The Comfort of Figs (2008) Read online

  Something distracts O’Hara from his game. In the middistance the engineer Lawrence appears, accompanied by a girl.

  The engineer and the girl walk up the slope towards the park and the steelwork. Her presence softens the tall man in the suit.

  Her skin is white where she has pulled the sleeve of her school coat up her forearm. The hem of her skirt sways with her gait.

  She follows the engineer with a deliberate stride until together they stop at the escarpment on Bowen Terrace, their faces to the river and the bridge.

  O’Hara knows the girl is Lawrence’s daughter. They all do.

  They have seen her visit the engineer at the site over the years, sometimes by herself, sometimes with a younger sister. Coming over from her school at the close of day to meet the engineer and walk with him down to the ferry terminal at Customs House, going home together across the river. Over the years she has grown up before the men, almost without them being aware.

  The engineer’s daughter lingers beside her father as he stands like a statue looking out over his work. She knows better than to touch his elbow, or break the quiet. She too looks across the river, trying to follow whatever course her father’s steady gaze is taking. She sees river, and streets and roads and steelwork rising and boats like toys moving under the half-built steel bridge. She shrinks as she sees nothing more than this at the end of his gaze, knows she cannot penetrate his contemplation, though she feels the growing weight of duty upon her father.

  On the sketch pad in Stahl’s lap the girl and her father have begun to take shape in charcoal.

  O’Hara turns to him. ‘Charlie, why don’t we . . .’

  They get up and make for the two figures standing on the escarpment. The engineer and the girl have not moved for some minutes. They look like twin pillars on the cliff. O’Hara and Stahl slow down as they approach the man and his daughter, not ready to be seen.

  They watch the girl in her uniform standing still with her back to them in the hard light. A brimmed school hat is pulled down on her head, a ribbon of neck between hat and coat and her straight shoulders. A slight breeze moves across the ground, whispering off the cliff before disappearing into the fall. The breeze shushes itself against the girl’s back, pressing her coat and skirt firm against her legs. O’Hara and Stahl see the outline of her calves beneath the skirt for the first time.

  O’Hara wills her to turn around, and in time she does. The engineer first, but then, in what seems a synchronised movement, she is turning too. The wind slips under her coat-flap as she shifts, and blows the lapel open as if in slow-motion.

  With her left forearm she presses the lapel back to her breast and they watch her hands and fingers as she buttons the jacket.

  Then she is at her father’s shoulder again, stepping away from the cliff, walking, brisk, in their direction. Their paths must now cross. O’Hara’s heart quickens and his thinking grows suddenly tangled by imagined conversations with the engineer, and the shape of the girl walking at the engineer’s side. Before he has settled on something to say, the father and daughter are onto them and O’Hara knows he must speak, but there is nothing and instead it is the engineer’s voice he hears.

  ‘Perhaps tomorrow will be our day, Mr O’Hara, Mr Stahl.

  Let us hope tomorrow will be our day.’

  Stahl and O’Hara nod as the engineer and his daughter pass by, and as they follow the departing figures both young men’s eyes fix on the girl, and find her looking over her shoulder back at them too.

  Chapter Eight

  It seems to Evelyn Lawrence that her life is fixed on the bridge. She is seventeen. She has been in Brisbane four years. Four years since she completed the long journey from Montreal: the train across Canada to Vancouver, the ship across the Pacific to Sydney, the final leg by steamer from Sydney to Brisbane, the bay and the river narrowing as they neared Petrie Bight where she disembarked. She and her father arriving ahead of her mother and sister. Being the elder daughter, she was the one chosen to accompany her father on the voyage to Australia, the one who would help him settle in and prepare a house for the rest of the family. They began with a rented house in the odd-sounding suburb of Coorparoo, then when the others arrived, a grander home at Kangaroo Point, closer to her father’s work, more suitable for entertaining in the evenings.

