The Happiness Glass Read online

  When her mother returned to Wilcannia with the baby, she had sent Lily a red velvet dress with fake-fur trim. Ginny must have gone straight home and sorted through her boxes of dress materials, finally seizing on the red velvet as an offering worthy of her daughter’s ordeal of jealousy and exile. And if anything could have eased it, the rich flurry of that red dress might have, especially the little fur muff that dangled on a velvet ribbon. It would have been perfect if the weather had been cool, but the town glittered with heat, from the dark slag heaps to the wide red strips that edged the melting bitumen of streets with strange mineral names – Cobalt, Chloride, Crystal, and the mysterious Brazil Street, which was always said with the emphasis on the first syllable – Bra-zil, which rubbed off the foreignness.

  In those days everyone dressed for the races. Even Lily’s grandmother plucked a pleated skirt from her wardrobe and eased her arthritic feet into good court shoes. When Lily appeared in the kitchen that Saturday morning wearing the red velvet dress, her grandmother had looked astonished.

  “Now that’s plain silly!” She had pointed at Lily’s hands, hidden in the depths of the fake fur muff.

  “Silly Lily!” Aunt Sylvie exclaimed. “You’re going to roast.”

  “You’ll get heat-sick.” Her grandmother pressed her lips together, always a sign that there was more she could say but that she trusted common sense would prevail.

  It did not. And by the time they left the house, though Lily kept a poker face, she was horribly close to fainting.

  Her basement room at The Mariners Rest, with its single recessed window, was dark even in the middle of the day. Lily took out her fountain pens and notebooks – the room was like a cave, with small pools of light from the lamps; it was a good place to write. On the bed, propped up with pillows, she tried to think about the end of the story of Josie singing in the ladies’ bar at the Santos Hotel, but all that came into her mind was the word ‘Tinakori’: Tinakori Road. She’d had so much time to write in that house, unlike now, when all she had were these precious Sunday afternoons. She could have written two novels there, at least, but instead she had sat in the kitchen, staring forlornly out of the window.

  Tinakori was an anglicised blend of tina, which meant ‘dinner’, and kahore, which meant ‘none’, for the Maori labourers who had laid that road along the base of Tinakori Hill had been made to work without stopping to eat. Well, she had gone without dinner often enough when she lived there – that, and the exhausting grief after her father died, probably explained why she hadn’t written more when she’d had the time.

  In the week before Christmas there was a heavy snowfall. If Rye had been beautiful before, under snow it took Lily’s breath; she kept going to the windows to stare out. Molly and Belle pulled on padded jackets and gum boots, and Lily helped them to build a fat snowman in the garden at the rear of The Mariners Rest. From their bedrooms they looked down upon his ghostly figure at dusk, and first thing in the mornings – carrot nose, potatoes for eyes, a straw broom under his arm, and one of their father’s old scarves around his neck. The girls insisted on exploring the town, made unfamiliar by the snow. With the bundled-up baby on her hip, Lily slowly trailed them as far as the Gun Garden, where they could look out over the boats on the river, and beyond to the Marshes, and Rye Harbour: it was the snowy scene of countless cards that had adorned the sweltering Christmases of her childhood.

  With The Mariners Rest closed to guests between Christmas and New Year, the girls played chase and hide-and-seek in its empty bedrooms. Whether it was the sheer number of hours they had spent with Lily, or having shared with her the potent magic of the snow, Molly and Belle had lost their reserve and accepted her wholeheartedly as their private property.

  On Lily’s birthday, Rowan took his first shaky steps towards her outstretched hands.

  “Clever boy!” She swung him up into her arms, and went to find his mother.

  Bet made a fuss of her son, but Lily could see that her heart wasn’t in it. Ever since Christmas she had been distracted and jumpy, her face more secretive than ever. There was something bothering Bet, Lily thought, but perhaps she wouldn’t ever know what it was.

