On the tram, when asked about her day, Lizzie said, ‘Alex needed to use the toilet but we couldn’t find one and then Julia knew where they were. I saw flowers in a glasshouse that grew in the Bible.’
‘They were ferns,’ said Susan.
‘Is that old?’ asked Alex.
Lizzie looked at him with concern. ‘Of course it is,’ she said.
The children were restless at bedtime. Julia wanted a light left on. Rose waited with them for tiredness to come, and was delighted by the sure and sudden way it did. Once asleep, they breathed like birds. Their bodies lifted, briefly, then fell back. As Rose returned to the living room, Susan said, ‘There’s so much dust in the air. How do you keep your skin cool? And so much noise in the street. I hope they’ll sleep.’
But the children slept long and evenly, their soft arms rigid over the sheets.
Rose and Susan sat by a window with one lamp on and the curtains open. They looked almost identical in this pliable light. Ships sounded out on the harbour and a buoy in the bay fell and fell in the tide. Susan composed lists in the lamplight: errands, letters to write, shopping to be done. One finger was bright with her wedding ring. Rose disliked the publicity of wedding rings. Or perhaps she was only irritated that Robert was out with his wife tonight, at a fancy-dress party to which Rose had also been invited. She would have gone as a dancer, with red circles on her cheeks and her hair curled around her face. At some point during the party Robert would have placed his hand on the small of her back, but he would have left with his wife. Usually, Rose was happy to go home alone to her bay, but there were times when her envy of Robert’s wife felt like a stone resting at the base of her spine, a reminder that she was wanted, but not singly, and not enough. She remembered feeling that way about Susan, once. Maybe even now. Rose seemed to have made a career of this doubleness, as if she always came in pairs. Jonathan had listed for her all the animals that do not mate for life. Chinchillas, he said. Bison. Deer, bears, sea lions. Elephants with their old memories. Waterfowl of various kinds. He said these names lying in bed beside her in that flat and pollinated town, in those new days after Lizzie was born, and Rose, who had already decided to leave for Sydney, loved this menagerie and was made impatient by it.
‘Many whales,’ he said, ‘don’t even mate for a season. Swans, beloved by the sentimental — that’s you, Rosie — don’t even necessarily mate for a season.’
Susan looked up from her list. ‘I hope you don’t disapprove of the way I indulge Lizzie. I mean with Julia,’ she said. ‘It’s all been so hard on her. But I thought the passage over, our time on the ship, would be a good chance to wean her off.’
Rose said, ‘Yes, I suppose it would.’ I know nothing, she thought, about the hearts of children.
Susan sat quietly for a moment. She was very pretty, still, and at thirty-five a widow. Then she said, looking out across the harbour, ‘Oh — America.’
* * *
The zoo rose out of the water on the north side of the harbour, a hillside of animals with Sydney’s best views. It pleased Rose to think that as she looked across the bay from her window there were giraffes looking back. A city with a harbour-side zoo was a happy city, in Rose’s estimation. It was a city playing a sweet joke upon itself.
To reach the zoo on Sunday they caught a ferry from Circular Quay, that busy square of water. The wharves hovered out upon the harbour, covered over, like Japanese pavilions. The day was warm and windless. The Coral Sea was already docked in the quay. The ship was a vast wall in the water, with small windows, and it seemed ridiculous that something of this size could remain afloat over the profound Pacific.
‘One of those windows will be yours,’ said Rose, kneeling beside Lizzie. ‘Isn’t that exciting?’
‘Which one?’ said Lizzie, turning her face up to her mother. ‘Which is our window?’
‘We’ll find out tomorrow,’ said Susan.
‘And that will be Julia’s window too,’ said Lizzie.
Susan kissed the top of Lizzie’s head. Then she said, ‘No, Julia will have her own window.’
‘Next to ours?’
‘Near ours,’ said Susan, ‘but not next to it.’
Alex pressed against his sister’s side. He said, ‘Will the boat go fast or slow?’
‘Very fast,’ said Lizzie.
‘Soon we’ll all be flying in planes to places like California,’ said Rose, and this seemed to disgust Lizzie; she turned away from the Coral Sea.
The zoo ferry, in comparison, was toy-small and overly bright. Alex ran toward it and had to be held back; he was thrilled and loud, as he had been about his navel. But Lizzie seemed sceptical. As they were walking across the narrow plank onto the boat, she gave a sudden cry, full of grief and fear, and people around them turned to look.
‘Are you frightened, Lizzie?’ said Rose. ‘Hold my hand. Don’t look down.’
Lizzie held her hand and took small steps across the plank, all the while looking down at the water, but once she had settled into a seat on the deck she no longer seemed afraid. As the ferry moved away from the quay, Alex complained of a ‘tummy feeling’, over which Susan fussed. Rose sat quietly beside quiet Lizzie, irritated as she always was by sick people, even children. Rose herself was never sick. But she helped Susan hold Alex against the railing as he threw up into the harbour, and she loved and pitied him, this small pale boy over all that water. They returned to their seats, where Lizzie waited tense and white. Rose and Susan bent their heads over the children as the ferry rocked.
The Sunday zoo was full of people, but Rose identified the dancers right away. There was a man she recognised with conspicuously red hair. She heard their accents and noted the surety and discipline with which they walked. Last night had been their final show and tomorrow they sailed on the Coral Sea; for now they were seeing the sights. They eddied about in same-sex groups, interacting with loud jokes and theatrical gestures. Passing aviaries on the zoo’s sloping streets, Rose saw half a dozen of them sitting among the tropical birds, coaxing them onto arms and shoulders with a trick of the posture that was, Rose knew, beyond her own shoulders, her own arms.
Rose couldn’t see Adelaide Turner with the dancers, but she hoped she might, later on. Perhaps they would meet beside the polar bear and talk together on the subject of his greenish fur and his obvious disgruntlement in the unlooked-for heat. Then, tomorrow after work, while the Coral Sea unloosed from the city and took Susan and Adelaide to America, Rose could tell Robert about it. Or she could not tell him, just as she pleased.
Rose followed Susan and the children to the aquarium, with its rocky grottoes and litter of Pacific shells. Afterward, they saw the Malayan bears and spider monkeys. A band played in the rotunda and children sat by a pond while a Sunday-school teacher read instructions from a piece of paper. There was a black rhinoceros calf, but Lizzie and Alex seemed annoyed by baby animals of any kind. Alex’s eyes remained on the ponderous mother and Lizzie drooped against the fence.
‘Is this the first time Julia’s seen a rhino?’ asked Rose.
Now Lizzie looked hard at the baby. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
Both children had begun the excursion with enthusiasm but were now almost shy. They stood on either side of the floral clock, following its fragrant moving hands; they remained silent on the little zoo train as it slid alongside emus and mountain goats. The very fact of mechanical movement seemed to have stunned them into noiselessness. It was as if their excitement for their trip to Sydney, and beyond to California, had all been worn out in the preparation for it; the actual journey was so large they couldn’t account for it. Susan appeared not to mind. Rose assumed her sister knew, from experience, that careful days of planned good cheer often turn out this way.