Two Lieutenants Manning

I

The rain had come in off the Pacific before dawn, and by ten o’clock it had settled over Sydney with the patience of something that meant to stay. Clare Ashby stood at the window of her rooms in Castlereagh Street and watched the umbrellas go by below, black and brown and the occasional brave green, and she thought, as she often did on such mornings, of another rain, in another May, falling on the canvas roofs of a casualty clearing station near Étaples. She allowed the memory to come, and allowed it to pass. That was the discipline. You did not slam the door on the past; you let it walk through the room, and you watched it go.

The woman who climbed the stairs at a quarter past ten was perhaps fifty, in a navy coat that had been good ten years before and a hat that had been retrimmed to be good again. She held her handbag in front of her with both hands, the way a woman holds a thing that contains a difficulty.

“Miss Ashby? My name is Knox. Elsie Knox. A Mrs Hartigan at the Repatriation office said you might help me. She said you were a nurse in France, and that you find things out.”

“I was, and sometimes I do. Please, sit down. I’ll put the kettle on, and then you can tell me what it is that needs finding.”

Miss Knox sat. She did not open the bag until the tea had come, and then she drew out a folded page of the Sydney Morning Herald and laid it on the desk, smoothing it flat with the side of her hand. Among the funeral notices one had been ringed in pencil.

MANNING.—The Remains of the late WILLIAM ERNEST MANNING, late A.I.F., will be privately Cremated at the Rookwood Crematorium, THIS (Wednesday) AFTERNOON, at 2.45.

“That’s today,” Clare said gently.

“Yes. I shall go, of course. There’s nobody else to.” Elsie Knox lifted her cup and set it down again without drinking. “He was my uncle by marriage. He married my mother’s youngest sister, my Aunt Christina, in 1908. I was a witness at the wedding, at St Michael’s in Surry Hills, with my Uncle William and my Uncle Frank. They’re both gone now. Aunt Christina went two years ago, in the North Shore Hospital. And now Uncle Ernest.” She paused. “Only the trouble is, Miss Ashby, I am no longer sure who Uncle Ernest was.”

Clare waited. She had learned long ago that the most important sentence a client spoke was rarely the first, and almost never the one they had rehearsed on the stairs.

“When he died — at the Prince of Wales Hospital, at Randwick — they asked me to see about his things. There was a letter in his wallet from the Repatriation people, years old. And when I went in to tell them he’d passed, the clerk looked him up and said, quite cheerfully, that the Lieutenant had served in Egypt with the Remounts in 1915, and was it his widow, Mrs Lucy Manning, I was calling for. I said there wasn’t any Mrs Lucy Manning. My aunt’s name was Christina, and she was dead. And Uncle Ernest never went to Egypt in 1915; he sailed in 1916, from Melbourne, because I remember Aunt Christina’s letters from Kew.” She looked down at her gloves. “The clerk was very kind. He said the army often muddled things. But I have been lying awake, Miss Ashby. My aunt was a good woman, and she waited for him all through the war, and there were years afterwards when — when they did not live together. If there was another wife, I think I would rather know it, today, before I stand in that chapel and say a prayer for him.”

Clare looked at the ringed notice, and at the hand resting beside it, which was not quite steady. A man had died, and his name had come loose from him, the way a label comes loose from a parcel in the rain. It seemed to her a small thing and an enormous one, both at once.

“I will do what I can before half past two,” she said. “Tell me about your aunt. Not the facts yet. Tell me about her.”

II

It was, as Clare had suspected, a family that told its own story well.

Elsie’s grandfather, William Thomas Cadden, had run away to sea from Lancashire at twelve, or so his obituary said, and had reached the California diggings in ’49 and walked, he claimed, three thousand eight hundred miles across a continent to reach the next rush. He had been at the Eureka Stockade, and on Lambing Flat when the soldiers came up from Sydney, and he had very nearly pegged the ground at Mount Morgan that made other men millionaires. “Grandmother used to say he made more than one fortune and lost every one of them,” Elsie said, and for the first time she smiled. “He was an upholsterer, at the last, in Grey Street, Glen Innes. And tyler of the Masonic Lodge. He kept the door.”

There had been seven children. Elsie’s own mother, Mary, the eldest. Then Frances, who married a mine manager at sixteen and had eleven children at Dalmorton. William and John, who as boys had picked up gold nuggets the size of loaves at Mount Wheeler, near Rockhampton. Frank, who kept a store on the goldfield and later a hotel in Clarence Street. Christina. And Walter, the youngest, who died at twenty-one and lies at Rookwood.

