1915 (27 page)

When Blacky left Billy said: “I met her father. He didn't know me from Adam. Look —” he took a much folded letter from his pocket, “she's said she'll marry me.”

“Because of the baby?”

“She's never mentioned the baby. It was the father that told me. Do you know one of the chief rules for sniping? Take on the background. If a man is somewhere he shouldn't be, the observer hardly ever sees him unless the man overdoes it. Nature is natural — so I could have got away without letting on who I was. But I told him.” Billy was triumphant. “I can't get over the way she never said a word. Didn't Frances never say nothing?”

“Nothing.”

Billy was too inexperienced a triumphant to resist the vindictiveness that often goes with that state. He handed Walter a much folded letter:

“You can read it — all of it. It's where she says she'll marry me. There's other news there about Frances.”

“I can't help thinking she's gone cool on me.”

“Frances? Cool? That's a laugh. She's taken up with Robert Gillen, that's what she's done.”

As Billy watched Walter concentrating over the letter, sorting the loose pages into order, his lower lip trembling and his adam's apple sliding up and down like the uncoupled shaft of a windmill in a hopeless attempt to stem tears, and then the letter rattling in his hands as he shifted each page under to read the next, he was sorry, and for the first time wished himself back in Australia, with Walter on the land somewhere nearby, and the two of them safe, as predicted by Ethel.

When Walter finished the letter he said: “I knew it.” But his face showed that he had just received the surprise of his life.

Nervously Billy said, “I've got you to thank for everything. Do you know what? I'm happy. I'm a changed man. I'll bet it was you who got me invited back that night, eh? Frances wouldn't have done it on her own. Right?” Billy did not believe that a human person had bestowed this gift of happiness that was so astonishingly his, but he wanted to make up for being the bearer of bad news.

 

But Billy was right, it had been Walter that long ago night who persuaded Frances to dash for the ferry and bring Billy back. She would not have done it if Diana herself had not added her entreaty — an anxious nod. Then the four of them had strolled to the point to watch the moon hovering above distant Vaucluse, plunging a million white blades into the harbour. After a while they drifted to different benches, and Frances, twisting around, muttered with a giggle: “I think Billy and Diana are kissing.” Walter then snaked an arm around her shoulders and vigorously drew her towards him.

“You're a surprise packet,” she murmured.

That was when the downward slide had started, the unfathomable delight she bestowed on him and its reverse, the bitter history of betrayal, the first detailed in action and long in memory, the second muddy with doubt until he found this sharp stone bedded in Diana's letter:

Franny talks of no-one but Robert, I suppose it's a disgrace
.

He had winced with pain as they kissed because of his sore ribs. But his sudden discomfort released from her a kiss on his cheek that soon changed to the warm application of mouth upon mouth which astonished him, and the pain melted, releasing a sensation that he needed to describe as soon as they separated to catch breath and listen to the racing of hearts: but she spoke first —

“I could do this for ever.”

He believed her. She too, he thought, had discovered the golden ecstasy at the centre of what was — he saw it now — his pilgrimage alone.

“It's like —” they kissed again before he could say: “A golden arrow! Electrified!”

“Tell me more. Is that nice? That?” This was the very Frances who, Diana's letter said, had been “finding her way” with Walter, who “had always known she would hurt him.”

He remembered her curiosity.

“Where does it hurt?”

Delicate fingers climbed his sore ribs.

“Ouch!”

Then with swift intimacy her hand was inside his shirt. This was different from being touched by Ethel. It was as if he had eaten something in a dream — her fingers fluttered on his stomach — an impossible dish composed of substance, sensation, emotion.

She spoke naked words, “You poor darling”, and allowed herself to be touched as he pleased.

But after all they had been two strangers on a seat overlooking rocks and water. A yellow lamp swung from tram wires at the terminus and the insects of early summer surrounded it, sending enlarged shadows to swoop over the foliage. Soon they would stand,
straighten creased clothing, and yawn from unresolved emotion.

