Gilgamesh Read online

  ‘It must be the cow’s milk,’ Edith said. ‘I’m trying to wean him.’

  ‘I’m not a baby person,’ Madge said, straightening up with relief, ‘but I’d say that’s an old soul there.’

  Jim started to wail. ‘Ssh,’ Edith said sternly. Her face was thinner than Madge remembered. Jim kept wailing. Edith picked him up, swung him on her hip in an experienced manner. She kept him wide, hoping he wouldn’t grab at her blouse and nuzzle like a little cub in front of Madge. Although, funny, she didn’t feel so daunted by Madge now. As if in spite of everything, Jim was a weapon in her arms, a source of power. ‘Look at the doggies, Jim.’ The Clark dog and Madge’s spaniel were sniffing tail to tail, shyly like well-bred strangers.

  ‘Dear girl,’ Madge said, ‘you know you could have come to me. Never mind, never mind, we’ve put that all behind us.’ An amber-coloured feather with streaks of salmon pink was tucked into the band of Madge’s brown velour hat. Edith had an impulse to reach across and pluck at it. It seemed so long since she had seen something pretty. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Frances crouching in the vegetable patch, her back assiduously turned. She wasn’t going to stop work for the lady of the manor.

  ‘I’m not the knitting type,’ Madge went on, ‘but you’ve been on my mind and I’d like to help. The Tehoes have always helped the Clarks, you know that. I’m not narrow-minded, never have been. I’m offering you a job. Not front-of-house, of course, we couldn’t have that. Backstairs. I’ve been left in the lurch again without a word of notice. Housemaid, two pound ten a week and I’ll throw in lunch. Starting as soon as possible. That is, if you can leave the child with your sister and—and your mother …’

  Ada had come to stand like a shadow at the kitchen door in her battered lambskin slippers. The dogs were suddenly growling and tumbling over the grass. Jim screamed and fumbled at Edith’s blouse.

  ‘He will be weaned,’ said Edith, in her new, stern voice.

  Perhaps it was better for a boy without a father not to be too much with his mother, who might spoil him and make him soft, as Frances said she did? Each morning Edith tiptoed out and left sleeping Jim wedged around with pillows in her bed. She lit the fire in the kitchen before she went so Frances could warm his milk at once when he woke. At first he used to scream when he found she was gone but after a week or two Frances reported that he had stopped all that silly business. When he cried and climbed all over Edith after she came home, Frances said that he’d been as good as gold for her, it was only with Edith that he turned into such a sissy.

  ‘My dear,’ said Ada, as Jim held out his arms to weary Edith, ‘is that your baby?’ Sometimes Ada held him and hummed and brushed her hand across his head. But she could not be relied on. Once Frances came in to find that Ada had laid him down like a stone on the floor and gone her own way, to call in the chooks.

  Still, he grew, fattened up on cow’s milk. His first word was ‘dog’, and it was Frances who heard it, a personal triumph. As Leopold had noted, she had a strong pedagogic streak. She pointed round the clearing, and waited for him to repeat, ‘tree’, ‘sky’, ‘dog’. She carried him as little as possible, to toughen him up. He crawled early. In the mornings she tethered him to the verandah with a rope until she finished her chores. ‘Dog! Dog!’ cried Jim.

  It was dark when Edith left Jim behind, dark when she came home. She watched the light of the day wax and wane through the Sea House windows. She had been brought out of hiding into the harsh light of the world. On her first day she would have skipped lunch in the kitchen but she was too hungry. At half-past eleven she sat at the end of the great table with Gwen, the other upstairs maid, and ate a cold mutton sandwich, while the kitchen staff bustled around them preparing the guests’ lunch.

  ‘So you’re back,’ said Mavis Staines, the cook. ‘Skinny as ever.’ Edith felt the waitresses’ curious eyes on her, and a sort of mocking current in the room. She had the sensation that she was sitting there stripped naked, the object of everybody’s lewdest speculation. She sat chewing, studying the knots and whorls on the wooden table. She found it hard to swallow. Gwen was as young and shy as she was, and thought to be a little slow. Nobody spoke to them. They ate in silence and avoided catching anyone’s eye.