“Aunt Christina was the one who stayed,” Elsie said. “When the others went off — Uncle John to Western Australia, Uncle William everywhere in the world — she stayed at West Brae, on Macquarie Street, and looked after Grandmother. She had a lovely voice. There’s a bit in the Glen Innes paper about her singing ‘Home’ at the school concert when she was a girl; Mother kept it. And she was clever with her hands, and she didn’t complain. Then Grandmother died in 1907, and Aunt Christina came down to Sydney to keep house in Uncle William’s hotel. The National, in George Street. He had a good many hotels, Uncle William. Before that it was Bowden’s, in Elizabeth Street; she was staying there once when someone stole her amethyst brooch, and it was in the Police Gazette.” She shook her head. “She’d have been mortified.”

“And that is where she met Mr Manning?”

“I always supposed so. He was a commercial traveller then, and travellers live in hotels. He was a New Zealander, from Christchurch — the youngest son of a brewer. Nice manners. Not tall. He’d been in the Boer War, with the mounted men, and he could talk about horses for an hour together. She was older than him.” Elsie hesitated, and then decided to be honest. “She was forty-three, and she told the minister forty. We all knew. Nobody minded.”

Clare wrote nothing down. She was watching the way Elsie Knox held her shoulders when she spoke of her aunt — lifted, a little, as if there were still a duty she was carrying — and she let her own shoulders take the same line, so that she might feel, for a moment, the weight of it. Love, she thought. And beneath the love, a fear of having failed to keep something safe.

“After the wedding,” she said, “where did they go?”

“To New Zealand first. I have a letter from Christchurch — 430 Cashel Street. She wrote to the Registrar in Sydney in 1911 to have the marriage register put right, because they’d written his mother down wrong. Stapleton, they’d put, and it was Craythorn. She was particular about that sort of thing. She said if a thing is written down, it ought to be true.” Elsie looked up. “That’s why I’ve come to you, really. Because of that.”

III

The Prince of Wales Hospital stood on the high ground at Randwick, a long sprawl of brick and timber that had been No. 4 Australian General Hospital in the war and had never entirely stopped being one. There were still men in its wards who had been there, in one way or another, since 1918. Clare knew the type of building and the type of silence. She signed her name at the porter’s lodge and asked for the sister of the ward where Mr Manning had died.

Sister Doyle was a square, grey-eyed woman of about Clare’s own age, and she looked at Clare’s hands before she looked at her face; Clare recognised the habit and liked her for it.

“Mr Manning. Yes. A quiet man. Rheumatism, and the heart at the end. He’d been coming to us on and off for years — Repat. He used to ask for the bed by the window so he could see the sky over Coogee.” She considered. “He told me once he’d been in France for four days. Four days, and then into hospital at Étaples with the pains in his legs, and back to England, and home. He said it as if he were confessing to something. I told him there were men in this ward who’d been in France for three years and would have given their eye teeth for four days.” She shrugged. “I don’t think it helped.”

Clare thought of the men she had nursed who had wept because they had not been wounded enough to be sent home, and of the men who had wept because they had. It was not the length of the war a man carried, she had come to believe, but the shape of it.

“Did he speak of his wife?”

“Christina. Often, toward the end. He had a photograph — two ladies in big hats, one old and one not so old. He said the younger one was his wife and the older her mother. He said his wife had waited for him at Kew all through the war, and that afterward he hadn’t been much of a husband to her for a while, and that he was sorry for it, and that she’d forgiven him, at Berry’s Bay.” Sister Doyle’s mouth moved. “He called himself Captain. He had a little motor vessel, the Phoenix. Said he’d been everything in his life — horse doctor, salesman, soldier, engineer — and he’d finished up a sea captain, like his wife’s father had started out. He seemed to find that a comfort.”

“He never mentioned a Lucy?”

Sister Doyle looked at her for a long moment. “No,” she said. “Only Christina.”

On her way out, Clare paused in the corridor beside a door marked Q.M. Store. Elsie had told her, almost in passing, that her Uncle Frank had worked in this very hospital in the war, keeping time in the quartermaster’s store. He had told the army he was forty-seven when he was fifty-six. Uncle John, in Perth, had told them he was forty-eight when he was fifty-four, and gone off to dig tunnels. And Ernest Manning, at forty-five, had quietly made himself a year younger so that they would take him at all. A family, Clare thought, that kept its ages the way other families keep the good silver — polished, and moved about the house whenever company came.