  Evelyn has watched the bridge grow day by day from her school perched on the high bank of the river. Each lunchtime she comes out onto the terrace, a viewing point protected within the walls of the old school. She observes the men and machines moving about on either side of the river and on the steelwork between. When she first began to watch, all she saw was movement.

  Human bodies arriving or leaving or waiting. Random movement of shapes that were not people, not men to her, but merely figures – scaled-down versions of the dolls she played with as a child. She saw nothing that was not moving, not a blur.

  In her watching it was always the figure of her father she sought, high up on the bridge deck in front of her. He was easily distinguishable up there on the bridge. Tall and lean and carrying his light maple-wood cane. It was not until one of her new classmates asked, that she realised her father didn’t actually need the cane. Had no limp.

  He’d been to war, she knew. She had seen the citation for his Military Cross: For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty while repairing a track. He succeeded in maintaining practically uninterrupted communications though the track was broken in nine places and the shelling was very heavy. Her tall strong father was once a Captain in a war, though as far as she knew, he’d come back unscathed.

  In the days when she first arrived at the school, if she did not find him out there on the bridge at lunchtime when she looked, she would return to class with panic stirring in her stomach. In those early days she retreated into herself, was even further away from her classmates than usual.

  * * *

  At first she was a thing of interest to the other girls, a thing to be wondered at and talked about. She was tall like her father, and her skin was pale. When she first arrived she wore hats they saw in magazines like The New Yorker, which they read in the drawing rooms of the wealthier parents. With the school years between Montreal and Brisbane out of kilter, she was six months older than most of them, six months more mature. Or six months more sophisticated, something her classmates felt but could never admit. Her accented way of saying things, and the sure rhythm of her speaking, added to her allure.

  As did the distance she kept from them. At first it was a polite distance, or a homesickness, or so they thought as they competed with each other for her attention. But as each of her would-be best-friend suitors fell away, as she failed to share gossip about the bridge, as the distance she claimed from them remained, she was allowed her place apart. Allowed her ritual of going out onto the school terrace alone each lunchtime to stare at the bridge.

  She would usually catch sight of him. An erect figure with a long stride, appearing and disappearing behind fretwork. Or a man in a suit standing motionless before a group of attentive workers.

  As the early months passed she began to lose the sheer physicality of her disappointment if she could not pick him out among the other men on the bridge. Finally, when it was a year, and then a second year, and she continued to grow and to settle, each day’s lunchtime searching for him had become habit rather than need.

  Increasingly she saw shape and detail in what had once only been movement. The crane standing further along the gantry, its head pointing north or south or east or west depending on the wind. Motor lorries parked where they hadn’t been the previous day. New girders added. A growth in the scaffolding, extra trusses. Fewer – or greater – numbers of men on the scaffolding.

  Men other than her father.

  Yet time passed too slowly, the bridge marking her days girder by girder, her life measured in the gradual years of the bridge’s growth. In the face of her father’s unfaltering attention to the lengthening steel span, there are moments when she f
eels captive to it. Some days, standing on the terrace, the bridge arcing vastly across her vision, she resists it, tips her head and loses herself in the wide sky above.

  Chapter Nine

  Time passes slowly. They enter a second day of waiting, their instructions clear: when the conditions are right, we will send a taxi to pick you up. Early. Don’t come in until then.

  Many of them go in anyway. To see it, to be near it. After working on it for so long, it is impossible to stay away now. The bridge is a magnet.

  Beside the bridge is the school, a citadel or a prison. Irish likens it to Alcatraz. And he tells the men about the jail on the island in the harbour at ’Frisco, which they looked down on as they built the Golden Gate. Here, he says, it is the jail that looks across at you from the top of the escarpment.

  It reminds Stahl of other things. Of family legends. The scenes his father described of his blood country, the country his father had left. Medieval Rhineland castles. Castle upon castle perched on outcrops of high land looking over the trade-route which was the river Rhine. He knows them by name, like stops on a train line. Schloss Rheinfels, Schloss Schonburg, Gutenfels, Pfalzgrafstein, Stahlbeck, Reichenstein, Rheinstein. The country of his father’s youth, river country which his father left for the ports in the north and, later, the long passage to Australia. One day you will see them for yourself, his father tells him, time and again, shaping Stahl’s river-memory.

