12 Edmondstone Street Page 3

  So my mother’s room was both hers and not hers. Nor was it my father’s. They might, in their different ways, have felt the same trepidation on entering it, the same sense of bold trespass, that we children did. It was already too fully occupied.

  All the more astonishing then, the innocence, or plain effrontery, of Our Burglar, a young fellow of unknown age and appearance who, one morning early in the war, picked the lock on the Side Door, found his way in the dark to my parents’ bedroom, and – impudently undismayed by the presence of the Sorrowful Watcher and impervious, it seems, to the magic of thresholds – entered, crept quietly over the creaky floorboards to my father’s lowboy, opened it, felt in along the second shelf among folded work shirts and pyjamas, and located our cash box; an iron one about the size of a large sewing basket, but heavy, enamelled black, and with a combination lock.

  He took it with him; but only as far as the Piano Room. There, in the growing light, he discovered what I might have told him immediately, that the lock was broken – no need to screw your brow up and puzzle over numbers – and could be sprung with a thumb. He spilled the contents in a heap on the lino, and amateur that he was, must have been baffled, even enraged, to find nothing there but a few family documents. No cash. No jewels even. Just a fob watch of my father’s which wasn’t gold and two florin pieces that were no longer in circulation. He pocketed them and fled, leaving the cash box open on the Piano Room floor, where Cassie would discover it on her early rounds; and was discovered himself, just after nine, at a George Street pawnshop. My father, whose name was on the watch, was called to the police station to see him, but declined to lay a charge.

  ‘What was he like?’ I demanded.

  ‘Oh, an ordinary young feller,’ my father told us. ‘I felt sorry for him.’

  Ordinary! I was appalled.

  Burglars obsessed me at that time. I had known for ever that one of them would come one day, and used to get up when all the rest of the household was asleep to check the windows and try the doors. Darkness to me was the abode of burglars. They were abroad in every street. I had already created in imagination the one who would choose some day to fulfil the deepest of my fearful expectations. I expected him to be bold at least – maybe monstrous. But that he should appear at last and arouse nothing in my father but pity! I was affronted. I set myself to observe the fellow, not through my father’s eyes but with my own. I imagined myself waking in the early hours, peering round the frame of the verandah window and catching him there in the otherworldly glow of the Sacred Heart. He was wearing sandshoes (it was the only detail my father could supply) and was feeling his way among flannel pyjamas towards the cold metal of the cash box, while Jesus – sorrowful – pointed helpfully to his own metal heart, as if to say, ‘Go deeper. It is there – a bit to the left.’ ‘Ah,’ says the burglar to himself as his hand finds an edge, ‘so it is.’

  I follow him then to the Piano Room. He is sitting cross-legged on the floor, sorting quickly through the tumbled contents, and when he glances up and finds me in the door frame gravely watching, he motions me to be quiet but is not otherwise disturbed. (And why should he be? If Sorrowful Jesus didn’t put him off, why should a small boy in pyjama bottoms, standing on one foot at the door – or does he believe I am his accomplice? Am I? When I checked the key to the Side Door, did I, unconsciously, turn it to the left instead of the right?)

  I step in over the threshold and squat beside him. I am full of questions.

  What are you looking for? It’s only papers, you know – our school reports, birth certificates, and the watch doesn’t go. How do you dare to do it – just walk into other people’s houses like that, in the dark, while they’re asleep? Aren’t you scared? Aren’t you?

  Piss off, he tells me, but without much force. He’s such a mild young fellow. I despise him.

  So once at least, just to see how it might be done, I go to the Side Door myself, and following what I think might be his route, creep barefooted down the hallway, cross the threshold of my parents’ room – on tiptoe, daring the magic, one big toe at a time – and am just at the foot of their bed, in the full glare of the Sacred Heart, when my father starts awake.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ he shouts, ‘what are you up to now?’ Then more quietly, as an afterthought: ‘Is he sleep-walking?’

  I put my hands out in front of me, close my eyes, and pretend, but it’s no go.

  ‘Stop that,’ my mother tells me, snapping the light on. ‘What’s the matter? Do you want the lav?’

  So if my parents’ room remains a place of mysteries, it is because of its intruders, though it is the second, Our Burglar, who impresses me more: that young fellow in sandshoes, his features a blank, who has so quickly solved the maze of our house and gone straight to its centre. It disturbs me that the face of Jesus should be so familiar (I could pick Him out in any line-up) while Our Burglar’s remains forever secret and dim. My father has seen him and found him ordinary. Which means only, perhaps, that he has no eye for things, or no powers of description. What does ordinary mean?

  4

  AT THE END of the Hall, across a wide crossways passage, lies what we call the Piano Room after the big iron-framed instrument that is its major presence. A solid upright of German make, with bronze candleholders and a fretwork swing for the music, it is topped by two splendid jardinières. They are identical but only the one on the left has a name. This is the Brass Jardinière, and it is the focus of such passionate attention on my part that I think of it as shining brighter than the other (as if my thoughts had power just in themselves to burnish by contact), though it is Cassie’s duty to see that they get equal attention from her elbow each Monday morning, and equal amounts of Brasso on a chamois cloth.

