1915 (11 page)

“Diana.”

“Ah. What's she like?”

“Do people interest you? I wouldn't have thought so.”

“Huh.”

“She's bright as a button. You ought to meet her.”

“Is that so?” Pleased with himself, Billy fastidiously
dabbed a floral tea towel around the inside of the crockery pie dish.

“You've done that before,” observed Frances.

“I like to take care.”

“Diana is man-mad as well as a scientist.
Scientiste
,” she added experimentally.

“She sounds dangerous.”

“Only to herself — she doesn't know she's man-mad.”

“She needs instruction, eh?” That coarseness again.

“Only in self-protection.”

“I told Wally you knew your onions,” said Billy complacently.

“
Onions?
” Frances turned with dripping hands.

Billy held a white shield of dinner-plate in rag fists. “You know what I mean — how many beans make five.”

Frances flicked water from the dishmop in a vertical whipstroke, leaving a spatter of suds down his trousers. “Watch out, Mr — Mr Fat Sheep.” The words spat, but hadn't Billy meant the phrase as a mark of admiration? This low kind of regard sprang from the physical, and called up a physical response. It could scarcely be answered by a retreat into indignation.

She went at him again, sloshing the mop on the plate when he parried. “Idiot,” she heard herself giggle. Suddenly close, Billy's free arm snaked on an inside track to escape the mop, and tickled. Frances squirmed and hunched head down, defending herself like a child by a direct rush into the arms of the attacker. Still laughing, she dropped to one knee as the mop skidded senselessly away, and Billy found himself with his arms right round her.

The piano's rising clatter took care of the mother,
and the maid had gone off upstairs. Therefore Billy made certain Frances knew what he was about. He urged one hand upwards, penetrating a fold of protecting limbs until it reached her chin: then he followed through for a kiss.

“No —”

This denial was a pretence, though forcefully spoken. Frances heard a distant voice — Diana's — saying, “Go on, go on, you should have,” as if what she was allowing hadn't happened, and already she was forward in the future regretting a lost chance at discovery.

Billy's lips now settled on hers — the cold lips of the surly blockhead who had prowled after her in Forbes. His mouth scraped and tickled, articulating as though in speech, while a disturbing slide of spittle somewhere intruded.

And yet —

Her head, being ground by another person's head smelling of tobacco and cheap soap, was no longer in command. Lack of air created a kind of drunken carelessness. Or was it that Billy's immoderate manner simply cancelled her out, and she was no-one, merely this fluttering sensation that might have been a heartbeat wildly racing, except that her heart — it registered on her now — boomed separately a dispassionate accompaniment.

Oh God — a hand of Billy's was travelling serenely up the inside of a leg, advancing to the very mark where she felt sick and unrestrained at the same time: where her being fluttered. Where victim and captor, if this horrible wrestling was to continue, must unite in complicity.

She heard Billy snort,
snort!
And it was over.

“You pig!” she managed. The thistle-patterned linoleum stretched to infinity as she rolled and then kicked clear. The world sprang back to its correct social shape of four walls and a doorway, of a piano talking once in the firm tones of the teacher, then many times in those of the awkwardly-responding pupil. The hall clock dizzily bonged eight.

Frances sat at the kitchen table straightening her dress, adjusting a tangled skein of hair, sniffing once and scratching the tip of her nose with a thumbnail. She felt as if she'd swum a creek which turned out to be wider and deeper than she'd imagined. There was also the pall of something murky in the air, not a smell — but a threatened mood oppressive as creek mud all the same.

“How shameful,” she threw at Billy's smug shape, which stood with its back to the wash basin regarding her. “How
dare
you?”

Billy regarded the flushed and quick-breathing Frances without answering. She was less desirable now than before. His grab for her had been a lustful impulse overlain by something more calculating. By the time his lips touched hers he had been thinking:
I've beaten Wally good and smart
. So the pleasure he should have had from her was all absorbed in this vengeful impulse. Something else had intruded. On feeling the tell-tale acquiescence of Frances's body — just a second or two of surrender had been enough — he'd been alarmed. His hand curving upwards did so almost unwillingly, and dreaded to reach its destination. The trouble was, having got this impudent girl where he wanted her, where he'd got plenty of other girls before, he baulked. What if she'd just gone on giving in? Hell, what a handful. It was then that he had snorted.

Still … she was all right. His eyes couldn't leave her alone.

“Don't,” she hissed.

