CHAPTER 17
‘YOUR HUSBAND IS at peace in God’s hands.’ Hannah Roennfeldt runs over the phrase again and again on the day of the mysterious letter. Grace is alive, but Frank is dead. She wants to be able to believe the one and not the other. Frank. Franz. She recalls the gentle man whose life was turned upside down so many times along the curious path which somehow led him to her.
The first reverse saw him ripped from his life of privilege in Vienna as a boy of sixteen, as his father’s gambling debts drove them all the way to relatives in Kalgoorlie, a place so remote from Austria that even the most ardent creditor would give up the chase. From luxury to austerity, the son taking on the trade of baker in the shop run by his uncle and aunt, who since their arrival years before had changed from Fritz and Mitzie into Clive and Millie. It was important to blend in, they said. His mother understood this, but his father, with the pride and stubbornness that had triggered his financial ruin, resisted adaptation, and within the year had thrown himself under a train bound for Perth, leaving Frank as head of the household.
Months later, war brought internment as an enemy alien – first on Rottnest Island, then over East – for this boy who was now not simply uprooted and bereaved, but despised, for things done far away and beyond his control.
And never once had he complained, thought Hannah. Frank’s ready, open smile was undiminished by the time she met him in Partageuse in 1922, when he came to work in the bakery.
She remembered the first time she had seen him, on the main street. The spring morning was sunny but October still brought a nip with it. He had smiled at her, and proffered a shawl she recognised as her own.
‘You left it in the bookshop, just now,’ he said.
‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’
‘It is a beautiful shawl, with such embroidery. My mother used to have one like it. Chinese silk is very costly: it would be a pity to lose it.’ He gave a respectful nod, and turned to go.
‘I haven’t seen you here before,’ said Hannah. Nor had she heard his charming accent.
‘I have just started at the baker’s. I am Frank Roennfeldt. Pleased to meet you, ma’am.’
‘Well, welcome to Partageuse, Mr Roennfeldt. I hope you’ll like it here. I’m Hannah Potts.’ She rearranged her parcels, trying to pull the shawl over her shoulders.
‘Please, allow me,’ he said, draping it around her in one fluid movement. ‘I wish you an excellent day.’ Again, he flashed an open smile. The sun caught the blue of his eyes and made his fair hair shine.
As she crossed the street to her waiting sulky, she noticed a woman nearby give her a piercing look and spit on the pavement. Hannah was shocked, but said nothing.
A few weeks later, she visited Maisie McPhee’s little bookshop once again. As she entered, she saw Frank standing at the counter, under attack from a matron who was waving her stick to make her point. ‘The very idea, Maisie McPhee!’ the woman was declaring. ‘The very notion that you could sell books that support the Boche. I lost a son and a grandson to those animals, and I don’t expect to see you sending them money like a Red Cross parcel.’
As Maisie stood speechless, Frank said, ‘I am sorry if I caused any offence, ma’am. It is not Miss McPhee’s fault.’ He smiled and held the open book towards her. ‘You see? It is only poetry.’
‘Only poetry, my foot!’ the woman snapped, thumping her stick on the ground. ‘Not a decent word ever came out of their mouths! I’d heard we had a Hun in town, but I didn’t think you’d be bold enough to rub it in our faces like this! And as for you, Maisie!’ She faced the counter. ‘Your father must be turning in his blessed grave.’
‘Please, I am very sorry,’ said Frank. ‘Miss McPhee, please keep the book. I did not mean to offend anyone.’ He put a ten-shilling note on the counter and walked out, brushing past Hannah without noticing her. The woman stormed out after him, clacking her way down the street in the opposite direction.
Maisie and Hannah looked at one another for a moment, before the shopkeeper assembled a bright smile and said, ‘Got your list there, Miss Potts?’
As Maisie ran her eye down the page, Hannah’s attention wandered to the abandoned book. She was curious how the dainty volume bound in forest-green leather could have caused such offence. Opening it, the gothic print on the flyleaf caught her eye: ‘Das Stunden Buch – Rainer Maria Rilke.’ She had learned German at school along with her French, and had heard of Rilke.
‘And,’ she said, taking out two pound notes, ‘do you mind if I take this book too?’ When Maisie looked at her in surprise, Hannah said, ‘It’s about time we all put the past behind us, don’t you think?’
The shopkeeper wrapped it in brown paper and tied it with string. ‘Well, to be honest, it saves me trying to send it back to Germany. No one else’ll buy it.’
