The Submerged Cathedral

‘Set me as a seal on your heart, for love is stronger than death.'

Spanning many years, travelling across Australia's vast continent and through some of Europe's great cities,
The Submerged Cathedral
is a beguiling, heartbreaking story of paradise and the fall, of sacrifice and atonement, and of sisterly love and rivalry. Most of all, however, it is about an enduring and sacred love-a love stronger than death-and the journeys undertaken in its name.

Written in spare, haunting prose, this novel is a work of the highest literary merit, as well as a timeless love story that will enthrall readers. The release of Charlotte Wood's acclaimed first novel,
Pieces of a Girl
, marked her as a young writer of great promise;
The Submerged Cathedral
thrillingly confirms that promise with astonishing assurance and lyricism.

Cover

About the book

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

PART ONE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

PART TWO

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

PART THREE

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

PART FOUR

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Acknowledgements

Notes

About the Author

Praise for
Pieces of a Girl

Copyright

More at Random House Australia

In my turn I showed him a postcard of my country … He studied it carefully. At last he turned his currant-coloured eyes to me and said,

‘
Les arbres sont rouges
?' Are the trees red?

Helen Garner,
Postcards from Surfers

Some private Eden shadows every garden.

Michael Pollan,
Second Nature

O
NE MORE WEEK
and he is waiting, his heart faltering, on her front step. In his hands he holds a fish.

She smokes slowly in the bath, and the slight scent of it fills the house.

Later, she will tell him how impressively the bath-water holds sound, how in her underwater ears his door knock is suspended for a second, stilled time. This afternoon her half-closed eye has spiked the bathroom light globe into a yellow grevilleal star, and she is all watery conductor of the senses. So when the flyscreen judders and his knuckles strike the frosted glass, the sound of it moves through the fibres of glass and wood and plaster and iron bath claw and water, and it enters her body like a note struck on a bell.

Her hair is wet down her back when she finds him there on her doorstep with electricity rising in him, and holding out to her a fish.

 

Martin has been home for the weekend. He has caught the small bream with his line on the Pittwater beach in the early morning, pulled it flipping and sliding from the water. Has driven it, wrapped in newspaper in a polystyrene icebox on the seat beside him, through the late morning city and then all through the afternoon, climbing the mountain roads to her door.

But now she is standing there and he knows he is only some stranger on her doorstep, yammering and gaping with the open mouth of the uncertain, the mad.

He holds out to her the newspaper and this shining platinum flower from the sea.

And all he knows is
Please take this fish from my hands
. His heart in spasm: please keep standing there, hand on doorframe and dripping hair and green dress casting its light on your skin, please open out your hands for this simple offered thing.

1963

J
OCELYN HOLDS OPEN
her front door in the fading afternoon, water dripping on her neck, fabric sticking to her skin. It is the doctor.

She had first seen him in the grocer's, across the rows of potato and celery. As she strolled among the shelves and crates, shopping bag over her arm, she had idly pulled a couple of grapes from a bunch and popped them into her mouth.

Then she heard a little snort, and looked up to see a man watching her.

He raised an eyebrow in mock disapproval. ‘I saw that,' he whispered, accusing. He wore a green jacket, was tall with pale wisps of hair. There was something about the way he stared at her, trying not to laugh.

She reddened, then leaned a little towards him. ‘Your word against mine,' she whispered back. He chuckled
quietly, from the other side of the wooden boxes, weighing potatoes in his hands. She laughed too and moved away. She saw him at the edge of her vision: an angular man in a canvas jacket, moving easily in a roomful of women.

Then at the counter he was behind her as the grocer weighed apples and pears and lifted her bunch of grapes onto the scale. She turned around. The man nodded at the grapes and opened his mouth to speak – but Jocelyn locked her eyes on his, and put an index finger to her lips.

He laughed again, and she left him there with his arms full of apples and potatoes and pumpkin in the dark shop, and she tried to stop herself smiling as she walked out into the bright street.

 

At a dinner in the town she saw him again, standing by a table and a chair with her blue jacket over its arm.