  In the Martello Bookshop, Lily bought To The Lighthouse and read it for the first time. Dear Lily Briscoe was her soul mate, and oh, how odious she thought Charles Tansley! But it was the middle section, ‘Time Passes’, that she read over and over. Every word of it was unbearable, yet Lily was mesmerised by its imagery of darkness and dust, stillness and light, the slow perishing of all that had once been so fully inhabited and alive. She felt it was the old house in Broken Hill that Virginia Woolf was describing for her, with her grandmother suddenly gone from it, like Mrs Ramsay. Or else it was the house by the sea where her mother had lived alone these last years; it was the house on Tinakori Road, and all the other houses that had ever meant something to her. And her personal time was passing too, dust accumulating as she cooked, and cleaned, and delivered Molly and Belle to school, and brought them home again. Dust gathering on her fountain pens, and between the pages of her notebooks, while she, like Lily Briscoe sitting alone among the clean cups at the breakfast table, could only go on watching and wondering.

  Bet Levin was having an affair. At the tea shop in Lion Street she whispered this to Lily while Rowan dozed beside them in his push chair.

  “The thing is, I’m going away with him for a few days, and I’ll need your help.”

  Lily squeezed hot hands together in her lap and waited.

  “I’ve told Gerald I’m going to London to stay with an old friend,” Bet said, “but actually we’re going further north. A lot further. Gerald won’t ring the London number because he doesn’t like the friend, and, well, that’s what he’s like when he gets on the wrong side of someone.” Bet poured milk into her tea and stirred in sugar. “He’ll expect me to call every evening to speak to the girls, but if he answers the phone he’ll hear the pips and know it’s a trunk call.”

  Bet was watching her closely, and Lily masked her nervousness by picking up her cup of steaming black tea.

  “What do you want me to do?” she said.

  Bet’s sharp little face relaxed slightly. “I’ll tell you what time I’m going to ring, and you make certain you answer the phone. I’ll let you have a number where you can reach me, in case there’s an emergency. Once you’ve picked up, you can pass me over to Gerald.”

  It was only the phone calls, nothing too terrible. Lily said she would stay near the phone at the specified times and pick up at the first ring. She imagined her grandmother’s lips pressed tight, but common sense was pitted against the need to keep her job.

  Afterwards, she pushed Rowan around Church Square and along West Street to Lamb House. Bet had told her that the writer Rumer Godden currently lived there, though it had once been the home of Henry James. Lily stared at the upper windows, imagining James’s portly figure behind the glass. If she knocked on the door would Rumer Godden answer? And if she did, what could Lily say to her? That she longed to write a novel, if she ever got the time? Reluctantly, she turned her back on Lamb House, and as Rowan was still asleep she took the longer route back along Mermaid Street and up through The Mint.

  On the evening of the day Bet left for London, Rowan focused his blue eyes on Lily and said, “Li! Li!”

  “He’s saying your name,” Molly squealed.

  The two girls gathered round, and Lily held the boy’s chubby hands and smiled her encouragement.

  “Say it again!” Belle ordered, and he did.

  “Li! Li!”

  The phone rang then, and Lily snatched it up. “Hello?”

  She heard the beeps, and then Bet’s voice, which even with the crackling line was tight with relief. “Lily! How is everything? How are the girls?”

  “Everything’s fine.” Lily passed the phone to Molly and went in search of Gerald Levin.

  Bet was gone four days, and on the last day Gerald stared coldly at Lily as she served his lunch. When his wi
fe returned there were raised voices behind the closed door of their bedroom. Bet had been crying when she came to find Lily.

  “Gerald tried to ring me in London,” she said. “I really didn’t think he would.”

  Lily sat Rowan down in front of his box of cars, and she and Bet moved into the kitchen.

  “He knows that you knew where I was,” Bet whispered. “Gerald and I, we’re going to be all right, I think, but he won’t put up with you being here. I’m sorry, Lily.”

  “But–”

  “I know, it’s completely my fault.” Bet pushed her hands into the front pockets of her jeans. “I’ll find a place for you to stay, and other work.”

  It had all happened so quickly, Lily’s head was spinning.

