The Submerged Cathedral by Charlotte Wood Read Free Book Online

She takes it and tosses it aside.
    â€˜How many snails have you got there?’
    Sandra meets her gaze for a second. She is dark-haired like her mother, her skin pale with Englishness. But where Ellen’s eyes are green Sandra’s are dark brown, like Jocelyn’s.
    â€˜Twelve,’ she says.
    â€˜I see,’ nods Jocelyn, shifting to sit cross-legged on the ground beside her. She wants to reach out and touch Sandra’s hand, but resists the urge.
    â€˜This one’s called Jeremy,’ breathes Sandra, pointing with a stick at one snail stuck three-quarters up the pot’sside, slowly making for escape. Her voice has an adult clarity and volume Jocelyn has never heard in the muffled, mumbled speech of Australian children. ‘No you don’t,’ says Sandra sweetly, and wields her stick to flick Jeremy from the side and clack him roughly back into the pot.
    When Jocelyn returns to the dining room Ellen and Martin are smiling at her.
    â€˜Martin’s going to deliver the baby,’ Ellen says, beaming.
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    Ellen’s first check-up is ‘like playing doctors and nurses’; she giggles, making her face prim and walking haughtily. Martin is playful too, ushering her into the surgery, pretending not to know her, calling her Madam .
    While he peels back her sleeve and wraps the black rubber cuff around her upper arm Ellen looks around and jokes there should be Van Gogh’s sunflowers, isn’t that what doctors’ rooms always have?
    Martin puffs the little ball in his hand. The band tightens on her skin. He stops, examines the dial, and then lets out the band with a sound of released air. As the air hisses he says, ‘So what exactly has happened, injury-wise?’
    She leans back for a moment, closes her eyes, then opens them. ‘Do we really have to go into this?’
    He says, merely, softly, ‘Yes.’
    So Ellen begins talking, in a shopping-list voice, sometimes lifting her blouse or standing and turning, pulling her skirt away from her back for him to see, chronicling the years of damage done to her body in another country on the other side of the world.
    Martin watches her while she speaks, and listens, and thinks about other, invisible kinds of pain.
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    In the night Martin climbs out of the fold-out bed in the sun-room where he sleeps now that Sandra and Ellen are here, and goes to Jocelyn’s room. They touch each other’s skin, and whisper the news of their week into the dark.
    â€˜Sandra reminds me of me when I was little,’ she says. ‘All that silence and staring.’
    He strokes her hand where he holds it flat on his chest. ‘Poor little you,’ he says.
    He has talked to George, who has given him a day’s locum work on Mondays, and the Sydney practice will let him have the extra day away.
    Jocelyn presses her fingers on her closed eyes, hard, in the dark to stop herself from crying. She knows she should be pleased. It’s an extra night. But she wants him never to leave.
    They talk softly through the hours, until they fall asleep. Jocelyn pretends she can hear the sea outside.

    Ellen plumps cushions, takes possession of the house as she moves through the rooms. ‘Thank God we had you to come home to,’ she says to Jocelyn one afternoon when the sun through the window divides the living room into quarters. Jocelyn nods, thinking of the way the sun strikes water, not glass. Thinking of Martin, of the meanings of home.
    Among the belongings Ellen puts around the house are her photographs in frames. She has several of her bridal ship journey with Thomas to England. She and Thomas in fancy-dress, a pharaoh king and queen. She had been skilful with their makeup and gold lamé. His eyes are particularly accentuated, pencilled black and sensuous into wide cat’s corners, and he has golden cardboard epaulettes on his shoulders and manacles on his wrists. It sickens Jocelyn now to see the picture, but