The Heaven I Swallowed (13 page)

I had left Fred's letters on the kitchen table so I took them back to the desk. The roll-top stood open, with its broken lock. I noticed Mary's window was smudged with fingerprints, the glass wanting a thorough wipe. And I had tracked in dirt when I came in from the garden yesterday. I needed to vacuum.

‘Not Mary's window anymore,' I said out loud, listening to the words in the emptied house.

†

It was easy, really, to move along. I worried about what I would be asked at church, who would inevitably pry into the details of Mary's departure. I had momentarily forgotten about the hushed lines of communication, how everyone knew about Mary running away before Mass even began, how this erased the need for direct enquiry. None of them had any facts, I was sure, only Father Benjamin's reassurance I had done my very best under difficult circumstances.

‘How well you are looking, Mrs Smith,' Mrs Andrews said.

‘The colour is back in your cheeks,' Mrs Bishop declared.

‘Thank you,' I replied. ‘Aren't the poplars growing well?'

The group turned towards the line of trees against the church fence. The poplars were still too short to provide a proper barricade but they were heading towards height and protection. I wasn't sure if this was an appropriate thing to point out and was reassured by the nodding of heads and murmurs of assent.

‘Yes, they are growing very well,' Enid Parker said quietly.

The sky above the trees was a blanket grey.

PART II

‘I sincerely, deeply, fervently longed to do what was right; and only that. “Show me, show me the path!” I entreated of Heaven.'

Charlotte Brontë,
Jane Eyre

9

Many years later, I had a dream all the streets of the city were emptied of children and the crowds who had celebrated the end of the war wandered around in black veils, weeping for their lost babies. In my dream, I did not belong in such a world—the women pushed me away—and I had to run back to my mother's house, a house I did not remember but which, in my dream, was a larger version of the home I had shared with Fred and then with Mary, its rooms vast, emptied of furniture and smelling, overwhelmingly, of varnish. I stood on the back step again, and the laundry tub was overflowing, its sudsy water running up to my bare feet, stopped only by the force of my dream-will from drowning me. In the distance, further away than it should have been, the jacaranda tree was burnt black.

†

I haven't lived in that house for four years now. It seemed sensible, when I finally accepted there would be no further additions to my household, to move into a flat.

Mind you, I had not been hasty. The poplars at the church grew tall and I smiled and simpered to Mrs Bishop and the widows, maintaining the illusion as I always had. Only gradually did I become desperate to flee, particularly after my final encounter with Father Benjamin. I kept my plans well hidden. The surprise from the church group when the For Sale sign sprung up in my front garden was testimony to how well I'd looked on the outside.

‘You will still be coming to services here, of course, Mrs Smith?' Mrs Joyce asked, unable to comprehend my wish to attend a closer congregation.

‘Yes,' I lied and wondered at the amount of attention my leaving was eliciting. Surely these women did not really like me? I reasoned there was probably a dearth of gossip; the mouths needed new material to chew on. The Mavis boy had killed himself months before, but the speculation surrounding his demise—a sad follow-on from Father Benjamin's more expected, but just as talked-about, departure—had begun to grow weary, not helped by the failure of Mr and Mrs Mavis to appear and receive their condolence.

‘Everything is changing,' Enid Parker said mournfully. She had tried to reach out to me after Mary was gone, but I had rejected her pity.

She was right, though, everything was changing. Father Benjamin had been replaced by a young ginger-haired gentleman whose healthy smile seemed a mockery of his predecessor. Father Richards would stand on the church steps positively beaming, frightening the old people with his enthusiasm. The loss of the Mavises had been felt as well, their quiet dignity a sorry absence, and with the growth of the poplars, even the feel of the churchyard had changed, now secluded and un-inviting.

Leaving Wayville Street and the house I had believed would one day sing with my family life was a deafeningly quiet time. I labelled the trunks meticulously, making lists of what was going into each of them, worrying about losing sight of the smaller ornaments. I wrapped the best china in layers of butcher's paper and had to make disconcerting ­decisions on what was to be sacrificed, moving as I was into a smaller place, with less space for furniture and plants.

When I first arrived at the two-bedroom flat it smelt of mothballs and I learnt from my neighbour that a Jewish lady had lived and died there. I aired it as much as was possible, letting the breezes in through the fly-screens. Whenever I returned from an errand, though, I found myself on the same carpet track as the previous owner: down the corridor, past the bathroom on the right, straight to the main bedroom and the built-in wardrobe to hang up my coat, out to the tiny laundry where the hat hooks were, nestled next to the living room that swept onto the dining area and then immediately to the kitchenette, decked in canary yellow, for a well-earned cup of tea. I was following in the footsteps of the dead and try as I might, it was hard to find another route.

