and bounces with a resounding and noticeably ceramic clack on the stone floor. Revelations wash over him. He recalls a china egg that Christopher Duncan’s mother had employed to turn her chickens broody. But as well as the mystery of the egg, which is whole and unmarked and clearly indestructible, there is the mademoiselle’s hyena laugh. It’s as if her face has split open, as if he’s seeing beneath the skin. She jabbers and smacks the table so her own breakfast jumps. There are tears in her eyes, floods, as if she’s been holding back since birth. He can’t match her hilarity. Best he can manage is a wooden chuckle, which sets her off afresh, roaring at his discomfort, at his determination to be a good-natured victim.

  Later in the morning she takes him to see her geese. A quick glance left and right (no one in the fields, no one on the road) then out into the crisp morning sun. She tugs at his sleeve, dragging him across the brick-paved yard to the barn. The geese honk ferociously behind the wall. She produces a key and pops the padlock. Again with a touching desire for stealth (didn’t he say he would be shot?) she stuffs him through the opening. He sees only one bird, a white gander with wings outstretched like an archangel. It advances and retreats, posturing, and makes a terrible racket in the enclosed space. Having clapped the door shut on the outside world, the mademoiselle indulges in a game of chase. The bird panics, tumbling over its wide flat feet. But then it makes a stand, rising up and exposing its angular breast. He decides she does a good impersonation of an enraged bird, right down to the wobbling hips. She goads and chastises it, wags her finger as if laying down the law to a bad-tempered boy. Undeterred, it attempts another little charge, until driven back with a clap and a shout. She grins, inviting him to share in the fun. Then she closes on it, seizing its throat with a lightning grab. It flaps but in no time she has the hinge of its wing, and dangles it like a sugar-sack, giggling at the startled look in its eye. Bringing it close for him to inspect, she folds it up under her arm with only its indignant head and blunt bill free to harass him. He has never liked livestock. The thought of George’s old working horse and its big teeth and even bigger half-moon shoes still causes him apprehension. Big or small, two-legged or four-legged, they’re all dirty or dangerous. In this he recognises the word-for-word pronouncement of his mother, a lifelong town dweller. Trouble is, the mademoiselle is delighted by his squeamishness, and would like to see him snuggle up to the gander. To demonstrate how harmless it is she permits it to savage her fingers. ‘See!’ she seems to be saying, ‘just a bag of wind!’ So he too proffers his hand and discovers that the snapping bill is about as dangerous as a clothes peg. She lets the bird fall so it hits the floor in a fury. With cupped hands she gives herself a pair of pointed ears
that swivel at the slightest sound. A fox, he understands at once. She thumbs in the direction of the bird, slits her throat. ‘Oui,’ he says. No match for a fox.

  But the bag of wind doesn’t know this. It delivers a feathery blow to his thigh. She laughs and feigns another grab at its throat so it flees then turns defiantly at a safe distance. She brings him to an empty horse stall, in which the floor is slippery with goose droppings and a corner heaped high with straw and fresh greens. She points out three Greylag geese, each watching him silently from a disorderly nest. He joins her squatting beside the nearest, the gander trumpeting at their backs. The goose permits her to slide a hand beneath its baggy undercarriage. Yet it has the look of an invalid submitting to medical indignities, its eyes wide and somehow ridiculous. She reassures it with a liquid warbling and reveals the clutch of eggs, removing one to show him the pencilled date on the shell: 24/3. In his hand it is heavy, like a heated stone, and he recalls the strong-flavoured yoke of the one he eventually managed to eat for breakfast. There is still an oiliness in his mouth. Again she lifts the goose, pushes it from the nest so it stumbles down onto the flagstones, raises its tail and squirts green muck.

  It surprises him that the nest itself is so clean. Not a trace of shit anywhere. He can feel the heat dissipating, can almost see it. She takes the egg and holds it up before the clerestory window so the light penetrates the shell. He can see no interior detail, just distinctions in mass, dark and less dark, which mean nothing to him but obviously something to her. She scrutinises the next egg in the same way, and another. He doubts this is strictly necessary for the well-being of the unhatched birds, more a source of pleasure for the mademoiselle. She turns and rolls them in the nest, her stumpy fingers lingering in the fluff. But nor, he supposes, is it a miserly appreciation of wealth. Or not wholly. Within those waxy shells a commonplace process is occurring. Her black eyes turn on him very briefly, and shyly. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she appears to ask. It’s self-evident: eggs are beautiful. A tactile and undeniable good. Any child knows it. And despite her grey hair and pushed-in face, she does seem childlike. Yes, he wants to tell her, eggs are beautiful. He’s never believed this before, and he wonders whether he’s wholly sincere, whether under present circumstances he might assert anything.

  She sends him to open the door and he floods the barn with light. Suddenly he’s aware that everything underfoot is spattered with green stains. And there is the reek too of ancient fox hides stiff on the wall. The mademoiselle rouses the other sitting birds, herding them out into the sunshine where the gander has already ventured. Wary of being seen, he remains behind while she directs them with a flexible stick. Out past the greenhouses they go, honking and flapping and clearly rejoicing in the fresh air. A glance at the road and he slips across to the house to observe them from his window. There she is above the dam, stationed like a sentry in the grey waist-high remnants of last summer’s reeds. On the water the birds duck their heads to be rid of the accumulated filth. Then they splay and shake their feathers, and all at once the gander is propelling itself with belting wings, its keeled breast like a white up-raised hull. Freedom!

