The Heaven I Swallowed Read online

  I think of my mother, embarking for London, still in her widow’s weeds with barely a word of farewell, and my brother not even telling me he had enlisted and now lost to me in the skies above France. (When I told the boys here that I have a brother in the air force they looked at me with new respect, although their ­admiration was followed, soon after, by suspicion as to why I had not been able to follow in his footsteps.) My immediate family have given me so little. You have become my family, Gracie, and, on my return, the three of us will make ourselves a haven.

  When you think of me, then, do not imagine me in these foreign places. Remember me sitting in the shade of the jacaranda tree with you, talking of small things, like our plan to plant tubs of geraniums because they are strong and hardy and colourful. Remember a man who always arranged his books ‘just so’, with a pedantry that made you laugh. Remember a man who remains

  Your Fred

  2

  On Mary’s first night, she had had to make do with sleeping on the lounge, as the single bed was yet to be delivered. I would be installing it, and Mary, in Fred’s study, a room that should have been the nursery. The bed was due at three o’clock and we returned from our shoe-buying expedition an hour before this.

  When the two deliverymen arrived with the steel frame and wooden bedheads we discovered that, due to the narrowness of the room, the bed met up with the long edge of Fred’s roll-top desk, cutting off any side access to the mattress.

  ‘She will just have to get into bed at the end,’ I reasoned and the deliverymen eyed me strangely.

  ‘Didn’t ya think to measure it beforehand?’ one of them muttered.

  ‘Can’t ya move the desk some place else?’ the other added.

  I could not explain I would not move Fred’s desk an inch, or that I was incapable of seeing the exact size of things. Time and time again it had happened to me. My new electric washing machine, for example, had seemed, from the beautiful sketch in Women’s Weekly, to be the ideal shape for my backyard laundry. It had turned out not to fit through the wooden doorway. Mr Roper had shaken his head at me when he came round to erect a makeshift tarpaulin to protect the machine from the elements, until the company could arrange for its removal. He never approved of my attempts to modernise, or my seeming unwillingness to measure out the ­possible consequences of my actions.

  ‘It will be fine, thank you,’ I told the men in a voice that held the authority I’d exercised in the schoolyard.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ they replied meekly, filing out past the awestruck Mary.

  ‘This is your room, Mary.’

  I spread my arms out as much as I was able; admittedly the wardrobe behind the doorway did not leave a great deal of space to display the splendour. Once again, Mary hung back in the corridor. I wanted to grab and shake her into some kind of reaction. I did not, of course, watching as she slowly made her way into the room, edging past me, coming to stand near Fred’s desk. She drew in her nostrils, like she was sniffing the air. The two windows at the end of the room were closed and I could smell lavender, wafting up from the bathroom. Whatever it was she detected, it seemed to make her content, her shoulders relaxed. Unfortunate then, that at that moment, she placed her hand on the desk’s roller.

  ‘Stay away from the desk!’ I shouted. I could not help myself. The shutter was locked tight but still I had fears of anyone finding their way into it. I had allowed a layer of dust to cover the oak, to provide evidence of any prying fingers and the key to the desk sat inside the ring box on my dresser.

  The girl remained ramrod still. I wanted to move over to the windows to draw the curtains against the evening but there was no room, I would have to stand on the bed. There seemed no path back to any kind of excitement.

  I walked out to the kitchen to begin making dinner. Perhaps my absence would allow Mary to explore and enjoy her new bedroom.

  What I wouldn’t have given, I thought, to have even that amount of space when I was a child. At the convent we had vistas of mountains from the dormitory windows but inside there was nothing to separate one bed from the next, nothing with which to distinguish one’s self from the other girls. One did not have one’s own room.

  On the southern side of the convent house there was a plantation of arum lilies. Originally each white blossom had stood for one girl, perhaps some attempt to give us a sense of being individuals. The flowers quickly took germination into their own hands and the Sisters had to weed them back for fear they would take over the entire orchard. I had never liked the lilies, whenever I had been instructed to pick them they made my skin itch.

