The Golden Day Read online

‘Can’t believe what?’ asked Martine, looking around for the waitress. She was hungry.

  ‘That it all ever happened.’

  ‘That what happened?’ frowned Bethany.

  ‘I don’t know, all those people. Those ancient Greeks,’ said Cubby. ‘Don’t you ever wonder, were they real? Did it all really happen? Or is it all just a kind of, I don’t know, a hoax.’

  Martine didn’t care if it had happened or not. ‘I think I will have a crumpet,’ she decided, reading the paper menu, ‘with honey and clotted cream.’

  ‘I mean, there are just so many people in the world that are supposed to have lived,’ continued Cubby, unable to let it go. ‘Millions and millions of people, living and dying. It’s sort of unbelievable. How could the world have so many people in it?’

  ‘Well, we wouldn’t even know about them,’ Icara pointed out, ‘if Thucydides hadn’t written it all down. Then it wouldn’t matter if they lived or died, would it? We wouldn’t care.’

  Suddenly Bethany made a noise, a kind of cough, as though something had caught in her throat. She grabbed Cubby’s arm, and held it hard with her fingers.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Cubby, alarmed. Was she sick? Was she choking on something?

  Bethany shook her head. She raised her hand in the air, pointing, like an actor on stage. Her face turned pink and then white.

  They peered out from the booth, to see what she was pointing at. And they saw. There was a woman coming towards them, powering forward relentlessly, like a tidal wave. She was gazing at them with a calm recognition, as though she had been sitting and waiting in Madame de Pompadour’s Continental Café all those years, just waiting for them to walk in the door.

  It was Miss Renshaw.

  NINETEEN

  Transformation

  ‘GIRLS!’ SAID MISS RENSHAW. She reached their table and stood before them, unmistakable in her drooping geometric dress. ‘I knew it was you.’

  The four girls were motionless as bricks. Miss Renshaw pulled over a chair and sat herself down, smoothing the familiar springy hair.

  ‘My goodness me,’ she said. ‘My goodness me.’

  The waitress came over with a notepad to take their order, but none of them noticed she was there. She shrugged, and strolled back to the cash register.

  ‘Well, haven’t you all grown up?’ said Miss Renshaw. Her tone was not exactly admiring. ‘What happened to those funny little girls I used to know? You’re all young women now.’

  Cubby felt her heart beating inside her as though it was banging against the bars of a prison cell. Let me out! Let me out!

  Bethany was the first to speak, her voice low but triumphant.

  ‘I knew you’d come back,’ she said.‘I always said you would. Didn’t I?’ She turned to the others. ‘I always said Miss Renshaw would come back…’

  Her voice trailed away.

  ‘Of course I was going to come back,’ said Miss Renshaw briskly. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  Why wouldn’t she? Cubby saw the four luminous words forming themselves on the blackboard in front of her. In all the years since, she had forced herself not to think about those words. She had refused to. By a great act of will she had wiped the memory from her mind. But the words were still there, hoarsely whispered in her ear.

  Not now. Not ever.

  It was Martine who said what they were all thinking.

  ‘At school they thought you were dead.’

  A phone rang. The waitress picked it up and began to murmur into it.

  ‘Did they now?’ said Miss Renshaw. ‘Dear me. Dead! For heavens sake. Do I look dead to you?’

  They had to admit, Miss Renshaw did not look dead. Her eyes were bright, her face and expression vivid and lion-like as ever. In fact, she was unchanged. They had changed, all of them, but Miss Renshaw had not.

  We shall all be changed, in the twinkling of an eye.

  ‘But we had a service in the chapel,’ stammered Cubby.

  ‘A memorial service. Because you were dead.’

  ‘Oh, not with that dreary old chaplain!’ Miss Renshaw groaned theatrically. ‘You know what, girls? I look forward to the day when we have women ministers in the church, don’t you? It’ll certainly be a lot more entertaining.’

  ‘So what happened?’ said Martine, again with that helpful tendency to ask what everyone wanted to know. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Where have I been?’ replied Miss Renshaw, raising her eyebrows. ‘I’ve been here and there, my dear. Here and there.’

  Here and there?

  ‘I mean that day,’ said Martine doggedly. ‘Where did you go that day? The day we went down the Gardens?’

