Conditions of Faith

Alex Miller

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781742377346
• eBook ISBN:
  9781742695365
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2001 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction

From the Author of Miles Franklin Literary Award and Commonwealth Writers' Prize Winner

With university behind her, Emily Stanton finds herself on the threshold of life. Introduced to a Scottish engineer, the exoticism of his life in Paris beckons, and she leaves her family home in 1920s Melbourne to become his wife. But far from providing answers, her conventional marriage awakens in her an ardent desire to find a reason for living beyond that of simply wife and mother. This desire leads her to flirt with risk, passion and unorthodox friendships, and carries her to Tunisia on a journey of self-questioning and intellectual reawakening.

Conditions of Faith is both a provocative romance and an elegant meditation on a timeless dilemma.
Impetuous yet entirely sympathetic, Emily Stanton, like Henry James' Isabel Archer, is in search of a reason for living in a society where motherhood is deemed reason enough. This mesmerising and thought-provoking story of dreams, obsessions and destiny will hold you in thrall.

PART ONE

THE VOYAGE OUT

ONE

When Emily reached the warm shallows she stood up and waded to the edge of the sand where she had left her towel. As she came to the shore through the soft lapping of the water she reached and pulled off her bathing cap and shook out her long brown hair. At the sand she bent and picked up her towel then turned and stood looking back out to sea, her hand raised shielding her eyes from the glare off the water. Two hundred yards offshore her father was stroking a steady overarm toward the partly submerged wreck, his solitary advance breaking the silvery membrane of the sea. The air was still and hot, the bay luminous and flat in the afternoon sunlight. Farther down the beach toward the yacht club with its thicket of bare masts, isolated bathers stood about listlessly in the shallows gazing out to sea or toward the beach. Far out a white-hulled passenger liner was steaming slowly toward the port past anchored cargo vessels; the grey smoke from its twin funnels was pencilled against the white of the sky and stretched behind it over the horizon. The sharp cries of children at play carried to Emily and somewhere behind her in the tea-trees that grew thickly along the slope below the road a dog barked repeatedly. Already the cooling effect of her swim was wearing off and the heat beginning to press down on her. She watched until her father reached the wreck, waiting until he turned and began the return swim, then she started up the beach toward the tea-trees and the line of gaily painted bathing boxes.

Outside her family’s blue bathing box Emily’s mother was still sitting in her deck chair beneath the shade of the red-and-white-striped umbrella. She was no longer reading her book, however, but was gazing off into the distance, or perhaps had fallen asleep. Beside her mother, their visitor’s deck chair was empty. Georges Elder had moved across onto the sand, where he was sitting cross-legged on a towel in the sun. Emily saw that while she had been swimming he had changed into his bathing costume. He was bent forward, drawing again in the blue notebook he carried about with him. The sunlight blazed on his coppery hair and his white shoulders. She had failed earlier to coax him into the water. As she approached him she examined his body. His shoulders were broad and well muscled, his arms long and pale, the veins of his forearms and biceps standing out in the hard sunlight. Fine coppery hairs glinted on his arms and chest as he moved. He looked up and saw her approaching and raised his hand and waved. She and her mother had wondered about his age and had supposed him to be in his middle thirties.

She drew level with him and stood looking down at his drawing, the hot sand beginning to burn the soles of her feet. He held the notebook at arm’s length for her to see, his head on one side and his lips pursed. ‘The future of your city,’ he said lightly.

The drawing was not an artist’s impression but was a rendering of the major elements of the landscape as simplified structures: the long curve of the bay framed by the yacht club on the left and far over to the right the huddle of city buildings, the You Yang hills on the western horizon. There was no attempt at texture. The bay was indicated merely by a single line. In the drawing there was a roadway that was not in the actual landscape. The fanciful road of the future escaped into the air from the crosshatched mass of the city and swung out over the distant hills, disdaining the congested structures of the city and the natural contours of the landscape and sweeping on its tall supporting columns in an elegant arc over the horizon westwards toward Geelong.

