A Hundred Small Lessons Read online

  Ashley Hay’s work includes fiction, narrative non-fiction, journalism, essays and reviews. Her novels have been long-listed for awards including the Miles Franklin and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and shortlisted for categories in the WA Premier’s Prize, the NSW Premier’s Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, as well as the Nita B. Kibble Award.

  Her second novel, The Railwayman’s Wife, was awarded the Colin Roderick Award by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, and also won the People’s Choice at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. It was also published in the UK, the US and in translation.

  A former literary editor of The Bulletin, she contributes to journals including The Monthly and Griffith Review. Her work has won awards in Australia, the UK and the US, and has been anthologised in collections including Best Australian Essays, Best Australian Science Writing, and Best Australian Short Stories.

  She was editor of Best Australian Science Writing 2014 and was awarded the 2015 Dahl Trust/ABR Fellowship, for which essay she won the 2016 Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing.

  She lives in Brisbane.

  By the same author

  The Body in the Clouds

  The Railwayman’s Wife

  Narrative non-fiction

  The Secret: The Strange Marriage of Annabella Milbanke

  and Lord Byron

  Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions

  With photographer Robyn Stacey

  Herbarium

  Museum: The Macleays, Their Collections, and the Search

  for Order

  As editor

  Best Australian Science Writing 2014

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright material. If you have any information concerning copyright material in this book please contact the publishers at the address below.

  First published in 2017

  Copyright © Ashley Hay 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone:(61 2) 8425 0100

  Email:[email protected]

  Web:www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781760293208

  eISBN 9781925576665

  Internal design by Emily O’Neill

  Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Cover design: Emily O'Neill

  Cover photography: © Reilika Landen; © Paul Moore/Arcangel Images; Shutterstock

  Praise for The Railwayman’s Wife

  ‘Exquisitely written and deeply felt, The Railwayman’s Wife is limpid and deep as the rock pools on the coastline beloved by this book’s characters and just as teeming with vibrant life. Ashley Hay’s novel of love and pain is a true book of wonders.’

  —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Secret Chord

  ‘The Railwayman’s Wife is a fine evocation of place and time—a vivid love letter to a particular corner of post-war Australia. Ashley Hay writes with subtle insight about grief and loss and the heart’s voyage through and beyond them. It’s a lovely, absorbing, and uplifting read.’

  —M. L. Stedman, author of The Light Between Oceans

  ‘This story is a study in emotion: grief, hope, love, redemption, and yearning. The prose is so elegant that it seems to glide.’

  —Historical Novel Society

  ‘The Railwayman’s Wife is a beautifully attentive study of what comes after—after a funeral, after a war—and Ashley Hay is a wise and gracious guide through this fascinating territory. This is a book in which grief and love are so entwined they make a new and wonderful kind of sense.’

  —Fiona McFarlane, author of The Night Guest

  ‘Significant moments are described with astoundingly solid writing, and the coastal setting is beautifully depicted. Previously released to critical acclaim in Australia in 2013 and a 2014 winner of the Colin Roderick Prize in the UK, this second novel from Hay is the kind of slow, ruminative, evocative story that will appeal to devotees of literary fiction.’

  —Library Journal

  ‘A tender portrait of a marriage and the poetry and grief it contains. A beautiful, dreamy, melancholy book.’

  —Gail Jones, author of Five Bells

  ‘Ashley Hay’s beautiful romance of grief and love set in the escarpment landscape that once enchanted D.H. Lawrence will come to speak for the south coast in the same way that Delia Falconer’s The Service of Clouds speaks for the Blue Mountains. Everything about this novel—sudden loss, unexpected love, misdirected hope and desire, as well as the mysterious power of the written word and the candescence of the coastal landscape itself—is expressed with a profound understanding of every nuance of emotion. An extended meditation on “the limitless surprise of being here”, to quote from the poem that is central to the story, The Railwayman’s Wife illuminates the deepest places of the human heart.’

  —Debra Adelaide, author of Letter to George Clooney

  ‘. . . in this poignant rumination on life, death, memory, dreaming, and the anxious spaces in between, it’s hard to find fault with a single one of Hay’s words, which speak to and provoke our deepest desires for literature to transform and heal us . . . Hay makes us acutely aware of our place as readers, appealing to our need to believe in and empathise with others, both real and imagined, while reminding us of our terrible powerlessness to alter history, no matter how much we may long for alternate endings. As Ani, Frank and Roy try to make peace with the edges of their stories, Hay throws the healing power of words to the wind. Ultimately, we are left to find within its beginnings and endings our own sense of meaning, acceptance and hope, and to lose ourselves within its tender melancholic beauty.’

