Incrementally, day by day, hour by hour, Marie reconciled herself to exile. She was on the far side of the earth, estranged from everything she knew, but the achievement of her exile and resurrection were shot through with an underlying sorrow for the loss of something left behind for good. Her new life felt not quite real, as if it were only temporary, a sort of story or a movie that would soon come to an end. Her lost life lived within her, a far-off land, more real than the new visible world in her eyes. Privately she thought most Australians resembled lucky children and she quickly learned where all their soft spots were, all their hurts, all their capacity for provincial affront. Like a proud schoolchild, Brisbane lay its achievements at her feet: Mount Coot-tha Lookout, Moreton Bay, Lennons Hotel. Sometimes at night she wandered through the solid brick buildings of the city, in search of the opposite of the wooden houses she lived in, where there was only the flimsiest distinction between inside and out, between the press of nature outside the thin walls and what passed for civilisation within. In every house, windows were left open and the sounds of outside—the bush, the streets, the cries of children—poured in; every house a house of sticks capable of being blown down by the Big Bad Wolf. When she stood at the lookout of Mount Coot-tha, holding on to her hat, the city below looked like a great army camp, temporarily pitched, surrounded by bush. Her own life felt provisional, flimsy as a house of sticks; she was homeless, homesick for a home that was no more, a perpetual stranger.
He came to the McCanns’ front door, his hat in his hand. ‘Prince Charming’s at the door,’ said Mr McCann, winking.
When she went down the hall, all the McCanns started peeking out from the rooms along the way, and before she reached the door she turned around. Terry and Mrs McCann and Mr McCann, their heads poking out from the kitchen; Wendy and Rhonda from the bedroom they all shared; Lance, Pat, Johnny and little Shane from the lounge room. It looked like a joke, a still from a warm-hearted Hollywood movie, and she laughed. ‘Shoo, you lot,’ she said, still laughing. It was an expression Mrs McCann used all the time—Shoo, you lot—and it was the first time Marie had used it appropriately.
‘Marie,’ Syd said when she opened the door, ‘can you ever forgive me?’
She closed the door behind her. Not speaking, she led the way down the head-swallowing front steps, down the bright cement path leading through the treeless front lawn and out the gate. The heat had not yet faded from the day.
She knew the way down to the river, the river that lay brown and wide and endlessly moving; the same river into which he had landed. She was not thinking straight; of course she should not have gone anywhere near the river, but it was the place her feet took her. Pat and Johnny had shown her their secret camp, where they caught tadpoles and tried to catch eels and fish and where they were attempting to make a canoe. Marie led him there, beneath the cool damp of the hanging trees, where they sat on two upended kero tins.
‘I don’t know why I did it,’ he said.
Still she did not speak.
‘Actually, I do know why I did it. I love you, Marie, and I can’t bear to think of living without you.’
Doesn’t every girl dream of hearing such words? Isn’t every girl supposed to long for love, her imagination jumping from love to marriage in a moment?
‘Marie?’
She looked at him, his long skinny legs crossed, his hat still in his hands. His face was kind, tender, she saw that, but she did not know him, she did not know where he came from, how he had lived. He might as well have been an African or an Eskimo, so different was he from her. She was shaking.
‘Oh, you’ve caught a chill,’ he said, moving closer, cradling her in his arms. It was then that she was reduced, touched, enveloped in living arms coursing with warm blood, her struggle momentarily suspended, her head falling as if in surrender to his chest. Marie Arene, in his arms!
She raised her eyes. ‘Yes, I’ll marry you,’ she said, although he had not asked her again.
‘Oh, my darling,’ he said, kissing her.
She did not love him; she was outside herself, looking at the girl kissing a strange man in the darkening green, alone, frightened, relinquishing the old, broken part, pushing it away, being grateful and happy to be in a safe place; like Mrs McCann said, all that was the past, gone, there were no wars in Australia. She did not need to think any more of the headmistress’s office and being told that her mother was dead, or what she was doing that night in London, three days after she last saw her brother, Eric—a chasseur parachutist, a hunter of the skies, down from training school in Manchester on a twenty-four-hour pass, getting ready to be parachuted into France, so proud of himself, laughing and practising his bad English, insisting on ordering the tea. She need not think of her father, of the workings of grief, of the sadness that stopped his heart. She need not think of her cousins, those strange and vulgar people, wringing the necks of animals, leaving their soiled underwear on hooks. Was she washing her hair the night Eric perished? She might have been making a piece of toast under the electric grill which sometimes turned on and sometimes did not; she might have been doing any number of banal things. She was so tired. She was tired of endless walking, of endless loss. She longed for that moment when experience passed into memory, for that moment when, without her participation, the years would effortlessly move her from the wounds of the present to a place where the past could no longer reach out and grab her by the throat.