‘Is that a road or a bridge?’ she asked.

He considered his drawing. ‘The road will have to become a bridge.’ He turned and looked up at her, squinting with the sun in his eyes, trying to see her. ‘To bridge the city,’ he explained and smiled.

She touched the reddening skin of his shoulder with the tips of her fingers. ‘You’re burning,’ she warned and she moved into the shade of the bathing box. He closed the blue notebook and put it aside, watching her spread her towel and arrange herself on the sand, her back against the painted weatherboards. She took a packet of cigarettes from her bag and leaned and held it out to him. He took a cigarette and waited, watching her and holding the cigarette close to his mouth, while she struck the match. Her mother’s deck chair creaked and she asked sleepily, ‘Is that you, darling?’

‘Not asleep, Mother?’

‘I was asleep. I thought I heard you talking.’

‘Mr Elder has done a drawing.’

‘How nice.’

Georges got up on his knees and crawled forward, bringing his towel and his notebook into the shade at Emily’s feet. He lay on his back, smoking and staring up at the pointed overhang of the bathing box.

The smoke from their cigarettes drifted in the still air between the bathing boxes and into the tea-trees. The dog barked persistently.

Emily looked down at him. The sea might have washed him up at her feet.

‘That dog’s treed something,’ he said.

‘A possum,’ she suggested.

He rolled over and raised himself on his elbow. ‘Let’s go and look.’

She smiled and shook her head. He lay down again. He had been with them at Richmond Hill for almost a week after spending a month in Sydney. He was in Australia to report to a Belgian construction firm on the feasibility of tendering for the design of the great bridge over Sydney Harbour. It was Emily’s father, Richard Stanton, the professor of civil engineering at Melbourne University and Australia’s leading authority on the new steel alloys, whom Georges had come to Melbourne to consult. Emily was remembering their initial meeting among the cool shadows in the hallway of her parents’ house on Richmond Hill. Coming out of the sun he had looked tall and a little stooped, as if he inclined himself toward her, modestly, to place himself in her trust. The sunlight through the lead lighted windows of the front door an amber radiance through the tangle of his hair. His gray eyes had searched quickly for her thought, as if he had been cautioned by her father to expect a difficulty or a challenge. His manner restrained, even grave. She had expected a French accent. But he spoke with a lowland Scottish burr. A certain formality. ‘How do you do, Miss Stanton.’ She welcomed him and put him at his ease.

Before dinner that first evening she took his arm and led him to the mantelpiece in the dining room and handed him the photograph of herself and her parents taken in Paris when she was five. The framed image of a little girl in a pale dress standing between her unsmiling parents and clutching a hired model sailboat against her ribbons and flounces. Her mother’s enormous black hat, like an untidy vulture in the act of alighting. The rank of marble statues of famous French women behind them and the avenue of dark trees, limes or perhaps lindens. Georges examined the photograph closely before pronouncing his confident verdict, ‘It’s the terrace overlooking the octagonal pond in the Luxembourg Gardens.’

She stood beside him, her arm brushing his sleeve. ‘My father returned to Cambridge for two years. On the way home we visited Paris.’ Georges turned to her, seeking a likeness in the features of the young woman at his side to the stubborn, rebellious child in the photograph. ‘I’ve imagined,’ she confided to him, ‘that I’ll go back one day and claim Paris for myself. It’s been a kind of promise.’ She looked at him, unsure if he would understand. ‘You know, not a real ambition, but one of those things you tell yourself . . .’ She didn’t finish, however, for his expression of faint puzzlement had not encouraged her to persist. She reached to take the photograph from him. ‘I still remember that sailboat.’

‘She clings to her little ship of liberty,’ he said with a smile, returning the photograph to her.

She replaced it on the mantelpiece. ‘I’d been told I had to give the boat back. But I was determined to keep it. Children can’t believe in the idea of hiring something. To be given a coveted object for half an hour and then to be told to give it back. I’d set off on my perfect adventure in that little boat.’ She reached and straightened the frame with her fingers. ‘I’m still convinced it belongs to me.’

