That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (32 page)

She related the story of the fleet of UFOs she thought she had seen when she was a girl. It was the first time she had spoken about the vision since the day of its occurrence. She had kept the memory, which already had the grubby fingerprints of doubt on it, a secret from then on, so that it should not be damaged any further by the application of anyone
’s disbelief.

The unexpected gift of a listener whose sympathy seemed guaranteed made her begin confidently, but when she had finished speaking she was not sure that she had not made a mistake in unburdening the tale to Mr Dean. Her experience seemed less remarkable in the light of his. She had to force herself not to end on a lame retreat into conceding that the objects might have been birds after all.

But he did not seem to doubt her.

‘
That must have given yer something to think about,’ he said. ‘I knew there was something different about you. You’ll have an interesting life.’

‘
Well, I hope I do.’

That seemed a natural end to the conversation and he looked about to take his books and leave. But Joan felt hungry for more sympathetic talk, and she was still alone at the desk with Mr Dean. She thought quickly of a subject to raise
.

‘
Are you going to Melbourne this afternoon?’ she asked

‘
Tomorrer morning.’

‘
Don’t you hate what they’re doing to the city? Pulling down so many beautiful old buildings and throwing up those awful office blocks?’ To be fair, many of the old edifices could not have passed a safety inspection; but sensing a kindred spirit in Mr Dean she felt sure of receiving from him the balm of agreement.

‘
Oh, I don’t mind about that,’ he said. ‘Things change. People want to try new ideas. They want to spread their minds.’

‘
Oh, well, I suppose so,’ she said without feeling.

‘
Don’t worry, you’ll have an interesting life,’ he said – she realised the phrase had taken his fancy – and he touched his forehead and left.

The house, when she returned to it in the evening, was bright, as it always was at night, as if its rooms were full of people; but it was only her mother, who was nervous of the dark, leaving the lights on. Joan had spent two years in London and was broke when she returned, so that she had been obliged to move back home. Keith had a bank job in Melbourne, so that dinner was only for Mr and Mrs Walker and Joan.

It was on the tip of Joan’s tongue to relate Mr Dean’s story. But she feared her mother’s response. Mrs Walker’s mannerisms had grown more extravagant with time, and there might be a hand laid on Joan’s arm, a sickly smile, and something sentimental said about Joan’s childhood vision. And Dad, whatever else he might say, would also say that you couldn’t discount the DTs, and she would agree with him because she increasingly liked to agree with him.

After the dishes, Joan took her shoes off and lay on her bed. She stared up at the ceiling with its modest rose and its several big cracks in the stale icing of the plaster. Her mind underwent a queer tremor. She composed a fantastical sort of script addressed to the spacecraft
– if they had been spacecraft – and the persons in them, if persons there were. The missive took a line of lament. Why, she asked, had they appeared so briefly; didn’t they know what contortions of hope their visitation might cause down below? Were they unaware, were they cruel, or did they misjudge their own effect – were they as careless as human beings?

Then her thoughts ran out
, and she lay quietly while the sense of waiting for a response wore away.

For comfort, she burrowed a little into the daydream
– she had kept it securely with her – of herself as an old woman for whom life was an accomplished feat. She was a little ashamed of it now, but no other daydream had come along with sufficient charisma to replace it. Library work was drudgery only relieved by occasional meetings with characters like Mr Dean. She was twenty-five and had not had a lover. A psychiatrist had made frowning if undiagnostic noises over her not having had at least one affair in London. She was now strong enough in her own opinions to think him a fool. The simple fact was that no one had appealed. She pushed up the sleeve of her blouse and studied a scar on her arm. What her mother had said, exactly, was: ‘That was very silly. We won’t tell your father. You can say that you did it in the garden. It was a rose bush – a very nasty rose bush.’

III.

Melbourne, 1981

The
renovated kitchen in the Essendon house was painted the strong yellow called Aztec Sun in the catalogue. There were signs of cost-cutting in the renovation, but the kitchen and the house it was in were large and the street was a good one. Joan stood in old clothes in the new yellow kitchen, battling with her mother’s phone call. At last she was able to get in the
coup de grace
:

‘
Yes, I’ll give them your love. All right. Goodbye, Mother.’ Joan hung up the phone and clenched her fists. Since there was no one to see her, she beat the air with them. An hour.
A whole bloody hour
. She swore under her breath as she hurried from the kitchen into the living room and then the hall of the house, with which she now had a closer relationship than ever since a computer had replaced her at the library two years ago. The cleaning and upkeep of the house was in her hands, according to a rigid schedule from which she disliked to deviate. In her more jocular moments she sometimes thought of herself as a housekeeper for the bank that owned the place.

With period front rooms
, and furniture of the right age hiding the worst of the rising damp, it was the sort of old house that people admired. She had assumed it would attract guests and fill naturally with friends, but the sitting room and the dining room saw use only a few times a year.

