Joan Makes History (19 page)
All those dark mouth-holes were making the history of their land, and making it in their own image, so that as far as I could hear, that history was one of pastures and acquisitions, pounds and acres: it was a history full of great men, men like themselves with whiskers and hats that concealed their eyes, and long ponderous sentences that concealed their souls. They spoke of
progress,
it was a word they seemed fond of, and which they uttered with enough conviction to bring it all the way up to us in our distant gallery. A few other words were robust enough to last the distance: words such as
enterprise
and
initiative,
and under these splendid words were others that no one quite uttered, but which we could all hear just the same: these unspoken words were ones like
cash
and
profit,
and the images were of gold things, of wads of banknotes, of fawning bankers, of diamonds against skin, of minions pandering. It was men in the leather armchairs of clubs admiring other men for making more
cash
and
profit:
it was tight-skinned pert children going to the best schools and having great things expected of them: it was an image of beating the other fellow, squeezing another few pounds out of a deal or labour out of a minion, or
objects out of a heap of some raw material: it was pride in being sharp, and pleasure in paying some ferret-nosed gent to find a way of breaking the laws without the laws being able to do anything: it was riding along in a fine carriage and seeing men in caps look up as they trudged, or lined up in front of the Works at Christmas, cheering on a signal from the foreman and being grateful for their Christmas boxes. Above all it was the satisfaction of having more than nearly everyone else, and the feeling that they deserved it all, for having also been cleverer than nearly everyone else.
My encounter with Lady McNab had punctured my pride somewhat, and I had been reminded all too brutally that I was not, in spite of my elegant charmeuse and the books about asparagus, on the same level as Lady McNab and her like. I was piqued and punctured, and as I stood growing weary of distant words, I found an argumentative frame of mind coming on.
What of the others, the ones who are not in this hall?
I became indignant and wanted to ask:
What of those who lived here before us? What of all the people who will melt away like mud when they die, remembered in no book of history?
However, I, Joan, had no cause for complacency: it was true that George and I were not in the business of stripping this land of all it had, and wringing profit out of every transaction, and we did not think it clever to do a man out of a living wage: but here we were, standing stiff in our best, listening to such men as if we admired them: we were accomplices. We were happy enough to be Mayor and wife of Mayor: we stood, fleshy ourselves, listening to other fleshy folk speak of
opportunity
and
freedom,
when we knew it meant their own opportunity, their own freedom, to do nothing but make profit on profit and let the rest go hang.
Finally the last speech, prayer, hymn and blessing had gone floating up on its puff of hot air: the Duke had said his piece, and had pressed the button for the flags to be raised all over Australia, and we had all cheered and clapped until we did not quite know how to stop. Then the band put an end to it, blaring out a sort of march to get us on the move, and there was a hubbub of people pleased with themselves for having witnessed history, and glad it was over, so that they could find a place for a bit of a sitdown.
The books would have many a fine phrase for what we had seen: they would tell how the hearts of all had
swelled with tumultuous feeling,
how the Duke had stood in a beam of light as if
illumined by the Finger of God:
how the
thunderstorm of cheering
had shaken the building to its foundations, and how we had emerged into the
dawn of a new age of liberty and hope.
In fact, George and I emerged into a din that made my ears ring, of people shouting and exclaiming: close by us on the steps two men boomed a lot of laughter out of their chests, and a woman called shrilly
Come ON, Percy, for heaven's sake!
and was drowned out by cheering from some group I could not see, over to the side. There was a din from the crowd beyond the barricades, of wooden rattles being whirled, and whistles blown: babies wailed, dogs barked, horses and carriages clattered on the road: I was made dizzy by the battery of noise, and by so much feeling running high.
I knew I should be wanting to join the exultation, but I could not find it in me to rejoice: I felt surly about it all now, and the more these other people believed in it, the more aloof I was.
It is all just so many fine words,
I called, made a little hysterical by the clamour.
Just words!
I heard my voice go shrill and strange,
but in the din no one seemed to hear: a man in a topper next to us turned and seemed to stare at me, but then he waved and smiled and nodded at someone over my shoulder: even he had not heard.
Joanie, Joanie,
I heard George beside me, and felt him squeeze my hand: he at least had heard, but it was not George whom I wanted to make listen, but those others.
Do not believe them!
I shouted, or tried to, but I could hear how reedy, how thin, how puny my voice was, how the words were lost as soon as they left my lips, and all at once I was consumed with tears.
I recovered myself on the steps at the side of the crowd, sitting hiccupping and gulping while George fanned me with his programme and warded off a fat woman thrusting smelling salts into my face.
It is just the excitement,
George mumbled at her.
Just a short spell and she will be right.
