Shell Page 3

  So at the furnace and the table, he experimented with shape and color, with ovoids and rings, blue, white, some of them clear, some shadowed like ice. He read and watched and walked the site, walked the city. Listened. Drew. The lines like an embarkation, a glimpse at a landscape already receding, so he had to look hard to keep it in his head. And to gather the courage to see what the lines might reveal, not just about what was in front of him, but within.

  He thought often of Lars as he worked, as he translated the delicate geometry of harbor and sky, the stream of light. As he tipped the pipe to his mouth and his breath inflated the bulb of glass, malleable as a lung. The memory of his uncle had entered his own glasswork like language, become intrinsic to it, a kind of conscience. He could hear it: It’s there in your hands: light and heat and depth. And: Wait for the shift. In you and in the glass. The connection between the two. That, Axel knew, was where the secret of each piece was hidden, in this tension between man and glass.

  Each day, when he looked up and saw that hours had passed, when he lifted his eyes to midday light at the windows, he would greet the others who, of course, had been in the room the whole morning. Not just Lars but his mother, his father. And Utzon. Always Utzon. He felt the architect’s presence as a subtle weight in his wrists, in his shoulders, in the play of possibilities as the pipe emerged from the furnace, in the first push of breath in its throat. Then it was just him and the work, the small miracle of the gather, clear and clean from the fire. He had to be wholly present within it, lost to all else, for its secrets to be revealed. The world retreated to a bowl of light and possibility.

  Pearl woke early in dream-tossed sheets. Children had been trapped on buses, passed through windows to gargoyle faces, carried off into darkness. Her twin sisters. Were they? The straw-colored hair, inscrutable eyes. In the dream she had lost the use of her arms, watched on as they were taken, expressionless, looking back at her over the shoulders of strangers. No sound. They’d never made much noise, hadn’t even cried much as babies. But she’d wanted them to cry in the dream, to claw, scream out, fight. Instead they’d complied with their captors, or so it seemed. Her own arms stuck to her sides.

  She pushed herself upright and reached for pouch and papers. The ritual of tobacco—pinch, order, roll, her tongue against thin paper—dislodged the dream pictures. They were never literal, she knew that. For days she’d been thinking about the Freedom Rides through western New South Wales. The black activist Charles Perkins, the protests at Kempsey and Moree. She’d tried to interest the women’s editor in a story about Perkins leading Aboriginal children through the gates of Moree’s swimming pool, where they had been banned. Was that it? She leaned back against her pillows and inhaled. Turned her face to the long sash window, where shapes emerged slowly from shadow. The nicotine did its work.

  The burr of the telephone brought her back to the room. She levered herself upright, shrugging an arm through a shirt on her way down the hall.

  Trouble is, the men in this country. Ray’s drawl, his lazy diction. He’d grown up poor in Marrickville and didn’t try to disguise it. His vowels remained broad and flattened, he seemed incapable of saying your or and, but beneath his street sweeper’s speech was one of the sharpest minds Pearl knew. She balanced the receiver between shoulder and chin, pushed an arm through the other sleeve. Pictured him, the crease of skin between his eyebrows, one hand raking his hair.

  The army’ll make their sons into men, eh? That’s what they’ll say. Sort ’em out. Something, fabric or skin, rubbed against the receiver, then the snap of a struck match. Menzies is counting on it.

  Pearl glanced up the hallway. Had she put out her own cigarette? Distracted, she said: Menzies is a fool. Outside, a kingfisher dropped one pure note through the cool air. She shivered, pulled the shirt close. Everyone knows.

  An’ half the sons’ll think the same. He went on as if she hadn’t spoken. War’s a great lark. Adventure, women. She heard him exhale. They’ll be queuin’ up for their bloody ballot papers, you watch.

  She wanted to say, not my father, not my brothers. But the lugubrious voice rolled on. Fuck these pansy protests, they won’t change nothin’. There was the grumble of an electric jug. We wanna harden up. He muttered something about work, then was gone. As usual, no hello and no goodbye.

