To the Sea Page 9

Eva

  WHEN THEY WERE LITTLE EVA’S OLDEST FOUR CHILDREN HAD MEASURED how close they were getting to Rosetta on the trip from town by the names of all the coloured houses along Pelagus Road: Tis Ours, After Ours, All Ours, Ours Not Yours, Ours and Days, Ours of Fun, Ours Forever.

  There was no sign on the front fence of Rosetta. Rosetta already had a name.

  The little named houses alternated in pastel shades of blue, pink, green and yellow with the occasional mauve and apricot thrown in to enrich the palette. No two of the same colour were next to each other and each had a colourful painted picture that somehow went with the house name. Eva couldn’t see the connections between the pictures and the house names but the children had a story for each of the signs they passed. Their stories always finished with all four children chanting together ‘and that’s how the house got its name’.

  One cold Friday night as they were driving down to Rosetta for the long weekend, Sadie, squashed between the others in the back seat of the old Rover, told the story of Rosetta. It was a garbled tale of selchies and finmen and a hero who saved all the children living at Rosetta from a storm at sea and brought them home safe to their worried parents. He sometimes called the children to him and they would go to sea with him, keen for adventures that only he could take them on.

  Eva didn’t remember the words she had said to Sadie to silence her but they had made Sadie cry and the other children had sulked even as they comforted their big sister.

  Hearing her eldest daughter tell the ridiculous story killed a hope Eva had carried with her for her whole life. The most important thing about her, and all her forebears all the way back to South Mayo, was to disappear with her. Like Chingachgook standing on the mountain with Hawkeye. She looked out from the Rover onto the pale sandy road lit up only by their headlights and the moon. No one would remember her people. She was the last and there was no one left in the world to tell her story to.

  Eva knew that it was some fault of hers and not of John’s. She didn’t know if it was possible to marry the wrong man. A man so wrong that she could not conceive the right child.

  She had chosen John just as he had chosen her. If he was the wrong man, Eva didn’t know what she could have done differently or how she could have known. Getha and Branna had married the men they loved. Ornice had loved. If there was something else that determined these things, like so much else, Eva was unaware of it. And it was too late to do anything about it now even if she could.

  On that long ago Friday night, after the children were all asleep, John was angry. He had spoken harshly, telling Eva that she had been cruel to speak to Sadie as she had. Their daughter had told a magical story to her little brother and sisters about Rosetta, which they had all been captivated by. Eva had been cruel to turn on her and deride her. Sadie was a child, he said, a wonderful little girl trying as hard as she could to find her mother’s love. John couldn’t love them all enough to make up for what they wanted from Eva.

  Eva had not protested, but John was wrong. She loved Sadie. She loved all her children. But they were not the children she had expected. Her love for them was an unfamiliar thing. She had to be on her guard with them. Not speak to them in her own language, not tell them the stories she wanted to tell, not teach them all the lessons, the only lessons, she knew.

  Eva had hoped Sadie would be the one. Cecile and Edith Margaret were not. That had been clear to Eva from their first breaths. And Carl never could be. But Sadie was her first child. Eva hadn’t known what to look for. And she had no mother or grandmother there to help her. She had taken Sadie into her confidence and told her their history. And Sadie had betrayed her trust. She had turned it into a silly story, a fantasy that was nothing more than a mockery of the truth. Eva had so very nearly wept when the other children had laughed.

  On that unhappy night of harsh words, John had gone to bed, leaving Eva alone downstairs at her grandfather’s desk. She sat there for hours.

  Sometime in the late night, Eva felt the slack water out in the ocean beyond the dunes. The tidal current had stopped. Silence and stillness descended as the ocean stopped for the turning. Soon the moon would commence its journey back to this side of the earth, the tide would turn and the ocean would come to life. Eva’s blood would begin to flow in her veins again. The waters of the world would flow. But in the silence of this moment, Eva could hear what was so often muffled by the swirling movement of the universe.