  ‘Oh that dreadful day.’ Miss Renshaw sat back in her chair and let out a deep breath. ‘Well, it wasn’t so dreadful really, I suppose, just unexpected. I had no plan, you know, girls, to take off like that. It was all Morgan.’

  Morgan. Morgan.

  ‘You see, girls, I might as well tell you.’ Miss Renshaw leaned towards them confidentially. ‘Morgan’s number had come up.’

  The forbidden name, spoken so casually, so lightly.

  ‘Surely you girls haven’t forgotten that barbaric time?’ said Miss Renshaw. ‘The draft? The Vietnam War? Oh really, as I used to say in the staffroom, these children might as well be living in an eighteenth-century convent, for all the interest they take in the world.’

  Well, of course they knew about the Vietnam War. Although it was true that they knew a great deal more about the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BC.

  ‘Morgan was going to be drafted. To go to Vietnam!’ Miss Renshaw’s shoulders shook, in a mixture of indignation and laughter. ‘Can you imagine it?’

  ‘But wasn’t he…’ Bethany began. ‘Didn’t he…’ ‘In the paper,’ said Cubby. ‘The paper said that Morgan…’ She couldn’t say it.

  ‘He’d been in prison,’ said Icara, the realist, speaking for the first time, and her voice was harsh. ‘He was a convicted criminal. They wouldn’t want him in the army.’

  Miss Renshaw put her head on one side. It was as though she hadn’t heard what Icara said.

  ‘Do you remember the weather that morning, girls? It was so fresh, so warm – positively alcoholic. I wasn’t really myself. Or perhaps,’ she raised a finger at them, posing the question, ‘I was more myself, my true self.’

  They waited. What could they say?

  ‘It was always Morgan’s plan, you know, to disappear into the centre of Australia. Even if there was no draft. He wanted to go where nobody could find him, to get away from nuclear war.’

  Nuclear war?

  ‘He had a Kombi, you know. His getaway car,’ said Miss Renshaw. ‘So – I don’t know, girls, I suppose I went mad. I thought, yes, I’ll go! So we just decided. Just like that. We would leave, we would escape, together.’

  She closed her eyes for a moment.

  ‘That’s why we took you down to the cave. Morgan thought it would give us time to get away. There was another route out of the cave, you see, at the back.’

  Who had said there was another way out? Someone – one of the Elizabeths? She was right, after all.

  ‘Morgan knew the way,’ said Miss Renshaw, opening her eyes. ‘I told you that, remember? Morgan knew all the paths and caves. All the hiding places.’

  Morgan knew. Cubby felt the familiar, terrible fear, that fear she had felt so many times over the past nine years in recurring nightmares. Morgan, his beard, his smell, his deep, beautiful voice. The cave, the darkness, the moving light – and the hands, all the hands on the rock, reaching upwards, beseeching, in those ancient, dusty colours. But how could she remember the hands, when she had never seen them?

  ‘What about us?’ Cubby burst out. ‘You left us there!

  Weren’t you worried about us?’

  ‘Oh, I knew you’d be all right,’ said Miss Renshaw, dismissively. ‘What could happen to you? You were perfectly safe.’

  The waitress began to clear the tabl
es, wiping them with a cloth. It was nearly five o’clock. The café would be closing. It was too late to order anything.

  ‘I knew you’d all go back to school,’ said Miss Renshaw, ‘and then they’d look for me and then they wouldn’t find me and then life would go on.’

  Tra la la, life goes on.

  ‘That’s what happened, isn’t it?’ said Miss Renshaw. ‘Life went on?’

  ‘I suppose it did,’ Cubby said dully.

  It went on, only it wasn’t quite the same. It was never quite the same.

  Next to her, Cubby became aware of Icara trembling. She had her hands wedged under her thighs, and she was staring down intently at the placemat in front of her, with its cheap drawing of Madame de Pompadour. Was she having a fit? Cubby had read about people having fits – there was that book, The Idiot – and that prince – what was his name? Russian names were so difficult – and why was everyone a prince, it didn’t make sense…

  ‘So what did you do?’ asked Martine. ‘Where did you end up going? And what happened to Morgan?’

  Morgan.