  She doesn’t come back at midday, nor later as the day grows warm and dust rises from dry sections of the road. He looks for her on the plain. First he locates the geese, pale blips on the verge of the railway. Then their guardian emerges from a fold in the country. She moves along a line of lighter green. Undoubtedly there is a wire fence, a rarity in this landscape, else the geese would be through to the crop. If anything she is diminishing; moving further away.

  Leaving the window, he takes his laundry down to the kitchen and pours water into the concrete sink. He peels off his tunic and throws it in with the rest. In a cupboard he finds a block of home-made soap with a repulsive abattoir smell. He rolls up the sleeves of his borrowed shirt and wrestles with the clothing. The water is cool on his hands and forearms, and when he pauses his skin is ticklish with suds. But the feeling of abandonment remains. He lifts, folds, bears down with his fists on the wet cloth. The practised and unconsidered movements are relaxing. He has always made his bread this way. Lift, fold and bear down . . .

  His father, had he lived, would undoubtedly have obtained a kneading machine. Sammy was an innovator, a lover of new ideas and techniques, a hater of repetitive chores. While he never ceased to regard breadmaking, which he learnt from a German during his first weeks in Melbourne, as a fascinating process, he resented the toil. In the early years he thought and talked and dreamt bread, seeking out old recipes, inventing new ones, combining flours from different districts and from different grains, experimenting with chestnut meal and potatoes and with yeasts, German and brewer’s, activated in water or milk or root beer of all things, and one Easter dispensing with it altogether to make what he promoted as the leaven of the Holy Land. Despite his scant training, he entered his loaves in commercial fairs and won prizes. He publicised his successes and in no time was regarded as a master baker. His rivals lost ground and were slow in catching up. For the farmers’ wives of Rushburn shire the crowning pleasure of a trip into town was a beef and pickle sandwich at Lambert’s.

  Of course this is family hearsay. Harry came along after the glory days. By the time he was old enough to take an interest in the business his father was bored with it. Art beckoned, and roses, and a hundred other whims. It’s Harry’s opinion the shop was in decline, trading on the ghost of its early reputation, all the years of his adolescence, and might have fallen in a heap if he hadn’t returned from boarding school with a superfluous matriculation certificate and no special ambitions, if he hadn’t become a partner and, as Uncle Lew would have it, a Bachelor of Buns. Then with Sammy suddenly gone, the bakery became something of a trap. To abandon it would have been disloyal to his father’s memory. And who would have supported Ma? So he made the best of a dull and solitary occupation. He learnt to make his dough in a ritual trance, taking pleasure in its warmth and malleability, in the physical act of expending energy. He was proud of the strength in his arms – a hidden force below the fat.

  Certainly he’d grown fat. On those uncommon occasions when he served in the shop people commented, joking with impunity, because he had the big frame to carry it. Mostly it was the presumptuous old ladies of his mother’s generation who teased him, but in recent years women close to his own age had been at it too. ‘How’s brave King Harry?’ they inquired, remembering back years to his part in one of Susan Minton’s extravaganzas at the Mechanics’ Institute. To please them, he made kingly gestures and declaimed, ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers!’

  He noticed that his mother bridled. He thought her overly sensitive.

  Lift, fold and bear down . . .

  Then one morning the power wouldn’t come on. He managed to feel his way through to his kitchen with its odours of yeast and cloves and smouldering wood. He lit a lamp then stirred up the firebox. The vibrations of his mother’s snoring came in waves from her upstairs room, shaking the walls. With a snore like that, she could hardly be dying! But there was also a more abrupt sound from the street outside. Something had knocked against the glass. His thoughts jumped to tomcats. Leaving the lamp behind, he moved through the storeroom to the shop. With absurd stealthiness, as if he might achieve a great thing by catching the culprits in the act, he pulled aside the curtain. The shop was all gloom but outside in the street a sheen of moonlight slipped under the verandah. His intruders weren’t feline. Two silvery shapes pressed close to the glass. Boys. He pushed slowly out into the shop and stood behind the counter as if expecting a customer. They couldn’t see him, but as his eyes adjusted the boys became clearer. He could discern their faces; could see the resemblance to other boys, now men, with whom he’d grown up. Rather than disturb them he stood motionless, intrigued. He didn’t have to wait long. One of them worked a soft object against the glass. With a broad sweep he painted a back-to-front S. What this meant didn’t immediately register,
but Harry was horrified by the sight of his property – his father’s property! – being defaced. He bolted out from the counter, skittling something underfoot. There was a clang as the dustpan collided with the skirting. The boys dropped everything and ran, so that by the time Harry unlocked the door they were well gone.

  He cleaned up the mess with newspaper and turps. By first light there was just a slight spatter of red on the pavement. He puzzled over the S. He regretted not having let them finish. Still, the possibilities were limited: Shirker . . . Slacker . . .

  He got the drift.

  Yet he was also bewildered. He coiled up in defensive apprehension. It had been more than a prank. Young boys didn’t think up these things on their own. He wondered how many of his neighbours privately despised him. He chose to blame the war: the ugly contagion of grief. He said nothing to his mother. She could do without the upset.

  twelve

  I won’t say it was like having Joseph back. When you have nothing but work and resentment you give yourself to any distraction. Even to trouble. Still, I was scared. I wanted him gone. I thought: One night and no more. Tomorrow I’ll throw him out.

  But I’ll tell you something: I dreaded he would melt away. I knew it would be for the best, but every time I came home and called out ‘Are you there?’ I braced myself for silence. When something hits you from nowhere you want to know what it means. I didn’t invite him. I didn’t welcome him. He created a terrible disturbance. You wouldn’t think a silent person could make such a noise in my head. He said he was afraid! Afraid! What sort of man confesses this to a stranger? And to a woman? I was ashamed for him.