I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills …
Psalm 121
Charlie and Linda made a better fist of their marriage the second time around. They had discovered how to be friends, which compensated for a lot. Even so, life at the cliff house was like an unending Guy Fawkes Day, with Roman candles going off all the time. Arthur has told me of endless rows, of yells and blows, both of them drinking like champions, all mixed up with shouts and laughter and thrown furniture and general mayhem.
You couldn’t really blame Linda; Charlie had got out of the habit of responsible living and never picked it up again. The honeymoon with the Brighton milk bar lasted less time than it took for the paint to dry, then he was back to the races. This time it was Linda’s turn to keep the customers happy. She did it, too. I suppose she thought even a marriage like she had was better than no marriage at all, and by now those were the only options open to her. For all their tantrums, she and Charlie always had this thing going between them; they probably couldn’t have explained it themselves but it was undoubtedly there, and it stayed with them all their lives.
In the intervals between their warfare, they managed to have three kids to replace the one they had lost. Frances came first, in 1956; then Arthur, in 1959; finally Jacqui’s mother Bella, the baby of the family and six years younger than Arthur.
The constant pyrotechnics of the Mandales’ home life was no environment for a sensitive child and short-sighted Frances was — and is — one of the most sensitive people you could wish to find.
She met Jock Woodcock in 1977, when she was twenty-one and he was fifty-seven.
To most people he would have seemed a poor catch. A sugar farmer from the north and a widower to boot, he knew about cane but that was about it. If you wanted information on sucrose content, the season’s prospects, the likely price for cut cane at the mill, Jock was your man. Anything else and you were thrown back on the library, the church or the Country Women’s Association. On top of being thirty-six years older than she was, Jock also had Harley, a twenty-year-old son from his first marriage, and a more poisonous bastard never walked. None of it mattered to Frances. What she wanted more than anything else in life was a stable, peaceful environment, and when she met Jock Woodcock she knew at once that he was the man to give it to her.
Frances met him in a Sydney tea shop when, brick-red face and brick-shaped body, he stumbled as he passed and managed to slop his cup of tea all over her. It was the luckiest accident in Frances’s life and, as far as Jock was concerned, the only good thing that happened to him during his visit to what he always remembered as the madhouse of Sydney.
So to North Queensland Frances came, to the cane plantation outside Goorapilly and the house by the beach, with its extensive views across the Coral Sea. Harley, being Harley, did what he could to make their lives difficult but, in spite of him, they were happy. I’ve always been glad, for Frances’s sake, that they had those happy years together. There weren’t that many of them. Jock was fifty-seven when they married; he never saw seventy. Eleven good years, then cancer took him. Arthur was the only member of the family to come north to the funeral. When it was over he returned to Sydney and Frances was alone once more.