  ‘Morgan,’ said Miss Renshaw, ‘was a fascinating man. His life took some strange turns. For a while, girls, he would only eat rice, nothing but. We kept a giant sack of it on the kitchen floor. And then, at one point, would you believe, he even became a warlock.’

  ‘You mean like a witch?’ said Bethany, with her large, round eyes.

  ‘Something like that,’ agreed Miss Renshaw. ‘It wasn’t easy, I can tell you. I don’t suppose you little girls can imagine what it’s like to live with a man who thinks he’s a warlock.’

  ‘We’re not so little now,’ said Icara.

  She’s mad, thought Cubby. Quite mad, just as Cubby’s mother had always maintained. Only they’d been too little, too inexperienced to recognise it.

  ‘But what happened to him?’ persisted Martine. ‘Where is he now?’

  Miss Renshaw paused.

  ‘He died,’ she said.

  ‘Drugs,’ said Icara.

  Miss Renshaw just looked at her.

  ‘You really have to try to be more sympathetic, Icara,’ she said. ‘Or people won’t like you.’

  But I like her, thought Cubby.

  ‘I like her,’ said Cubby out loud.

  ‘He had cancer,’ said Miss Renshaw, ignoring Cubby. ‘And then, with his principles, he wouldn’t go to a doctor.’

  ‘What principles?’ wondered Bethany.

  ‘Modern medicine has brought nothing but trouble,’ said Miss Renshaw. ‘It creates more diseases than it cures. You girls should think about that.’

  There was another pause.

  ‘I’ve thought about it now,’ said Icara.

  ‘Anyway,’ continued Miss Renshaw, ‘he wouldn’t see a doctor, but he found a marvellous healer just outside Lismore who treated him with herbs. I had to cook them up twice a day into a kind of tea. Brilliant stuff. Life-giving.’

  ‘But he died,’ Cubby couldn’t help pointing out.

  ‘Well, I guess his number was up,’ said Icara.

  ‘Icara, there is something intensely unsympathetic about you,’ said Miss Renshaw. ‘We are talking about a man’s death here.’

  ‘Did he write any more poems?’ asked Martine, changing the subject.

  ‘Some,’ said Miss Renshaw. ‘But he became more interested in politics.’

  ‘I suppose you could write poems about politics,’ said Bethany doubtfully.

  Miss Renshaw stood up.

  ‘I must go, girls. I just couldn’t resist coming over, seeing you like that. I hope I haven’t given you too much of a shock.’

  She smoothed down her springy hair, and smiled broadly.

  Then she leaned over, and patted Cubby on the shoulder.

  ‘Don’t look so stricken, Cubby. Courage.To strive, to seek, to find!’

  ‘And not to yield,’ said Cubby automatically, for she knew the poem well.

  ‘That’s the spirit.’

  And Miss Renshaw was gone. For the second time. Gone.

  TWENTY

  Schoolgirl Flying

  THE CAFÉ WAS CLOSING. The waitress tapped her watch, and gestured at the door. They had to leave, having eaten nothing.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Icara.

  They struggled out of the cushioned booth, dazed, and left Madame de Pompadour’s Continental Café, heading out onto the sloping plaza of the city.

  ‘That was strange,’ said Bethany.

  The bells of the General Post Office clock were chiming and the summer evening began to fall, the dying light tunnelled in by the high bank buildings that rose up on either side. Automatically, they put their hats on their heads.

  ‘Wait till we tell the others,’ said Martine. ‘They won’t believe it. Miss Renshaw came back!’

  They won’t believe it. Nobody would believe it. Did it really happen?

  ‘I wonder if she’ll go to school,’ said Bethany. ‘You know, and walk in the gate and say, Hello, everyone, it’s me!’

  She stopped for a moment, staggering into Martine. Her face was still very pink, but she didn’t cry.

  ‘She won’t go back there,’ said Icara definitely. ‘She wouldn’t dare.’

  They passed a newspaper kiosk. A crowd had gathered round it, picking up papers. There were posters with shouting black headlines. But the girls didn’t stop to see what the news was. Perhaps they remembered the day when Morgan’s ghostly head had appeared across the front page, in a threatening mist of ink.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ said Martine, lifting her nose like a bear.

  It was a rich smell, but not of flowers. Then they saw a man with little bunches of rosemary for sale, standing on the corner.