In the second bedroom a glassed-in alcove held Fred's desk.

The smallness of my new flat was a comfort. I had escaped the creaks and groans of an old house settling and found instead the hum of new cement walls and the distant pound of the sea. The lowness of the ceiling was the most difficult change to cope with—whether it was really lower I could not tell, perhaps everything felt diminished because the space itself was so much smaller. To make up for it, the balcony gave me a view, through the figs, of a strip of seemingly flat blue ocean and I began a ritual of sitting out there at sunset, drinking a gin and tonic, lady's tears providing just enough blur to allow me to sleep. I watched the sun sliding away behind the distant horizon, a flat white disc, and thought of the Holy Communion. A wafer converted to Christ's body, coming into me, swallowing God and all He was supposed to contain. How I had tried to hold Him close, to keep Him always part of my flesh.

I'd never been particularly attracted to the seaside but I would occasionally take an afternoon walk down to the ocean. I did not attend church, or hold lunches, or help at a charity. I tried my best not to think of that last scene with Mr Roper or the other moments that had contributed to my departure. Though I had not moved far away, in terms of physical distance, I had stepped outside of their hermetic world and felt it was enough to cook myself a meal every night and wait for the hours to pass.

†

I had visited Father Benjamin only once during his decline. He had gone to a religious hospice and received me, not lying in a bed as I had dreaded, but sitting in a wheelchair. His room was as sparsely decorated as his house had been and, if not for the careful tread of the staff down the corridors, we could have been as alone as when I had visited him at the presbytery. Father Benjamin looked as drained as a person could be without already being a cadaver, his hair in patches, and I was not surprised when he didn't rise in greeting or offer refreshment. He simply sat, a blanket over his knees, and stared at me, trying desperately to hold to the strings of the conversation.

‘Are they looking after you well?' I asked.

‘Yes, Mrs Smith. The good as well as the damned.'

I chose to ignore the second part of this. Mrs Bishop had warned his sentences did not always fit together.

‘I am glad to hear it. It is a beautiful place.' I immediately regretted saying this for Father Benjamin began to look around, as though in search of beauty and, although the sky showing through the window was mid-summer blue and the grounds outside relatively well tended, I saw the walls themselves were an ugly cream, thickly applied, hairs and spots of dirt stuck in the paint.

‘Mrs Smith.' Father Benjamin spoke my name, as if to remind himself of who I was.

‘Yes, Mrs Smith.' I took a breath and smoothed out my skirt. ‘I took in Mary, do you remember?'

‘Mary.' The word spoken in his mouth could have conjured the girl out of thin air as, in truth, he had once done.

‘I wanted to know …' I asked. ‘I was wondering if they ever found her? After she ran away?'

In the time watching the poplars grow, I had never been able to ask him this question. Surrounded at church, as he always was, by the ears of the congregation, it had become a subject unspoken, like the hardness of Mrs Bishop's ANZAC biscuits, capable of breaking one's teeth. While I had planned many visits to his presbytery, to find the privacy to enquire, they had never eventuated, my courage petering out behind the steering wheel, forcing me to scurry back inside the house to easier ignorance. Once a coward, always a coward.

‘Mary?' Father Benjamin repeated.

‘Yes.' I nodded eagerly, trying to will him into memory.

The door of the room opened and a nurse stuck her head in. ‘Everything fine in here?' she asked loudly, not bothering to step into the room. Her face, closeted by a tight white headdress, was young and pink, her cheeks flushed. I wondered if she had dropped in from some other hospital where breathless exertion was still worth the effort.

‘Yes, thank you,' I replied. Her eyes were on Father Benjamin whose head bobbed, only just under his control.

‘Good. Let me know if you need anything. Tea?'

I worried this interruption would make it even more difficult to keep Father Benjamin on track.

‘No, thank you.'

The nurse stayed for another moment, still using the door as her shield against complete immersion into the room. I had the distinct impression she did not want to leave us alone.

‘Well, too-da-loo then.'

She closed the door quietly. Her footsteps were barely discernible but I sat, my head inclined towards the corridor, and waited until there was no chance she could still be within hearing.

I turned to the priest again and discovered he had his eyes closed.

‘Father Benjamin?'

