David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Mrs. Wau Hing had a cabinet in her front room made of carved cherrywood, with shelves and brackets and appliqud ivory flowers, chrysanthemums and little fine-winged hummingbirds. It was beautiful. Though you wouldn't really know what to do with it. Mrs. Wau Hing called it decorative.

Mrs. Wau Hing called her Blossom (which was silly really, but she liked it) and gave her chicken in garlicky black sauce to take home, which Leonard said “different.” Too different for her, but never mind, it was the thought.

What pleased her was the fine blue-whiteness of the bowl her friend sent it home in, with its design of pinpricks filled with transparent glaze.

When she went out barefoot in her nightie to get a glass of water at the kitchen sink, there it was, rinsed and shining in the wooden rack along with her own familiar crockery.

So what did the Rock have to do with any of that? Or with the stones she had in her kidneys in 1973?

These days, mind you, it's everywhere. Including on TV. Turns up dripping with tomato sauce as a hamburger, or as a long red-clay mould that starts to heave, then cracks open, and when all the bits fall away there's a flash-looking car inside, a Ford Fairlane — stuff like that. Its red shadow turned into a dingo one night and took that baby.

Suddenly it has plonked itself down in the middle of people's lives like something that has just landed from outer space, or pushed up out of the centre of the earth, and occupies the gap that was filled once by — by what? She can't think. Movie stars? Jesus? The Royal Family? It has opened people's minds — this is Donald again — in the direction of the incommensurable. What a mouthful! It is exerting an influence. Well, not on her it isn't! She gives it a quick dismissive glance and takes another deep drag on her Winfield.

Cathedrals. With Leonard it was cathedrals. As soon as the war was over and the big liners were on the go again he started planning their trip. They made it at last in 1976.

Cathedrals. Great sooty piles at the end of crooked little streets, more often than not with something missing, like the veterans they made a space for, mutils, on every bus.

Or on islands. Or high up on cliffs. Leonard's eyes went all watery just at the sight of one of them and she felt him move quietly away.

He wasn't religious in a praying way. When Leonard got down on his knees each morning it was to polish his boots — Nugget boot polish was what he believed in. The smell of it hung about in the hallway long after he had taken his briefcase and hat and run off to the tram. But with cathedrals, she'd decided, it was the gloom that got him. Which had been brewing there for centuries, and connected with some part of his nature she recognised, and felt soft towards, but had never felt free to enter. She associated it with the bald patch on top of his head, which you saw, or she did, only when he got down on his knees in the hallway on a sheet of newspaper, and held one boot, then the other, very lovingly to his heart, and stroked it till it shone.

She felt such a surge of tenderness for him then. For his reliability, his decency. And for that bald spot, which was the one thing she could see in him that he couldn't, a hidden weakness. That's the sort of thing that got her. But cathedrals, no thanks!

When she did manage to feel something, other than a chill in her bones that was like creeping death, was if the organ happened to be playing, or the sun, which was rare enough, was dropping colours from a stained-glass window on to the stony floor, in a play of pink and gold.

As for the proportions, as Leonard called them, well, she didn't go in for height, she decided; all that gave you was a crick in the neck. What she liked was distance. A good long view towards the sunset, or at a certain soft hour at home, towards an empty intersection, and if you got a glimpse of something more it would be the way the hills blurred off into blueness beyond the last of the flashing roofs. You would feel small then, in a way she found comforting.

What really put her off was when Leonard, half lying in one of the pews, with the guide laid open in his lap and his arms extended along the wooden back, rolled his eyes up, like suffering Jesus or one of their Catholic saints. Where, she wondered, had he got that from? As far as she knew he was a Methodist.

As they moved on from Cologne to those others — the French ones — she'd taken against the cathedrals, started to really resent them.

The way you can resent a teacher (that Miss Bishop in third grade for instance) who has got a set against you and decided you're a dill, or some little miss at the bank.

She had never had to worry, as some do, about other women, but she'd felt then that Leonard was being stolen from her. The moment they pushed through the doors and the cold hit her heart, she felt the change in him. Lying awake at his side in poky rooms, she would stare up at the ceiling and have to prevent herself from reaching out to see if he was still there.

She began to feel a kind of dread. The sight of yet another of those Gothic monsters looming up out of a side street and opening its stone arms to him was more than she could face.

But when it happened it wasn't in a cathedral but in one of the hotels, and for two days afterwards she sat waiting in the room beside their ports, eating nothing, till at last Donald arrived to reclaim her and take his father home.

“It's something you should see,” Donald had told her, speaking of this Rock.

“Why?”

“Because you should, that's all.”

“You mean before I die,” she said, and gave a rough laugh.

It's what Leonard had said. “I want to see Cologne Cathedral before I die.” But after Cologne he had got in another six.

“Are there any more of these things?” she asked of the Rock. “Or is there just the one?”

Donald gave her a hard look. He wondered sometimes if she wasn't sharper than she let on.

She had come out here to please him. He was easily pleased and she knew that if she didn't he would sulk. It was a break as well from the unit, and from having to show up at Tess Hyland's every afternoon at five thirty — the Happy Hour — and listen to her complaints about the other owners and what the dogs were doing to her philodendrons.

Tess Hyland had been a convent mouse from Rockhampton when, in all the excitement after the war, she was recruited by UNRWA and went to work in the DP camps in Europe, then spent twenty-five years as a secretary at the UN in New York, where she had picked up a style that included daiquiris at five thirty in the afternoon and little bits of this and that “crackers.”

Five thirty, the Happy Hour. Personally it was a time she had always hated, when a good many people might think seriously of cutting their throat.

She would also miss out, just this once, on babysitting her three grandchildren, Les, Brett and Candy, on a Saturday night, and her drive in the back seat of Douglas's Toyota on Sunday afternoon.

They had given her a room out here with an en suite, and the menu, even at breakfast, “extensive.” It was only three nights.

The first thing she'd done when Donald left her alone in the room was to have a good go-through of the cupboards. She didn't know what she was looking for, but people, she knew, were inclined to leave things, and if there was a dirty sock somewhere, or a suspender belt or a used tissue, she wouldn't feel the place was her own.

The drawers for a start. There were two deep ones under the table where they had put her port, and two more at the end of the long cupboard. When you opened the cupboard a light came on. There was a good six feet of hanging space in there, with a dozen or so good hangers. Real ones, not fixed to the rail so you couldn't walk off with them like the ones in France.