  —Meredith Lewin, The Sunday Age

  ‘. . . a heart-crunching novel about reading and writing, dreaming and hoping, loving and taking flight. It’s been a while since I felt so deeply affected by a novel and I will be very surprised if this book is not an award winner.’

  —Paula Grunseit, Australian Bookseller and Publisher

  ‘This gentle and contemplative book is more like an extended poem than a novel. It’s an elegiac story to be read quietly for its exploration of loss and hearts seeking consolation.’

  —Good Reading

  ‘Hay is a gifted and insightful writer; her prose is elegant and she has an eye for the telling detail. Most important, she understands people and the secret battles her characters face.’

  —Adelaide Advertiser

  ‘. . . a melancholy love story, unfolding at its own steady pace, engrossing us in the lives and losses of its principals . . . Hay manages the emotional weather of the novel with equability, compassion and intelligence . . . another recent fictional return to the just-out-of-reach Australia of the 1930s and ’40s. Hay’s venture
there is wishful, astringent and rewarding.’

  —Peter Pierce, The Canberra Times

  ‘. . . a beautifully rendered and psychologically acute picture of Ani Lachlan’s widowhood . . . Outwardly, there is no exorbitance to Ani’s grieving. Only the reader is privy to the chaos of her emotions, the perverse and magical thinking she privately indulges . . . Hay handles the delicate progress of Ani’s return to the world with sympathy and toughness; she is an author in whom intellectual scope and empathetic imagination are not separate activities but two sides of the same coin. If her first novel, The Body in the Clouds, was a book in which ideas were predominant, this work is unashamedly concerned with the movements of the heart. Another author, Ford Madox Ford, began his The Good Soldier by claiming, “This is the saddest story.” It isn’t. That title rightly belongs to The Railwayman’s Wife.’

  —Geordie Williamson, The Australian

  ‘One of the strange contradictions of fiction is that immense beauty can often be found in writing about grief and loss. The things we often choose to look away from or avoid in everyday life can, in the hands of a novelist like Ashley Hay, become rich terrain. The key to the novel is the notion that it is only through narrative that we can understand ourselves at a personal level and that, through this process, can we come to terms with the world. This is the uplifting message that surges through The Railwayman’s Wife and out of the experience of loss. It shows us that not all stories about grief are desolate, that somehow, in finding a way to travel through these difficult emotions, people are capable of great things. This sense of hope is conveyed in one of the novel’s concluding sentences, aptly reminiscent of Hemingway: “Somewhere in the world, the sun is always rising.”’

  —Gretchen Schirm, Sydney Review of Books

  ‘An extraordinary light falls on every page of this tender and gripping story. The lives of a widow and a war poet, mending and dreaming in a tiny coastal village, reveal movingly a wider world of catastrophe, violence and beauty.’

  —Belinda Castles, author of Hannah and Emil

  For Nigel Beebe, and for Hux

  Contents

  1 Elsie’s house

  2 The clock

  3 The pendulum

  4 The wedding

  5 The call

  6 The sitting

  7 The family

  8 The photographs

  9 The crow

  10 The river

  11 The intruder

  12 The astronaut

  13 The portrait

  14 The flood

  15 The doilies

  16 The kiss

  17 The little blue bird

  18 The photograph

  19 The flowers

  20 The function

  21 The visit

  22 The princess

  23 The curlews

  24 The candle

  25 The planetarium

  26 The time lapse

  27 Lucy’s house

  Acknowledgements

  . . . the people we were

  who said

  or omitted to say

  the appropriate words . . .

  The shapes we mistake

  for love . . .

  the shapes we mistake

  for ourselves

  at the edge of the water.

  John Burnside ‘III De libero arbitrio’

  1

  Elsie’s house

  It was early on a winter’s morning when she fell—the shortest day of 2010, the woman on the radio said. From where Elsie lay, quite still and curled comfortably on the thick green carpet between the sofa and the sideboard, she could see how the sun coming in through the back door made a triangle on the kitchen floor. The light caught the pattern on the lino and touched the little nests of dust that her broom had missed under the lip of the kitchen cupboards.

  The bright triangle changed as the minutes passed, disappearing from the kitchen to pop up first in the back bedroom, then across the busy pattern of Nile green and white tiles in the bathroom. Later, in her own bedroom, it reached almost all the way across the floor to the thick rose-coloured chenille of her bedspread, before it swung around further towards the west in search of the sunroom. The pile of the carpet, from where she lay, looked like neatly sheared blades of grass, the tidy job of mowing that Clem would have done.

  There was something comforting about being this close to the topography of the house. She knew this place so well. She wasn’t sure if it was an extension of her, or she of it. So this was a new kind of exploration, noticing the way the floor sloped a little into the spare room, and how the beading sagged slightly on one segment of the ceiling.