‘Oh, hello,' he said, holding out his hand. His name was Martin, he was the new locum. He stood, slightly built and upright, smiling at her. As she stepped forward to shake his hand he said, ‘Jocelyn, I have a confession to make.'

Her skin cooled at the way he spoke her name.

‘I've stolen one of your cigarettes,' he said, and grinned again. ‘I thought you wouldn't object to a little petty theft.'

Then he took her packet from the table, offered her a cigarette from it and lit a match. He cupped his hands around the flame and she hoped he could not see the slight tremor in her fingers as she held the cigarette to her lips, pushing her face into his bouquet of tiny fire.

 

And now he is here, standing on her red concrete step in the afternoon with something in his hands. He has slender arms and wears a blue shirt. Behind him the dark pine trees creak, and time slows and forms a circle. She sees this doctor standing before her as a school child with a satchel, as an adolescent boy with medical ideas, she sees him one day old and dying.

But here in this moment he is a young man offering her a fish on her own front doorstep. She holds out her hands for the newspaper flower. She is twenty-six, and she can feel the faintly shining fabric of her dress lying over her like a marine creature's skin. Her hair still wet, black.

She leads him through the house to the dark kitchen, and they stand there on the cool linoleum.

 

This is how Jocelyn comes to be cooking a fish in her kitchen for Martin, whom she barely knows. She stands in bare feet at the sink and scales the fish, and
the translucent tiny skins attach themselves to her fingers, wrist, the backs of her hands as she grasps its tail. And Martin sits and listens to her talk, and feels his heart slowing in his chest. Watching her moving there in the early evening light through the window, until she is sequinned with it, turning and blinking, her moving hands braceleted with the silver skins of his gift.

 

Much later, his wrist trails over her hip and they smoke cigarettes while he tells her about the anatomy of the human hand – ‘twenty-seven individual bones' – and relaxes his own long pale one to fall back hingewise from his wrist. He shows her how a hand at rest will always curl. He peels the skin for her, describes the moist red poetry of tendons, ligaments, their connections to the muscle and bone.

He has unfurled the skin of cadavers to see this. Drawn it back from the flesh like turning up a sleeve. And has been reverent, ever since, in every glance at his own hands; remains struck by a lasting (he thinks profound) awareness that it is the intricate construction of his own hands and finger bones which allowed him to witness the intricate construction of those finger bones, that palm, those elegant veins.

Now he holds her hand up and presses his against it, the larger one echoing hers, finger to finger, palm to palm.

Of all his boyhood, he says, he can recall mostly his hands: tucked beneath his head in sleep, or curved around a railing, a pencil, ball, shoelace. Then the realisation, at five, of his fingers' particular dexterity, and that understanding falling like a stone into water, and the lip of possibility forming in slow motion, pluming outwards. The radiating certainty of a future brought into being by his hands.

At five he had lifted a quivering pigeon from where it lay scouring a circle beneath his father's car with its wrongly bent wing. Reminding him of a stepped-on cardboard box. He held its jittering body away from his own, terrified of its smell and its plasticky beak. Then held it closer and pulled the bent wing gently outwards. The bird now only stared, perfectly still, the feathers oily between his finger and thumb.

And then a tiny jolt, and then – this is the moment, over and over again, the moment he cannot ever fall away from, like the first leaping flame in the memory of an arsonist – he felt the weight of the thing shift in his hands and then the creature shot up, arced, righted itself and flew a clear straight break into the suburban air. The last thing the child Martin saw was that wing spanned out above the street, and in his mind now he sees
every bladed feather of that silver oar, dipping and rowing the rippling air.

He knows it is ridiculous, knows it to be a matter of an animal's shock and recovery, or a mild dislocation righted. But each time he's remembered it over the years, his five-year-old's shock and reverence returns. He is planted beneath a white sky on a suburban driveway, in his school jumper, his feet inside his grey socks and his shoes. Holding his hands out before him, fingers stretched, these instruments of the supernatural.