The fat woman left and gradually the clamour died away. The rattles stopped one by one, or grew more distant as the crowd wandered away along the paths: boys got sick of blowing their whistles, everyone ran out of laughing and things to shout to each other, and the minds of most began to turn toward lunch. George and I sat on our step while the carriages all rolled away bearing the gentry off to their silver and damask, and the men in cloth caps and the women in aprons straggled back along the avenues, their babies asleep over their shoulders, looking forward to a plate of cold mutton and a glass of stout. Now we could hear the wind in the trees and a bird or two: we could hear doors slamming behind us in the hollow building where it had happened, and a broom somewhere close at hand sweeping a path, and a pail of water being set down with a clank.
George stood up and I stood too, and took his hand. He tucked it up against him: I felt foolish and flat now, and there
seemed nothing to have become so excited about. The bunting looked ragged, the grass was ugly and trampled where the barricades had been, and all the glory had evaporated from the scene. Everyone had gone, even the group of blacks was nowhere to be seen, unless a cluster of shadows under a distant tree might have been them.
It is silly,
I whispered, meaning myself as well as the pomp we had seen, but George squeezed my hand tighter.
But we were here, Joanie, and saw it with our own eyes,
he said.
We were on the spot.
We did not say any more about my lapse, but walked in an agreeable silence along the avenues of trees.
Alice will nag us for every blessed thing,
I said at last, and George smiled and said,
By Jove, we had better not leave anything out or there will be strife!
We walked along smiling then, for Alice was at the age of questions, and we both knew the way she would pluck at my skirt and insist:
Then what, Gran, what happened then?
What had happened? Well, some grand men had said some grand words, and those inclined that way had got a bit dewy of eye about it all. Other things had happened too: I would not shift from telling Alice how my glove had made a fool of me, and how I had thought the Duke looked like an impostor in someone else's hat, and how I had got hot and bothered at the end, and made a spectacle of myself in a small shrill way. It would not matter that we would not be able to tell her the precise words that the Duke had used, or exactly how many notables had been on the dais, or just who they were, for she would be able to read that in any of the books. What we would be able to tell her was priceless, for it was all that no one else could tell her, all the things no book would ever mention. They were peculiar, lopsided, absurd sorts of things that we would tell her:
they were things that would look silly in a book, and no one would be tempted to make a bronze statue out of any of them. They mattered just the same, for they were the rest of the history, and without them it was all wrong.
Alice,
I would say seriously, so that she would become solemn and her eyes would grow very big, watching my face for what I would tell her:
Listen carefully now, for this is your inheritance.
Here is our Madge, caught by the Brownie held by her proud father. She is ten years old, and this is an educational excursion: today Duncan and I, and Madge and her somewhat smug little friend, neat catlike Caroline, and the other friend, gangly slack-jawed Ellen from next door, have all crammed into the creaking black Humber with the peeling walnut veneer dashboard. Here we all are, standing on an ugly bit of municipal concrete, pointing theatrically at a squat obelisk behind a chain with spikes in it, as if it would be everyone's first thought to make off with this ugly obelisk. Why are we there?
They should see it,
Duncan had said.
We should all see it, Joanie, have you seen it?
And I had to say I had not, and Duncan, too, shook his head over his porridge, for he had not seen it either.
Let us go today then,
he said, and dabbed at a bit of spilled porridge on his knee.
The birthplace of the nation, after all Joanie, our history started there, in a manner of speaking.
Neat Caroline has taken up a strategic position to the left of the obelisk, so that she can point tidily to it while still smiling for the Brownie. Her fringe glistens, her ears stick out below her homemade pudding basin haircut and her pale cardigan hangs neatly by her sides. Her feet are together oh, what a well-brought-up
and obedient little person she is, and how insufferably pleased with herself (the insufferable friends of your children is something no one warns you about).
What does our Madge have to do with her?
Duncan and I ask each other in the murmuring time before sleep, and we have no answers, for our unruly Madge is like chalk to the soapy cheese of smiling Caroline.
On the other side of this puny monument is Ellen, whose features have not quite co-ordinated themselves enough for a smile, let alone a smile of Caroline's relentless kind: poor Ellen's mouth is ajar on one or two of her yellow and crooked teethâ
She'll have the lot out at twenty and be shot of them, like I done,
her mother has shouted to me between the tea towels on the line. Although she means well, her eyes are wandering away at the vital button-clicking instant and she is slumping sideways, propping up on the side of a foot, all crooked lines and awkward contrivances against gravity, like a barn leaning over with all its angles wrong, and a plank holding it up at the back because no one has thought it worth while to mend it properly. Ellen lives on potato and bread, and could not care less about obelisks or history, poor thing, caring only about avoiding the strap from her fierce boilermaker's-riveter's-mate of a father (and I have seen that strap, a thick leather belt that hangs out in the laundry), and about not having to exert herself. She is always tired, always listless, always pale with too much bread and jam, always having to be chivvied by Madge (I have eavesdropped, pretending to hang out a sheet or pull a weed) into any game that involves more than sprawling in the shade. But although Duncan and I can tut-tut about her teeth, the strap, all that bread, there is no need to ask why our mercurial Madge should be with such a
slow-coachâEllen is the girl next door, and even the most sluggish of playmates is better than none at all.