The sherry was located in the dining room. She allowed herself one glass for each thirty minutes of the phone call. After the sherry she felt grandiose and forgot that she was wearing grubby housecleaning clothes. Her body went on with the day
’s interrupted chores while her mind turned upon snatches of poetry and oratory that she felt an affinity with. Sweeping in the kitchen, she recited in full voice – ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York–’; ‘We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds–’; ‘Should you ask me, whence these stories? Whence these legends and traditions, with the odours of the forest, with the something-something, with the rushing of great rivers–’

The rhythms of
‘Hiawatha’ caught her up while she darned a pair of Natalie’s school tights. Those rhythms encouraged her to a militant pitch of feeling. She marched up the hall singing at the top of her lungs, as off-key as ever, the first verse of the French national anthem and into Natalie’s bedroom singing the first line of the German. And then at last, standing empty-handed in the hall with her head held up – ‘Swing low, sweet chario-ot…’ until the sentimental tears pricked her eyes.

Then it was time to pick Natalie up. Natalie always went to Amanda
Lucas’s house on Tuesdays, and Amanda came to theirs on Thursdays. It would not do to bring Churchill and Longfellow and Richard III. Joan laughed inwardly at the thought of turning up with them all in tow. She changed into a skirt and blouse for going out and ran a brush through her hair. She gargled toothpaste in the bathroom and chewed mints in the car.

Natalie was talkative on the way home
.

‘
Gail’s nice, isn’t she, Mum?’

‘
You should call her Mrs Lucas. And yes, she’s nice.’

‘
She said I could call her Gail.’ A pause. ‘I like her hair a lot. Do you like it?’

‘
Yes, it’s a pretty style. Though I’m sure she helps it with a curling iron.’

From the back of the car, Natalie
’s loud voice piped approval of glamorous Gail Lucas who went jogging and did jazz ballet and always wore makeup. She was particularly impressed, it seemed, by Gail’s ability to sunbathe in a bikini by the pool.

‘
When I grow up, I want to be like her,’ Natalie declared.

‘
Well, if you want to be someone’s trophy wife, that’s your business. I hope you’ll have the looks for it.’ Joan sometimes found herself talking to Natalie as if she were much older than ten. Natalie let her sigh be heard.

That evening, while Joan prepared dinner, Natalie sat at the kitchen table copying notes out of a book for a homework project. Part of her remained attuned to her mother
’s mood, which every gesture and attitude revealed to be tense and hostile.

She knew
she had provoked the mood. But there was a wisdom in her mind which believed that with the right sort of goading, her mother might change and become a pretty, fashionable, relaxed mother like Gail. To go with the new mother there would be a new, modern house with a swimming pool. And with the new mother and the new house, there would be a new Natalie, much prettier and more like Amanda. This Natalie would have a horse somewhere in the country and be allowed to wear makeup.

All of that was worth risking a row for. Therefore, while her mother was doing the potatoes, Natalie found new praiseful things to say about the Lucases. It did not take long for Joan, her patience tried, to snap,
‘Just dry up about those bloody people.’

‘
I’m only talking.’

‘
Well, find something else to talk about.’

Joan fought the upsurge of rage. She attacked the eyes of a big spud with the sharp end of the peeler.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said bitterly, ‘that I’m not what you want me to be. As you get older, you’ll find that most people aren’t what you want them to be. And perhaps if Mrs Lucas was your mother you wouldn’t think she was that much chop, either. You don’t know people when you only go to their houses.’

Although Natalie felt a little frightened, it was always interesting to hear her mother talk like this. She decided to say:

‘Am I what you want?’

‘
Of course. Although I wish you would be more obedient and loyal at times, I love you very much.’

She did not turn around as she spoke, and Natalie only saw her mother
’s old t-shirt and her pink elbows, and her thick waist around which an apron was tied, and heard in her voice an inflection of force that she took for strictness.

Joan did not want to show how hurt she was by her daughter
’s crush on someone else’s mother, or how, by operations one could not explain to a ten-year-old, she was upset by the thought of the Lucases’ world, which to her seemed both enviable for its wealth and despicable for its plastic-and-pine aridity. You could not imagine what its spiritual qualities were; they were people who knew only materialistic and hedonistic goals, and while she reasoned with herself that it was natural for a child to be attracted to such people, it pained her that Natalie showed no signs of being the unusually sensitive sort of child who just might have felt something amiss.

She had told herself often
– and felt it sincerely – that she was glad Natalie was not odd like her. And yet, she had hoped that out of herself might come someone whose soul was naturally in sympathy with her own.

There is, she thought, a masculine spirit inside me; a martial spirit
– but a useless blustering one, all sentiment and no courage.

So she condemned herself.

Natalie was pushing it. ‘Why don’t we ever go to Bali?’

‘
Do you want a sting around the legs?’

‘
No.’

‘
Then stop saying things to drive me mad. I’m not having a good day.’

Natalie fell ostentatiously quiet
.

Going on with the vegetables, Joan heard a plane and glanced up through the window above the sink. The sky was limpid and, as ever, free of visitors. She had not told any of the doctors about the silver shapes. There had been no other hallucinations. A couple of years ago there had been that pilot, Valentich or Valentik, who vanished over Bass Strait, and all the stir about a UFO
having something to do with it. And when they gave you gloomy black and white pictures to look at, how were you supposed to make up anything but gloomy stories about them?