  But a few days later Ronnie Tehoe started to sit with them, to make their aquaintance while he took what he called his ‘elevenses’.

  Ronnie Tehoe was Reg’s younger brother, recently arrived from England. He was everything Reg was not, slight with small feet and sloping shoulders, a quiff of fair hair and fine English skin. He was here to see Australia and to be Madge’s right-hand man for the length of his stay. His light steps bustled up and down the corridors, his bright eyes peeked in and out of rooms and cupboards. He was as domestically observant as a woman. Already he knew all the staff and guests, and everything that was going on above and below stairs.

  He observed for instance that Edith always took two biscuits with her tea but ate one, slipping the other into her apron pocket. Once she caught him watching her.

  ‘For the birds on the way home,’ she said. She was businesslike in the way she lied these days. She made it a rule not to mention Jim.

  ‘Ah, I knew you were a Child of Nature!’ said Ronnie, winking at her. ‘From the moment I laid eyes on you.’ He acted as if he had special knowledge about everyone, which in her case he probably did. Nobody ever told him to mind his own business. Somehow it was flattering when his eyes fell upon you. Besides, he was in cahoots with Madge.

  He called Gwen the Child of God.

  Gwen lived for her job. She had pale floppy hair and shiny shins and a distracted thin-skinned face across which colour flooded and retreated like tides. ‘Mud tracks on the stairs!’ she would gasp at Edith as she flew past with a mop, or ‘Hot water for the Bridal Suite!’ She confided to Edith that she’d spent her last day off cleaning the western windows. She couldn’t live with herself, the way they looked. She paused only to write reminder notes to herself which she shoved into her apron pocket. Madge had a special way of talking to Gwen, in an exhausted half-whisper. Gwen listened, her face crumpled in sympathy, then raced away to do her bidding. The rest of the staff despised her a little. Did Madge pay her extra for all the extra work she did?

  ‘You are an angel come from heaven,’ Ronnie told Gwen, whose colour became so fiery that tears came to her eyes.

  Gwen lived in a little one-roomed cabin attached to the Sea House garage. She took Edith there at morning tea to show her. It had whitewashed walls and a polished timber floor. Its window overlooked the hills above the creek with their ridges of limestone.

  Before the job at the Sea House, Gwen used to live with her brother and his family in one of the timber towns. She had slept all winter on the verandah on a stretcher bed. Now the morning sun poured through the window onto her white cotton bedspread, and Gwen patted the pool of warmth. One day Mrs Tehoe was going to let her have a kitten, she said. The room had a chair and table and a small chest of drawers and some hooks on the wall for Gwen’s hat and coat and spare uniform. It was a room for one person only. On the window sill was a pot of lily-of-the-valley, green spears and white childlike bells that you could almost see breathing.

  Gwen had no sense of the taint surrounding Edith, no curiosity about her. She only thought about the Sea House, and what Madge might think or want. She was as devoted as a nun. Being with her was restful, as it is with the pure at heart. Edith lay back on the white coverlet, sighed and closed her eyes. Gwen’s room sent a pang into her stomach that took her by surprise. Gwen’s room, where nobody wanted anything more of you, where there was nothing more to want.

  There was a hush upstairs. Couples came out of their rooms whispering as they locked their doors. The rooms held silent clues to their lives, spilt powder, crumpled nightclothes, intimate tumbled beds. This was Edith’s domain. She mopped and polished and changed the linen. She laid fires in winter and in summer set up mosquito nets. She cleaned shoes and turned back beds
and delivered breakfast trays. She also snooped a little, inspected clothes in wardrobes, thumbed through diaries, ate from bowls of fruit. When she was sure the occupants were safely in the dining room she tried on coats and kimonos and puffed herself with shell-pink powder. She never could resist a hat. She liked to pee in their lavatories, using the special roll of paper, treating herself to a chain flush.

  She looked at herself in the three-faced mirrors from all angles. For the first time in her life she could see the back of her head. Her childish plait dismayed her more than ever. Her face looked different, tighter, set. Did she look like a mother? When she worked she forgot about Jim.

