The Stars in the Night

November 1970There was a rhythm to the way Harry Fletcher did things, year in, year out. If you hadn’t started studying by the time he tied the new canes of the Albertine rose up the verandah post, then you were getting behind. When exam results came out, he’d be putting a new coat of glossy black on the front door and washing down the weatherboards in preparation for Christmas visitors. You could rely on him asking after your results and showing an interest in your choices. He knew everyone’s name in the street, and he would talk to anyone; he always had a word to the postie, the milkman, everyone’s visitors, delivery men, council workers, kids cycling by during the holidays on their way to the beach. Anyone walking a dog. Love. Duty. And the habit of decades. Not a task was left undone, no small repair awaited attention; no maintenance job was too small, or too big, for Harry Fletcher. Now, a month after Mrs Fletcher had died, it looked like the old man was finally letting things lapse. The house was a double fronted, two-storey place, and old—one of those houses with the front boards cut in blocks to mimic the sandstone of its grander neighbours. Most of the back part, downstairs at least, was built of corrugated iron. Only the chimneys were brick. Every four or five years, Mr Fletcher painted the whole place a pearly blue-grey with white trim. The street number—Eleven—was a broad sweep of black wrought iron above the left-hand window. The sea air had courted the weatherboards for nearly a century, and Mr Fletcher was often seen refusing these advances on the house’s behalf, making careful repairs to dry-rotted window frames and scraping back any flaking paint on the barge-boards. Nothing was left to decline untended. It was a noisy family home at one time. Alex Fletcher would hare around the front lawn on his push-bike, with his two little sisters in pursuit, squealing fit to burst your eardrums. Or Alex and his father would play for hours at cricket, with Winnie and little Vera losing attention in the flowery field while Mrs Fletcher watched from her seat on the front verandah. Then the girls had music blaring out of the upstairs window, Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby—American stuff. That was during the war, after Alex went away and before both Winsome and Vera were nursing. The house was quieter after that, until the granddaughter, Alex’s little girl Kate, came to live with the Fletchers. Her mother had married again after Alex died. The kiddie wanted to stay with her grandparents. Mrs Fletcher gave up teaching to mind her. But that was years ago too. This morning the sun poured gold across the whole scene. The door was closed, but the upstairs windows were open to the breeze. Passers-by noticed the scent of the roses and the quiet. Usually, people looked up as they passed, ready to return the old man’s greeting. It got to be a habit whenever they walked down the street. Today no one was there. But for the open windows, the place could have been deserted. The house itself was very quiet, considering that two people were inside working on a difficult task. Upstairs, a young woman sat cross-legged on the floor reading from a small notebook. Her long, straight brown hair was tied back with a bit of woven braid and she wore a loose shirt of soft Indian linen over faded jeans. Around her, sorted into rough piles, were letters, lists, books, newspapers, postcards, music scores, and photos. She turned the penultimate page, frowning, and gave a surprised noise. She looked again through the small box in front of her, but there was no sign of another notebook. She went to the door and called aloud. ‘Pop, where’s the rest of this?’ ‘Don’t call me Pop. Harry will do. The rest of what?’ ‘This book.’ Kate hung over the balustrade and waved a slim, dark blue notebook at her grandfather in the hall below. ‘It says “Volume One” on the front page. There must be more. It can’t just stop here.’ Harry looked away. There was coloured glass in the top panes of the front door; it took the sunlight and cut it into bright lozenges. Yellow, pink, green, red. Not a leadlight picture, not even etched glass, just squares of coarse colour. He’d always thought they should take those bits of coloured glass out, set the whole lot with clear glass. Let the light in. They were old, those bits of coloured glass, old-fashioned. But Nora liked them, she thought they were pretty. And it was true, the colour kept the worst of the heat out; clear glass would make the place much hotter on those scorching summer days. The colour offered a bit of protection. ‘Pop?’ ‘What? Oh.’ Harry looked up. ‘We’ll never finish this if you keep stopping and reading everything.’ ‘Pop! Wait a minute.’ Kate skipped down the stairs, two and three at a time. She stood at the door of the front room where Harry had retreated. He had his back to her while he looked at the wall of books in front of him. Kate frowned. ‘Pop?’ ‘Don’t call me Pop. Harry.’ ‘Harry. But you’re still my pop.’ Harry grunted. ‘You’re a grown-up young lady now. You’re Miss Fletcher, physiotherapist in training. Very grown up.’ ‘Well, thank you, but you didn’t answer my question.’ ‘It’s just an old book, nothing to worry about.’ Kate walked into the room and sat down, saying nothing, a trick she had learned from watching her grandmother. With a sigh, Harry put down the books he was holding and came to sit beside her. The stiffness of his movements showed his reluctance, as if he had closed in a bit on himself. Kate noticed, but prodded again. ‘Well? Pop? Is there any more?’ This was how it happened, thought Harry, feeling the memories rise; they were never far away, always readier to the touch than he expected. You thought everything was laid up and settled, long ago, and there it would be, suddenly reaching out to you like a bad dream that won’t let you wake up. Like a joey that struggles out if its dead mother’s pouch when you try to shift a bit of roadkill. Sad and pathetic and hopeless, but glad to see you all the same. Trusting you to remember. Trusting you to do something about it. As if you could fix things, mend the dead, put the world back the way it was. As if you knew the answers, knew the way home, knew the way back. And you had to try to find the way, because you could never wake up. But he wasn’t sure he was up to answering Kate’s questions today, not with his grief for Nora so raw. He tried again to put her off. ‘It’s a very old thing. You don’t want to go into all that.’ ‘But I do! It’s interesting. It talks about you, you know. And who is this Edmund fellow, anyway? I never heard of him.’ Harry narrowed his eyes at her. Kate grinned unconcernedly. She knew that look of old. Harry wouldn’t shout at her. He never got angry, that’s what Grandma said. He just got a bit silent and went walking with the dog. But usually he’d do whatever you wanted him to, or talk about whatever you wanted to talk about, when he got back. Kate went to the door, tucking the book into the back pocket of her jeans. She rattled the lead hanging from the hat stand. ‘Pirate! Coming for a walk?’ From the cool recess further down the hall, a young white dog came bounding, just about leaping out of his skin with excitement. He was a mongrel with a lot of staffy in him, all white but for one black ear and one black eye. He fawned on Kate but looked to Harry. Walking with Kate was fun, but he’d really prefer Harry to come. He stood with one paw raised, quivering with enthusiasm. Harry took the lead from Kate’s hands and slipped the collar over the dog’s head. Pirate licked Harry’s hand and leaned in against his leg. ‘Good dog,’ Harry said absent-mindedly, pocketing his keys. While Kate opened the front door, he reached automatically for his hat and the dark glasses he always wore outside. He opened his mouth to call out to Nora that they were going walking and then closed his lips together very tightly. God! How many of the dead were going to gather around him today? Kate slipped her hand inside her grandfather’s elbow as they set off toward the seafront. She knew he’d answer her questions eventually. He always did. Anyway, a walk and a talk would do him good, do them both good. The two of them were making a long job out of sorting Grandma’s things. Kate was distracted by the cards, letters, and lists she found whenever she opened a cupboard, drawer, or box. And Harry—Harry worried about which of Grandma’s bits and pieces he should give to the family, and what should go to the parish, and what had to be thrown out. He had, he told her, no way of knowing what was precious and what was rubbish. What would Winnie want, so severe a woman that he couldn’t imagine she’d value any of her mother’s pretty things? And would Vera like this, or was it too old? Everything looked the same to him. Take that white linen tablecloth. Why, it had been stored so long it had started to fray on the folds. But Kate said it was a shame to throw it out—look at the work! And all done by hand, by Grandma, cross-stitch forget-me-nots and violets, and satin-stitch gum leaves along the edges. Kate said she’d love that cloth, she’d cut it into pieces and make a sundress out of it, a long one with no sleeves. He’d see. It would be beautiful. Harry let Kate decide. They walked on into the morning sun. Harry glanced down at the dog, walking beside him with a jaunty, self-satisfied air. Pirate was not the best dog he’d ever owned, or the smartest, but he was easy to please. It didn’t seem to matter how long or short his walk, whether they sat inside all day or suddenly found they’d walked halfway down the bay, he never showed the least surprise or impatience. So the girls—Nora and Kate, and Kate’s mother Sylvie, and his daughters Win and Vee—were right. Seventy hadn’t been too old to have another dog. Not that he would have had the heart to give the puppy back to the lost dogs’ home, anyway. No, he and Pirate suited, better than he ever expected. He made a satisfied, encouraging noise at the dog. Pirate c****d a knowing eye up at his master and then busied himself with dog-thoughts. This was a long walk, then, one of those thinking walks, not a ball-chasing walk or a shopping walk. Good! But then anything Harry did was well done in Pirate’s view. They went some distance along the foreshore before Kate spoke again. ‘It’s going to be awful, isn’t it, Christmas without Grandma?’ Harry patted her hand. ‘Yes, love. It’s—yes, awful.’ ‘Will we still have Christmas at our place? Mum could come over and do the cooking.’ Harry considered. Below the sea wall, a young mother and her three littlies were building a sandcastle. The kids had zinc cream on their noses and red patches on their shoulders where they must have got burned earlier in the week. The middle child, an angelic-looking little boy with a cluster of blond curls, was gleefully hurling handfuls of sand at his younger brother. The mother was having quite a job of settling them back to the castle; the sand fight seemed much more fun. Harry looked away. ‘I don’t know about that. Win probably wants to do it. Or we could go to Aunty Vee’s. Or not. I mean—maybe—perhaps it’s best to move on. We could all go to your mum’s place. Or, I dunno, maybe just not have it.’ ‘Not have Christmas! You can’t just not have Christmas, Pop! Everyone has Christmas, every year.’ ‘No they don’t,’ Harry said briskly. ‘We never—oh, let’s think about it later, eh?’ He walked on a bit more quickly. He’d nearly said something very stupid, something Kate could never understand. Not that he wanted her to, of course; she didn’t need to know all that. We never had Christmas in 1916, or 1917, and hardly in 1918 either. Well, not so that you could really call it Christmas, even though France looked exactly like the drabbest, most miserable, dirtiest excuse for the worst Christmas card you ever saw. But then Kate couldn’t know that. She was—what was she now? Nearly twenty-two. They’d always had Christmas at the Semaphore house since she was born, and 1918 was more than fifty years ago. Fifty years! He shook his head. More than fifty years since Eddie started that little blue book. Volume One, he’d called it, because they said the war wouldn’t be over as soon as they’d thought in the first place. Harry knew every word of Volume One by heart. Volume Two had disappeared with Eddie. 9 October 1917 Here we are, waiting to go ahead. Daylight now, but wet. The sky is yellow. Stuck in a ditch, MG on right. Safe but stuck. Skipper says barrage needs to move. Harry volunteered to take a message. Nearly ten o’clock. We have to go soon. Harry’s not back. Skipper wants to wait. 11.20. Our guns doing the trick, so message got through. H not here yet. Skip says any minute now. Can’t wait for him. Hate going in without him. Hope he didn’t get knocked coming back. Nearly midday. H not back. Going now. Where the f**k is he? Now.