  Topography: she counted through the letters—ten. Geography; landscape. The answer to fourteen down in that morning’s crossword, where she’d been trying to make ‘projection’ fit. She was losing her touch.

  From outside, she could hear the kookaburra; he’d be looking for his food. You could set your watch by him, she thought. There were cars on the road, the squeak of the swing in the park, the rich buzz of aeroplanes climbing up from the airport, the chatter of lorikeets, corellas. All that activity; it was nice to lie still among it—although the kookaburra would be disappointed she’d put nothing out today. And then the house muttered a little too, its boards creaking and stretching as the day warmed.

  It was a consoling sound.

  They’d had a long chat, Elsie Gormley and this house, more than sixty years of it. It had witnessed all her tempers, all her moods, and usually improved them. It held her voice, her husband’s, her children’s, and now their children’s in turn—echoes and repetitions lodged in around the skirting boards, around the window frames like those pale motes of dust that had wedged at the edge of the kitchen floor.

  ‘Reverb,’ one of Don’s young boys had told her—Don’s own grandson, she supposed: her great-grandson then. The one with the noisy guitar. ‘Imagine it like this, Nan: layers of echoes arranged to make it sound like you’re in a great big space.’

  Well, reverb, she thought clearly. A nice word. She liked to keep abreast of what they knew, how they lived—their magic gadgets, their shiny new phones. Like this, Nan: one swipe and it turns on.

  She swiped her fingers now against the thick green carpet. Yes, she could almost hear it. All those voices; all those years.

  It was lunchtime, and then afternoon, and as the sun sank lower, she wondered how cold it might get, there on the floor, overnight. She was eighty-nine years old, and her bones were brittle and tired.

  The neighbours came then, one to the front door, one to the back. ‘Elsie,’ they called, ‘are you there, love? Are you right?’

  ‘I’m not here,’ she said, and lay still, wondering if she could turn her head far enough to see the fiery clouds of the sunset through the windows at the front of the house.

  There were sirens in the street—she could see the reflections of blue and red flashing lights on the wallpaper above her head—and then a policeman broke in through the door. By whose authority, she thought she said, but no one seemed to hear and she was onto a stretcher and into an ambulance before she had time to realise she didn’t have her shoes.

  Imagine leaving home without your shoes.

  It was cold in the back of the ambulance and too bright. She wanted her cardy. She wanted to sleep. If she could move her head slightly, she might see the steps, the porch, the battered front door. If she could lever herself up a bit more. But she couldn’t.

  ‘Rightio, love.’ The uniformed man was far too cheerful for his job.

  Elsie closed her eyes. ‘I don’t think I’m ready to go.’ Her voice, this time, quite loud and clear.

  In the hospital, a fortnight later on, she thought they said she was going home, but it wasn’t her home they took her to. Some other place, with a bright new apartment for her, a view down to the river, a bell she could press for attention, and meals, if she preferred it, in a hall. She had her shoes now, and her cardigan—they were bringing mountains of stuff
for a short stay.

  ‘What’s that word? Respite?’ she said to Donny when he came one day at lunch.

  ‘Sort of, Mum,’ he said. ‘In a way.’

  She’d signed some papers about some people she’d never heard of, a pair called Ben Carter and Lucy Kiss. Donny’s wife Carol said they had a little boy. But what was that to do with her? Were they tenants for her house while she was here?

  ‘Sort of, Mum,’ said Don again. ‘Yes. In a way.’

  ‘Well, make sure they keep up the garden. Your father will never forgive me if that rockery goes wrong.’

  Clem Gormley. Now, where was he? When did they say he’d be here?

  ‘Ben Carter,’ said Don, squaring the papers. ‘Lucy Kiss. I think we’ve made the right choice.’

  Of course, she knew what was happening; she knew where she was. The facility, she’d always called it, with its apartments for the well ones, and rooms—then wards—for those who weren’t. It was just a stop or so on the bus along from her place, with its back fence butting the sports fields where Donny’s grandkids played. She could walk home from here, she thought. Be back in no time.

  She’d lived in that house more than sixty years—nearly sixty-three, she worked out as she lay the first night in her new room in her old bed and her old, cold sheets. She could remember the day they moved in, the size of their loan so cripplingly vast that she never dared to speak of it to Clem. To even put it into words. Back when the house was fresh and new. The house whose lawns her husband had so carefully tended. Rest his soul: yes. That was it.

  And yet in spite of so many years, the day she fell, the day she lay there on the floor, was the first time she’d seen the way the light moved from one room to another, tracking from the back of the house to the front, calling into corners, illuminating space.

  Such a lovely thing to have seen, she thought. Such a lovely day to have spent.

  •

  The house was sold, as the real estate agent had promised, in next to no time. ‘A big block like this, with the park at the back, and the shops, and so close to the city—no trouble at all,’ the agent had said.