  She left the sleeping house and waded out into the cold black water of Driving Sound. She walked until she was fully submerged. Underwater, she could feel the universe’s clockwork crank over. The slack water had passed. She followed the motion of the tidal current. She disappeared into the moonlight and the dark ocean. She left behind John’s hard words and the children who were hers but who she barely knew.

  She went home.

  John

  JOHN HAD MET EVA HARDING WHEN HE WAS DOING A LOCUM FOR A colleague at St Helen’s private hospital. It was a psych locum and John had initially been reluctant to take it on but Peter had needed to go to Melbourne to be with his dying mother and inept father and so John had done a quick brush up on his psych training and told Peter to go for as long as he needed.

  Working at the psych hospital was more interesting than John had imagined and after a couple of weeks he wondered whether he had it in him to go back to university and do the additional training to become a psychiatrist. He’d had a few offers from local practices to join them as a GP, mostly from old friends of his father, but that was the dull end of medicine and John had delayed making any decisions. He’d enjoyed working in Emergency at the Royal Hobart Hospital for the past couple of years but didn’t want to spend the next forty years splicing together accident victims and working the demanding hours Emergency required.

  Late one afternoon at St Helen’s, an elderly man approached John in the corridor.

  ‘Are you Dr Kennett?’ he asked. The man had a soft accent. Scottish or Irish. He was taller than John, thin and had thick white hair, a short white beard and a weary lined face.

  ‘I am. Can I help you?’

  ‘I hope so,’ the man replied. ‘I’m Tom Maguire. I understand you are the doctor currently treating my daughter, Branna Harding?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  John recognised the patient’s name. Branna Harding was experiencing acute depression and had been receiving electroconvulsive treatment for two weeks before John arrived.

  The two men stepped into an alcove off the main corridor to continue their conversation. Tom told John a brief medical history of his daughter. She had suffered from depressive bouts most of her life since adolescence but she had suffered more frequent and longer bouts since the death of her husband twelve years earlier. She had more recently begun lapsing into long psychotic episodes. Tom was looking for any advice he could get on what best to do for his daughter.

  As he listened, John recognised the soft lilt of Tom’s Irish accent. It was nothing like the hard growl of the Scots.

  John was hesitant to say too much. Branna Harding was a tragic case. She had been receiving psychiatric treatment for a range of mental illnesses since she was twenty. Regular shock treatment seemed to get her back on the rails for periods of time but the gaps between those periods were getting shorter and she had spent eight of the past twelve months in hospital. She had attempted suicide on at least three occasions that John could remember from reading her file and he had not yet been able to meaningfully connect with her. Peter thought she was incurable and that she would benefit from institutional care as would her worn-out father. She was lost to her melancholy, her delusions and her desire for death.

  John’s heart went out to the father. Hope was a cruel gift in this case but maybe peace of mind or acceptance were possible. John resolved to do what he could for the man.

  They walked back down the cold green-linoed corridor to Branna’s room so John could refer to her file before he said any more to Tom Maguire. John entered the room to
find a young girl in the drab Scottish garb of Fahan school sitting in the armchair beside his patient’s bed. The girl was leaning back in the armchair with her eyes closed. She was talking and holding the older woman’s pale hand in her own small strong one. The girl’s voice was quiet and soothing. John stopped so as not to disturb her. Even though he could not understand the words she was speaking, John recognised the cadence of a storyteller.

  The girl stopped and looked up at John. He didn’t need to be told that she was Branna’s daughter. She had the same wide-set slanted eyes and full lips. But in the daughter, there was an animation long lost to the faded mother. The girl had pale flawless skin and even now, in the middle of a bleak Hobart winter, John could see a few faint freckles leftover from summer. She had the blondest hair John had ever seen. It was tied back in loose braids with long strands falling down the sides of her otherworldly face. She looked at John. Her blue-eyed stare caught him off guard and he felt himself blushing. He was transfixed by a teenage schoolgirl.

  ‘This is my granddaughter, Eva,’ said Tom Maguire. ‘Branna’s daughter.’

  ‘How do you do,’ said John, not looking at the girl. He reached for the file on the side table and stood with his back to her.