  She moved her few belongings into a room above the sweet shop next door to The Mariners Rest. Bet had got her a job at the gallery on Lion Street. After a month Lily moved to rooms in the High Street above Liptons. She was turning in there one afternoon when Bet and the children came towards her along the pavement – to Lily’s dismay, Molly and Belle stared past her with closed white faces. Bet greeted her with an awkward smile, but it was clear she did not want to linger. Little Rowan leaned forward in his push chair, chubby arms reaching for her. “Li! Li!” he squealed, as Bet wheeled him away.

  After Liptons, Lily moved to an attic room at Oak Corner. On the way to the gallery each morning she would pass Lamb house. She had more time to write now, but was still struggling with her stories.

  One morning in late spring, when the wind off the marshes blew flurries of blossom over garden walls, Lily walked up Mermaid Street in a storm of pink petals and ran into Thomas Raines; he was standing in the middle of West Street, and at the sound of Lily’s heels on the cobbles he turned and waved at her with the sheet of paper he was holding.

  Lily saw that it was from a local real estate agent.

  “I’m going to view a cottage,” he said. “Its upper windows overlook Henry James’s garden.” He handed the paper to Lily. “Have you got time? Would you like to look?”

  Before she knew quite how it had happened they were standing together inside a small but charming parlour. The agent came through from the back, and after a quick look at the tiny kitchen he led them upstairs, where they gazed down upon the famous garden. In the main bedroom, a blue Chinese bowl set in the window had been planted with white hyacinths. Lily closed her eyes and inhaled the scent. When she opened them she found Thomas watching her. She felt that he wanted to take her hand, but he touched her hair instead, which the wind had made wild.

  “You’ve got blossom in your hair.”

  “Have I?”

  “Just a bit.” His gaze swept the room, passing over the hyacinths, the fireplace with its silvery over-mantle mirror in which the two of them were reflected, before settling on Lily. “Well, what do you think?” he said.

  An image flashed through her mind then of a house that must belong somewhere in her future, its darkened rooms sweetened with the soft breath of sleeping children. There was a ticking inside her, and for a moment she fancied it ticked in Thomas, too.

  Lily met his eyes, and smiled. “It’s perfect, isn’t it?”

  THREE

  Palaces of Loss

  This summer, only a few days into a family holiday that I had been looking forward to for months, I began to feel homesick. We were staying in a small coastal town less than a two-hour drive from where we live; the weather was perfect, and the house – which we had rented the previous summer – was familiar to me and comfortable. Yet we had barely unpacked before I started thinking about home; it was as if I had left a part of myself behind. As we settled in and began to explore the surrounding towns and beaches, the silent rooms of our house would drift unbidden into my thoughts. I imagined the garden, too, with plums dropping from the laden tree onto the lawn, and birds coming unobserved to drink and bathe in the fountain. It was too ridiculous, this almost teary longing, and yet when I returned home a day earlier than scheduled it was with the same rush of happiness and relief that I used to feel on touching down in Australia after an extended absence.

  The first sign that homesickness could kick in so close to home had come the previous year during a four-day trip to Melbourne. In the hermetically sealed glass box of our hotel room, which at night was almost too quiet, yet never completely dark, my dreams of empty rooms were weirdly reminiscent of paintings by Edward Hopper. As a long-time fan of Hopper’s work – a taste that may not be unconnected to a susceptibility to homesickness – these dreams should not have been so disturbing, yet they were. Because the dream rooms were our rooms at home, standing empty in our absence, with their furniture and other belongings either missing or rearranged by unknown hands.

  If I am to be confronted by visions of our house without us, I would prefer it appeared as if by the Danish artist, Vilhelm Hammershøi. At Copenhagen’s Strandgade 30, Hammershøi painted a closed and private world of beautiful greys balanced against a complex and even more beautiful black; his solitary figures are alone at home, whereas Hopper’s are often alone in public places, or in rooms so impersonal, so stripped of belongings, that they condense all the loneliness of hotel rooms. Hopper painted America mostly in saturated colour; he painted the night, with figures pinned under shadowless artificial light until they seemed drained of life. Even when the sun does shine in a Hopper painting, it falls heavily, except in his coastal watercolours, where it glints as sharp and bright as knives.

