SIX

AT THE start of 1937 Charlie graduated with honours and two prizes for surgery, and started his residency at the hospital. One night at the shop he said he had a favour to ask. As a resident he often had to spend the night at the hospital and Win didn’t like being alone in the f lat. Would Nance go and stay with her now and then? It was an easy favour to grant. She liked Win and it made a change from the boarding house. Win would make tea for them, she was a good cook, then they’d have a few hands of rummy and Win would tell the story of falling in love with Charlie, how she went into the Five Dock Pharmacy one day for cough syrup and there he was.

Charlie and Win had planned to wait until he got through Medicine before they started a family, and a few months into his residency Win was starting to show. But every time Nance went to the flat, Win was less well. Nausea, palpitations, swollen ankles. Win made light of it. Oh, Charlie doesn’t seem worried and he’s the doctor! In the shop, though, Charlie was more and more preoccupied. One night it all spilled out. Win had eclampsia: high blood pressure. She was taking magnesium sulphate and avoiding excitement but that was only a half measure, not a cure. The only cure was to get the baby out. The problem was, Win wasn’t far enough along. The baby would die if delivered now. She might die, too, from the shock. But if you waited until the baby was sure to survive, the mother could go into convulsions and they could both die. On a great shuddering sigh Charlie said, It puts the doctor in a terrible position, Nance. There was a silence between them because it wasn’t just the doctor, any stranger. The doctor was the husband and the father, and he was haggard with the choice that had to be made.

A few weeks later Nance had hardly opened up the shop when the call came through. Charlie’s voice was strangled, a thickness around every word. She’d never heard a man cry before. Win had gone into convulsions. They’d done an emergency Caesarean but it was too late. Mother and baby were both dead. Nance said, Oh, how terrible, I’m so sorry, and there was a long silence. She squeezed the receiver hard, pressed her ear to it. Finally she heard the click of him hanging up.

Win’s father phoned later. Could you close the shop, please, Miss Russell? His voice was brisk and businesslike. She understood that Mr Betts was one of those men who needed to be busy and not stop to think. She inked a black edge around a sheet of paper, wrote the phrases she’d seen on other shop doors.

At the funeral Charlie’s face was warped by grief. She lined up with everyone else and spoke to him. He glanced at her without seeing, pressed her hand. She was nothing but another person who wasn’t his dead wife. She saw his white lips say, Thank you, thank you. Then she had to let the next person take his cold hand and murmur something that he didn’t hear, and have him say, Thank you, thank you.

It was Nance’s first death. While the clergyman talked about someone called Winice, she thought about Win, the fun they’d had. Everything they’d done seemed significant. For a lark she and Win had read each other’s palms one night. She remembered the silkiness of Win’s skin, the warmth of her fingers, the weight of her hand. The lines on the palm were neat, like embroidery, the flesh rosy. Now that hand was in the coffin. It would be cold and pale, stiff by now. No one would ever hold it again. No one would ever sit with Win over a bottle of beer and laugh themselves to tears about the silly things in the palm-reading book. That was what death was. Nothing solemn or grand, just a hole in the world. She looked at her own hand. It would be in a coffin, cold and dark, one day. Then it would just be the bones she could see under the skin.

Afterwards Mr Betts came up to her. Keep the shop closed, Miss Russell, he said. A month. Let’s say six weeks. Mr Gledhill told me to tell you specially, thank you for your support and naturally you’ll be paid. He glanced at her for the first time and she saw how his eyes were shrunken in their sockets, the blue of them bright against the bloodshot whites.

For once it was Nance waiting for the others at the boarding house that night. They said to shut the shop, she told them. What will you do, Nance? they wanted to know. She opened her mouth to say, I don’t know, and found that she’d said, I’ll go and see the family.

She knew then that she’d never leave behind the longing. Family. She’d thought that seven years of pharmacy had driven it into the ground. But the less a family was a family, the more the longing for it would never leave. She thought, On my deathbed I’ll still be longing.

The place Frank had won at Bringalily had been covered with the wreckage of prickly pear when he’d gone there. No stock, no crops, no house. He’d worked a long time on the roads around Bringalily to get a bit of cash. Reckon I’m the champion gravel-spreader of Queensland, he wrote. Once the farm was up and running, Dolly and Max had joined him. Bert stayed on at Mittagong. No one spelled it out, but it was a way of quietly burying a dead marriage.

Nance went to Mittagong first. The farm was a dry stony place, always windy, the little house creaking. None of that mattered. Not being locked up in the pharmacy was a delight she didn’t tire of. It was enough to get up in the morning and live the day through, walking out into the yard or up on the gaunt paddocks whenever she pleased. She thought, The wonderful thing about hard times is that you don’t need a Caribbean cruise. It’s enough to have the day to yourself.