  Mary would wake up in her room to a different kind of vista: the jacaranda tree dominating our back garden. The legend went that when Fred’s parents moved in this tree was almost dead, attacked by a botanical disease. It was Fred’s father who had saved it, a victory, counting as one of the few triumphs during his lacklustre life in the city. The jacaranda was magnificent. I looked forward to spring—‘the falling of the purple’, as Fred called it—when the grass was almost completely covered by the tree’s violet blossoms.

  I did not want to think about what Mary would not see, which, of course, made me think of them: those tubs of geraniums. I grew them from cuttings, nurturing them in water-filled jam jars and spent autumn days transferring them to soil, lining the clay pots along the wall of the outhouse-cum-laundry, opposite the jacaranda, something like a waiting guard of honour. I was impatient for Fred’s return, anticipating his joy in each gaudy combination of pink and red and orange. Only later, after the war ended, did I have the energy to move them to the empty space at the side of the carport, out of immediate view.

  †

  The next day I took Mary down to the end of the street, past the broken bayonet, to the park and the tiny stretch of sand that an optimist might call a beach. At one end it was bordered by a private jetty, at the other the boating club Fred had once talked of joining. He had never found time, only ever fishing off the sandbar and watching other men venture into the harbour.

  Whenever I came to the ‘beach’, I sat on the third bench along, set into the sandstone wall and surrounded by a rose bush with one yellow bloom that promised more to come. I would bring my knitting and keep my head down, only there for a change of scene, aware of the need for accompanying children or dogs to be truly valid in such a place. With Mary, it was different.

  She broke away from me almost as soon as she saw the sand and sat down with a thud to pull off her shoes and socks. She moved as fast as the seagulls and, before I could tell her not to, she had her bare feet at the water’s edge and was running back and forth to the small lapping waves, daring them to catch her. I did not immediately move to my bench. For once, I was permitted to watch. Unfortunately, we were the only ones there and I had no one to show off to.

  Mary picked up a scrap of seaweed and placed a fragment of it on her tongue.

  ‘Salty,’ she said simply.

  Behind her, the boats bobbed and a dark, snake-necked bird—a cormorant?—traced itself along the edge of the shore, disappearing into the water and reappearing sporadically. Mary turned and watched the bird, her torso swelling. For a moment, I thought she was having difficulty breathing until I realised she was holding her breath to the timing of the submerged bird.

  I moved up to my bench and sat. Mary stayed on the beach, hopscotching on the imprints of dog paws and webbed feet. I knitted, a ladybug rug I was making for the church fundraising stall, and her occasional looks toward me to ensure I was still there, made the afternoon a joy. I managed very few rows, losing the strict rhythm of knit one, purl one, so often caught up with watching Mary play. The same cormorant—if that is what it was—hung itself out to dry on the jetty, spreading its wings to catch the dusk sun while putrid smells of rotting fish wafted up from a boathouse. Mary dug a hole in the sand with her hands. As the sun set, I did not want to break the spell and she did not want to leave. Our movements were tied to one another, no possibility of loss. How sweet it
was.

  †

  On Sunday, Mary and I went to church. I had always felt soothed in Saint Aloysius, every door an arch pointing to God. It was here I had laid eyes on Fred again. But as Mary and I walked up the path towards the red brick edifice, I knew this was not going to be a typical Sunday. Whispers began as soon as we were noticed walking down the centre aisle towards my usual pew. Heads turned, eyeballs swivelled. This time, unlike on the streets of the city, the atmosphere did not hold contempt, there was a buzz of awe, even excitement, and it was all I could do to stop myself from beaming. I kept my lips tightly pressed together, however, and gave the normal nods and brief smiles to the widows and others I knew. They nodded back, careful to keep their eyes from fixing too firmly on the treasure beside me, though careful not to ignore her either. Mr Mavis clucked at Mary, as if she were a bird, his own peculiar way of acknowledging her ­presence.