And our Madge, where is she? There she is, between her friends, directly in front of the podgy obelisk, so she is caught wondering how to go about pointing at it. One foot is beginning to turn towards it, a hand is beginning an awkward gesture over a shoulder, and her face is full of the mischief of someone spoiling the snap for her serious father, frowning into the tiny square of life caught in the glass of the viewfinder.
That father, my Duncan, was becoming bored now with these tidy walks and wallows of dirty water. I watched him slip the strap of the Brownie over his hand and push back his sleeve in an ostentatious way, checking the time, and then stare off over the dunes where the black folk lived, so that no one would involve him in a conversation that would delay our going.
The girls were arguing now: they knew, even dull Ellen knew, that the obelisk had not been here when that first commander had unfurled a mildewed Union Jack, but what of the path, the sea wall, the lawn? Tidy Caroline had no conception of a place without such amenities, and was becoming pink and outraged at Madge's suggestion that there had been just dirt.
What plodding municipal foot was it, activated by what earnest brain, that had decided that this was the very spot, this and no other, on which that first buckled foot had stepped? Someone had pointed and said
Here
with more confidence than was possible, for who could know? Someone had driven in a surveyor's stake, and there the obelisk had been erected, along with a bit of sea wall, nicely made by council workers who had all day to get the curve on the stone just right.
Great moments in history! Here is another: here is our Madge,
cross that day because I have made her wear the pink gingham she hates, scowling at her father behind the Brownie, her head down in the sunlight so her eyes are black sockets and her mouth a sulky shadow. She is supposed to be pretending to be Captain Cook, standing in the doorway of his cottage in the middle of the Melbourne greenery, but she is resisting the coaxing of her parents and is standing there mulishly.
But she had been intrigued by that small bleak house with the bare thick planks on the floor and the tiny uncurtained windows: it was a house like a whitewashed box. It was not possible to imagine anyone curling up in those hard-looking cold-looking beds, much less (the look Duncan and I exchanged above Madge's head agreed on this) to imagine Mr and Mrs Cook writhing in passion on that matrimonial bed in its alcove: were folk so much smaller then, or simply used to taking up less space? Duncan and I, our glance agreed, would not have been able to manage in such a tight space, under such a frosty starched counterpane, on such a lumpy and unforgiving mattress.
The tiny cupboard which was the other bedroom, where Mr and Mrs Cook's Madge, if they had had one, would have have lain on her skinny bed, with no space for anything else in the room except for a candle in a pewter holder, was on the other side of a wall that looked like a flimsy and sound-conducting affair.
Madge made a shrill sound of indignation at the sight of the tiny other bedroom:
But there is no room!
she shouted,
Why are they so small?
and at last announced in a voice that could have been heard in every corner of this house:
Gee, but I am glad I was not them!
We let our Madge run ahead of us down the tight steep staircase, calling back up impatiently,
Come on! Come on!
but Duncan took a moment to press me into the corner of the staircase and give me a kiss like a small instalment, a down payment, a sample demonstration, of the kind of thing that cheerless bedroom had made us think of.
Now, this one is better altogether. Madge is looking full into the camera, with some sort of a smile on her face, but I can tell you why the smile is crooked, embarrassed, unsure: why her look at the camera, although not cross, is puzzled, diffident, ambiguous. Let me draw your attention to the fact that she, and of course Duncan too, is at a beach. You can see sand and rocks, dune grass and the edge of a shrub and a bit of the lagoon behind the beach, and although the snapshot is grainy black, grainy white, and shades of grainy grey, I can see the way the sand dazzles yellow, can see the grey-green sheen of the dune grass and the shrubs. I can feel the salt breeze and hear the surf behind the camera. We were all there that day, Duncan and Madge and I (I was in the thick black swimsuit I felt appropriate for a middle-aged wife and mother, Duncan in the blue trunks with small red clocks on them, like socks, that I had bought him in a sale somewhere, thrifty housewife that I was), and Madge had befriended some little boy with smooth brown skin and a short fur of hair, who was there in the photo too, holding the stick that was the spear of some game of Aborigines they had been playing.
