The Young Wife, page 1
DAVID MARTIN
THE YOUNG WIFE
About Untapped
Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
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For My Brother
THE YOUNG WIFE is entirely a work of fiction. No character or group of characters in this book is intended to resemble any person, living or dead.
My gratitude for generous help goes to Mrs Marjorie O’Brien, Mrs Iris Gunner, Mrs Claire Balding and Mr Michael Michaelides of Melbourne.
Like children upon Christmas day we go.
Seeking a hand in which to lay our present,
But every hand already holds its present,
And every hand denies us and says no.
In deepest woe we cry to every hand:
O take from us this riches, our burden.
But every hand already has its burden,
And like poor misers we are left to stand
Until our gift becomes the heavy stone
Of a wide world of love we mutely carry.
Out of the grief a voice calls: All must carry
Their stone of love, and carry it alone.
Out of the grief a voice cries: Understand
How each is martyred by his bitter longing.
Will you not comfort someone’s bitter longing,
Yield your own gift and open wide your hand?
And we make answer: How shall we be free
If none will save us from this fierce compassion?
If every hand must guard its fierce compassion—
As they are their own prisoners, so are we.
Then there is laughter in the core of grief:
Find your own judgement in your mind-made riddle.
The unborn grave is keeper of your riddle.
Is there a rose that does not love its leaf?
No hand will take your present and forgive,
For each would be the giver of his hunger.
Sweeter than death, this self-devouring hunger.
O love the stone in your own hand, and live.
1
Every time Yannis entered his brother’s office in Elizabeth Street the elegant nameplate beside the door filled him partly with amusement and partly with irritation. Joannides Enterprises. It was so much like Alex! Enterprises could mean anything; it sounded both grand and suspicious. It made you think of anonymous wealth and power. But while he gave nothing away about his enterprises Alexis clung to his name and saw to it that others were reminded of it on every occasion. He had his initials embroidered even on his dressing-gown. Yannis, who made an old overcoat serve for a dressing-gown, always felt subtly patronised whenever his brother’s bold use of the family name confronted him. His own business was called Joannides Fruit and Vegetable Store. But that was different. A green-grocery wasn’t an enterprise; it was just a shop.
Nevertheless, or perhaps because he felt himself to be so unlike Alexis, he was fond of him. Even when they acted on opposing sides, as they usually did in community affairs, and people thought that they must be on the verge of becoming enemies, they could still laugh together because they saw through each other’s motives. Alexis was the elder by two years, and ever since boyhood he had taken the lead. The trouble was that he had also inherited Yannis’ share of worldliness.
The cool-looking Greek girl behind the desk in the front office—Alexis did not employ Australians because they were harder to control—looked up and gave Yannis her special, mature smile. ‘Good morning, Mr Joannides. This is an important day for you, isn’t it? Are you excited?’
‘I’m quite calm,’ Yannis assured her, but suddenly he did not feel at all calm. ‘Is my brother in?’
‘He’s waiting for you. He’s bought an extra nice carnation for his buttonhole.’
‘Ah … And I forgot to get one for myself.’
He walked unannounced into his brother’s inner room. Alexis was standing under the large portrait of Queen Frederika. He stared at Yannis with half-closed eyes.
‘Is that your best suit?’ he welcomed him.
‘Yes,’ Yannis said, sitting down and wiping his moist forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Do you think she’ll turn back when she sees it?’
‘I wouldn’t blame her,’ Alexis said, beginning to smile, which made him look younger than his brother. ‘But it’s pressed, anyway. Well—how do you feel?’
‘Like one of your wrestlers before a big fight.’ He motioned to other pictures around the wall; photographs of wrestlers, some dressed in leopard skins. There were also studies of Greek actresses. A miniature statue of a naked athlete stood on the birchwood desk.
‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ Alexis said. ‘All men have to get married sooner or later.’
‘But most know the girls they are going to marry. I’m fifteen years older than she is. If Mama had left me in peace …’
Alexis grinned. ‘If we left you in peace you’d never do anything. You would still be in Cyprus, and you’d die a bachelor. So don’t be ungrateful. Your problem is not that you are too old, but that you are afraid of women. Tell me the truth: did you ever have one?’
‘Don’t be silly, Alexi. Your problem is that women are afraid of you.’
But he was too honest not to admit the truth to himself. He had possessed a few girls, but in one way or another, directly or indirectly, they had been paid. He was not sure why they were not attracted to him, but he thought it was probably because he had no conversation. On the whole he got on better with Australian than with Greek or Cypriot girls, but to marry one of these would have broken his mother’s heart.