IV

The Carlton Cross Hotel in Young Street remembered nothing; it had changed hands three times since 1917. But the Repatriation office, when Clare presented herself and Mrs Hartigan’s name at the counter, was more forthcoming than it had been to a grieving niece. The clerk brought out a buff folder, frayed at the corners and tied with pink tape, and Clare saw at once what Elsie had not been in a position to see.

There were two men in it.

One of them had applied, in September 1915, for a commission in the Remount Unit — a stock and station agent of Fitzroy, born 3rd June 1870, next of kin Christina Manning. That man had not been taken; he had enlisted instead in January 1916 as a mechanical fitter, trained as an engineer officer, sailed on the Aeneas with the Pioneers, and come home on the Beltana with myalgia. His signature was the same on every sheet: a quick, slanted Ernest, run together, and a great looping M.

The other man had been appointed a lieutenant in the 2nd Remount Unit on the 13th of October 1915, sailed from Sydney in the Orsova, gone down with influenza in Egypt, and returned on the Seang Bee in April 1916, at a time when the first man was sitting, by his own sworn statement, in a classroom in Melbourne learning to be an engineer. The second man’s signature was not on any sheet at all. Somebody, twenty years ago, had seen William Ernest Manning on one docket and William Ernest Manning on another and tied them up together with pink tape, and that had been that.

“The Remount man,” Clare said. “Do you know who he is?”

The clerk did. Everybody in Sydney did, it turned out, once you knew where to look. The eldest son of the late Sir William Patrick Manning, sometime Mayor of Sydney; a solicitor of Andrews and Manning, brother of the Attorney-General; a fine amateur rider in his youth; married to a Miss Lucy Throsby Osborne of Jugiong. He lived at Darling Point.

Clare thanked him and went out into the rain, and she did not go to Darling Point. She did not need to. A man who had ridden to hounds and gone to Egypt with the army’s horses and come home in indifferent health was entitled to his own name, and to his own wife, and to his own peace. It was enough to know that he existed, and that he was not Ernest. She stood for a moment under the awning of a tobacconist’s shop — her client’s grandfather, she remembered, had kept one, in Edward Street, Brisbane — and found that she was smiling.

V

The crematorium at Rookwood stood among wet lawns and dark pines, and the chapel was very small. There were five people in it: Miss Elsie Knox, Miss Clare Ashby, a man from F. W. Hartley’s of Newtown, a clergyman who had not known the deceased, and Sister Doyle from Randwick, who came in late, shaking the rain from her cape, and sat at the back.

Before the service began Clare leaned toward Elsie and told her, in a low voice, what she had found: two lieutenants with the same two names; one file; one careless clerk, long ago. There was no Lucy. There had only ever been Christina.

Elsie Knox did not cry. She closed her eyes for a little while, and when she opened them she looked at the plain coffin with something that was not quite forgiveness, because there had never been any need for it, but was very like relief.

“She’d have wanted it right,” she said. “She went to all that trouble in 1911, writing to Sydney from New Zealand, just to get his mother’s name right in the book. She’d have hated it to finish with the wrong wife.”

“Then we shall see that it doesn’t,” Clare said. “I’ve written to Base Records. It may take them another twenty years, but the letter is in the post.”

Afterwards, when the clergyman had gone and the man from Hartley’s had driven away, the two women walked a little through the cemetery under one umbrella. Elsie wanted to find Walter. They found him eventually, in the old part of the ground, the youngest of the seven, twenty-one years old in 1896 and in Rookwood ever since.

“They were such a family for moving on,” Elsie said, looking at the stone. “Grandfather from Lancashire to California and back. Uncle William to San Francisco, right in the earthquake. Uncle John to the Kimberley, as a mounted policeman, and his Pearl married off to Johannesburg. Moving on. All of them except Aunt Christina, and even she went to New Zealand in the end.” She drew her coat closer. “I used to think it was restlessness. Now I wonder if it was hope. Always one more rush. One more town.”

Clare thought of the old man walking across a continent toward a rumour of gold, and of his daughter singing ‘Home’ in a schoolroom in Glen Innes, and of a small grey motor vessel riding at her moorings in Berry’s Bay with nobody aboard. She thought of all the names in all the registers, the ages made younger and the mothers put right, and the long patient work of setting the record straight for people who could no longer ask it of you.

“Perhaps it is the same thing,” she said. “Restlessness and hope. Perhaps it only depends on whether anyone is waiting at the other end.”

The rain eased a little as they walked back to the gate. Above the pines, toward the west, there was a thin bright line of evening, like the edge of a page.