Syd’s mother, Min, was not keen on him marrying a reffo. Marie was too dark, too dramatic, too other. Besides, if she had caused Sydney to throw himself off a bridge, what other tricks did she have up her sleeve? Now, if he was marrying that pretty little Gwen Harris at least Min would know everything she needed to know: who her people were. Marie might even be a gold-digger; it wasn’t unknown for girls to set their sights on wealthy young men, and Syd was certainly wealthy; everyone in Queensland, probably everyone in Australia, knew McAlisters. Why, Syd had served an apprenticeship with the famous London store Selfridges and gained special experience in the silk factories of France! But Evelyn, who taught with Marie and who was responsible for introducing her to Syd in the first place, laughed at any suggestion of Marie being a gold-digger. ‘Don’t be silly, Mum,’ she said. ‘Marie wouldn’t know McAlisters if she fell over it.’ Min found this hard to believe.
They were to be married in the chapel at the Anglican Church Grammar School, known as Churchie, where Syd went to school; a big society wedding, anyone who was anyone would be there. In the absence of a mother, Mrs McAlister and Evelyn took Marie to Gwen Gillam to have a wedding dress made (organza, the bodice stitched with seed pearls; an extravagant veil, trailing six feet). Evelyn and Syd insisted she go into McAlisters after closing hours to choose her going away outfit, which she did, eventually, reluctantly. Marie was amazed that Syd had not breathed a word of how rich he was; an entire shop, running over several floors, hundreds of employees! Standing in the magnificent shop, her courage failed her; she was hoping to talk to him about marrying in a registry office instead but she understood then that it would be a waste of breath. Everyone was making such a fuss; she would never have said yes if she had known.
‘All brides are nervous,’ said Evelyn, holding up a dress.
She felt sick, faint; she had to sit down.
‘I can’t do it,’ she said.
‘Yes you can,’ said Evelyn. ‘Girls have been getting married forever. Nobody ever died from getting married.’
‘I can’t,’ she said.
Evelyn put the dress back on the hanger.
How could she possibly explain? What could she say to a girl who thought the worst thing that could happen to you was getting your hair caught in the rain without a scarf?
‘I don’t like being the centre of attention,’ she said.
‘Oh, everyone secretly likes a bit of attention,’ Evelyn said. ‘It’s just bad taste to admit it.’
‘I really don’t—I don’t,’ Marie said, beginning to cry, her courage not only failing her but running, sprinting out the door and onto the street, every ounce of will and hope and bravery she had left in her fleeing.
‘Sshh, sshh, don’t cry now,’ said Evelyn, kindness itself, so kind, so very kind.
‘I can’t do it,’ she said again, when she could speak. ‘I can’t, Evelyn, I can’t.’
Evelyn passed her a clean hanky. ‘I think we should get the tram home,’ she said. ‘If you really can’t go through with it, you’ve got to tell Syd.’
Marie swallowed. ‘D’accord,’ she said.
She did not want to get married. She did not want to be singled out, every eye upon her. She did not want misery, stockings flung out windows, a son released into the sky, a flower blooming, fading, falling.
They did not talk on the trip home. Their bodies swung gently against each other; terribly, Evelyn took her gloveless hand in her own. Marie hated being touched; she hated having her hand held. Her hand began to sweat but she did not know how to extract it so she kept it there, in misery, the sweat flowing like a fountain from her palm, like a religious miracle. Finally, in agony, at last, they were at their stop. When Marie stood up there was a damp patch on her dress where her hands had been flowing in her lap.
Syd was in his room; fortuitously, Mrs McAlister had nipped up the road to Mrs Anderson’s to discuss the flower roster for the church. ‘Marie!’ he said, his face breaking into a grin when he opened his bedroom door. ‘Did you get a dress?’
‘I can’t do it, Syd,’ she said, starting to cry again.
‘Can’t do what, darling? What can’t you do?’ He took her in his arms, kissing the top of her head.
‘I can’t marry you,’ she said. She dare not yield; she dare not risk giving up her hard-won self.
He laughed. He actually laughed! ‘Which bridge do I have to jump off this time, Marie Arene? The Story Bridge? The Sydney Harbour Bridge? London Bridge? I’m going to run out of bridges.’ She smiled. She was crying, smiling, laughing, and then he took her hand and led her inside, shutting the door. For an hour Marie lay beside him on his bed in the dark room, in a sick, miserable fever, talking and talking, caught in the long unbroken breath of her unburdening, and, as she talked, Syd did not laugh anymore and soon his eyes grew dim from seeing.