All the Voices Cry by Alice Petersen Page A

pulled onwards by the bright thread of the Pacific dawn. Surely fate could not be so easily evaded? Norman had only to live long enough to reach the second date. Surely there was one? Surely.

Neither Up Nor Down
    T HE WIND BLEW the palm fronds upwards and turned them into giant combs raking the mist. Penelope’s hair stuck to her forehead. She clutched at her shoulder bag while the water braided and swirled around her thighs. A walk along a Tahitian beach in search of a sea cave was one thing, but wading through the streams that poured off the land into the ocean was enough to challenge even the strongest determination to be a good sport. Close by, chestnut-coloured hermit crabs crept in and out of the piles of coconut shells banked up against the trees.
    â€œEm. Dickinson appreciated Melville’s novels,” said Charles. “Lots of coconuts and breadfruit in Typee. Em. made a mean gingerbread. Maybe she liked coconuts too.”
    â€œDid they cook much with coconut in the nineteenth century?”
    â€œNo idea.” Charles was off again. He hated a question that he could not answer. Back behind the palms, a pointed peak rose up with shrubs growing out of it at right angles. White birds fluttered in front of the greenery like handkerchiefs dropped from a great height. Penelope wanted to pull herself up the peak, clinging onto the stubby trees until,
triumphant and alone, she could stand looking out at the wide grey Pacific.
    â€œAnd when they were up they were up, and when they were down they were down, and when they were only halfway up they were neither up nor down,” she chanted.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œDoesn’t matter,” said Penelope. Nothing she thought mattered. Thirty-five years ago they had been newly-weds touring Ireland with a rug and a volume of Yeats in the back seat of the car. Now, he was an irritating know-it-all, and she, she was a pudding.
    Of course what Penelope thought did matter. Her former supervisor in food science, Howard McMurray, a mild man in a homespun sweater, had believed that Penelope’s research was of key importance to fried chicken manufacturers everywhere. He had complimented her on her careful approach. Penelope had met Charles at Howard McMurray’s annual Snowflake Do. Penelope had been charmed by the young professor with his careful way of dressing and his whimsical habit of embroidering the view with a sparkling quotation. Can you fall in love with a purple smoking jacket and a signet ring? Penelope had.
    After his fourth gin and tonic Charles had pulled down some snowflake tinsel and draped it around Penelope’s neck, stroking her hair. After his fifth gin and tonic he leaned heavily against the door frame and revealed that as a little boy he liked to balance on one foot. He had been practising this very skill when his sisters came to tell him that their mother had hanged herself in the pear tree at the bottom of the garden.
For many years he believed that if he could succeed in standing on one foot for a day and night, his mother might come back. As it happened, she had not died, but she had lingered, and that was worse. Charles did not like shadows in trees; he did not like to be alone. If Penelope did not already love him, she told herself that with time, she would. Upon finishing his sixth gin and tonic, Charles became rather ill, and Penelope took him home to her bed.
    After their wedding, Penelope had concentrated on being a faculty wife because she imagined it was what she ought to do. In retrospect, her life had been governed by the sign of ought: I ought to be a better, thinner cook; I ought to have had more children; I ought to have found a job teaching adolescent girls how to roast chickens. Every Christmas she made plates of sugar cookies for Charles to take to the department party, she dropped off his late library books and searched for lost coffee mugs in his study. She had raised their son, a bookish child called Colin who