The Body in the Clouds Read online

  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

  “After wowing European audiences, this book is coming stateside to dazzle you . . . Beautifully written, and featuring some excellent passages about writing and reading itself, this book will have you feeling every emotion at once.”

  —Bustle

  “Ashley Hay weaves a moving tale of love, loss and hope.”

  —Us Weekly

  “[Hay’s] prose style is simple yet vivid, and her insights on bereavement and moving forward are wise. Perhaps most impressive is her portrayal of the human predicament, the notion that one’s heartfelt hopes are sometimes crushed against the rocks of reality.”

  —Star Tribune

  “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

  “A literary and literate gem of a book that leaves you with a set of emotions that I suspect last for a long, long time.”

  —Psychology Today

  “Multilayered, graceful, couched in poetry, supremely honest, gentle yet jarring, Hay’s thought-provoking novel pulls you along slowly, like a deep river that is deceptively calm but full of hidden rapids. Much to ponder.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “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 . . . , this second novel from Hay is the kind of slow, ruminative, evocative story that will appeal to devotees of literary fiction.”

  —Library Journal

  “This thoughtful, elegant portrait of lives turned inside out and finding the way forward from despair is sure to find a place in the hearts of its audience.”

  —Shelf Awareness

  “Hay delicately threads together the lives of a widowed librarian, an unproductive poet, and a guilt-ridden doctor as they grapple with life after loss in post–World War II Thirroul, a small seaside village in New South Wales, Australia.”

  —Coastal Living

  “Hay has lovingly crafted a poignant, character-driven novel filled with heartache and hope, which is transferred to the reader through lyrical prose, poetic dialogue and stunning imagery.”

  —RT Magazine

  “The Railwayman’s Wife uses beautiful prose and empathetic characters to tell a story of both hope and heartache.”

  —BookPage

  “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.”

  —Sydney Morning Herald

  “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. . . . recalls the sour-sweet best of Michael Ondaatje’s fiction. 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.”

  —The Australian

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  For Les and Marilyn Hay

  In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

  Quite leisurely . . .

  . . . the sun shone

  As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

  Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

  Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

  Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

  —W. H. AUDEN, “MUSÉE DES BEAUX ARTS”

  That they have some idea of a future state appears from their belief in spirits, and from saying that the bones of the dead are in the graves, but the body in the clouds: and the question has been asked, do the white men go thither?

  —GOVERNOR ARTHUR PHILLIP TO LORD SYDNEY, FEBRUARY 13, 1790

  Into the Blue

  FROM ABOVE, from some angles, it looked like a dance. There were men, machines, and great lengths of steel, and they moved in together, taking hold of each other and fanning out in a particular series of steps and gestures. The painters swept their grey brushes across red surfaces. The cookers tossed the bright sparks of hot rivets across the air in underarm arcs. The boilermakers bent to the force of their air guns, rivets pounding into holes, and sprang back with the release of each one. The riggers stepped wide across the structure’s frame, trailing a web of fixtures and sure points behind them.

  From above, from some angles, it looked like a waltz, and a man might count sometimes in his head to keep his mind on the width of the steel cord on which he stood, on the kick of the air gun on which he leaned, on the strength of the join created by each hot point of metal. To keep his mind off how far he stood above the earth’s surface. One, two, three; one, two, three—there was a rhythm to it, and a grace. They were dancing a bridge into being, counting it out across the air.

  Halfway through a day; brace, two, three; punch, two, three; ease, two, three; bend, two, three; and it was coming up to midday. It was one way to keep your concentration. Here was the rivet, into the hole, a mate holding it in position, the gun ready, the rivet fixed, the job marked off. And again.

  Brace, punch, ease, bend—the triple beat beneath each action tapped itself out through your feet into the steel sometimes, and other times it faded under the percussive noise of the rest of the site.

  Perhaps that was all that happened; perhaps there was a great surge of staccato from another part of the bridge and he lost his place in the rhythm. Lost his beat, lost his time. Because although he bent easily, certain of what he was doing, when he went to straighten up, his feet were no longer where they should have been, his back was no longer against the cable of rope the riggers had strung into place. When he straightened up, he was in the air, the sky above him, heavy with steel clouds, the water below, an inky blue.

  He was falling towards the harbor—one, two, three.

  And it was the strangest thing. Time seemed to stutter, the curl of his somersault stretched into elegance, and then the short sharp line of
his plunge cut into the water. The space too, between the sky and the small push and pull of the waves: you could almost hear its emptiness ringing, vast and elastic.