He told her about the hotel, daring to say “lovers go there”, and about the feeling he had had since leaving camp the day before that something good was bound to happen between them.

“These lovers — do they give their names?”

The question planted itself like a shoot of willow. How could a fool like Walter have guessed that an experimental mood was upon this girl — soft, undangerous! — who ran sharp fingernails up and down his ribs, who took his hand and scored the fleshy palm as if inscribing a claim, who kissed him clumsily and aggressively, drawing a knee across his lap, a knee hidden in the folds of her dress that rested on the uncomfortable fact of his erection.

Billy and Diana were similarly entwined.

“Billy was seen with a black girl in the yard of the hotel. I'm not supposed to know. Don't you feel that Billy's mysteries are all a bit like that?”

“Like what?”

At the time he had thought of her profile as dreamy and speculative, but now it struck him how anxious she must have been. Anxious for what? Here was the phrase in Diana's letter: “She's happy now but will it last? Franny's bad nerves spoil so much. Whatever she finds in one place needs something from somewhere else, something unobtainable, before it satisfies her. So nothing satisfies her.”

“Dad says Billy is sly,” said Frances. “Neat as a pin, polite, and then — doing
that
.”

According to Diana's letter Billy at that moment on the other bench had been honourably occupied: “Remember when you kissed me in the park? And said
something foolish? I thought you were making fun of me and for a whole minute I disliked you.” She had starred “rather foolish” and written “our secret” in the margin at right angles to the rest of the letter.

Frances had asked for a cigarette.

“Are you supposed to smoke?”

“Oh
give
it to me,” and she plucked from Walter's lips the drooping cigarette he had just rolled. Then she composed herself with a hand cupped on her knee, and said: “How would I look in a moonlight photograph?”

“Mysterious.”

It was no longer the mystery of personality that intrigued him (if only it had been) but the mystery of flesh.

“Do you think I'm mysterious? Really? It's a nice thing to say.”

“I was thinking about when we came down together on the train. I wanted to kiss you then. Would you have minded? But I couldn't work you out.”

“Pretend I'm on the train now,” she answered. “Kiss me.” She looked out a play-acted window to where the ferry, having slipped its moorings and headed around the point, was gliding past on the opposite side. “Oh look! What town is that? Aren't they pretty lights!”

He stood over her as he had long ago when raising her fallen blanket, and she stared up at him as before. He bent, tasting her tobacco-pungent breath, but before he could plant his kiss she said: “I didn't think of you in that way at all. Not for a minute. Do you think that strange?”

He kissed her anyway, not at all disquieted that she was again wearing the self-contained look that had been hers on the train — at this most intimate of
moments when all (so he thought) had been revealed.

 

Walter handed the letter back to Billy, who stuffed it together with his armbands into a trouser pocket. Side by side they sat, each wanting a signal from the other. Then both spoke at once: “Why didn't she tell me?” The phrasing matched perfectly, but only Billy laughed. For once he felt superior in all ways to Walter, convinced he was free of the poison of resentment. In a rush of feeling he scrutinized his own least slip, and took up the burdens of others in his joy: “It's not bloody fair is it, Christ I'd like to show bloody Gillen around the bloody trenches.”

Walter said nothing.

A characteristic of the place where they sat was its patch of green grass. A well had been dug here after the landing but now it was dry. Trampled but still juicy tufts bore witness to a soak where clean water trickled through the earth a hundred feet or more below the trenches. Still there was nothing either could say. Both nibbled and sucked at green stalks. Not words but time was needed, thought Walter, to correct the imbalance of fortune between them, time that ruthlessly narrowed their future as the walls of the gully narrowed — that climbed, threshed and spat around the dark scrub on the skyline where a whirlpool of venomous geography existed to entrap it. Complaining, enraged, but inevitably condemned.

“Take these,” said Billy, handing Walter a small package. “I've been waiting for the chance to show them to you.” Walter peeled back much-folded tarpaper to find a dozen smaller packages within, each
enclosing a photograph. The wrapping was of fine but tough tissue paper, the kind used to protect frontispieces in books. The photo inside showed a white disc — a straw hat on a knee — and a wedge of sky bearing down like the outline of South America.

