The Winds of Heaven (28 page)

She meant to write, of course she did, only she kept putting it off. And when she did try, sitting at the small desk in her room, pen poised over a blank sheet of paper, she couldn’t think of anything to say. She would begin awkwardly, write
one or two rubbishy sentences, crumple the page and toss it into the wastepaper basket. Then she would sit there, chin on hand, and puzzle over why her last visit to Lake Conapaira seemed so very long ago.

It was because so much had changed for her, she decided. Yes, that was the reason, surely. In these last fifteen months she’d moved beyond the small world of Chisolm College and her parents’ house in Willow Street. She was a second year arts student now and her world had become that of the university, of lectures and tutorials, of student parties and long earnest discussions in the little cafés of Glebe and Camperdown and Chippendale. She even had a boyfriend – Phillip Massinger – a third year law student who took her to cricket matches and dinner at the Malaya, to law school parties and once, last month, to afternoon tea with his widowed mother in her big white house on the north shore.

And all of this was a long, long way from Lake Conapaira. Beautiful though it was, and however painfully its images – the grand sky and the endless paddocks, the red grains of its soil – might stir her heart, it had now become part of the landscape of her childhood; it was left behind. And Fan? She hardly ever thought of her cousin these days, and she never dreamed of her. The closeness, the feeling of being like a sister, had melted away. This was the reason she couldn’t think what to write in her letter.

I suppose Cash is quite big
, she began, and then crumpled the page again, because she thought it sounded patronising, and anyway, she couldn’t remember how old Cash would be, now. And she couldn’t write anything about the new baby, because Caro had asked her not to mention that she’d written – and how else could Clementine have known there
was a baby, now Mum and Aunty Rene weren’t writing to each other anymore?

But though she couldn’t write the letter to her cousin, Fan lingered now in Clementine’s mind. Once she even thought she saw her. It was a rainy Monday afternoon and Clementine was hurrying down a long dark corridor in the Old Arts Building, on her way to a philosophy tutorial in room thirty-four, and there, at the shadowy end of the passage, she had a sudden glimpse of a tall girl with dark blonde chopped-off hair. A girl in a faded blue-grey dress with the hem half coming down, who vanished round the corner the moment Clementine caught sight of her.

‘Fan?’ whispered Clementine. ‘Fan, is that you?’ And then more loudly, almost shouting, running to the end of the hallway, peering down the narrow passage where the girl had disappeared, ‘Fan! Fan! Fan!’

The passage was empty. Even if there had been a girl there, Clementine told herself, surely it could never have been Fan. If her cousin had come to the city looking for her, she’d have gone to the house in Willow Street first, and waited for Clementine to come home. She’d never have come to the university, a place she didn’t know, which she’d only seen on her neighbour’s television. She wouldn’t have known how to get there; Fan had never been to Sydney, and Clementine guessed that she might be shy of asking city strangers, and shy of the city itself. And if she had somehow managed to find the way, why had she run off the moment Clementine had appeared?

It had been some other girl, it must have been. It was only because she was tired that she’d thought it was Fan, because she’d stayed up so late the night before, trying to write the letter and finding nothing she could say.

Only she’d thought the hem of that girl’s dress was coming down. Fan’s hems were always coming down; she wore her skirts too long, her heel kept catching at the cloth…

Simply to walk through the quadrangles now, or along the shady cloisters, past ivy-covered buildings and tall spires, brought Fan to Clementine’s mind: Fan saying shyly, ‘I saw it once,’ and then confiding how her glimpse of the university had reminded her of those magical places she’d imagined waiting for her up there in the blue hills. It’s not fair! thought Clementine childishly. It wasn’t fair that a beautiful person like Fan should be stuck in that old house in Palm Street, while she, who’d never once longed to be in a different world, had entered one so easily.

This sense of luck and privilege made the letter even more difficult to write. ‘It’s not my fault,’ she said one day, walking across the quad, speaking her confusion out loud. Phillip, who was walking next to her, leaned closer. ‘You’re talking to yourself, do you know?’ he whispered. ‘First sign of madness, that.’ He tweaked at a strand of her hair. ‘What’s not your fault?’

So she told him about Fan and Lake Conapaira.

He waited till she’d finished and then he said briskly, ‘Of course it’s not your fault. Don’t be silly, Clementine.’

She hated it when he said stuff like that. He was handsome as Prince Charming and her mum thought he was wonderful, but she hated it all the same.

‘Why is it silly?’

‘You worked hard to get here, didn’t you?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You
suppose
so?’ Phillip’s reedy voice was incredulous. ‘Of course you bloody did. While that little cousin of yours –’ he paused, his elegant nostrils flaring with distaste.

‘My little cousin what?’

‘Oh, nothing. But Lake Conapaira sounds a good place to keep away from.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Clementine. ‘The lake, the red earth – you should see it, Phil! And at night, the stars! They’re so big, they look like faces shining through the windows.’

He smiled faintly. ‘The situation, Clementine,’ he said. ‘That’s what I was referring to: teenage mum with two kids, all on her ownio – it sounds a good situation to stay away from.’

‘But – ’

‘Write her a letter by all means, but I don’t think it would be wise to go up there and get involved. You can’t go now, anyway; it’s only a week till the mid-year exams and then there’s the camping trip straight after.’ He frowned. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of reneging on that?’

‘I – ’

‘Bob’s girlfriend won’t go if you don’t come along too.’