‘The real reason is,’ Alexis said, ‘that you’re too fond of politics. You had better watch out. Anna doesn’t care a bit for politics, I am certain. She’s a good girl, brought up in the old way. Don’t go trying to convert her. That’s the quickest way to lose a woman. You’ll have a wife and a business now. Let it be enough, Yannaki!’
‘What about yourself? You are even fonder of politics than I. You’re a politician. And Elena has not run away from you yet.’
Alexis frowned slightly. It was always like this. Yannis and he rarely actually quarrelled but a certain hostility easily entered into their talk. Somehow it was not right for Yannis to put himself altogether on the same level with him. It was not just because he was poorer—in fact that was the least of it. The thing was much more subtle. They loved each other, and yet even as boys they had fought more bitterly than most brothers. Money? Yannis never accepted any from him. He had stopped offering it long ago.
‘My politics is not politics in the way yours is,’ he explained. ‘I’m not against things, I’m for things. That makes all the difference, you blockhead. And I don’t get involved with our piddling clubs. We should have left all that at home; it does not fit in here. As for Elena, she agrees with me. I wish you half the luck that I have had with her. She’ll be coming down to the docks to hold your hand.’
‘I can tell you what I am for,’ Yannis said quickly, but annoyed with himself for feeling on the defensive. ‘Only you don’t like it. Why argue? You stick to your bishop and your wrestlers and I’ll stick to …’
‘Marx and vegetables,’ Alex interrupted maliciously, brightening at once at his own witticism.
They were silent for a moment, studying each other. Alexis wore a white duck suit and a blue silk shirt. The carnation in his buttonhole was a blossom that had only just opened. ‘He is dressed as if he were expecting his own bride,’ Yannis thought. He was glad his brother was coming and he knew that, if it had been Alexis’ girl they were going to meet, Alexis would have been just as pleased to have him come along. ‘He will insist on my buying a carnation too,’ he thought. ‘And he will make me look an ass over it.’
Yannis’ remark about ‘your bishop’ was a dig at his brother’s interest in the recent appointment of a new Orthodox Archbishop to Australia, an unusually energetic man who wanted to carry out certain financial reforms. Yannis and his friends regarded them as aimed at the democratic rights of the community. The struggle was agitating all the clubs and societies. Yannis’ own club, Kypros, of which he was treasurer, had denounced the proposed changes as a reactionary plot and the thin end of the dictatorial wedge. Alexis, on the other hand, for personal reasons chiefly connected with the com
In his secret heart Alexis shared the dislike, though he could not afford to indulge it. He had no more religion than Yannis, but he was a free-handed giver to Church endowments, and their mother, who lived with him, was devout.
‘God be with both of us,’ he said. ‘Mama is waiting for the girl as for the spring. She’s burning candles for her safe arrival. I only hope she won’t be disappointed.’
‘It will be her own fault if she is,’ Yannis said rather bitterly. ‘She fixed everything, right from the beginning, as if it was her own marriage. It’s a conspiracy. Mama had the idea, Mama wrote the letters, Mama asked for the photographs, and now she has Anna’s birth certificate.’
‘Well, you are her favourite.’
‘She thinks I am a child.’
‘No, but her mind is on children. You can’t let her down.’
‘And so she finds Anna a husband, sight unseen. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had one good look at me and caught the next boat home. It has happened before.’
‘It won’t happen to you, my boy. I shall not pay her fare back, and I don’t think you could without borrowing. What is more, she will probably like you. You have what is needed to make a wife happy.’
‘I have?’ Yannis asked guardedly.
‘You are generous,’ Alexis said, looking at his nails.
‘Rubbish!’
‘And simple. Girls love men who are simple. Only … not too simple. You understand?’
‘No, but what does it matter?’
‘It matters a lot. The simplest girl is not as simple as some men are. Not even a village girl.’
‘If I get into trouble I shall phone you,’ Yannis said sarcastically.
‘Do that, my son.’ Alexis looked at his watch. ‘It’s time we went and picked up Elena. But wait, I have something for you.’
He went across to a cocktail cabinet. Opening it, he produced a bouquet of roses in an expensive plastic box, which he laid on the desk. Then he went back and took out a red carnation.
‘Here. These you give to her, and this you pin to your lapel. And don’t argue. They are not the roses that grow round Lapithos—do you remember? But they are nice and big.’ He added with paradoxical pride: ‘Everything here grows bigger than at home.’