  We took our place in the third pew from the front. Mary pressed herself up against the end of the row, seemingly attempting to make herself smaller, while next to me, young Ronny Thompson kept leaning forward to ‘cop a look’—as he would, no doubt, tell his friends later.

  Mary started to cough. I could not tell if it was from the beginnings of a cold or the musty smell of the knee cushions’ cloth. I had never really noticed how much the cushions stank. Being there with the girl made me examine everything anew, trying to see it through her own, fresh eyes. She had been to church before, since it was Father Benjamin who helped her come into my care, but the institution’s church was probably some ratty old converted hall, not imbued with the ancient traditions of a place like Saint Aloysius. For fifty years this church had stood, soaking up the religiosity of at least two generations. The plaster of Paris statues of Jesus, Mary and Joseph standing around the altar still held their paints brightly enough to attract the childish eye, yet were worn enough to speak of wisdom.

  ‘There is the Virgin, your namesake,’ I whispered to Mary who seemed to be focusing on the people closely packed around us. I wanted her mind to be on the less tangible, the less physical. She turned her gaze towards the statue, the Holy mother in blue holding the baby Christ with a small angel on each of Her shoulders. Mary might have spoken but, at that moment, the organ started and we stood for the priest’s entrance.

  The Mass was as it always was. Father Benjamin wore the gold cross on his vestments, echoing the real burden of Christ and leaning forward toward the altar as if under a weight, his arms spread like the wings of a bird. In contrast, the wooden back of the pew cut into my shoulderblades and I had to keep my arms pressed tightly into my sides to avoid contact with the children on either side of me. I tried not to be distracted by this discomfort and looked up to the depictions of the saints in stained glass. A stream of red light fell through the pane of Saint Bridget, catching at one of the altar boys. It made me think, once again, that all the decorations should be like the oak Stations of the Cross, dark brown carvings barely perceptible.

  ‘Are we going up, Auntie Grace?’ Mary whispered.

  I blushed to realise how far my thoughts had gone away from the service. The whole row was waiting for me to stand and join the line for Communion.

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  I knelt before Father Benjamin. He placed the round thin host onto my tongue. ‘Corpus Domini nostri Jesu, Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam,’ he rattled off with his usual lack of enthusiasm. May the Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ keep your soul unto life everlasting.

  ‘Amen,’ I replied loudly and clearly, with the distinct disadvantage of being lower than him. This was the converted essence of Jesus and I did believe and remember Him. I felt that old tingling as the wafer dissolved on my tongue. Maybe it was the renewal of feeling? Or was it another reminder to keep certain feelings, certain thrills, away? Push them under the surface. Only allowed in small doses. This was the problem. How did you distinguish between the joy of God’s love and less exulted sensations? There was so much talk of flesh. For this is my body. For this is my blood. My namesake, Saint Teresa, swooned from ecstasy as the angel plunged into her with an arrow of fire. What could one make of that? And Saint Bridget, up there in her harlot colours, embracing ugliness in order to avoid marriage only to be returned to physical glory, to beauty in the flesh, the moment she committed herself to God!

  Beside me, Mary received her Communion bread and for the first time I saw her smile, at Father Benjamin. Not a big smile but a smile nonetheless.

  We moved back to the pew and knelt again on the thin mouldy cushions. I could feel, with the bones of my knees, the narrow strip of wood under them. This new discomfort interrupted my prayers further—why had I never noticed before?—not to mention the memory of Mary’s smile.

  †

  ‘She is such a beautiful child,’ I heard Mrs Thompson say, and I had to hide my surprise. Standing in the shadow of the church after the service I could only guess that she could not see Mary well enough. ‘Really, you wouldn’t even know she was … well …’ Mrs Thompson stopped, leaving the sentence in the air.

  Her husband gurgled down at the girl as if she did not speak English.