  On the piece of land he liked best, the land near the bridge’s southeastern footprint, Ted Parker looked up from patting the foreman’s dog and saw—so fast, it was extraordinary—a man turn half a somersault and drop down, down, down into the blue. The surprise of witnessing it, of turning at just the right time, of catching it, and then his head jarred back, following the water’s splash almost up to the point where the fall had begun. All around, men were diving in—from the northern side, from the barge where Ted should have been working, from the southern side where he stood.

  In they went, and down, and here was the fallen man, coming up between their splashing and diving. The top of his head broke through the water and the miracle of it: he was alive.

  Along the site, men had stopped and turned, staring and waiting. On the water, people bunched at the bow rails of ferries and boats; a flutter of white caught Ted’s eye and was a woman’s white-gloved hands coming up to her mouth, dropping down to clutch the rail, coming up to her mouth again. He could almost hear her gasp. And it seemed that he could see clear across the neck of the harbor too, and into the fellow’s eyes—so blue; Ted was sure he could see them—blue and clear and wide, as if they’d seen a different world of time and place.

  He thought: What is this? He thought: What is happening here? And he felt his chest tighten in a strange knot of exhilaration, and wonder, and something oddly calm—like satisfaction, like familiarity.

  At his knee, he felt the butt of a furry head as the dog he’d been patting pushed hard against him.

  “You’re all right, Jacko,” he said, turning the softness of its ears between his fingers. “Just a bit of a slip somewhere.”

  Dawes

  AT THE height of summer, the ocean a rich blue under a rich blue sky, King George III’s eleven British ships plowed one last path. Leaving the disappointment of Botany Bay—where was the fresh water they’d been promised; where was the grass?—they passed two unexpectedly arrived French ships, and turned north along a coast with rose-gold sandstone cliffs, high dunes, and scrubby heathland. Four leagues on, they turned inland, catching at the hidden entrance of another harbor and sailing into the body of the land itself. It was the southern summer of 1788, and they had disappeared from any place that existed on any Admiralty map. The ships slid silently into this New Holland, this New South Wales; their passengers wondered what might happen next.

  Before this, the only white that had glanced at the blue of this harbor, the blue of this sky, had come from clouds, from flowers, from feathers. Now a procession of chalk-sailed boats moved slowly westward, quite small against the size of the shore, the trees, the rocks. From above, they were scrubbed lozenges of wood topped with squares of canvas pinned and floating. From below, they were dark oblongs, obscuring some of the light, the sky, the day. From the cove where they anchored, they were a new world, tacking and curving. The flour, the blankets, the piano, the plants, the panes of glass, the reams of paper, the handcuffs and the hundred pairs of scissors in their holds—what they held of these things was all there was of them here.

  Their cargo included a thousand-odd people—some two hundred marines and officers to take care of some seven hundred convicts; an even five dozen officers’ wives and children. And this augmented by an ark of five hundred animals. They were here to establish a colony, an outpost of the British Empire. They were here to establish a prison, an outpost of Newgate or the convict hulks that floated on the Thames. So far away, they were here to settle the mythical antipodes, literally out of the world—as the old sailors said of such low southern voyages. They were here, on the whole, to either guard, or to be guarded.

  But one man—twenty-four-year-old Second Lieutenant William Dawes from Portsmouth—had plans beyond that. Championed by the Astronomer Royal, William Dawes had also been dispatched to scan the skies and the stars, to look for a comet. Praised for a facility for languages and natural history, William Dawes aspired to astronomy, to botany, to meteorology and cartography. He wanted to know what was here. He wanted to see everything. He wanted to learn new stories.

  It was midday, and in the captain’s quarters at the back of the ship, he paused in the middle of winding the clock. A fine-featured young man, his eyes bright and his brow almost always dinted by a frown of concentration, he was especially charged with the care of this expedition’s astronomical instruments, like this beautiful silver-backed timepiece. Which accounted not only for the frown, but also for an occasional straightness of the back, and an occasional pleased smile.