  The Piano Room is my favourite room in the house. It is where we are most often to be found – we children, my mother, Cassie and the occasional visitor – in the long afternoons, since it is shaded by the leaves of an enormous mango and is always cool. It is where we gather each evening to listen to the wireless and hear the news, and where, quietly playing while my mother and Cassie exchange bits and pieces of talk, almost not listening and too young as yet to be sent out of the room, I pick up other news as well, the secrets and half-secrets of the world of women. Soon after this it will be closed to me for ever; and even now sometimes, with a glance in my direction, my mother or Maisie or one of the others will slip into code. But little minds are quick. I am skilled at the art of overhearing. Besides, I have learned in this room to listen to music. You let it fill your mind; but what you follow, under variations, is the tune.

  My mother plays a little; poorly, but enough to provide an accompaniment when there is a sing-song on Sunday nights. That is, when five or six friends, in those innocent days before the war, link arms and harmonise from an illuminated sheet. The picture I have of them is clear in outline but fuzzy with sentiment – not all of it mine. That is why I have used the word ‘innocent’ of days that were neither more nor less so than any other. I mean it to express feeling rather than fact. For what they are recreating, these people, or so I now see, is some earlier moment when they were all younger. The quality of nostalgia in the image is in them rather than in my memory of them; they exist in several dimensions of time. These youngish people, now dead, are my parents; they belong, even as they evoke their youth, to another generation, and they seem old to me (though in fact they are younger than I am now) because they are my parents, and because the clothes they are wearing, Fair Isle sweaters and pleated slacks, georgette blouses, strapped shoes, are ones that will be out of date when I grow up. The songs they are singing are out of date already: ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’.

  (Our father also plays, but only in octaves and by ear. He plays for us children: soldiers’ songs from the Great War.)

  I have my first lessons on the piano, practising for half an hour twice a day. But the instrument is too grand and imposing, has locked up in it too much power, for my stiff-fingered stumblings or my pare
nts’ bland simplicities. Only when my mother’s sister, Aunt Frances comes, does it reveal itself. The result is almost frightening.

  Aunt Frances is a ‘real pianist’. Twenty years older than my mother, she learned to play as one of the accomplishments of a middle-class young lady in the nineteenth century. It is a century to which she still belongs.

  As a girl, it seems, she was a beauty. My grandfather, a well-to-do fruit merchant, was excessively proud of her. He took her to first nights of all the shows and light operas, The Quaker Girl, Les Cloches de Cornville, bought her the sheet music next day, and treated her generally ‘like a princess in a fairy tale’. (This is a phrase I hear over and over when my mother retells the story. She is evoking a time she never knew.) But the princess fell from grace. She ran off with a cousin, breaking several laws, and became in consequence the first of my mother’s people to come to Australia; in the beginning to Lightning Ridge, then to a tent at Mount Morgan. Things went badly in both places, and when her husband, who was too spoiled to find regular work, took to mending clocks and watches, she had to supplement their income by giving lessons in piano, fiddle and mandoline. All this, of course, was years back. When I first knew her she was already sixty, a tiny person with a beehive of silver hair, not at all the sort of woman, you might have thought, to break even one law – till you heard her play. Very gentle but easily offended, she had notions of austere gentility that awed my father, though he was very fond of her, and must have made my mother feel at times that she had failed her parents and all of us by not keeping up. (She did keep up, of course, but was it by English standards enough?)

  My mother was the baby of her family by many years. When she came to Australia she was thirteen, just the age perhaps when it is most difficult to make a change. She clung to what she had left or lost and was more English than any of her brothers, who had all been grown men when they migrated and who prided themselves now on being local boys. English for my mother was right. She reproduced in our childhood what she remembered (minus a few housemaids) of her own life in Edwardian London. We ate the same food, heard the same little tags and sayings (‘Hark at the boy!’ my mother would say; or scornfully, of one of my father’s no-hoper friends: ‘He’s not got tuppence to jingle on a tombstone’) and were given the same old-fashioned remedies against winter ills. Forbidden to use local slang, or to speak or act ‘Australian’, we grew up as in a foreign land, where everything local, everything outside the house that was closest and most ordinary, had about it the glow of the exotic. The effect on me was just the opposite of what my mother must have hoped. ‘Gimme,’ I would snarl when my sister and I were out of earshot – playing Australian and tough; or ‘I’m goin’ t’ th’ dunny’; or, with shocking self-consciousness, ‘Him and me done it this arvo. I betcha we did.’ My ideal was one of those freckled, red-headed kids who burned at the beach and got blisters and had to wear a shirt into the water. (I liked the look of the shirt when it stuck in some places, showing the pink skin, and bubbled blue in others.) I even longed for the real Australian rubbish in other families’ yards: beer cartons, the straw jackets that Fourex bottles came in, the stack of ‘dead marines’ waiting for the bottle-oh on the back porch. The smell of stale beer, which my mother abominated, was especially authentic.