Frances's thoughts narrowed to the problem of getting rid of him. He seemed unaware of any offence, having burst in uninvited to gulp a dinner and do what he liked. Was this all that men wanted from her — would ever want? At least Billy had done her the service of sneaking past the dithering and wasteful pretence of other men, but the bleak offering required of her at the end — to be a body — drew a curtain of despair over the future. Yet — there had been that sensational letting go.

Billy straddled a chair, chin on folded forearms, regarding her as if from the top of a fence.

“This isn't a sale.”

“Huh?”

She hadn't expected him to understand. Didn't want him to. She just wanted him out. So she said with all the sourness she could muster:

“I suppose you're quite nice in your way.”

He didn't mistake her hostility, but the sharpest edge of her meaning all the same whizzed through the jammed-wide window at his back and disappeared into the harbour night.

“Thanks,” mumbled Billy in an imitation of gentlemanly lack of complication.

She spoke more softly: “Please, don't ever do that again.” She had not intended to be conciliatory, but here she was — bother — almost making up.

“I promise.”

She could see he'd sworn the formula before. “I just don't know what come over me — you're a temptation,” he explained finally. His rancourless grin
blamed her in a way she appeared to accept.

“Don't you think you should go? There's a boat at nine,” suggested Frances. She heard her mother farewelling her pupil at the front door. Billy anticipated Mrs Reilly's entry into the kitchen by standing, fingers drumming the back of his chair. The sexual contest died away to be once more replaced — on Billy's side — by something larger: the set Frances and her kind seemed to have against his nature.

Mrs Reilly entered to take his arm and steer him through to the parlour. She called back to Frances who replied, “Coming!” in the brightest tone she could manage, though by then tears were streaming down her cheeks and she sat gulping helplessly in an attempt to thrust back a threatened downpour.

At the Gilchrists' polite table a new Billy chewed open-mouthed without caution. He had arrived at tea time with the latest talk from town. Half was about a social event, the Roller Skaters Fancy Dress Ball. The rest was war talk.

Until the week before Billy had rarely opened a newspaper. Now he read even the “extraordinaries” pasted up outside the
Champion
office, and had become a political expert, though nobody pressed him to say exactly where these suddenly luminous European places were.

“With Austria and Serbia at each other's throats it's just a matter of time. We'll be in it.”

Between courses Mr Gilchrist and Billy rehearsed a sequence of events using salt cellar, butter dish, knife, fork, spoon and plate. Austria struck Serbia chimed Russia gonged Germany rang France roused Britain.

“See?”

Alan Gilchrist threatened the table with a knife (Germany). It shifted from his wife to Walter, who nodded.

But until this minute, when the knife flashed under his chin, the goings-on in the papers hadn't touched Walter at all. One fact followed the other all year, but remotely, dry as a time chart in a history lesson. Now it occured to Walter that his own standpoint was closest
to Billy's. He'd wanted change — here it came! Mountains in the northern hemisphere were already rising, falling, clashing. Shock waves bowled through the oceans, struck the coastal cities and cracked the glass calm of the everyday, shooting up-country to craze towns and remote homesteads all in a matter of minutes. Incredible that a distant quarrel between foreigners could wreak such an astonishing transformation, yet leave a person feeling expectant!

Billy described how a hundred costumed skaters had rumbled and squeaked their way round the hall, which was so full that couples even used the stage. Eddie Harkness had skated right off the edge. At nine thirty they had squeezed against the walls to watch Mr Harley Davidson, the world champ, leap over three chairs. Mr Farlow won the best costume with “Aboriginal Chief', and the comic prize went to Mr Deal's “Dark Town Barber”. But who got the loudest cheers? Miss Finity as “Britannia” and Jack McGee as “The Admiral”.

After the meal the men sat in front of the fire. Mr Gilchrist studied Billy's
Herald
in the yellow lamplight while Billy and Walter sprawled at his feet smoking their pipes.

“It looks a certainty. If England goes in we'll be in it too.”

“
If
,” reflected Billy. “It'd be just our luck if she don't.”

“I say she will,” said Walter. “If distant places like Australia are ready, why should the old country hesitate?”

They toyed with differing opinions, not because they held them, but because the facts were so few.

“What the pommies want is to call Australia in and sit back.”

“One in, all in.”

“I reckon we're gamer.”

“They've got the army. We'd just be extra. Wouldn't we?”

“We've got the
fight
,” concluded Billy. He heaved a log to the centre of the fire and admired a tower of sparks.

For a while, in the intensified firelight, all talk ceased. Alan Gilchrist dropped the paper to his lap — the flames chopped his face with hard shadows. He barely knew why, but war would be welcome.