  Through the wrinkled glass of the cabin’s windows, he watched another of the fleet turn and settle, and he squinted against the flash of her sails, the rush of white movement as they were hauled in. The hard sun made it dazzling. Outside the door, the sentry scuffed his feet and coughed, waiting for the task to be done: when the clock was wound, the watch could change. Clearing his own throat in return, Dawes looked down at the instrument in its cushioned box, his sight dull in the dim cabin after the shine of the world outside. He blinked, recovering its shape, its white face snowier, cleaner than any sail and ringed with elegantly black Roman numerals that marked minutes, hours, days. It was a beautiful thing, this clock, and it had made its own momentous voyages. Sometimes Dawes, daydreaming, wished it had been able to record what happened in those seconds, not just count them out. Then he could have seen its long and far travels with that great mariner, James Cook. “My never failing guide,” Cook had called it, and it had even marked off the last hour, last minute, last second of the great man’s life—was said to have stopped at that moment. Imagine a clock that could show you what had happened in that then, that there, as clearly as its casing showed you the edge of your face, as its numbers showed you the when and where of your position.

  It was midday, and probably the first time any kind of “midday” had been marked here, thought Dawes. There it was, so simply done: another place, fixed into the world’s twenty-four hours of time, fixed into its web of longitudes. He rubbed at the clock’s silver, bits of himself reflected in its surface: the hair, the face, the deep bright eyes, and the dint pressed above them. He smiled. Here they were then, after all this time. There was a shout and a splash outside; one of the sailors must have gone out of the rigging. He gave the clock an extra rub with his sleeve, and set it back into its box.

  “Here we are, then.” His voice echoed a little in the room.

  On the deck, under the sun, Dawes took his bearings—the coast four or five miles out to the east; the harbor’s water heading west along some unknown course. All around the cove tall trees jostled for space, some with subdued green leaves hanging straight against the colors of their bark, others with wide shiny leaves spreading from wide, dark branches to make canopies of damp-looking shade. Below these, the different greens of ferns, grasses, heaths, low brush mixed among themselves, offset here and there by the bright feathers—scarlet, green, blue—of some quick bird surveying the British arrival.

  Twenty-four hours, thought Dawes, and the first of you will be shot for our collectors.

  Below the birds’ movement, a shuttle of luggage and people was making messy, busy progress, oars hauling weight through the water and landing one thing on top of another, random and haphazard. It must have been so quiet here this morning. The Governor’s dogs and the parson’s cats made their contesting calls above shouts of instructions and misunderstandings, questions and decisions. Things would be determined today, in a hurry and for half a reason, and that was how they would be fixed and set. At least time had arrived, pinning the ship and the clock and this new port back to the faraway reference of England with lines of mathematics and measurements, as certain as if the two pieces of land were floating safely together in a bathtub of water.

  Dawes took a deep breath in and held it, his shoulders back and his body straight as he heard h
is name called—“Lieutenant Dawes, I need you here”—and made for one of the jolly-boats and the short trip to land.

  “What do you think, sir? What’ll happen here?” one of the ship’s mates called down to him as the little boat began to pull away.

  Dawes waved at him, smiling. “Anything you like, Mr. Southwell,” he called. “Anything at all.” It was one thing to come into port somewhere, to struggle with new words, to find your way among new streets, to bow at ladies with different hairstyles, different dresses to any you’d seen, to worry down a dinner of some meat you couldn’t quite place. It was another to come into an anchorage like this—no buildings, no systems and, on the few people who had been seen, no clothes. There were already complaints about what little headway Britain’s implements could make against this forest, yet trunks were beginning to fall, gashes of space were beginning to appear among the branches, and the beginnings of a camp, a settlement were being made. Dawes could feel the look of the place, the way it had been until now, dropping away like the edge of a precipice while all that it might turn into rushed in at him. He grabbed the dinghy’s edge to steady himself against it.

  He saw her then, a young girl sitting cross-legged on the cove’s western shore: still, dark, watching, and he raised a hand to her, repeating the wave he’d given a moment before. It was hard to tell, beneath that brilliant sun, if she saw him, let alone if she waved back.

  His ambitious imaginings of the settlement’s progress, its future state, folded in on themselves like an umbrella and he trailed his fingers through the water, its cool wetness shutting up his fancies and dropping him back into somewhere practical, somewhere useful. Looking around, he began to visualize the line of the cove from east to west as it would be drawn for a map. From above, the headland where the girl sat was held firm by a ridge along its spine, set here and there with tall red-trunked trees and squat grey undergrowth. Below this, the cove’s western edge ran almost precisely south to north, one indent like a semicircle and then on to its end, a snubby stub, almost square, and set as perfectly north to east as the edge ran south–north. A nice finish to a drawing, thought Dawes, like a flourish at the end of a signature.