  (Once, when my father is organising a float for one of the war parades, we have three soldiers in the house who are to appear on the back of one of his lorries with sandbags and unloaded tommy-guns. The youngest is a freckled fellow with wavy red-gold hair, and in the afternoon, when they are lounging about waiting to be called, half-asleep with the heat and the beer they have been given, I climb on to his knee and push my face up to his. The boy must think I am trying to kiss him. Drowsily, to humour me, he responds. But I know nothing of kissing. I am intoxicating myself with his strangeness, the smell of Fourex on his breath.)

  ‘So what is it to be?’ says Aunt Frances. ‘The Battle of the Nations?’ As if she had to ask! It is my favourite. Also her own.

  The illustrated sheet is coloured. It shows the charge of Napoleon’s Old Guard, above it the grouped flags of the Allies. And the music itself, full of rumbly cannon fire in the bass, the clash and tangle of cavalry charges, snatches of anthems, has so entered my imagination by the time I am six or seven years old that I can follow the progress of that momentous affair, reduced as it is to purely musical terms, in all its shifts and changing fortunes and flashes of light through smoky cloud. It never fails to fire me to a pitch of breathless excitement.

  ‘Here comes the Old Guard,’ Aunt Frances shouts, leaning low over the keyboard as she plunges into ‘La Marseillaise’.

  ‘And here comes Wellington!’ I yell at the turn into the climax.

  I can read these entries in the music, the legs of the massed horses in waves of semiquavers, almost before I can read a book, and am allowed sometimes to take the music out and follow the battle in my head. I know every note. And even if I didn’t, the sheets themselves would excite me. The title has such a powerful effect on my imagination that it creates a music of its own.

  How grand it sounds: ‘The Battle of the Nations’. So final. So universal. Like ‘The Great War’. It gives me a shivery feeling and a special view of history – a series of dramatic climaxes and resolutions, all shot through with coloured uniforms, patriotic tunes, torn flags; a view that is inherent as well in certain words from the books I like to read, ‘Age’ and ‘Era’, and in such phrases as ‘the day hung in the balance’ or ‘the field was won’. So that I feel a subtle shift of meaning when the real war, our war, begins and ‘the Great War’ becomes simply ‘The Last War’; as if history, that closed book, had suddenly been opened again, or we had been turned right about so that what lay before us wasn’t the clear past but an entirely unpredictable future.

  I did not mistake the horrors of what was happening in Europe – I had seen too many newsreels for that. But I did not reject ‘The Battle of the Nations’ either. What I saw now was that it belonged to another form than documentary, that its events, as I knew them, had taken place not at Leipzig but at the same place on another planet – which is to say, in a language that can be heard and read, and which the body responds to as immediately as to taste or touch, but which no one has ever spoken on this one. It is a language of the spirit, that comes out of people’s fingertips more than their mouths and is locked up as well in furniture. From which it can be beaten or stroked or strummed.

  What astonishes me now is not the pictures I see when Aunt Frances strikes up ‘The Battle of the Nations’ – the heroic visions – but the mystery that is involved in my experiencing anything at all: my actually hearing and making sense of this disembodied language that has to break out of a physical body before it can be expressed, but is contained as well – the cannon fire and carnage of ‘The Battle of the Nations’, but also Traümerei, Liebestraum and an infinity of other events and states of being – in our suburban upright. The piano is a magic box. But we too are magic boxes. That is the revelation.

  Compared with this, that modern miracle the Wireless seems a poor thing, entirely earthbound. I have begun to be interested in the inner working of things and ‘wireless’ puzzles me, since it is the fact of its actually having wires, all wonderfully stretched and pegged to a frame, that makes the Piano capable of flight. The Wireless is limited to what is actual and mundane: the unpredictable happenings of the nightly News.

  Still, as a piece of furniture it is impressive, you can’t deny it: three feet high with three kinds of veneer and a speaker whose shape you can feel behind knobbly cloth. The voices that come from it owe as much of their significance, surely, to the rich solidity of the thing, its oneness with tables and beds and chairs, as to their own rounded vowels or the importance (for the course of World History depends on it) of what they have to report. Much of what we come to feel about the war, and our own present and precarious fate, might be different if the instrument itself were different. If it were made of some metal alloy,
for example, rather than living wood. Or if it were small enough, as now, to be one of the body’s light appendages. A degree of gravity, at this moment, is essential. The Wireless has it. We are in the age of certainties. Its three veneers, the baroque curves it shares with wardrobes and sideboards, its bourgeois dignity, are terms we appreciate. It gives a visible presence, a tangible form, to words that might otherwise, in this quiet backwater, have nothing to attach themselves to.

  Freedom. Destiny. The easy life we have grown up in, white for the most part, British almost entirely, in spirit Protestant, has never been under threat. If there are those among us whose freedom has been lost, who have been dispossessed, we do not see them. They are invisible – like the aborigines, who have not yet established themselves in our consciousness. Or they have not yet arrived, even if they are already living down the road or next door – like the migrants, whose sorrows we do not hear because we have not yet opened our ears to receive them.

  The Wireless commands attention because it is ‘furniture’. We draw our chairs up and attend. And this sitting together in a family group, drawn here by the furniture itself, is part of the message we are to receive.

  We do not know it yet but the war is already won.

  The other thing we do not know is that all the values it was meant to embody, even in us, are already lost.