  She filled her own jug and put it to boil. His words in her head: They won’t change nothin’. It was true: the protests went almost unnoticed. The phrase “National Service” rang nostalgic in this country, with its images of clean-cut boys and bright metamorphosis: from untidy youth to uniformed men, bronzed, strong, responsible. Ready to fight for freedom. Who would reject it? In the factories and sheds, in Pitt Street? Her father, of course, she knew that. Patrick would see right through it.

  Light pressed at the window. She opened the kitchen blinds. First week of autumn, the sun hesitant, shy as a bride at five a.m., her father would say. As a child she’d imagined a girl in a dew-damp dress, white as the morning, its hem grubby against the grass she fled over. Later she understood better, but on those mornings when she’d willed herself to wake and sit in the early chill with him, it was part of a fairy tale in which there was only the two of them, she and her father. She leaned close to smell his work shirt, shivering in her thin nightie. Shared his weak tea, watched the smoke from his durrie float across the backyard.

  Her own rollies had never tasted as sweet as she’d imagined. She’d thought they’d be just like those mornings, which held the deep flinty smell of her father’s breath and skin, like the embers of old kindling. She’d searched for years for just the right tobacco, settling recently for a blend of plum and spice she found consoling, if not sweet. Those hours with her father reenacted in the rhythm of the match striking, the tobacco catching, the shape of thumb and forefinger around the smoke.

  He could still manage one with his left hand. Every week, in a parlor wheezing with old men, she would slot a smoke between his fingers and wait as he raised it to his lips. The match lit an unalloyed pleasure in him, flushed the sorrow from his face, and on that first deep draft he would turn his head to her and smile. Crooked, fleeting. It didn’t matter. She would fill two hours with talk and politics, at least half of it on the scoundrel prime minister, all the while rolling and rolling, filling his tin with smokes to last a week. Filling the air with banter, anything but the obvious: the appalling absences, his wretched loneliness. For whole minutes, she did not have to look into his eyes.

  No matter that Patrick rarely spoke now, that the stroke had taken his voice and his strength and half his memory. His eyes held everything, all that he’d lost. Spoke for him: where are my boys? Even the twins visited, bringing husbands and grandchildren and flicking the blond plaits they both still wore. They swept in and kissed their father and sat babies on his knee, then left again in a bubble of their own self-sufficiency. Pearl had never quite forgiven them their luck. To have each other, a mirror image, physical proof they were not alone. Patrick would smile his half-smile, his good arm around a baby, his gaze just over their heads. As if his sons might arrive at any moment.

  She sipped tea. Relit her cigarette, brushed tobacco from her blouse, scattering the shreds of memory: her father’s voice, clear as a bell and as sure, at the kitchen table before her mother got sick, before Jane was born. Uncle Kevin was dead of the malaria he’d got in New Guinea, the stinking war still killing a year after it finished. Her father’s voice like crushed glass as he told them. He wiped a handkerchief across his face, looked around at their faces. And swore to her mother, to the boys themselves, even as they waved their baby fists: there will be no wars for my sons.

  She walked into the Telegraph building at a quarter to ten. It was her habit to be punctual; she’d learned it as a teenager, keeping chaos at bay for the others and for herself. She’d found routine and order comforting then, a way to negotiate the days. A cushion against grief, against the appalling and sudden recognition, as she washed a bowl or pushed a broom into cor
ners, that her mother was gone. She might cry then, hands pressed to her face, but the soft clack of the clock, the minute hand relentless, pulled her back to the room. The lump of mutton stewing, the sting of onion in the air.

  In the partitioned cubicle off the main newsroom she collected the day’s edition and sat at her desk. She’d laughed when they’d told her: the women’s pages. The punishment so transparent, and all for one unguarded moment, her face caught and snapped at a protest. She didn’t regret it, even now, months after Menzies brought his midnight bill to parliament. There were few in the chamber that night to object, to hear him talk about “National Service” or “aggressive communism,” and it was too late for the papers. So they’d cobbled together a rally in Hyde Park the next day. On their placards: “IT’S NOT NATIONAL SERVICE, IT’S THE DRAFT!” And: “OUT OF VIETNAM!” A week later she was summoned before the news chief.

  It’s too obvious, Pearl, he’d told her. You’re too obvious. You’ve forgotten the rules.