He teased her lightly, ‘Then why not come back to Paris with me and claim your property?’

‘My ship of liberty,’ she said and had laughed with him; but all the same it had been a secret pleasure to imagine a mysterious destiny in their meeting; something arcane and concealed from everyone but herself, for which his heroic design for the Sydney Harbour Bridge was to provide them merely with a resemblance of purpose. His teasing invitation, Come back to Paris with me and claim your property, sounded uncannily right to her. She put her arm through his, ‘Excellent, Monsieur Elder, ainsi sera fait.’ His pleased surprise at the readiness of her French.

Lying on the sand now in the shade of the painted bathing box she closed her eyes. She was enjoying the steady heat of the summer afternoon, the taste of tobacco smoke on her palate, aware of Georges Elder just below her and behind her mother’s deck chair, attentive and undecided. He was lying on his stomach looking up at her. She could feel his gaze on her body. In his silence she sensed his preoccupation, his uncertainty; the skin of her bare thighs tight and tingling not only with the sea salt. She was sure that if he did not speak within the minute, he would touch her. She was waiting for his first caress, the question of his desire in her mind.

‘I’ve been dreaming of coming to Australia all my life.’ He spoke softly, for her benefit only and so that her mother would not hear. ‘I was twelve when I first read about the Sydney Harbour Bridge competition. It’s been with me all my life.’ He fell silent and she opened her eyes, conscious of his appeal to something serious. He was examining the arch of her foot. ‘I was in boarding school in Glasgow.’ He touched her foot lightly with his forefinger, then looked up at her. She did not withdraw. With his finger he followed the curve of her instep, delicately brushing away the grains of sand that clung to her skin. She curled her toes, encouraging his caress. ‘You here dreaming of Paris,’ he said, his voice a little unsteady. ‘While I was over there dreaming of Australia. Now here we are on this beach together. Your beach. It’s extraordinary.’ His fingers remained touching her foot.

Behind him Emily saw her father wade out of the sea and start up the sand toward them; a large, broad-girthed man of sixty, but still strong and without any hesitation in his step.

Catherine Stanton, who faced the sea and could not see them, said lazily from her deck chair, ‘Oh, not so extraordinary, Mr Elder. Here we all spend our lives dreaming of Paris.’

There was a soft drift of air, the first sign that the heat of the day was to give way soon to the cool of evening, and for a moment the honey perfume of the tea-tree blossoms invaded the shade where they lay.

Richard Stanton came up and stood looking down at them, his small eyes bright and intensely focused, shifting from the young engineer to his daughter.

Georges had removed his hand from Emily’s foot. He sat up.

‘How about drinks for everyone then Em?’ her father said.

Emily drew up her legs and hugged her knees. She looked up at her father but made no move to get up. ‘If you like,’ she said.

Richard Stanton was over six feet tall with a thick powerful body and heavy facial features. The moment he stopped speaking his mouth drooped at the corners, making him look sulky, disgruntled and on the point of anger. His hair, which was thick and long and completely grey, was plastered to the dome of his skull and lay in wet licks against the loose skin of his neck.

Catherine Stanton twisted around in her deck chair and examined the three of them.

Seeing that Emily was not about to get up, her father laughed shortly. ‘A glass of something, then, Georges? Catherine, for you?’

Catherine Stanton reached and touched her husband’s hand, accepting his offer of a drink. ‘I’ve been thinking about the You Yangs,’ she said, determined to share her private contemplation with their visitor. ‘That bluish smudge on the horizon, Mr Elder. There! Do you see?’ She was pointing, a tremor in her long pale finger.

‘Georges has already put them in his drawing,’ Emily said softly and she looked at Georges, who was dutifully ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part One: The Voyage Out
• Part Two: Perpetua’S Medallion
• Part Three: The Conditions Of Faith
• Part Four: The Household Of The Elders
• Part Five: Death Of The Mother
• Part Six: Her Painted Table
• Acknowledgments