Silent before the fire, he thought of his land as a bastion — nothing less — from which he would willingly send forth magnificent confirmations of title. Yet earlier, questioned by his wife, he had turned red in an effort to explain: “The thing is to get on with it!”

Billy watched miniature cliffs of red-hot wood collapsing. Fire absorbed him. It was strange that war had never occured to him before. He was made for it! If all the excitement fizzled out he'd be desperate.

Other more practical needs drove him. If war came, he could escape. Away from his father, stone-hearted now, and a drunk. Away from the silent churchyard that haunted him, yet was not itself haunted. Away from the consequences of news from Wellington which lay in a crumpled letter in his pocket. Trouble was brewing there, though not with his name attached to it. Not yet.

“Yes, sir!” said Billy into the silence.

“Would you be scared?” asked Walter.

“Not me.”

“Now wait a minute,” said Mr Gilchrist, denying his own intensity of thought, “we're talking about a national event, not a jaunt for youngsters.” He made a
show of hunting though the paper for farm news, struggling with himself over the thought that if Walter was to go off to war he would be glad. Six months or more had been enough to show that he and his son were strangers. To be honest, he disliked the boy — who was half the time locked in hostile broodiness, and the other half gushing with green ideas.

“I'm sure I'd be scared,” Walter continued, “because of a dream I had about Blacky. When was it?”

“Get on with the show,” said his father, rolling the paper tight and prodding Billy.

“It was in the cadets — only it wasn't. There we were marching through scrub. You too,” he said to Billy, who liked to figure in such phantom lives as other people's dreams gave him. “On we went through wattle and saplings and suchlike. It was a sandy sort of place. We advanced in line with our rifles at the ready looking for something.”

“Rabbits?” The suggestion came from his father.

“We arrived at a ship's gun. A barbiette.”

“What's that in English?” asked Billy.

“I couldn't see what was going on but something told me to watch out. Then I realized that the — blighters — wanted to put me in the gun and fire me through the barrel. I've never been so scared. Now this is the funny part. The bloke in charge was Blacky Reid.”

“That'd be him all right.”

Mr Gilchrist stood and stretched. “Blacky's always had you bluffed. He's all wind.”

“Don't be so sure,” said Billy, out of a mixture of friendship for Blacky and hard knowledge: “But it'd be him all right, he'd be there, telling all and sundry what to do.”

“A windbag.”

“I woke up then. I remember — it was last Christmas.”

His father tapped his pipe on the edge of the fireplace: “I'm for bed.”

From the kitchen they heard him talking in undertones to his wife, who after a minute came through to say goodnight.

“I want no more hysterical war talk,” she ordered. Then footsteps knocked on the bare boards of the hall; they heard the click of a door, the whimper of a dog, and a mopoke calling across the cold ocean of trees.

 

In front of the fire Walter and Billy shook hands and swore that “if the worst came” they would join up together.

The pact surprised both of them, and decided Billy on a confession.

“Are you and the Reilly girl still writing?”

“I wrote once, but she never replied. Good riddance, eh?” He managed a grin, but thought: How does Billy know? If that Scott woman's been fiddling with the mails —

“I seen her. It was after Mum died,” said Billy, “when I was in Sydney. I bumped into her.” He told no lie. “We talked. She told me the two of you were corresponding.” Because of Walter's uncomprehending look he added: “Writing letters to each other.”

“She to me? You've been bloody quiet about it. When I met her at the railway at Christmas she asked me to write, so I put down the news and sent it off. But she never replied.”

“To hear her talk you'd have thought the two of you were scratching away like mad. Women! Who can fathom 'em?”

“
You
,” Walter spoke with sudden vehemence: “Why do you think she said she'd written when she hadn't? Come on —” His tone swung between scorn and helpless submission. Clumsily he lifted the poker and jammed it among logs.

Billy spoke calmly. “She was putting me off for one thing. She couldn't spare the time of day. Anyone'd think I was a pig — fresh from the trough — the way she kept her distance.”

It sounded wrong. What about Billy's siding with the Reids at harvest time, the way he'd never talked straight about his trip away, especially concerning Wellington — now Sydney too —

“Come off it!” Walter snapped, and the poker was in the air, its tip glowing cherry-white. He could have, he really wanted to, Billy ought to —

Down came the poker with a smack on the sooty bricks.

“That's a dangerous instrument,” said Billy coolly.

“So are you.” Either it was belt him with the poker, or do it with words.

Billy reclined without speaking, and who could tell if it was cunning or innocence that held his tongue? Besides, the burst of anger had stripped Walter of hostility. And Billy's silence, though it wasn't forgiving — impregnable rather — somehow took a share of the blame.