At the baker’s a few moments later, Hannah put the little parcel on the counter. ‘I wonder if you could give this to Mr Roennfeldt please. He left it behind at the bookshop.’
‘He’s out the back. I’ll give him a cooee.’
‘Oh, there’s no need. Thanks very much,’ she said, and left the shop before he had a chance to say anything else.
A few days later, Frank called on her to thank her in person for her kindness, and her life began a new path, which at first seemed like the most fortunate she could have dreamed of.
Septimus Potts’s delight at the inkling that his daughter had found a local man to step out with turned to dismay when he learned he was the baker. But he remembered his own humble beginnings, and was determined not to hold the man’s trade against him. When, however, he found out he was German, or practically German, his dismay became disgust. The spats with Hannah that had started soon after the courtship began made each of them, stubborn in heart and head, more entrenched in their position.
Within two months, things had come to a head. Septimus Potts paced the drawing room, trying to take in the news. ‘Are you out of your mind, girl?’
‘It’s what I want, Dad.’
‘Marrying a Hun!’ He glanced at Ellen’s photo in its ornate silver frame on the mantelpiece. ‘Your mother would never forgive me, for a start! I promised her I’d bring you up properly …’
‘And you have, Dad, you have.’
‘Well something went up the spout if you’re talking about hitching up with a German bloody baker.’
‘He’s Austrian.’
‘What difference does that make? Do I have to take you down to the Repat Home, and show you the boys still gibbering like idiots because of the gas? Me of all people – I paid for the bloody hospital!’
‘You know full well Frank wasn’t even in the war – he was interned. He’s never hurt a soul.’
‘Hannah, show some sense. You’re a decent-looking girl. There’s plenty of fellows hereabouts – hell, in Perth or Sydney or even Melbourne – would be honoured to have you as a wife.’
‘Honoured to have your money, you mean.’
‘So we’re back on that now, are we? You’re too good for my money, are you, my lass?’
‘It’s not that, Dad …’
‘I worked like a dog to get where I am. I’m not ashamed of what I am or where I came from. But you – you’ve got a chance of something better.’
‘I just want a chance to live my own life.’
‘Look, if you want to do charity work you can go and live out with the natives on the mission. Or work in the orphanage. You don’t have to bloody marry it, your charity career.’
His daughter’s face was red, her heart racing at this last slight – not only at the outrage of it, but somewhere beneath that, at the unformed fear that it might be true. What if she had only said yes to Frank to spite the suitors who chased her money? Or if she was just wanting to make up to him for all he had suffered? Then she thought of how his smile made her feel, and that way he lifted his chin to consider things she asked him, and felt reassured.
‘He’s a decent man, Dad. Give him a chance.’
‘Hannah.’ Septimus put a hand on her shoulder. ‘You know you mean the world to me.’ He stroked her head. ‘You wouldn’t let your mother brush your hair, as a little ’un, did you know that? You’d say, “Pa! I want Pa to do it!” And I would. You’d sit on my knee by the fire in the evening, and I’d brush your hair while the crumpets toasted on the flames. We’d make sure Mum didn’t see where the butter had dripped on your dress. And your hair would shine like a Persian princess.
‘Just wait. Just a while,’ her father pleaded.
If all he needed was time to get used to the idea, time to feel differently about it … Hannah was about to concede, when he continued, ‘You’ll see things my way – see you’re making a bad mistake –’ he took one of the deep, puffed-out breaths she associated with his business decisions, ‘and you’ll thank your lucky stars I talked you out of it.’
She pulled away. ‘I won’t be patronised. You can’t stop me from marrying Frank.’
‘Can’t save you from it, you mean.’
‘I’m old enough to marry without your consent and I will if I want.’
‘You may not give a damn what this will mean for me, but have a care for your sister. You know how folks round here will take this.’
‘Folks round here are xenophobic hypocrites!’
‘Oh, that university education was worth every penny. So now you can put your father down with your fancy words.’ He looked her straight in the eye. ‘I never thought I’d hear myself say this, my girl, but if you marry that man it will be without my blessing. And without my money.’
With the composure that had first drawn Septimus to her mother, Hannah stood straight and very still. ‘If that’s how you want it to be, Dad, that’s how it will be.’
Following a small wedding, which Septimus refused to attend, the couple lived in Frank’s rickety clapboard house at the edge of the town. Life was frugal, there was no doubt. Hannah gave piano lessons and taught some of the timber workers to read and write. One or two took a nasty pleasure in the thought that they employed, if just for an hour a week, the daughter of the man who employed them. But by and large, people respected Hannah’s kindness and straightforward courtesy.