Whether it was the shame of the bankruptcy that could never be mentioned, or not having to deal with Dolly, she didn’t know, but her father was a good companion in the evenings by the fire, gentler and quieter than she remembered. For the first time he was willing to talk about personal things.

Your mother never thought I was good enough for her, he said. Mind you, she might have been right. On her good days you had to go to the front parlour to get someone better than your mother.

He laughed, rubbed his hands up and down his thighs the way he did when he was thinking about something.

Remember Rothsay, Nance, he said. Never any good there. My word, the rows we had! She threw me out once, you know. Frank a little baby. Then she changed her mind, sent word, would I come back. Well, I did in the end and you were the result. You were a fluke, Nance.

The window made its little song in the night wind, a shingle rattled up on the roof. He stared peacefully into the fire, rubbing the nap of his trousers as if he’d said nothing of importance. A fluke! She’d always known she wasn’t wanted. Otherwise why would her parents have sent her away so much? She’d thought nothing could be more bleak than knowing. She was wrong. Here it was, something worse: being told.

Bert got up to pour himself another whisky but stopped behind her chair and ruff led her hair, the way he’d done when she was little. Good having you here, Nance, he said. She knew what he was saying, and knew he’d never be able to say it. She touched his hand, held it for a moment. You had to take what you were offered.

The village near Frank’s place was called Bringalily on the sign, but Frank told Nance that it should really be spelled Bringalilli, because it didn’t have anything to do with bringing lilies. It was the name of the Aboriginal tribe of the area and should be pronounced with a hard ‘g’. He’d got to be mates with a man who’d worked on the roads with him, he said. Half Aboriginal, had told him a few things about the old ways. Seems only right to say it their way, Frank said. Least we can do, all things considered.

It was a Frank she’d never known before, someone who thought about such things as the right way to say an Aboriginal word. She’d never thought about anything like that herself, though once he told her she made a point of saying it the Aboriginal way. It made her realise how little she knew Frank, how far apart they’d grown since those sweet years at Rothsay. It was hard when you’d been separated for so long. A letter was no good for the small things like that, the ones that told you who the other person really was. For those things you had to be there day by day.

Dolly was calmer and more cheerful at Bringalily than Nance had ever seen her. She’d thrown herself into helping Frank. He’d dug a dairy, three-quarters underground, and she’d rigged up a clever system of hessian curtains and water troughs to make it cool, so they’d get the top grade, choicest, from the butter people. She was full of all her other plans to make things better. Nance watched her pour water into the troughs that kept the hessian wet. Oh, Mum, she thought. You should have been a man, or born later.

The place was doing pretty well, but even easygoing Max was sick of the cows. You had to milk them at dawn and dusk, no matter what. Frank had gone in another ballot, for some land at Guyra, not far from Tamworth. Sheep and potato country, he said. You can have a sleep in now and then.

He’d got to know the neighbours, all dairy farmers. Their lives revolved around the milking. They’d come over in the evenings, though everyone went to bed early. Being the host was a side of Frank she’d never seen. He was warm and smiling, quietly making sure everyone had what they wanted and heading off Dolly if she started to get hot under the collar.

And Frank, have you got anyone? she asked him one morning, walking back from the milking. She glanced up in time to catch a grimace.

Yes, he said. Norah. She lives along the way. You’d like her, Nance.

Well, she said. Well, Frank? Smiling up at him, but Frank didn’t look at her.

Norah, well, he said. She’s Norah Gallagher. Catholics. You know what Mum’s like about Catholics.

It never made sense, Frank, she said. Wouldn’t have a bar of Catholics but sent me off to the nuns.

You don’t look to Mum to make sense, he said. All I know is, she won’t have Norah in the house.

Nance could see it: the family divided all over again, Never darken my door! That iron will of Dolly’s. Nance wanted to say, Go ahead anyway, Frank, it’ll work out if you love Norah and she loves you. But what if she was wrong, what if the Catholic thing meant more misery for everyone?

When Nance got back home to Sydney, Frank wrote to her. He and Dolly had had a row about Norah, Frank called it the Row to End All Rows. Mum promised she’d make our lives hell, he wrote. But I should have stuck to my guns for once.

He’d won the land at Guyra, a place called Green Hills, but Dolly didn’t want to leave Bringalily. Well enough where we are, she grumbled to Nance in her letters, I don’t know why Frank’s got to be always on the move. Nance laughed so loudly she startled the others in the dining room.

She thought the real trouble with Guyra was that it was too close to Tamworth. Too much shame there. And too close to Currabubula. Dolly had grown up on a farm scratching out a living, and at Guyra she’d be doing it again.

Bert was leaving Mittagong and going to Guyra. He knew about sheep. Max went along with things in his easygoing way. Milk a cow, crutch a sheep. It was all the same to him.