1915 (29 page)

Miraculously there was straw to sleep on. They burrowed in, and without talking turned over to stare at a sky full of stars. At home on mild nights Walter liked to lie in the grass and force himself to view the night sky not as a dimensionless scattering of points of light but as a deep and dark crystal wherein near and far were related, with the earth and the patch of it he occupied bonded to the farthest reach of space. Could it be so here, among these odd northern constellations?

After the tears and frantic questioning of why she was here, what were they
doing
, and how it was wrong, so terribly wrong, Frances had stared into the moonlit yard of the hotel with fingers covering her mouth while Walter sat on the bed with his hands dangling between his knees thinking the same thoughts. Neither spoke.

Earlier, on their arrival from the theatre, Billy and Diana had gone up first, and after a wait Walter and Frances followed. When they found the foyer deserted, and unglimpsed entered the shadowy stairwell, she had giggled, hurrying him along from behind with nervously playful pushes. But in the room her mood changed. A step had been taken from which there was no turning back. What could Diana have been thinking to talk her into it? She wished she had not agreed. Then she named Billy as the force behind this shameful adventure. Billy did not know right from wrong and did not care. She blamed the war. Why was Walter going? Did he have to? He must believe that without the war she would not have agreed to come. Did he believe her?

“Walter?”

She drew a breath and waited for him to snip the thread of her performance. She wanted to feel arms closing tightly around her, she wanted to sink into the room's darkness which was without morality, without obligation — unless, as she half feared, morality consisted wholly of reaction to practical consequence. And such a concern, to be truthful, had forcefully overcome her upon entering the unlit room with its moonwhite square of window, its virginal bedspread, and the pale tiles surrounding a tiny grate. For her childhood had been spent being chased in and out of
such rooms with their tidewrack of partnerings guilty and otherwise. She heard footsteps in the corridor and irrationally wondered if it was her father, or someone who knew him and would tell, or a drunken guest or merely a strange one — the kind who opened doors by mistake, and stared.

To sweep her clear of such fears she was dependent on a person whose strength was no greater than hers — who was himself a victim of prevarication and awe. An absurd feat confronted him. He was incapable of imagining how the fully-clothed Frances with her turned back would become the undressed Frances in his arms. How comically ignorant he was, not of the practical motions that must follow (the stallion and the mare hid no secrets) but of the human etiquette involved. There must be words to accompany that abrupt union: how ridiculous not to know them.

Frances felt a mixture of curiosity and impatience. She rubbed the glass and it squeaked, so she turned and smiled. But Walter was staring at the floor. Would her life never begin?

“You mustn't think I won't come back,” he said, looking up. “Ethel saw it clear as anything.”

“What is it about this Ethel? Is she nice?”

“We went walking at the picnic. After a while she kissed me.”

“Did you kiss her in return?”

“You'll have to guess.”

“I'll bet you did.”

“Why?”

Frances crossed the floor and balanced herself on the edge of the bed. “You couldn't resist her. She's prettier than me.”

“But you've never met her. She's not.”

“Not prettier?”

“She knows who you are. She's watched you at the station.”

They kissed, bumping foreheads. Frances twisted herself closer. Her mouth was dry. Then she lost balance, and a second later they found themselves side by side on the bed.

“Did you touch her?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

Frances seemed lashed into starched layers that nowhere gave access to anything soft. He could feel heat rising from her cheeks and then, in a gust, a closer heat released from her loosened bodice.

“She touched me.”

“Where?”

So it went on, until piece by piece clothing was negotiated to the floor.

She said, “I'm cold,” and as he drew up the cover she became someone else entirely — not the sociable person of irresolute and tempting gestures, nor the soul he sometimes thought of as deep and at other times as vaporous, nor the figure in time on whose past and future he made tentative claim. She existed, in that moment, as nothing more than a body. And it was with the intelligence of one body seeking entrance into another, and with the foolish and human practicalities also involved, that these two finally met.

