Annabel - Kathleen Winter [53]
On her table was a stack of pictures with heavy outlines: archers, lyres, winged sandals, golden apples of the Hesperides. Normally she would not give grade sevens colouring sheets, but these were to make booklets about the Greek deities, and she had found the pictures in an Athenian museum. They were informative in a way that would tell a good part of each god’s story without words. Some of her students could read marks on a trail winding through eighty miles of wilderness but they were not good readers of English textbooks. Each student would be responsible for researching one persona: Artemis, Hera, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Apollo, Hermes, Demeter, Ceres. There was a deity to represent every human character, and Thomasina had found them all in her class, though the students did not know it, from the control and manipulation of Artemis reflected in Donna Palliser to the musical Euterpe in Wally Michelin and the presence of a descendant of the child of Hermes and Aphrodite, Hermaphroditus, in Wayne Blake.
Thomasina did not venerate Greek religion over the Protestant Christianity of the settlers in Croydon Harbour, or over the aboriginal stories her dead husband, Graham Montague, had known. She saw all tradition as metaphorical. It was, in her mind, all about story, character, psyche. She would not drum any religion into her students. They would see, she knew, through dogma of any kind. What interested Thomasina in Greek studies was that there was no pretense that the gods had lived. Everyone knew they represented the character in all of us. She would not tell her class this but intended only to let them enjoy playing roles they normally hid. Donna Palliser, for example, concealed from adults the way she led and ranked the girls. Wally Michelin had gone so far underground with her music that only the most intuitive person could spy it. Wayne Blake had no idea there was a girl, fully formed, curled inside his body.
To colour the illustrations Thomasina had artist-quality pencils. The Greek dance recording featured drum music she had bought from street musicians in Athens. A small man had played a bellows-like instrument she was eager for her students to hear, since it sounded like the button accordions their fathers and grandfathers played when they came home from the trapline.
She took her trousers and cardigans off the radiators and put them away, and made toast with homemade strawberry jam. She had stewed the berries whole. There was no place in Croydon Harbour to get strawberries. They were a soft berry, a summer berry, and Croydon Harbour did not have a summer long enough to include them. Thomasina had brought these frozen, insulated in newspapers, in her suitcase on the plane along with her tape recorder, her music, her few clothes, Pears soap, a ten-pound bag of coffee beans, and a small grinder. Could you not make a life for yourself any way you wanted, and in any place?
No man in Croydon Harbour would knock on the door of a woman not his wife on a moonlit night unless it was to inform her that her husband had perished, or unless he was a doctor come to save her life or the life of her child. But the night he saw that Wayne’s homework consisted of colouring a picture of Hermaphroditus — a young man with gladiator’s arms and a beard and a woman’s breasts and hips — Treadway felt he had no choice but to knock at the Guest House door and ask Thomasina Baikie what in the name of God she thought she was up to. If there was anything Treadway could not stand, it was someone who was sneaky or underhanded, and who used a back door as a way to get around his wishes.
He stood on the Guest