  John continued talking to Tom Maguire for a long while. He tried to answer all his questions and make suggestions as to the best possible treatments for Branna. But all the time he was talking, John could feel the girl, Eva, behind him. He had to exert a huge effort not to turn around just to look at her. He strained to hear any faint movement she might make. But she did not stir and but for her silent presence filling the room behind him, she might not have been there.

  When he and Tom had finished their conversation, John hung the file back on the bedside locker. In his peripheral vision he could see the girl was still leaning back in the armchair holding her mother’s hand.

  ‘Come on, Eva girl,’ said Tom sadly. ‘We must be getting home for dinner. And you will have homework.’

  John watched the girl stand. She put her blazer on, leaned over her sleeping mother and kissed her softly on the cheek. She said some words quietly into the side of Branna’s face but John could not make them out. The girl was slim and not especially tall in her long tartan kilt and brown blazer. She put her beret on her head, wrapped a dark green hand-knitted scarf around her neck and took her grandfather’s outstretched hand. She did not look at John or say anything to him. Grandfather and granddaughter walked out of the room and out of sight.

  John stood stranded in the room with his sleeping patient. A light prickling heat rippled beneath his skin. His heart was thudding. This was new. He set off down the corridor in the opposite direction from Tom Maguire and his bewitching granddaughter.

  That stint at St Helen’s changed John’s life. He found himself waiting for Tom Maguire and his granddaughter to visit Branna. He learned from the matron that Tom’s wife had died several years earlier and that he was Eva’s only family in Australia. They lived in Sandy Bay and Tom was a retired lawyer. Outside of the small closed world of St Helen’s, there was no way these people’s paths would cross naturally with John’s. He began to worry that once Branna got well or Peter came back from Melbourne, which surely must be any day, he would never see Eva again. In the weeks since he had first met her, he had said not more than a few words to her and he couldn’t remember her speaking to him at all. And yet she was always in his thoughts.

  One afternoon, while Tom and Eva were visiting, Branna was the most hysterical and violent John had ever seen her. Crazed eyes, flailing in her bed and screaming abuse. He could only assume it was abuse. She was yelling in an unfamiliar language and she spat each word at anyone who entered her room.

  John had left Tom in Branna’s room, standing at the end of the bed looking on in despair, and gone to the nurses’ station to prepare a sedation. He filled a syringe with phenobarbital and laid it in the kidney dish. It was a big dose for such a frail woman but she was in need of something to knock her out. He signed the drug book and asked the nurse to take it to Branna’s room and wait there for him.

  ‘Has anyone said anything to Mrs Harding’s daughter about what’s happening?’ he asked the three nurses.

  ‘No,’ said Matron. ‘I put her in the waiting room and told her to wait there. She’s just a young girl. She shouldn’t have to see such things. Not her own mother. It’s not right.’

  ‘I feel sorry for her,’ said the youngest nurse whose name John couldn’t remember, ‘even though she doesn’t need my sympathy.’

  ‘Pardon?’ said John.

  ‘Mrs Harding’s daughter,’ the young nurse said. ‘She’s a knockout. Looks like a movie star. Like Marilyn Monroe or Elke Sommer. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed, Dr Kennett. All the interns are in love with her.’

  ‘I’ll let her know what’s going on, Matron,’ interrupted John. ‘If you are all so concerned about her, perhaps one of you could organise a cup of tea for her. And maybe a kind word.’

  John walked down the corridor to the waiting room. Eva was sitting in one of the uncomfortable metal chairs. She wasn’t reading a magazine or a book. Her school bag was under her feet and she was sitting motionless with her eyes closed. She opened her eyes when John entered the room.

  ‘Hello, Eva.’ He didn’t know what else to say to her.

  She didn’t answer. John felt himself withering under her gaze.

  ‘I just came to let you know that I’m going to be with your mother for a while. It would be best if you didn’t see her today. She’s not well and it might distress you.’