She was happy. She had found a husband who seemed to understand her completely, who could discuss philosophy and classical mythology, whose smile dispersed worry and made hardship easy to bear.
As the years passed, a measure of tolerance was afforded to the baker whose accent never entirely disappeared. Some, like Billy Wishart’s wife, or Joe Rafferty and his mother, still made a performance of crossing the street when they saw him, but mostly, things settled down. By 1925, Hannah and Frank decided that life was certain enough, money secure enough, to bring a baby into the world, and in February 1926 their daughter was born.
Hannah recalled Frank’s lilting tenor voice, as he rocked the cradle. ‘Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf. Dein Vater hüt’ die Schaf. Die Mutter schüttelt’s B?umelein, da f?llt herab ein Tr?umelein. Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf.’
In that little room lit by a paraffin lamp, with a back that was aching, on a chair that needed mending, he had told her, ‘I cannot imagine a more fortunate existence.’ The glow in his face was not from the lamp but from the tiny creature in the cot, whose breathing made that tell-tale change in rhythm as she finally surrendered to sleep.
That March, the altar had been decorated with vases of daisies and stephanotis from Frank and Hannah’s garden, and the sweet scent floated all the way across the empty pews to the back of the church. Hannah wore pale blue with a matching low-brimmed felt hat, and Frank his wedding suit, which still fitted, four years on. His cousin Bettina and her husband Wilf had come from Kalgoorlie to be godparents, and smiled indulgently at the tiny infant in Hannah’s arms.
Reverend Norkells stood beside the font, fumbling slightly as he pulled one of the brightly coloured tassels to turn to the correct page of the baptism rite. The clumsiness may have been connected to the whiff of alcohol on his breath. ‘Hath this child already been baptised or no?’ he began.
It was a hot, brooding Saturday afternoon. A fat blowfly buzzed about, coming in periodically to drink at the font, only to be chased away by the godparents. It came in once too often and, swatted by Wilf with his wife’s fan, plummeted into the holy water like a drunk into a ditch. The vicar fished it out without a pause as he asked, ‘Dost thou, in the name of this child, renounce the devil and all his works …?’
‘I renounce them all,’ the godparents replied in unison.
As they spoke, the door to the church creaked in response to a tentative push. Hannah’s heart lifted at the sight of her father, led by Gwen, making his way slowly to kneel in the last pew. Hannah and her father had not spoken since the day she left home to be married, and she had expected him to respond to the christening invitation in the usual way – with silence. ‘I’ll try, Hanny,’ Gwen had promised. ‘But you know what a stubborn old mule he is. I promise you this, though. I’ll be there, whatever he says. This has gone on long enough.’
Now, Frank turned to Hannah. ‘You see?’ he whispered. ‘God makes everything work out in His own time.’
‘Oh merciful God, grant that the old Adam in this child may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up in her …’ The words echoed off the walls, and the baby snuffled and wriggled as her mother held her. When she started to grizzle, Hannah put the knuckle of her little finger to the tiny lips, which sucked contentedly. The rite continued, and Norkells took the child and said to the godparents, ‘Name this child.’
‘Grace Ellen.’
‘Grace Ellen, I baptise thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’
Throughout the rest of the service, the infant stared at the brightly coloured glass in the windows, as fascinated as she would be when, two years later, she gazed at it again from beside the font, in another woman’s arms.
When it was over, Septimus remained in his pew. As Hannah walked slowly down the aisle, the baby stirred in her blanket, winding her head a little this way and that. Hannah stopped beside her father, who stood up as she offered him his grandchild. He hesitated, before putting out his arms to cradle the baby.
‘Grace Ellen. Your mother would be touched,’ was all he could manage before a tear escaped, and he gazed with awe at the child.
Hannah took his arm. ‘Come and see Frank,’ she said, as she led him up the aisle.
‘Please, I’d like you to come in,’ Hannah said later, as her father stood at her gate with Gwen. Septimus was hesitant. The little clapboard cottage, barely more than a shack, reminded him of the Flindells’ lean-to affair in which he had grown up. Going through the door took him back fifty years in a couple of steps.
In the front room, he talked stiffly but politely to Frank’s cousins. He complimented Frank on the excellent christening cake, and the small but fine assortment of food. Out of the corner of his eye he kept sizing up the cracks in the plaster, the holes in the rug.
