He did reopen the way to her alien contact, then wrote in a more personal way to say that he had heard of her work, which was not quite so obscure as she believed, and how pleased her mother and father would have been — it seemed strange, after so long, to recall these guardian figures, these ghosts of a lifetime ago — and went on, having evoked the spirit of family, to a private matter, the death of his wife, which had occurred just seven months before. He wondered if he might come one day and visit her. Did the order permit that? Only, of course, if it was permissible and she herself did not mind.
She was surprised, reading his letter, by its courtesy, its tentativeness, its tenderness she might have said, and recalling her own prickly tone felt foolish; all the more because she knew it had less to do with the offence to her pride in having to beg than with her feelings for him, which were still, after so long, quite raw and unresolved.
She read and reread his letter, and meant to reply but did not. A whole year went by. Till one morning she opened the newspaper and found herself swept up in a storm of public anger, and accusation and denial, that meant they had to meet, but no longer on their own terms.
A Fortitude Valley pastry cook, Walter Goetz by name, a naturalised German, had had his windows broken the week after Paschendaele by a gang of patriotic football fans. When he complained he was himself arrested, charged with disturbing the peace, and found guilty. He and his Australian wife and four children were to be deported and their assets confiscated.
It was an ugly affair. Protest meetings were called at which inflammatory statements were made, editorials appeared, one or two men in high places, who put their names to a petition, were pointed to and pilloried. One of these was Walter Goetz’s representative, a Minister of the Crown no less, Lachlan Beattie. He was attacked in Parliament, there was a break-in at his home, someone in his own office leaked documents to the press, and among them was a letter from a nun, Sister Monica, who turned out to be Mr Beattie’s cousin, appealing, etc, etc. Sister Monica, Janet, was astonished one morning to find her letters to Father Elsheimer reproduced in all their dangerous mystery on the front page of The Courier, flight-patterns, dance-steps, points of the compass, all explicable now as the language of an international conspiracy. Most damning of all was her letter to her cousin.
Rereading it in cold print, she did find it odd. Its tone was provocative, no doubt of that, and seen in a public rather than a personal light, rather puzzling; even she had to admit that. Within an hour he had called on the telephone to apologise and reassure her. The affair really involved only himself. He was sorry she had been dragged into it. But she was ashamed. She saw at once the seriousness of the thing.
The other nuns, caught up in the excitement of it, did not; till other calls began to come in: newspapers demanding interviews, parents cancelling music lessons, anonymous voices shouting loyal obscenities. A youth on a bicycle rode up the drive, a butcher’s boy it turned out, and put a stone through one of their windows wrapped in a Union Jack.
In the afternoons after school was out, half a dozen local children, rather ragged and barefoot, the girls and boys both, had been accustomed to come with shoe-boxes under their arms and pick mulberry leaves. They were poor children from one-roomed shacks on Wynnum Road. Their mothers took in washing. Their fathers worked at the abattoirs at Cannon Hills or were labourers on the roads. Sister Monica had let them scramble up high after the tenderest leaves and given them beeswax to chew. When all the sweetness was gone and the wax was white, they would mould it into miniature chairs and tables for their dolls’ houses, and the boys, these days, into tanks, which they brought to show her. ‘Baroom!’ Now they were forbidden the place. In half a dozen houses all along Wynnum Road there was wailing as silkworms starved and fathers set off in search of alternative mulberry trees. Ridiculous, all of it! At the end of the week Lachlan Beattie telephoned again and, on Mother Francis’ suggestion, made his first visit.
They had faced one another on that occasion with a certain shyness. It would have been difficult anyway, after so long. In some ways the ‘circumstances’ made it easier; they could start off with something public between them. She apologised again for having embarrassed him.
‘No, no, you mustn’t,’ he insisted. ‘I’m the one who should apologise. You’re being dragged in my wake — you, poor Goetz. All that has nothing to do with it. Even the war. They don’t care about that. They want my head, that’s all.’ She looked at it. It was fine, familiar. ‘And they’ll get it too, that’s what I’ve come to warn you of — eventually. When it happens,’ he looked amused, ‘you mustn’t think that you were to blame.’
‘But is there nothing you can do?’
‘Yes — I can fight, I’m doing that right now. I’ll give as good as I get. I’m no saint myself when it comes to that sort of thing. But I won’t win. I’ve embarrassed the Government, that’s the real issue. It’s my colleagues who’ll get rid of me … We might as well drop this, you know. I’d rather talk about something cleaner. Your bees, for instance. Let’s talk about your clean little bees.’
‘Cruel little bees,’ she corrected. ‘Oh clean too, yes — but there’s nothing noble about them, or difficult, or unpredictable. That’s why they’re so easy to handle. And Mr Goetz?’
He shook his head.
‘Was he a friend?’
‘No. He’s rather an unattractive fellow really, I don’t quite trust him. The wife is all nerves. Sick, I mean. They’re helpless, hopeless people. Nancy —’ He paused, but she knew who Nancy was — ‘used to go there. She was fond of his Gügelhopf. So really,’ he said, after a little pause — they were running out of steam — ‘that’s the end of it.’
They were walking down to look at her hives, and as they passed through the scrubby orchard he reached up for an apple. ‘May I?’ he asked. ‘Will they mind?’, and pulled one. It was ripe enough but small and misshapen. He slipped it into a pocket.
She showed him her hives, which were not of the usual sort but of glass so that an observer could see through to all that was going on in them, all the events and organised procedures and rituals of another life.
Like one of her children, Alice or Kevin or Ben, who loved to look in and see if they couldn’t catch some bit of information that she might have overlooked (they too were on the track of the Great Secret), he squatted, peered in through the transparent pane, and his face, she saw, had the same puzzled wonder and wide-eyed, dreamy calm that she looked for in the children, being pleased, for a time, to give up the greater study for this lesser and no less touching one.
It was like peering through into the City of God — that is how she thought of it, and how she saw it reflected in them; into the life of little furry-headed angels with a flair for geometry, and some power (this was the great Problem she had set herself) of communicating. The form of it was plainly visible, she knew, each time she came to the glass, but her mind in its human shape could not grasp it, though there had been a moment, long ago, when she had known it, of this she was convinced.
This, all those years ago, was what Mrs Hutchence had led her to. Not by explanation but through example and sympathy, which was why she made no attempt now to tell him what her life was but to let him look into the hive and see.
She would have thought of it once, the many-minded, one-minded swarm, as an angel. She thought of it these days as a machine, which was a change but not a difference. Would he understand any of this? She wanted him to.