  She’d sat opposite him in his glass-walled office. Screwed up her face. What rules?

  Henry’s desk was littered with papers and notes and a dummy layout for the front page. He played with three paperclips, pulling their ends apart. Without fear or favor, all that. Remember?

  She held his eye. I have no fear, she said calmly, and shrugged. And I don’t favor anyone.

  He cocked an eyebrow. Depends on who’s reading. A hand in the air to cut her off. The protest was the last straw, Pearl. Heart on your sleeve, for all to see. He let a second tick by, a beat. Including the boss.

  Come off it, Henry. The effort to contain her voice. That rally was on my own time. Are you saying I can’t have a private life? She tipped her face to the ceiling to hide her smirk. So much for democracy, she said.

  So much for objectivity. He leaned forward. You’re a reporter, Pearl. You report the news, not make it.

  She tried not to blink. Don’t patronize me, Henry. Her voice a low growl. We go back too far.

  He had the decency to blush. Five, six seconds ticked by on the newsroom clock.

  Finally: Look, he said, quieter now, pursing his lips. You know Bob won’t fire you. Just lie low in women’s for a while. All right?

  She stood then but kept her eyes on him. Anger flamed in her throat. No promises, Henry. Then turned for the door. Over her shoulder: Remember that line? She didn’t wait to hear his reply.

  That had been November. She’d measured the time by the stories she’d missed, could have no part of: the Wanda Beach murders, the ban on Dawn Fraser, Churchill’s death and funeral. The Rolling Stones. The Freedom Ride just a week before: what she’d have given to cover that. Some days were worse than others. A kind of grief possessed her: every few hours she would leave her cloister for yet more coffee from the cafeteria at the end of the corridor, but really to inhale the smell and feel of real news. Smoke and ink, the clash and banter of fifty typewriters, human voices rising and falling, and always the air of some impending drama, a kind of lull that was the newsroom waiting, holding its breath, even as its engines churned and composed, deciding the news of the day.

  An unlucky error of timing: she looked up from the page to meet her editor’s eye. Pressed the stub of her cigarette into the ashtray, once, twice, taking her time. Pushed back her chair. Betrayed nothing as Judith briefed her: a preview of the Royal Easter Show, a chat with a charity matron, the weekly fashion piece. And—Judith was all apology—they’d forgotten the Recipe of the Week. Could Pearl dredge one up from the files?

  The banality of it all—skirt lengths, hats at Randwick, the call to conformity—was like a dead hand on her shoulder every morning as she walked through the door. And there was the certainty that, as she searched old editions in the library for Rhubarb Crumble or Shepherd’s Pie, her colleagues in the newsroom were watching. The news editor himself probably, waiting for her to cross another line.

  She typed up a recipe, grimacing over the ingredients for Spicy Meat Loaf, and finished a trite piece about fearful young women on shadowy beaches. She hated these stories. It wasn’t just the subject matter but their flattening effect, the way they turned real lives two-dimensional, like the paper itself. Objectified them, made them items to be read and turned away from, unlike the social columns, the display ads for frocks and appliances. Capitalist press, her father would say, it’s what they do, and lately she’d begun to understand what he was saying. That the newspaper barons were heartless, manipulative. Like puppeteers, pulling invisible strings.

  At lunch she dropped a notebook into her bag and left the building. Wandered down to Pitt Street. The windows of Grace Bros. were all new autumn fashion; she wrote: “stilettos, pencil skirts, denim. Pillbox hats, rolled collars, Jackie Kennedy. Shrimpton, goddess of Carnaby Street.” It was a bit like thinking and writing in a foreign language. Pillbox hats? Her eyes went instinctively to her own knee-length skirt, the collared print blouse from her mother’s cupboard. She ran her hand over gabardine, firm across her thigh, a reassurance. She couldn’t bear couture.

  In a phone box nearby she pushed a coin into the slot. The convent’s number carved into memory. She left a message for Sister Jeanne.