As he was leaving, he drew Hannah aside and took out his wallet. ‘Let me give you a little something for—’
Hannah gently pushed his hand back down. ‘It’s all right, Dad. We do all right,’ she said.
‘Of course you do. But now that you’ve got a little one …’
She put a hand on his arm. ‘Really. It’s kind of you, but we can manage on our own. Come and visit soon.’
He smiled and kissed the baby on the forehead, then his daughter. ‘Thank you, Hanny.’ Then in hardly more than a mumble, he said, ‘Ellen would have wanted her granddaughter watched over. And I’ve – I’ve missed you.’
Within a week, gifts for the baby were being delivered from Perth, from Sydney and beyond. A cot, a mahogany chest of drawers. Dresses and bonnets and things for the bath. The granddaughter of Septimus Potts would have the best that money could buy.
‘Your husband is at peace in God’s hands.’ Because of the letter, Hannah goes through both a mourning and a renewal. God has taken her husband, but has saved her daughter. She weeps not just with sorrow, but with shame, at her memories of that day.
The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community, where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth, or of the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man’s name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.
That’s how life goes on – protected by the silence that anaesthetises shame. Men who came back from the war with stories they could have told about the desperate failings of comrades at the point of death say only that they died bravely. To the outside world, no soldier ever visited a brothel or acted like a savage or ran and hid from the enemy. Being over there was punishment enough. When wives have to hide the mortgage money or the kitchen knives from a husband who’s lost the thread, they do it without a word, sometimes acknowledging it not even to themselves.
So for Hannah Roennfeldt, her memory of losing Frank is one she has learned she can share with no one. ‘Raking over coals – what’s the good of that?’ people would say, anxious to return to their civilised picture of life in Partageuse. But Hannah remembers.
Anzac Day. The pubs are full – full of men who were there, or who lost brothers there; fellows back from Gallipoli and the Somme and still not over the shell shock and the mustard gas, even ten years on. The twenty-fifth of April, 1926. The sly two-up games go on in the back bar, where the police turn a blind eye for this one day of the year. Hell, the police join in – it was their war too. And the Emu Bitter flows and the talk gets louder, the songs saucier. There’s a lot to forget. They came back to their work on farms, to their work behind desks and in front of classes, and they got on with it – just bloody got on with it because there was no choice. And the more they drink, the harder the forgetting becomes, the more they want to take a swing at something, or at someone – fair and square, man to man. Bloody Turks. Bloody Huns. Bloody bastards.
And Frank Roennfeldt will do as well as anything. The only German in town, except he’s Austrian. He’s the nearest thing to the enemy they can find, so as they see him walking down the street with Hannah at dusk, they start to whistle ‘Tipperary’. Hannah looks nervous, and stumbles. Frank instantly takes baby Grace into his arms, snatches the cardigan draped on his wife’s arm to cover her, and they walk more quickly, heads down.
The boys in the pub decide this is a fine sport, and spill out onto the street. The fellows from the other pubs along the main drag come out too, then one wag decides it will be a great joke to swipe Frank’s hat, and does.
‘Oh, leave us alone, Joe Rafferty!’ scolds Hannah. ‘Go back to the pub and leave us alone,’ and they keep up a brisk pace.
‘Leave us alone!’ mimics Joe in a high-pitched whimper. ‘Bloody Fritz! All the same, all cowards!’ He turns to the mob. ‘And look at these two, with their pretty little baby.’ He’s slurring his words. ‘You know Fritz used to eat babies. Roasted them alive, evil bastards.’
‘Go away or we’ll get the police!’ shouts Hannah, before freezing at the sight of Harry Garstone and Bob Lynch, the police constables, standing on the hotel verandah, schooners in hand, smirking behind their waxed moustaches.
Suddenly, like a struck match, the scene’s alight: ‘Come on, lads, let’s have some fun with the Hun-lovers!’ goes up the cry. ‘Let’s save the baby from being eaten,’ and a dozen drunks are chasing the couple and Hannah is falling behind because her girdle stops her from breathing properly and she’s calling, ‘Grace, Frank! Save Grace!’ and he runs with the little bundle away from the mob who are corralling him down the road to the jetty, and his heart is thumping and out of rhythm and pain shoots down his arm as he runs along the rickety planks above the water and jumps into the first rowing boat he can find, and rows out to sea, out to safety. Just until the mob sobers up and things calm down.
He’s known worse, in his day.