The grooms and lovers were getting out of hand. Ignoring the shouts of the ship’s officers and evading the harassed policemen who guarded the gangways, they assaulted the steep flanks of the vessel like boarding parties. Some were trying to get a foothold in the open portholes of the crew’s quarters, through which laughing men in singlets looked out. A few daring ones were climbing into the shore net that had already been dropped. One youth, handsome as Apollo, had taken off from a bollard and hand over hand was climbing up a cable at the bow, cheered on by the passengers and the waiting crowd.
Standing a little apart, Anna was looking down from the for’ard end of the boat-deck where the press was not so severe. This upsurge of collective passion frightened her because she could feel the responding need of the women of the brideship who were calling out to the men below. She was too nervous to take her eyes off the pier for long, afraid that she and Yannis would not recognise each other. Never had she longed so much for her mother, and never had her mother been farther away than now.
She began to scan the faces on the pier one by one. But the crowd was restless. A snapshot of Yannis was in her handbag and she would have liked to look at it again, but as it was possible that he was watching her unseen, she refrained. Once or twice she thought she heard someone calling her name.
Suddenly a hand was on her shoulder. ‘Desposini, Signorina … please, just a moment!’
It was only a photographer who had managed to get on board. He was a youngish man in a loose sports shirt, his top button undone against the early afternoon’s heat of this unseasonable November.
‘Your picture, please, Desposini?’
She shook her head, but he was pointing to a newspaper which he carried folded under his arm, and from it to his camera. Finally, not quite knowing whether this was something that was expected of her, Anna took out her lipstick. She wore a simple grey blouse, held in by a narrow belt, and her hair, plain and smooth with a faint parting in the middle, fell free from her forehead and was gathered in a tight roll above her nape. The man glanced up and caught the anguish in her large, defenceless eyes. ‘She’s a peasant girl,’ he thought.
‘Very pretty,’ he said, closing one eye and raising the camera. ‘Italian?’
‘Cyprus.’
‘Speak English, then?’
‘Little.’
The shutter clicked. ‘Won’t take too long to learn. Your name, Desposini?’
Desperately she wondered whether to give her own family name or that of Yannis. But he was not her husband yet, and perhaps he never would be; maybe he had thought better of it and was not waiting for her down there.
‘Anna Christofidou.’
She watched him as he wrote it down, hesitating over the spelling.
‘Age? How old?’
She did not understand immediately. The photographer looked about to find someone who could help. A slight, well-dressed young man with a rather sad face was leaning with folded arms against a lifeboat. He was looking at Anna with a mixture of amusement and pity.
She knew who he was, but not his name. He came from Nicosia and had joined the boat at Piraeus. He had kept himself apart from the others, neither joining in their games nor in the protests over the food which had been organised when an engine breakdown had delayed them in Port Said. She had seen him occasionally, sitting by himself, usually in the same spot on the after-deck, reading or making notes in a little book. The only people he seemed to like talking to were sailors. Some of the unattached girls had eyed him curiously but, either because he was shy or because he remained unaware of them, he made no response.
Anna remembered an incident which had taken place in Colombo. She was waiting at the jetty for the launch that would take her out to the liner, ready to sail. A party of tourist-class passengers, with the young Nicosian among them, had got out of a bus that had brought them back from Kandy. There was also an Italian family, father and mother with a brood of young children. One of these, a thin little girl of about three, dead tired, was giving trouble. In the launch she would not sit still and finally began to cry loudly. The mother, an excitable, unhappy-looking woman, tried to quiet her. When she failed, her husband, a muscular, thick-set man, reached across and slapped the child hard.
The girl began to scream hysterically and her father, losing control of himself, got to his feet, lifted her up and beat her furiously over the bare legs and thighs. Everybody looked away embarrassed except the youth from Nicosia. He, sitting next to the chastising father, rose suddenly, enraged, and said something in fluent Italian which made the man look at him in astonishment. But he went on beating his daughter. Thereupon the young Cypriot suddenly snatched the child and gave the man a shove which made him fall back heavily on his bench. Anna had seen her countryman’s face. His eyes were blazing, yet he looked as if he himself might start crying at any moment.
A heated argument ensued between some of the Greeks and Italians, and a fracas had been avoided only by the intervention of the purser who happened to be in the launch. There had been bad blood between the different nationalities earlier on, and all that day and the next insults were exchanged. But the young man who had so unexpectedly drawn attention to himself did not show up: he stayed below deck and later there was a rumour that he was ill and had been put in the ship’s hospital. Anna had not seen him again.