  From family legend comes also myth. At a bend in the river, a bend like Petrie Bight though broader and wider in its sweep, sits the Lorelei. It’s the sacred bend of the fable of the mermaid and her seductions. On the banks of the Rhine a young mermaid sings, her beautiful voice drawing lonely sailors to their doom on rocks submerged in the river.

  Stahl sometimes looks across the airy chasm, at the school, and feels the pull of mermaids.

  The afternoon lesson bell rings. Girls leap up and stand by their desks, waiting for permission to leave. Only when there is absolute silence, only when they are all utterly still, their final prayer said, does the nun nod. The girls swirl out of the room, and past Sister who stands like an iron sentinel beside the door.

  Girls disgorge from classrooms into the courtyard. Those who are not boarders make for the convent gates. There is this daily excitement, and relief, though it is muted by the nuns stationed on balconies, in doorways, behind windows. God might be watching, but the nuns definitely are.

  Evelyn and her sister Meg walk down the steep driveway towards the arched wrought-iron gate and the public street outside. They are part of a stream. At the street, the current of students parts and the schoolgirls swing either left towards the city or right into the Valley. Evelyn and Meg turn towards the Valley, following the school’s high convict-built perimeter wall, as it runs towards the Fortitude Valley shops before turning, a sandstone curve, back up the hill towards the cliff-top and the bridge-site where they will meet their father.

  Stahl sketches. He draws the lines of the school building with its turrets, and its austere rows of windows, losing himself in the building’s perfect angles and perspectives.

  Then he hears the school bell in the distance, chiming the end of classes.

  ‘Come on,’ O’Hara says, rising.

  Across the road from the school is the vacant block of land set aside for the largest ‘new’ Cathedral in all of Christendom.

  Its foundations have been marked out, a below-ground crypt completed, and a fine low sandstone wall teases at the ambitious Cathedral planned for the site. But construction has paused. The Cathedral’s completion must now wait until the Archbishop’s funds are replenished, following his unsuccessful speculation on the discovery of vast and profitable oilfields at Roma on the Downs country to the west. Roma, Rome, the Holy See. There were good portents in the name, but the venture was a failure.

  Still this remains the Catholic end of town, land where the Catholic businesses took root. And O’Hara is at ease here, feels it is his part of town more than it is Stahl’s. Not that he’s ever asked – it barely matters. He’s just assumed Stahl is Lutheran, like the other Germans he knows. And that therefore O’Hara has some title to this part of the city – no matter how vague – that Stahl does not.

  It was not always like this. The first whites in Fortitude Valley were passengers from the Fortitude, free men and women, Scots mainly, lured to Australia by a puritan pastor and his promise of land. Pastor Lang was not just an advocate of migration, he was an advocate of Presbyterian migration, the only hope for a morally debauched colony, brimming as it was with Catholics of convict stock. The promise, however, went sour. There were no land grants. The two hundred and fifty-three from the Fortitude were cast ashore at Moreton Bay in 1849 to settle in the shallow valley to the north of the colony, the valley running down from the river cliffs, and from the hills named for Bowen, a governor.

  The Catholics came later, at the turn of the century, when the river rose up and they were forced to flee their south-side homes and businesses. The floods arrived in 1893, and again in 1897, wiping out their South Brisbane shops. Always in exile, always seeking refuge, this time from the river, the Catholic businesses moved into the Valley. Retail stores with names like T.C. Beirne, and Barry & Roberts.

  So the Valley is the Catholic business district, but it is the Protestants who run the City. In the early years of the 1930s, when all the talk was of a second bridge across the river, it was the City business lobby that won out. The Grey Street Bridge was erected from South Brisbane to the city centre near Roma Street, a boon to City trade. This new bridge, however, the expansive one where Evelyn’s father strides, will serve the Irish Catholic businesses rather than the Protestants, by directing more traffic and more custom their way. From the south side into the Valley, bypassing the City, the bridge offers Catholic prosperity.