“The exposure was all right,” said Billy. “They buggered it up in the printing.”

It had been taken the Saturday they had gone to the Botanical Gardens, when Billy went mad with his camera using up three rolls of film and finally breaking Diana's reserve — so that when the ever willing Frances at last persuaded her to join in a “spring dance” against the backdrop of a Moreton Bay fig she threw a leg almost as high as her friend's and Billy caught the motion forever. It was more like a highland fling — there they were, hand in hand, two left legs flying, smiling into each other's eyes. Frances's left arm was fully extended, her palm upturned to catch (should chance permit) all she considered her due, while Diana's stayed closer in, fingers modestly enclosing a sprig of gum nuts. They smiled, they were happy, and afterwards when they sat fanning themselves with their vast wheels of hats Walter had knelt beside Billy while he attempted a more reflective picture. “Look over here. Now look away. Whoa! Bugger, they moved. Hey Frances! Now tell them to hold it.”

“Hold still!” And as if in emphasis a clap of thunder had echoed across the city.

“Do you know my trouble?” asked Billy as he squatted on the grass and folded the camera away.

“Have you finished?” called Frances.

“
F. 16
at one fiftieth,” muttered Billy, and scribbled the number on a slip of paper which he slid inside his wallet. Walter waited for the answer — Billy seemed
about to make a confession. But all he said was: “I don't know how to develop and print my own pictures. I'd like to do everything myself.”

“Hurry up, we'll get wet!”

They set off for a hall in Elizabeth Street where the explorer Mawson was to give a lecture at three.

“Do we have to?” said Frances.

“I don't care one way or the other,” said Billy, but he became enthusiastic when Diana said she wanted to go.

The idea had been Walter's but when he brought it up Frances had just drifted away from him. The secret he thought he had learned by kissing her was no use after a week of separation. He felt too shy to offer his arm in public, and when he went up to her at a shop window and leaned a palm on the glass to enclose her, she ducked out. Yet the Saturday outing had been her plan. About the following weekend too, when she would be staying with Diana, she was full of plans.

Finding themselves at a corner waiting for Billy and Diana (arm in arm) to catch up, Frances said: “Do you wonder what they talk about?” Then, slipping behind to listen, they discovered them absorbed like children in a string of comparisons — “I likes” and “don't likes” about food, modes of transport, even the raindrops that chased them into the nave of an insurance office. When they made a dash for it Diana shrieked “Don't!”, but Billy lifted her off the ground anyway, and she sped along with heels locked in a glide of pleasure.

In the hall Walter ran his fingers along the shining runners of a sled. He felt clumsy and half made. Wordlessly he followed Frances as she marvelled at the smoothness of the wood despite its scratch marks. When he mumbled that the scratches were exactly like
photographs he had seen of glaciated stone, no-one bothered to listen.

“Come on, look at these.”

A spirit stove, a wireless transmitter, a fur suit and a pair of snow goggles were arranged on a table for inspection. Billy tried the goggles on, and groped about like a blind man while Diana blushed and told him to stop.

But when they sat down things changed. Many other soldiers were in the hall, and suddenly it was clear that the attraction of the Antarctic explorer's adventures had brought them here not merely because of the wet afternoon, but out of fellow feeling. Like Mawson, they felt themselves embarked on an adventure with a true Australian flavour. “I was privileged to rally the ‘sons of the younger son'”, said the explorer in his opening remarks. They knew what he meant. He surveyed the audience with clear eyes and a proud jaw that were themselves a reward for effort. Walter felt less removed from a meaningful existence, and found the strength to tell himself that in such an arena Frances did not matter …

In planning his trip, said Mawson, he had found an opportunity to prove that the young men of this young country could rise to those traditions that had made the history of British polar exploration one of triumphant endeavour as well as of tragic sacrifice.