  Back at work she filed her fashion story, then pulled out a folder labeled “Affront.” In the first weeks of her exile from the newsroom, she’d concocted a series on forgotten women writers. Good series were popular with editors—the regular guarantee of filled space on the page. A guarantee for Pearl too: they might protect her from some of Judith’s more vacuous story ideas. Already she had enough names to string it out for months: Kylie Tennant, Katherine Susannah Pritchard, Jean Devanny. Eleanor Dark, Christina Stead. Write one up, Judith had said, and I’ll see if it fits.

  But Pearl had been delayed by the pleasures and disappointments of research. As she read, it became clear how interconnected the women were, how different their lives to those of their male counterparts. It was all too familiar: they’d all lived in captivity, caught in the prescribed role of caring too much: for husbands, children, parents. Into this crowded cage they still managed to squeeze writing. Good writing: in the thirties, she realized, they’d published more quality fiction than men had. While washing nappies, feeding elderly aunts, playing helpmeet to husbands. Pearl looked at her folder and then around the room. “Affront.” At the midpoint of the sixties, what had changed? She pulled out her notes on Jean Devanny and Kylie Tennant and began a tentative draft.

  Time was sluggish. As the clock dragged to five, she gathered the files spilled across her desk. In the library she dropped them on the wide wooden counter next to someone else’s returns, plain manila folders tagged with subjects and dates. Then turned and walked back through the newsroom, listening to snatches of phone calls, conversations. Stopped near the news desk to eavesdrop. Something about the Works Minister, incomplete drawings, contractors. Tom, one of the boys on the political round, was trying not to shout at the chief of staff. This is the real story, she heard him say, as if he alone knew, not the blackfellas in Walgett, or Borneo or the bloody election. It’s that fool, Ryan.

  Tom stalked away, still talking over his shoulder to those at the news desk. He raised his brows as he walked past Pearl. You watch, he said, to her and to the room. Utzon’s on a hiding to nothing.

  There must be records. If they’ve had jobs, paid rent. She sat opposite Jeanne in the plain convent library, her thoughts derailed by the nun’s bare head. Or nearly bare. The heavy black and white wimple was gone. In its place a plain white band that exposed dark hair. It made her look a different creature to the one Pearl had known as a teenager. A woman with a woman’s feelings and thoughts. A woman’s body. Pearl’s own thoughts skittered away as she spoke. She tried to focus but was distracted by the nun, the way her eyes looked now, her skin, the movement of her head. Fluid, unrestrained. But somehow, less certain.

  She found herself speaking in a different way. Felt a shift in the power differential; she was no longer the child, impressionable, na�
�ve. May not even be, she realized with a start, much younger than Jeanne at all. She sat back in her chair, tucked her own hair behind her ear. Straightened her spine.

  Jeanne frowned. You’d have to know what kind of jobs. The sort of work they’d done. Victoria’s a big place.

  No idea. Pearl shrugged. They did station work in Queensland, years ago. Horses, fencing.

  So they could still be in the bush.

  I don’t know. Possibly. Pearl felt an old defense tighten in her chest. It gave her voice an edge she hadn’t intended.

  Jeanne stood and moved to the sofa. Patted the cushion beside her, the familiar gold band on her wedding finger. They’re two needles in a big haystack. You could look up the names of some stations and ring them, I suppose.

  Pearl ignored the implied invitation. She thought, not yet. For some reason I thought the church could help. She looked directly into Jeanne’s eyes.

  The nun raised her eyebrows. Only if they were going to church. Her gaze steady.

  I thought you lot had ways to find missing children. Networks. Files.

  There was a two-second beat before Jeanne replied, two seconds that spoke what they couldn’t say. That they’d both been angry after the boys left, each blaming the other. The two telephone conversations they’d had at the time made it worse. Finally: Jamie was nearly fifteen, Pearl, Jeanne said levelly. That’s not a child.

  Nearly fifteen means he was fourteen. And Will was a year younger.

  And now they’re young men. Jeanne lifted her face to the ceiling. The crucifix against her pale throat the same one she’d always worn. She said: Pearl. I suppose there was an assumption, back then. That they’d be with you.

  Pearl felt the color rise in her cheeks but she held Jeanne’s gaze. Well, they weren’t. And I had problems of my own then, Sister. The title a punishment they let hang in the air between them.