His lids opened and I saw a strange milkiness in his eyes, as if a film had formed between the world and the supposed windows to his soul.

‘Mrs Grace Smith?'

‘Yes, Father Benjamin?'

‘You have not changed.' Father Benjamin's voice had the solemnity of a godly judgment.

I felt myself move physically away, pushing my body into the back of my chair.

‘I simply wanted to …' I began.

‘There is nothing simple about you, Mrs Grace Smith.' He said my entire name like a punishment. ‘You came here to pick at me.'

‘No.'

‘You came here to pick at me and pick at me. To throw her in my face once more. But I tell you, and will I tell you this only once, a healthy tree does not bear bad fruit, nor does a poor tree bear good fruit.'

His voice had become gravelly and his fingers twitched on the arms of the wheelchair.

‘For every tree is known by the fruit it bears; you do not pick figs from thorn bushes or gather grapes from bramble bushes! Do you, Mrs Grace Smith? A good person brings good out of the treasure of good things in his heart; a bad person brings bad out of his treasure of bad things. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.'

Spit dribbled down the sides of his mouth. I wanted now for the nurse to return. Surely the sound of the priest's ramblings would be carrying to someone?

‘I only came here to see you in your convalescence, Father Benjamin.'

I stood up. I had used the wrong word, ‘convalescence' implied there was recovery around the corner. Father Benjamin did not follow the movement of my standing, his head still turned to the level of my waist. Perhaps he could not see me at all, his mind transported to another time and place?

‘Can you tell me anything of Mary?' I asked again, in as soft a tone as I could manage, pushing my irritation away as best I could.

‘For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of,' he mumbled.

‘Goodbye, Father. I think you need to rest.'

I walked to the door, hearing a strange sound behind me and only understood when I turned to say my farewell that Father Benjamin had wheeled the chair after me in a fit of energetic derangement. His hands lay on the tyres, shaking wildly. The chair was so close I could not open the door. The smell of stale urine drifted up from his hospital tunic.

‘They never found her,' he whispered, his voice had a completely different quality to it, the timbre of frightening sanity returned.

‘Mary?' Though I knew he could not be talking of anyone else.

‘They searched and searched for her.' His eyes were wide now, cleared of all whiteness. ‘Her mother, you see, Mrs Smith, found me. She begged to be allowed to see her daughter. She thought I was lying when I said Mary had disappeared. She stood on my doorstep and wailed. She said I had an evil spirit in me and that I would be punished. She would not believe a word I spoke to her. My word! I gave her my word.'

I could barely breathe.

‘My word,' he said again finally and slumped back down into himself, the film back across his eyes. ‘What good is my word?' He slurred the last, so it might have been ‘world'.

‘I was trying to help her. Her mother—God, but how she wailed!'

He closed his eyes once again, his chin slumping down onto his chest. He seemed to be breathing heavily, I did not want to think he was crying.

I leant over and rolled the wheelchair back, far enough away from me so I could open the door and leave him. I found the nurse who had stuck her head in earlier and told her Father Benjamin was ‘distressed'.

‘Why would he be distressed?' she asked, with an accusatory frown.

‘I don't know,' I lied and scrambled from the hospice with an image of Mary's mother on the presbytery steps, cursing Father Benjamin to Hell.

†

Father Peter Benjamin passed away three weeks later. Peter, named for the rock of the Church. The funeral was well attended for a man with no family, although the formality of the homily from one of his fellow priests betrayed his ­separation from common order life. It was his parishioners who seemed to really weep for him, recalling his home visits and their sitting-room confessions, mournful and, perhaps, just a little relieved his knowledge of their sins was being buried forever.

I watched the coffin descend into the ground and, rather than praying, I found myself trying to recall if Mary's ­mother's letter had been given to me in an envelope or if Father Benjamin had simply handed over the pages on their own. If there had been an envelope, surely I would have noticed some kind of address on the back, or the ink stamp over the Queen's face, a pointer to its place of origin? Even the briefest of glimpses would surely have stayed with me? If ‘the word' was good for anything, it was for this: creating a permanency for fleeting thoughts otherwise lost. At the very least, I had remembered the surname.

Mrs Chilsom had patted me on the arm by the graveside. The groups had already begun to form after the end of the service, the clusters of quiet comments beginning. The Catholic clergy section of Rookwood was a rectangle, ­bordered by oaks.

‘At last he has rest,' Mrs Chilsom said, her usual piousness pervading.

‘Yes,' I replied uncertainly. I could not say if Father Benjamin really had peace.