  ‘We think you are very brave.’ Mrs and Mr Mavis nodded together as she spoke, grim worry-lines cut into their faces at almost the same points.

  ‘I think it is appalling,’ I heard someone whisper behind me. I turned quickly and only saw Father Benjamin. Disorientated, I lost hold of Mary’s hand.

  ‘Everything is going well?’ Father Benjamin asked me with an excessive smile.

  I nodded, turning back to the group, aware of Mary’s shape moving away.

  ‘We were saying how brave it is,’ Mrs Mavis repeated and the Thompsons started nodding as well, their bright faces fixed on me.

  ‘But you are going well?’ Father Benjamin asked again. The focus on me was overwhelming.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I heard myself saying and wondered how rude it sounded. The Mavises and Thompsons exchanged glances and found excuses to drift away. Father Benjamin was taken aside by a less confused parishioner.

  I stood alone again, the conversations moved on around me.

  ‘But where is Mary?’ I asked no one in particular.

  ‘Are you all right, Mrs Smith?’ one of the ladies from the Widows’ Group spoke to me. I had completely forgotten her name.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘I think you need to sit down.’

  To my relief, this came from Mr Roper whose blonde head I had noted in the front row pew. He put his hand on the small of my back and guided me to the chairs put out on the grass for the elderly who wanted to participate in the after-service socialising but whose legs could not cope with the strain. One of the dear old men stood up for me.

  ‘Thank you.’

  I was making a spectacle of myself and could just imagine the whisperings about how it was ‘all too much for her’. For years they had tiptoed around me, without knowing the real reason for my troubles.

  ‘I am fine,’ I said to Mr Roper. Unfortunately, he was no longer by my side and I remembered he had gone to fetch me a glass of water. He had muttered something about the heat getting to me, his excuse for any social oddness. Yet I was not going to faint. I had only become confused about what life I was leading today.

  I spotted Mary in a group of children near the saint’s grotto: a half-egg stone construct with an effigy of what could be Saint Aloysius himself, although the plaster of his youthful face had been too eaten away for positive identification, only the lily he carried still survived. Mary was standing next to Ronny Thompson who seemed to be holding court over the other two girls and one boy in the cluster. The noise and distance made it impossible for me to hear what he was saying but when he stopped they all laughed, even Mary. I knew it was about me.

  ‘Here you are.’ Mr Roper handed me a glass of lukewarm water. The glass had love hearts etched into it.

  ‘Could you fetch Mary for me, Mr Roper?’ I asked.

  ‘Mary? Tha
t’s her name is it?’ He glanced over to the group of children with an interested expression. Once again, I thought of how much better his hair would look if he left it natural, instead of running a blonde dye through it so it shone, a harsh beacon in the sun. If anything, this vanity made him seem older than he was. What would a few grey hairs matter around such a face, almost free of wrinkles?

  ‘How long is the trial for?’ Mr Roper asked.

  ‘Trial?’

  ‘You haven’t agreed to have this … child … living in your house for good?’

  ‘The terms of her stay have not been formerly determined,’ I said to him in a voice from my working days, the same one that had tamed the deliverymen.

  Unfortunately, Mr Roper was not a deliveryman. He replied with a grotesque snort and strode off to fetch Mary. The children scattered as he approached, leaving Mary to stand alone, crumbling saint behind her shoulder.

  Again, I could not hear what was being said and now Mr Roper’s back blocked me from a view of Mary. For the last five days she had barely been out of my sight. Perhaps the church people were right. Maybe this was too much for me? Waiting for Mr Roper to come back with her, I thought how foolish I’d been, not thinking of the possible consequences, of the true size of things.

  †

  I would have named my baby Mary if I had been given the time. In the hospital they did not tell me whether it was a boy or a girl I had lost. Still, I knew, as surely as anyone could know, it had been a little Mary forming inside me, with my eyelashes and her father’s nose. She would have loved me as no one had ever bothered to love me before, with the fierceness only a child can have.