  Nevertheless, from the girls’ convent school, fortress-like behind its high walls on the hill between the Valley and the City, at eye-level with the bridge, the nuns look down upon the Valley and its commerce in some faintly reproving way. This generation of girls, Evelyn’s brood, remains unprotected by a great cathedral beside their school grounds.

  Evelyn and her sister skirt the Valley, and walk down to the cross-river ferry terminal near Customs House, also sandstone, and copper-domed. A ferry is docking as they reach the jetty.

  A small group of girls boards the boat for the Holman Street terminal, their school shoes clattering up the plank before dropping into the boat itself, Evelyn and her sister among them.

  ‘My feet hurt,’ Meg says as she sits on a wooden bench in the hollow of the ferry.

  ‘Take your shoes off for a minute then,’ Evelyn says and Meg bends over to undo her laces and free her feet. There is the noise of the narrow gangway being drawn, and the gate closed.

  The engine sound deepens and the ferry pulls away from the jetty and into the stream.

  Evelyn leaves Meg and makes her way to the front of the ferry where she can feel the wind against her face, and watches the other bank approach. Then she closes her eyes.

  ‘Hello.’

  The male voice startles her. She catches her breath and turns.

  A thrill follows the moment of panic.

  ‘Hello,’ she replies. It’s the two men from yesterday, closer now. Perhaps only a little older than her, but men, from a world beyond uniforms and bells. The one who had spoken – taller and darker, more muscular across his shoulders – smiles at her, broad and confident. The other man is the more handsome: sandy haired, blue eyes, skin soft despite the workman’s tan. He stands half a step back, almost behind his friend. He is smiling too, but to Evelyn, in this shortest of first moments, his eyes rest a little more gently.

  ‘School over?’ O’Hara asks.

  ‘Just the homework now,’ she says. She laughs out over the railing, but feels disappointed too. That he asked about school, that she replied with homework.

  ‘So you can’t escape, hey?’ O’Hara grins. ‘They won’t let yo
u go.’

  ‘It’s not too bad.’ She feels light-headed. The breeze off the river rustles the locks of hair around her temples, loosens her uniform.

  ‘When do you get to have some fun?’ O’Hara asks.

  She looks out over the water at the approaching riverbank.

  ‘What’s it like?’ she says abruptly, turning the conversation.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Working on the bridge.’

  ‘From the top you get the best view in town, for a start,’

  O’Hara says.

  ‘You can see for miles,’ Stahl joins in. ‘The mouth of the river and the Bay. The range on the New South Wales border, out to Ipswich, up to the Glass House Mountains.’

  ‘It sounds magical.’

  ‘Yes.’ Stahl smiles at her.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ and for a moment she wishes she could join them, high on the steelwork of the bridge, all giddy excitement and danger.

  ‘And that’s just for starters,’ O’Hara says. ‘From up there, you’re so high you can see people moving around below you.’

  Evelyn raises her eyebrows, inviting him to continue.

  ‘People doing things. Women in their backyards. Kids in the street.’ O’Hara pauses and winks. ‘Girls going to school.’

  ‘Well you are lucky, then,’ she says, hoping she sounds calm, fearing it is too forward, or worse, pathetic.

  ‘Girls catching ferries,’ he continues, ‘girls talking to handsome men . . .’

  They all laugh.

  The ferry bumps against the Holman Street jetty and the pilot puts the boat into slow reverse, manoeuvring it alongside the wharf. The deckhand tightens the rope which he has looped over the iron cleat, pulling the ferry firm against the timber landing.

  Evelyn returns to the bench where Meg has put her shoes back on and is retying her laces. O’Hara and Stahl remain on the front deck. Evelyn wonders if they will get off here too, or did they just come for the ferry ride? The passenger gate slides across and people pass through it onto the gangway, the hollow sound of footsteps on timber suspended over air. Meg stands.