  Hammershøi painted light as a precious presence. In his quiet rooms a square of sunlight falls upon the floor, a stretch of wall, or a card table, in images of mesmerising stillness and calm. But in Melbourne it was the Hopperesque vision of home that invaded my dreams, and the loneliness lingered on waking. I imagined the mirror in my study reflecting only stray beams of sunlight, or the infinitesimal accumulation of dust, and the section in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse called ‘Time Passes’ came to mind. Although this is one of my all-time favourite passages of prose, there was something so wrenching about it in the context of home that I could hardly wait to board our return flight.

  Meanwhile, friends were filling social media with photographs of adventures in China, Spain, England, and other countries. They were delighted to be ‘away’; you could see it in dozens of smiling selfies. On our holiday to the coast I posted a couple of pictures of the sun setting prettily over the sea, and spent much more time wistfully scrolling through garden pictures on my camera roll.

  Homesickness arises when we are unable to inhabit the same space that our memories occupy. What arrives then, if we are susceptible, is a creeping grief, low-key but all pervasive, that can produce symptoms very like those of depression. Having moved out of home at seventeen without a backward glance, I never imagined this would happen to me, and for many years, under the enchantment of new places and new people, it didn’t. There was, though, a Hopper-like sense of isolation during those footloose years; I even worked as an usherette for a stretch at the Metro Theatre in Kings Cross, and Hopper’s painting New York Movie evokes that time vividly whenever I encounter it. I was lonely then, but I was not yet homesick, being still at the stage of romanticising my life, endowing the future with limitless possibilities. But now, having reached an age when the future’s limits are all too clear – and they are more than a tad scary – it is the present I engage with and strive to imbue with meaning, and the present is bound up in my sense of place, in being at home.

  Friends promote the desirability of ‘getting away’; the aim is usually to write, but also to unwind.

  “You need to get away, Carol,” they insist.

  But what, I always wonder, am I to get away from? When everything I treasure is gathered here under one roof, it seems beyond reckless to lock the front door and go, leaving it unattended. But perhaps what I am describing is a form of agoraphobia, or anxiety, or some other mental health syndrome; perhaps, if they ever read this, I will hear from concerned psychiatrists. For homesick
ness was once considered a serious disorder, and in this era of unprecedented mobility when large numbers of people leave home voluntarily for work, or pleasure, and others leave because home has become untenable, it is still a daily struggle for many humans. We see it at its darkest in the suffering of refugees, people who through no fault of their own no longer have homes they can return to.

  The phenomenon of homesickness was identified in 1688 by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer, who named it nostalgia from the Greek nostos, meaning homecoming, and algos, meaning pain, grief, distress. It was the disease of soldiers, sailors, convicts, and slaves, being particularly associated with soldiers of the Swiss army who served as mercenaries and among whom it was said that a well-known milking song could bring on a fatal longing, so that singing or playing that song was made punishable by death. Bagpipes could do the same to Scottish soldiers. Deaths from homesickness were recorded, but despite various treatments the only effective cure was to send the afflicted person back to where they belonged.

  The meaning of nostalgia seems to have shifted over time, from a sickness brought on by a yearning for home, to a yearning for a place and time that has passed and can never be recovered. Childhood is one such place – childhood, with all its palaces of loss. I am fortunate to still have access to two of the houses that were important to me as a child. Though the kings and queens are almost all gone, I was, at times, a princess in those places, and they belong to me, and I to them, in ways that are complex and magical. It takes time to build history with a place, although after ten years our house and I are getting close. Unfortunately, bonding forges a sword for us to fall on, and the Buddhists are quite right in promoting the desirability of a state of non-attachment. For whatever answers our deepest yearning is precisely the thing, that, when lost, will bring the sharpest grief.

  At ninety-two, my mother lives in a house she first arrived at as a seven-year-old. Having left it as a bride, and returned as a widow, her bedroom now is the same one she once shared with her sister. But various illnesses have forced her to leave home for periods of time, to recuperate in my care. And although we make her comfortable, I sense the chaffing of homesickness, more terrible, perhaps, for the fear that she may never recover sufficiently to return to full-time residence.