  She loved the light in these rooms, infinitely changeable, closer to the heavens. She didn’t have to look out the windows to know how the clouds were moving across the sun. The light changed like moods which she could feel through her fingertips.

  ‘Whatever happened to those visitors of yours?’ Madge said when Edith was collecting her pay in the office. ‘Your cousin and his friend, the Albanian. Adam?’

  ‘Aram. He’s Armenian.’

  ‘Yes, Armenian. Heavens, where is that?’ She raised her eyebrows at Edith. ‘He was quite the man.’ She took a cigarette from a box on her desk and tapped it up and down. ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘England. Aram is staying with Leopold.’ Edith was backing towards the door. Did she used to lie so easily? Did she used to lie at all? Once there had been nothing to lie for.

  ‘They were always pretty thick, weren’t they? Are they coming back here?’

  ‘I don’t think so. They have to get on with their careers.’

  Madge lit her cigarette with a silver lighter. ‘That must be very disappointing for you.’

  ‘No,’ Edith said, opening the door behind her, ‘why should it be?’

  Their eyes met and locked for a moment and Edith remembered the old competition between them. Competition! Yes, that’s what it had been.

  Edith rushed into the bar and left money for a packet of Capstans on the counter. It was cold going down into the Honeymoon Gardens, and smoke was coiling up from smouldering piles of raked leaves.

  Madge knew. She must have guessed, looking at Jim. In every way that Aram was beautiful, Jim was not, but he certainly didn’t look like any Australian baby she had seen.

  He was quite the man. When Madge had said that, Edith in a flash had a vision of Aram, arms and legs outstretched, strung naked between them. Quaite the man, she whispered, imitating Madge’s genteel vowels. What had Madge known of Aram? He had only ever laughed at her.

  But who knows the strange ways of a man? She thought of noble Dr Bly’s playful hand.

  Edith, walking fast through the bush, felt her easily moving bones, her small empty breasts, her lightness regained. Her body had healed. She felt strong, ready for something. She was yearning for Aram again.

  He was back. Resurrected, detached from Leopold, shy, watchful, beside her in the darkness of the track. She heard his voice, his hesitating English. She reconstructed his hands and lips, resuscitated his touch. Remembered tenderness that she had once banished from her mind. She remade him into her lover.

  And with the lover came the anger. Again and again she enacted it, finding him, standing before him, confronting him with Jim.

  And then of course he would hold his arms out to them, and they would have a home at last.

  Where did the idea come from, to go to Armenia? Such a preposterous idea, in a place where most of Edith’s generation, the children of the settlers, had never even been to Perth, in times so straitened that you would choose to walk five miles to save a sixpenny fare. Where those like Ada, who had come here from other countries, were never able to go back.

  Who had even heard of Armenia? Was there really such a place? You might as well say you were going to Woop Woop or Timbuctoo or the Great Inland Sea. You grew out of such ideas. You put your head down and got on with it, accepted your lot, stayed put.

  This was the voice that Edith heard in the night as she and Jim lay small and frail together in the darkness. But in the morning as she sped up the track, she traced that voice, so reasonable, so powerful, back, back to the hospital bed at Matron Linley’s, to the moment when she’d been about to give up, to give in. She had only just saved herself and Jim by running away. She had to save them again.

  The letter lay waiting for her in the mailbox. Here it was at last, The Misses Clark, in Leopold’s flowing black script. Even their humble address, Lot 44, Nunderup, looked elegant in that writing.

  Dear Frances and Edith, he wrote. The paper was a sheet of ordinary foolscap, as if he had picked it up off the top of a pile on his desk, and written on it quickly among all his other writing tasks, his translations and studies. The script had the flourish of speed.

  My very dear long lost cousins, in retrospect the time in your company and your spectacularly remote land was the island in the whirlpool. These are troubled times in this part of the world. My days of irresponsible youth are well and truly over. I have a job with the Government, there being a shortage these days of frivolous archaeological expeditions. My job is, roughly, to do with maps, which will make you laugh, knowing my sense of direction. And Aram has heeded the call and gone home to the Motherland. I myself for the time being am living with my mother (who is well and sends her greetings etc), but later I may be required to set off for parts unknown.