  He sounded like a fool. This girl had seen the worst. She’d been with her grandfather when Branna had been admitted after two suicide attempts. Peter told him that Eva had come in once with her mother in the ambulance and that Eva had blood all over her dress and thickly through her hair. He had to get a nurse to shower her and put her in clean clothes. Eva knew exactly what was going on. She ignored John. John felt she was right to do so.

  ‘Would you like to see your mother?’

  She nodded with the slightest incline of her head.

  ‘OK. A nurse will be here soon with a cup of tea for you. Drink that, and then you can come and see your mother.’

  He smiled his most reassuring doctor’s smile for her.

  He should have left her in peace but he stood looking at her. This was why he had come. Just so he could look at her without her grandfather being present. Eva looked up at him but did not speak or smile. Eventually, John tore himself away and walked down to Branna’s room. He was ashamed of his behaviour. She was a young girl, the desperately sad daughter of one of his patients, and he had just preyed on her for his own pleasure. He was no better than the randy young interns. He was worse. He was a man. He was her mother’s doctor. A man she should be able to trust.

  He stopped in the middle of the corridor and looked out the window onto Macquarie Street and the early evening traffic. He was right to be ashamed but he knew his shame was superficial. He liked the overwhelming sensations Eva Harding aroused in him and here he was still trying to keep them hot and alive, not dispel them as he knew he should.

  ‘Doctor.’ It was Matron come to find him.

  ‘Coming.’

  That night, John dreamed of Eva and woke to the erotic warmth of such dreams. It troubled him to remember her in her dowdy school uniform with her plaits and ink smudges on her fingers. And so he did not hold that vision. His dream Eva was the Eva he wanted and the Eva he could not put out of his mind.

  During the day, his mind replayed her every move: the slight tilt of her head, the slow rhythm of her walk, her gentle touch with her mother and her exquisite low quiet voice which he often overheard but could never quite catch as he entered Branna’s room. Her remembered gaze filled him with discomfort. She also had a distinctive fresh scent which reminded him of the sea. Not salty exactly, more the faint briny sting of a sea wind blowing across a cold day. He would sometimes stand in Branna’s room after
Eva had left, breathing in the last faint traces of her. Her extraordinary beauty and ethereal presence dazed him.

  Branna slowly got better over the last weeks of winter and John always made himself available when Tom and Eva visited. He realised that Eva was not as young as he had first feared. She was in form six and so probably eighteen. It was still way too young for him. She was at school, for heaven’s sake, and he knew that it could only ever be an unrequited fascination.

  One Saturday afternoon, Eva came to visit her mother alone. John had gone to Branna’s room on the pretence of checking her medication schedule but really to see Eva out of school uniform for the first time and without her grandfather present. He wanted to look at her. He told himself that he was hoping to see a gawky child that would dispel the thoughts he had been having. Maybe the school uniform had created some forbidden cliché which John could finally dismiss when he saw her for the girl she was.

  She was wearing a long-sleeved grey dress with a narrow black belt. She had black patent leather heels on and sheer stockings with a straight black seam running up the backs of her shapely legs. She was standing by her mother’s bed with her back to the door. John stood and watched her before stepping back into the corridor. He did not know what to say to her. He was sixteen years old and clueless again.

  When he finally walked back into the room, Eva was sitting on the bed and John could see the faint outline of her suspenders and the tops of her stockings through the fine woollen fabric of her dress, which was stretched over her crossed legs. She wasn’t wearing the usual girdle and layers of elasticised underwear all the women John knew locked themselves into. She stood up when she heard him behind her. She had a thin black headband in her loose hair which fell almost to her waist in blonde waves. Her face shone even though she wore no makeup. That young nurse was right. Eva looked like a Hollywood siren but with a young girl’s naturalness.

  Branna Harding was discharged the following Monday and a week later Peter returned from Melbourne and John was back in Emergency at the Royal. He got on with his work and went out on a few dates with a couple of nurses he knew but he was living a new and strange life. Eva invaded his daytime thoughts and, on the best nights, slept with him in his dreams. As the months passed, he began planning how he could meet her. She would have finished school by now. He knew her address and phone number from Branna’s file. He had written them down for the day when he could no longer stay away.