  ‘It’s Remembrance Day,’ said Icara.

  So it was. November 11. Because of their exam they had hardly noticed. They hadn’t been involved in any of the usual school rituals, the two minutes’ silence and the singing of hymns for dead soldiers. Remembrance Day.

  ‘The Day of the Dead,’ said Martine.

  They were close to the Cenotaph now, just outside the shadowy porticos of the General Post Office. A helmeted soldier in bronze stood at one end of a long box with a stone wreath laid on it, and a bronze sailor stood at the other end, both staring blindly out into the city in opposite directions. TO OUR GLORIOUS DEAD was engraved in the stone on one side of the box, and on the other, LEST WE FORGET. Yellow roses lay at the great glowing feet of the soldier, next to his resting gun.

  ‘It looks like a coffin,’ said Bethany.

  ‘It is a coffin,’ said Icara. ‘“Cenotaph” means an empty tomb in Greek. That’s what it is.’

  A hot wind blew down from the hill, carrying dust into their eyes and hair, like cinders.

  ‘You know what was really strange,’ said Martine.

  What? What was really strange?

  ‘Miss Renshaw was wearing the same dress.’

  Ah.

  ‘You mean…’ said Bethany.

  ‘Exactly the same dress as the day she disappeared,’ said Martine.

  They looked at each other carefully. Martine was right. Miss Renshaw was wearing that same crimson dress with its geometrical pattern of interlocking squares and triangles and its drooping sleeves. The dress she had been wearing that last day, in the Ena Thompson Memorial Gardens.

  ‘Yes, she was,’ said Cubby slowly.

  ‘It wasn’t just her clothes,’ said Martine. ‘But her – I mean, she looked exactly the same. Didn’t she?’

  ‘Do you think…’ Bethany began, and then stopped.

  ‘That she was a ghost?’ Martine finished the sentence for her.

  ‘A ghost? Just because she was wearing the same dress?’

  Icara rolled her eyes. ‘People do wear clothes more than once, you know.’

  ‘Nobody wears dresses like that any more,’ retorted Martine, ‘not even a teacher.’

  ‘But if she was a ghost,’ said Bethany, perplexed, anxious, ‘then it doesn’t make s
ense. All those things she told us, about Morgan and – and all those things. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘No, that’s right, it doesn’t make any sense,’ said Icara impatiently. ‘It’s ridiculous. She’s not a ghost. There are no such things as ghosts. When you’re dead, you’re dead.’

  ‘Yes…’ Bethany admitted, but she did not sound at all sure.

  ‘And she definitely wasn’t dead,’ said Icara. ‘Was she? Did she look dead?’

  Bethany thought about it. No, Miss Renshaw did not look dead.

  ‘So she wasn’t a ghost,’ she said, pleading.

  ‘No, she wasn’t,’ said Icara. ‘I was wrong. I was the one that said she was dead, and she’s not. She’s not dead. She’s alive.’

  They walked on, away from the Cenotaph and the plaza, on to George Street.

  ‘I think she was a ghost,’ said Martine.

  ‘Well, you’re wrong,’ said Icara.

  At the end of the road they could see a sliver of the ocean, that same curling Pacific Ocean that had carried Captain Cook across the world in his little wooden boat. It shone like a thousand mirrors, mirror upon mirror upon mirror, like star upon star in the sky.

  ‘Let’s run,’ said Martine, who was intending to go wild, after all. ‘Let’s run down to the water.’

  They ran.With one hand on their hats to stop them blowing away and the other outstretched, they sprinted. They ran to the edges of the earth, four schoolgirls for the last time.

  They ran until they reached the end of the wide street and crossed over to the row of creaking wharves, the newsstands, the red-eyed seagulls and the smell of fish, and darted through the afternoon crowds to the lapping water. The air was full of sounds – ropes splashing, gulls crying and the soft bells of signalling boats.

  Catching their breath, they leaned together on the cold iron railing, gazing out at the ocean. Cubby stood slightly apart, next to Icara. Her heart was beating hard and her eyes were thick with thoughts.

  She knew Miss Renshaw was dead, whatever Icara now said. Cubby knew it. Morgan had murdered her in that low, dark cave nine years ago. Cubby knew it now, without any doubt, because of something she alone had seen that afternoon, that no one else had even noticed.