Well, Madge was wearing her old blue-and-green swimsuit, that was nearly too small for her growing body, so she had become impatient at the way it restricted her shoulders, and had rolled it down to her waist so her flat little-girl chest was exposed. While it was all right to expose her chest to this beach, and to her Mum and Dad, and even to this smooth little boy with sand
on his cheek, it seemed to her not all right to expose her nipples to the unblinking eye of the camera.
No,
she had cried,
No, Dad!
as Duncan had stepped back and frowned into the camera, and the boy had stood up straight like a soldier about to be shot.
Duncan fiddled and peered, turned things and peered again, paced out the distance between Madge and himself, and squinted up at the sun, lost in calculations. Madge tried to hoist at the blue-and-green straps, but the whole thing clung to her waist so she could not drag the fabric up, and now Duncan was half-squatting to get the right angle, and started to call out:
Smile now! Smile, kids! This way!
and Madge was appealing to me:
But Mum, my cossie!
for she was not old enough to have any flesh on her chest, and not old enough to know why such inflammatory flesh was covered up, but she was old enough to know that while boys such as this brown one could stand with their flat pink nipples exposed to the camera, the equally flat pink nipples of girls were generally hidden.
But Mum!
she was protesting, bewildered, unsure.
No, Madge, it is okay,
I called,
it does not matter, it is all right, Madge love,
because to me it was absurd and sad that a tiny flat-chested girl had been made ashamed of her bare skin, that her young face should be creasing with uncertainty, that she was not sure whether to be embarrassed, so that even as her father finally clicked the button, she was beginning that sad ashamed gesture of covering her innocent chest with her arms, and looking congested with doubt and shame.
The moment after the snap was taken, I could remember, she had burst into furious tears, and the smug little boy had stared, and his loud-voiced mother had said
Overtired, is she?
so that Madge roared all the louder, and the sun suddenly slid behind the trees, and the sand was all at once cold and nasty, and a
breeze was whipping up the waves of Providence Bay as they raced up the steep beach. The day began to trail away into a wearisome hike back to the Humber with the picnic things, and a long cranky drive back home with the thousands of other Humbers, with a picture of our daughter's fall from innocence waiting to emerge from the small black box.
There was no Garden of Eden, ever, for any of us, although here is Madge standing proudly beside a wooden box in which she has planted tops cut from carrots, which are waving in a cheery feathery way, and her bright hopeful face says that she is sure the carrot tops are growing downward, growing another carrot from the stump of the old in the way lizards can grow new tails: that was another small expulsion from childhood's Eden, when at last those feathery leaves grew coarse, yellow, then brown, sent out a feeble flower head or two, then withered away entirely, and oh, we could not look at our Madge's face, crestfallen, all the brightness gone from it, when she dug up the hairy stumps of buried carrot. Even Duncan, keen though he was to immortalise every moment of history, even he knew better than to get out his brand-new camera then and ask poor Madge to pose with the trowel in her hand.
Often I watched from behind an oleander feeling my heart beat like a person watching her love: there was my Madge, a large-faced girl in blue box pleats. She was an active child, and even when smug Caroline and feeble Ellen were nowhere to be found, to be harassed into some game that involved shrieking up and down the garden, and doing things with long sticks, or throwing things (I watched, proud prying mother that I was, and saw that our Madge could always throw further, hurl her stones straighter, run faster, shriek shriller), our Madge could invent her
own playmates and her own busy activities. She might spend the morning smearing mud on leaves for sandwiches and baking mud pies, and decorating a big cake of mud with a peppering of sand in the shape of a house. Or she might beg me to fill up the old copper that sat in state in its tumbledown shed, with the black lines of smoke running up the whitewashed wall behind it. She would stand in there, stamping at the water, pretending to be a wine treader, or would find the old bleached copper-stick, worn to shredded fibres at one end and shiny on the other from the grasp of who knows how many washerwomen's hands, and stir a witches' brew in her cauldron.
Our Madge loved a gun as much as any boy and would always rather be an Indian than a cowboy.
Bags be Chief Sitting Bull,
I would hear her shriek from the garden, and she would come in later, faced darkened with dirt, boasting about how good she was at dying.
If you're an Indian you have to be real good at dying,
she would explain over her milk and arrowroot biscuit.
Now why is that?
I asked: I knew the answer, having played the same games myself, but was curious to hear how she would explain it.
Well, if you're an Indian you have to fight bravely, see. And kill a few cowboys. But in the end you have to get killed, the cowboys always win.
I persisted:
But Madge, why do the cowboys always win?
Madge took a long drink and sat looking at me with a white moustache. She burped and said,
Well you see Mum, the Indians are brave and everything but backward,
and here she was inspired.
See, they did not know how to make guns, they only stole them from the cowboys, but the cowboys knew how to make them.
She finished the milk and was off again, out the door to the garden, yelling,
Want to see me die, Mum? Watch, quick, this is how I die.