Billy played on this. Dumb guilt, he knew, lent him an air of integrity. In silence practically anything could be shammed.

“She likes you, Wally. I used to say, didn't I? that
you've got a real chance there. She asked all about you.” Billy reclined on a cushion and nestled his head on his arms. “A hero! That'd be the way to win 'em over.” He rolled to his side and looked at Walter. “You could just march in and take her. No messing about. No knocking on the door. The direct approach. Nothing like it.”

“It's not me.”

Billy spat into the heart of the fire. “If this war comes off we'll be well out of that kind of trouble. What do you say?”

 

At midnight Billy set off for home. At the start he rode slowly, smoking the tail end of a pipe, coat collar turned high, hat rammed low to keep the icy air from his ears. He held the reins in one hand and let the horse follow the track of her own accord. She was an ex-polo pony from Narromine called Novelty, for which he'd paid a fortune two months before; she had good Arab from somewhere, and a touch of draught as well.

Soon after leaving the yards Billy muttered to himself: “Wally's a mug.” A little later he shouted: “
A mug!
”

Back at the house, standing at the far end of the veranda — taking a leak into the bushes — Walter heard the phrase but failed to identify it as human. It seemed one of those shifts of matter peculiar to the bush at night, as unfathomable to diurnal creatures as blackness itself.

When Billy reached the crest of the ridge he looked back. A tiny yellow light swayed and went out. Then he and Novelty moved alone through the universe.

He thought about galloping and they galloped. He thought about going faster, dangerously fast, and Novelty fairly devoured the track. Billy bellowed, and the horse answered by leaping forward into flight. And weren't the stars also hissing and tumbling ahead? The night was a vast future into which they hurled, man and beast with bared teeth, bone and muscle flung against the passionless depth of things.

When they came to the high clearing, which was now a disc of frosted grass, Billy dismounted. He set the horse free and squatted for a minute to catch his breath. His face burned. Then he lay full length on the ground and rolled over and over. Novelty tracked him, head down. Billy might have been happy, like a horse taking a dust bath, or in agony, like a man who has been poisoned but does not know it. Novelty's reins, loose on the ground, rustled alongside.

“A mug,” Billy said once more, but the judgment no longer mattered, for now, his mind fixed on war, his senses feasted on a host of new sensations.

 

It was Tom Larsen the young schoolteacher who brought the news of the outbreak of war to Walter, pointedly playing it down. He wouldn't be in it — not for quids.

“Why not?” Excitement raised odd peaks in Walter's voice.

“Because I'm not bored,” the teacher consented to answer. By then Walter had collected Peapod and found himself fumbling wildly with buckles. He was mad to be off, but not sure where. Billy's!

The teacher had not kept his head: it only seemed
that way. With school finished early he had grabbed his bike and pedalled furiously out of town to be alone, finding himself at the gate of “Whispering Pines” an hour or so before sunset.

He mumbled something about the conflict between England and Germany having to do with money — who was to get the upper hand in a market. Walter had no patience with such a viewpoint. It was too dry to express the quality of what was happening, too narrow for its magnitude. If Larsen's beliefs were measured up to fit people, as he said they were, then how come he missed seeing the opportunity that the war's adventure offered to the human frame?

The teacher continued: Why shake yourself free of superstition only to attach yourself to a new set of delusions? Another thing — but Walter was in the saddle now, and Peapod, sensing a chase, had to be held hard. He circled excitedly while Tom withdrew a couple of yards, clutching the fragile frame of his bike.

Right-oh, what
was
the other thing?

In retreat, and cooled off from his ride, the mottled purple of Larsen's face had sunk to its usual grey.

“Forget it!” he shouted.

They now saw Billy thundering down the track brandishing a kind of sword, a length of silvery sapling. The two boys on horseback circled the isolated teacher who despite his serious outlook was the same age. Only he wouldn't join in, except to bellow, “On to death and glory!”

There — the “other thing” was out.

In return he brandished a sardonic fist to make his meaning plain, but Billy took up the cry and meant it. Then he drew alongside Walter and said, “Let's tell the girls”, and with a careless whoop in the direction of the teacher they set off.

Larsen watched their disappearing canter through the trees rocking and tilting through a series of frames in the late afternoon.

 

At Bindogundra the cousins hadn't heard.

“It's not so wonderful,” shrugged Ethel. But when Aunty Bea started hugging the boys she perked up, and thrust Walter against a veranda post to give him a kiss. Long-faced Uncle Len shook hands: “I'm too old.” At this Aunty Bea put an arm around his shoulders, and the moment hung in memory for that reason as much as any other.