  I often think of you both and it seems to me that you are women of exceptional qualities. For the time being of course, like all of us, you have responsibilities. But one day you will not. Let me say to you this: Take your life into your hands. Work, travel, study: you are more than equal to the challenge.

  I wish only to assure you that I am ever at your service.

  My fondest regards to your mother. Until we meet again, Your cousin, Leopold.

  The letter lay on the kitchen table, where it would soon be splashed with soup.

  ‘Nice of him,’ Frances said. ‘Dashes off a little advice to the colonial cousins after he’s ruined their lives.’

  ‘He hasn’t ruined our lives.’

  ‘Well look at us.’ On one side of the table Frances was cutting up Ada’s bread into bite-sized pieces. On the other Edith was feeding soup to Jim on her knee. As she spoke to Frances the soup went too fast down his throat and he spluttered and howled. Edith rose and walked around the room patting him. He cried on drearily as if it was a matter of principle.

  ‘Has he been like this all day?’

  ‘Of course not. He only tries it on with you.’

  Edith took Jim out onto the verandah. Relief made the stars look brighter. Word at last from the outside world! This was how prisoners must feel, she thought. She hadn’t realised how much of a desertion Leopold’s silence had seemed to her.

  For all his even-handedness, she couldn’t help feeling that the letter was really speaking just to her.

  Ronnie Tehoe was a traveller. He had been travelling since he was sixteen. He was working in a hotel in Brighton when he met a yachtsman who offered him a job with a millionaire’s crew in the Caribbean. From there he went to Alaska with a sealing company, and then on to Japan in a cargo ship. He sailed down the China Sea, through the Malacca Strait to Madras, and then travelled overland till he caught another ship from Constantinople to Marseille. When he arrived back in Brighton he had been away five years. That was first of his voyages.

  Everybody in the kitchen listened to his stories, of ice floes, typhoons, Saddhus, mountain passes, camel trains. They had never heard such stories. They had never met a traveller in Nunderup before. They didn’t know whether to believe him, or whether he was making fools of them all.

  ‘All well and good if you have money,’ said Mavis Staines.

  ‘It’s not so terribly expensive,’ Ronnie said. ‘That’s what people don’t understand. I stop somewhere and work and then I buy a cheap passage on a cargo ship. I once had a job as Second Entertainment Officer on a transatlantic liner, but it’s
not an experience I’d care to repeat. I like the cargo ships. You go to out-of-the-way ports, and you go where the sailors go, the cheap cafés and hotels, and then you link up with other ships. It’s a sort of trail. Your money goes a long way. When it runs out, you find work.’

  ‘What sort of work?’

  Ronnie threw out his arms. ‘I’ve worked in hotels all over the world. You don’t have to stay at home! You don’t have to wither on the bough! You can go anywhere you want. You don’t have to grow old. How old do you think I am?’

  ‘Thirty?’ ventured Gwen.

  ‘I’m nearly forty. Five years younger than Reg.’ They all peered. He was lean and compact and restless. His teeth were white, his eyes clear. There was barely a boyish fuzz on his cheeks.

  ‘It’s a way of life,’ he said. ‘Every day a holiday.’

  ‘Some of us have got mouths to feed,’ said one of the yardsmen.

  ‘Ah, there you have it. The traveller must be prepared to leave behind all responsibilities. A true traveller takes care to avoid them.’

  ‘A girl in every port, eh!’ said the yardsman, a grin spreading on his face.

  Ronnie didn’t deign to reply.

  Later upstairs as he was counting out sheets for Edith from the linen room, he said: ‘Don’t think that there’s some leafy Tehoe estate back in England. Father was a drunk. Reg and I grew up in cheap hotels. We had to leave school when Father couldn’t pay the fees. Hotels are all we know. The money in this place is all hers, if you want to know. But he’s got the accent. They were made for one another. Poor old Reg.’