Clementine hadn’t really been planning to go up to Lake Conapaira, not right away. But when Phillip spoke in this manner she felt mutinous, almost tearful. He always sounded so cool and sensible, yet with him she sometimes got the feeling that being sensible could be an excuse for not doing the more difficult thing.

‘She was my
gindaymaidhaany
,’ she said in a low trembling voice.

‘What? What’s that when it’s at home?’

‘It means, like a sister. It’s an aboriginal word. When
Fan was little she had this friend who was aboriginal – ’

‘Figures,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Those kind of girls, they always get mixed up with Blacks.’

She didn’t ask what kind of girls. ‘He was an old, old man,’ she said coldly. ‘He told her stories, that was all. He was kind to her; her dad and sister had gone away, and her mum – ’ Clementine faltered. ‘She didn’t get on with her mum. There wasn’t really anyone to care.’

Phillip didn’t reply. They walked on in silence, down a shadowy cloister, over lawns and through gardens, and out by a small gate into the busy road. It had been a heavy grey winter’s day in the city, but now, in these dying minutes of the afternoon, the sun pierced through the clouds at last.

Clementine turned, straining against Phillip’s hand, and gazed back at the university, which had caught this extraordinary light and become a golden city, the kind of place where she and Fan had imagined the pair of them might sit and drink
Griffiths Tea
. ‘It just doesn’t seem right,’ she said.

‘Right,’ grinned Phillip. ‘Who are you to judge what’s right or wrong, little Clementine?’

‘Fair then,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t seem fair.’

‘Life isn’t fair,’ he replied smugly. ‘However,’ he leaned closer and kissed her on the corner of her mouth.

‘However?’

‘Write your little cheer-up letter by all means. Can’t do any harm.’

Clementine didn’t write. She still couldn’t think of anything to say.

At one of the parties given by Phillip’s friends, Clementine saw Daria, the Hungarian girl from Chisolm College, who was now doing second year law. There was another person from Chisolm Clementine occasionally glimpsed around the university – the Home Boy, David Lowell. He was in med school, a scholarship student like Daria and Clementine, and when she saw him it was always at a distance, across a street, in a crowd at the station, going up the steps of the library. He never came and spoke to her. Catching her glance, and one uncertain smile, David Lowell looked away. He was taller than he’d been at Chisolm, and thinner too. She wondered where he lived now. She never saw him at parties or other student gatherings.

Daria was sitting on a sofa, a glass of white wine in her hand, and when she saw Clementine with Phillip, she smiled a narrow, cat-like smile. Later in the evening, as Clementine was searching for her coat in the jumble of clothes left on someone’s bed, Daria came up to her. ‘I see you have found someone,’ she observed.

Clementine flushed, and Daria stood silently, watching the colour mount and then fade in the other girl’s cheeks. ‘You will get married, I think,’ she said, and Clementine knew from her cool dispassionate tone that what Daria really meant was, ‘You’ll
only
get married.’ Get married to Phillip and live in a big house on the north shore or in the eastern suburbs, the kind of houses she and her parents had passed by on those long-ago bus trips through the city. They would have two children, who would attend private schools, and Clementine would go to coffee mornings and play tennis in the afternoons.

‘No I won’t,’ she said.

‘Oh?’ Daria glanced down the hall to where Phillip stood talking with a friend. She gave her cat-like smile and waited.

‘I don’t really like him,’ said Clementine unexpectedly. The words had rushed from her lips before she’d thought them out; she hardly knew where they’d come from. And yet now that they were there, spoken aloud to someone else, she saw that she meant them. Oh, she might like having Phillip for a boyfriend, she might like going out with him, even like him making love to her in his cautious, prudent way. But she didn’t like
him.
She didn’t like the way he’d criticise her clothes: ‘That dress doesn’t really suit you.’ She didn’t like the way he bossed her round: ‘Time to go, I think,’ he’d say at parties, without asking her if she wanted to leave. Most of all, she didn’t like how he never seemed to understand anything she really cared about. He hadn’t understood about Fan and the place where she lived, she could see he thought her feeling for them was childish and ridiculous. It was the same when she tried to share some discovery she’d made in her reading, or in a friendship; he’d brush it aside, like he’d done with Fan. ‘Nothing to get excited over,’ he’d say. ‘Nothing to get all worked up about, little Clementine.’ And he would put his arm round her and murmur softly, smiling into her hair, ‘You’re a little bit crazy, do you know that? My crazy little Clementine.’

She didn’t want to be his crazy little Clementine.

‘
Don’t let some thickie bloke put you down
,’ Fan had said on their last walk round the lake.
‘Promise me
.’

She had promised.

‘You will have to do something then, I think,’ murmured
Daria now, and she brushed a light cool kiss on Clementine’s hot cheek and said, ‘Good luck to you, my darling.’

She would have to tell him. She would have to break it off. He would be angry, of course he would be. He’d accuse her of leading him on. There wouldn’t be an engagement after all. Mum would be disappointed, but Clementine knew she could count on Dad. ‘Ah, there’s plenty of time yet,’ he’d say, and she knew he’d say the same thing if she was pushing seventy.

She would wait till after the exams, Clementine decided. And she wasn’t going on that camping trip with his mates and their snobby girlfriends. She hated them. She hated him. And when it was all over she’d write to Fan. Fan was better than him – better in a way Clementine couldn’t put into words. How could you? It would be like comparing one of Shakespeare’s sonnets to an article in Phillip’s
Financial Times.