The convent was an imposing structure of sandstone and timber with a double-storeyed verandah, open below but with rust-stained Venetians above. The roof was of colonial iron but the towers at either end, each with its set of louvred windows, and the columnated brick chimneys, gave it a baronial, almost Elizabethan look.
It had been built, with ballroom, billiard room and separate kitchen and servants’ quarters, for a local shipping magnate, whose fortune, before Federation put an end to that sort of thing, had been based on blackbirding for the sugar interests up north. His widow, an organiser, these days, of charity balls for the War effort, had deeded it to the sisters, as part of a bid for respectability in which the family name, in keeping with the new mood of expeditionary fervour and heroic self-sacrifice, would be relieved of the stain of Early Days in the South Seas, and the old ruffian who had been the scourge of all the nearby islands could become, with his white waistcoat and whiskers, a benign, grandfatherly figure, the very embodiment of the last great, if rather rough age of hobnailed visionaries. In this form his portrait dominated the staircase with its cedar newel posts and spindles, glaring down in regret, perhaps, of the children and grandchildren he had expected to fill the house when he first conceived it in the loneliness of nights up in the tropics, or in disapproval of the women in sensible boots who crossed and recrossed the stained-glass entry hall with their hands in their pockets, or, with skirts hauled up in the freedom of seclusion, swabbed its tiles with lye.
On his first visit, Lachlan Beattie had been entertained by the Mother Superior. Passing under the gaze of the old cut-throat (he had come across Duncan McGregor once or twice in earlier days, an unedifying experience), he had been led into a dark, overfurnished room to sip tea from a little ladylike cup, while Janet, impatiently, looked on.
The Mother Superior was a sensible woman, not inclined to panic at their moment of notoriety. She had allowed him to charm her, as she had him, but did not see him again. These days, free of formality, Janet led him round past the shabby side of the building towards the garden.
Things were ramshackle back here. There were tubs and a blackened furnace for washdays, and down a path of uneven bricks, two lopsided dunnies under a crown of pink antignonon. He imagined the sisters slopping out after dark under umbrellas in their loose boots, and the nightmen with cans on their shoulders, staggering to their wagons early enough on hot mornings not to cross one of the sisters on the path.
The garden, this afternoon, was steaming after a downpour. Snails were out, dragging their shells from under cassia and canna bushes. Sister Monica, Janet, very deliberately set her boots down in a little crunching dance this way and that in front of him. He felt, as he passed, the drag of a wet branch at his sleeve. Plumbago, all its long shoots drenched. He plucked a flower and, without thinking, put the stem between his teeth, finding the drop of sweetness. She turned to see what had stopped him.
‘Ah,’ she said. What struck her, almost painfully, was the blue of the flower, which was exactly that of his eyes.
‘Children still do that, you know,’ she told him, thinking of her little lost visitors; but what she was looking at was the town-boy she saw standing up in him, all his roughness gone in the tender mouth and formal, angelic pose as the song poured out and her poor mother wept.
‘Do they?’ he said, feeling a little foolish. It had been an unconscious gesture. He had forgotten the drop of sweetness, or thought he had. Something in him had not.
Over the five weeks since his first visit they had settled on a favourite spot in the garden. It was here that she led him.
A balustraded terrace, much decayed and minus its urns, looked down beyond marble steps to a lawn. The left side of it was laid out as a chessboard, squares of black and white marble — the white veined with black, the black with white — of which some had tilted and others were split, with clumps of dark-leaved yellow-flowering clover in the cracks. Along one side was a bench, also of marble, in the shape of a sofa, with bolster-like arms, clawed feet, and in the panels a pair of plump-cheeked scowling cherubs. It was out of the sun but in sight of her hives, which stood in the lower garden beyond a row of scrubby apple trees and a giant mulberry.
‘Do you mind?’ he asked. But it was a formality; he did not wait for her permission, but removed his jacket and sat, heavy-shouldered and shaggy, in shirtsleeves and vest. His hands and forehead you saw, now that he looked so much like a workman, were scabbed from the sun.
After a moment she slipped her hand into the depths of her habit and found an apple, a Granny Smith.
He made a little gesture of surprise, as if the apple were special rather than the established opening it had become to their talk. ‘What a beauty!’ he said. He turned it in his loose-skinned hand, then raised it to his nose and sniffed.
She watched him take the penknife from his pocket, unclasp it, and very cleanly, cutting in towards the core, remove a crisp little green-skinned wedge, which he offered her on the end of the knife. When she shook her head, he slipped it into his mouth and very slowly chewed. She was conscious of the sunspots on his hands, the scabs; like her own, like her father’s — the wrong skin for this country.
The way of cutting an apple too was her father’s. It was to see it again and experience the tender pleasure it gave her, that she had, each time now after the first, brought an apple for him. It was his reaching up that first day in the orchard and plucking one of their hard little apples, and sitting himself down and cutting into it, that had, almost by chance, re-established the continuity in their lives, and created, with an immediacy they might not otherwise have managed, this intimacy between them.
They had seen little of one another over the years. His place in the House, then later as a Minister, meant he had always been in view, but only in a public way. It was her mother, and later Meg, who had passed on family news. Then, two years ago, when one of her contacts was threatened because of the war, she had, presuming on their closeness, written him a letter, asking if he could use his influence with the authorities who, as she put it, were being more than usually stupid. It did not occur to her that it might harm him.
Her contact was a Catholic priest in Jena, whose work touched on her own, but whose doctorate, the backing of his order, and a university laboratory to consult, meant he was better placed than she was to answer certain questions that had engaged her for nearly thirty years.
It seemed absurd, she wrote, that the business of nations (these were early days, before the full horror had come to them) should get in the way of work that had only to do with nature; which knew nothing, cared nothing either, for the little laws of men — even statesmen. There was, she assured him, no code involved in the information she and her priest were passing back and forth; or rather, there was a code, but they had not cracked it, and she doubted whether the Commonwealth censors would either, unless they happened to be bees. She had no reason to believe her priest (however patriotic he might be — she too was patriotic, up to a point) was any more dangerous as a German, and a Roman, than she was as an Australian and a mere woman and nun … All this in a hasty, rather untidy hand, and all of it evocative enough of what he had known of her over the years to make him smile at the bossiness, the mixture of appeal to his power and large-handed dismissal of its sphere.
He kept it by him and read it again, not much interested, frankly, in the problem, but to get the quality of her, which was so tart on the page, and which took him back to his boyish self, and her, and all that time of painful beginnings.