“May I,” Walter murmured politely, “put my … self … in there?” He placed a hand between her legs and felt her respond with a bolt of sensation to his wondering exploration of a rustling dry and then suddenly humid place. The question was needless but she whispered “Yes,” her head turned sideways into
the pillow. There was a moment of blindness then as Walter's searching engaged in a baffled encounter, but all at once clumsiness ended and an embrace became possible that placed the body of Frances closer to him even than his own, with fragments of perfumed ear and hair, nipple and buttock, bone and pulsing artery rising through him, then all swirling, as in a whirlpool, softly enclosing both in one or the other's amazed sigh before spilling from walls down to a centre, an endlessly promising descent of sensation in which Frances showed she was one with Walter, unreservedly one, by uttering a delighted, drowning cry.

 

Lying in straw, with the stars refusing to deepen overhead but maintaining a frosted flatness, Walter slowly became aware of a closer horizon than the one actually marking earth from sky. It was a nearby hill, a hump of darkness with two low ridges flowing out to enclose the sleeping men like the walls of an unlit amphitheatre. Half awake, half dreaming Walter thought: it's as though we're on stage and out there is an audience seated on dark tiers.

In the past twenty-four hours Walter had definitely changed. On this day of no shooting, he realized, he had narrowed his hopes for himself and dulled his nervous excesses — and he resolved to cling to this dullness. The speculations of the likes of Reg Hurst were trapped between walls formed by pickets of crosses. Even here in this herb-scented hollow Walter had seen efficient stacks of crosses ready to mark the remains of those who surrounded him, still dreaming or praying, calling out in their sleep, hungry, or thirsty, or
sleeplessly rising to poke at sad embers with a stick.

When at last he slept he found himself hard at work, still facing the amphitheatre of hills but seated now at the centre of a ramshackle machine made of wood and galvanized iron. “I'm going now,” said Walter. But as he tried to pull his legs out he discovered them fixed to the floor. He heard a moaning chorus cry “
Hang on!
” With shock he saw an expectant audience packed tightly into the amphitheatre, the curious and dull reddened faces of home staring back at his own sweating features.

“Did you hear Mrs Gillen shouting at Rob last night? She doesn't like us being here,” said Frances.

It was almost time for breakfast. She and Diana wore shawls and faced each other drinking tea across a low table. Two grey cats crept along a dark line of damp at the edge of the veranda boards.

“I wonder what she thinks,” Frances continued. “She stared right through me. Did you notice her careful speech? You shouldn't worry, it's me she disapproves of, a publican's daughter. I'm sure she drinks. I
know
she does.”

“Didn't we resolve not to care?” said Diana, mockingly quoting Frances's words back at her.

“She couldn't wait to say hello and goodbye. I'll bet her tipple's gin, or something fancier,” Frances mused, recalling Mrs Gillen's pungent scent during the obligatory kiss, and trying to remember the name of a bottle of exotic spirits in the private bar of the Albion that no-one ever ordered. “I don't care,” she concluded. “Cross my heart. But I'm interested to know what people think.”

“
I
worry about things all the time. I've never said any different. I was just reminding you of your own resolution.”

“Remind away,” said Frances, leaving the table and standing as close to the edge of the veranda as she could
go without getting wet. From here she could see the creek and its fringe of trees a half-mile distant in the misty rain: a frayed green doorsnake with dark twists of stuffing poking up. In clear weather the roofs of the settlement on the ridge four miles away were visible, but now everything in that direction was shrouded.

“It's true you've got nothing to worry about. Nothing that shows,” muttered Diana. Frances made no reply but moved farther away. Last night after unpacking they had stepped from their adjoining rooms to stand here shivering. A wall of lightning-illuminated cloud had surged towards them bringing cold gusts of wind and a wild storm that overnight had become this obliterating change of season. By morning things were sodden enough for hoofprints on the road beside the garden fence instantly to become flooded half moons, and when a dray crept past bearing a sack-covered sheep's carcase to the kitchen it left twin trails that for a moment ran clean and shiny before filling with fawn sludge.

“She even got our names mixed up,” said Frances on rejoining her friend.

“Anyway, I liked her.”

“You would.”

“Are we going to argue here as well?”

“I didn't start it.”

“She's interested in the war, really, quite interested.”

“Then you're bound to have lots to talk about. But if you keep twisting your ring like that someone's going to get suspicious. Leave it alone.”

Diana rested her hands on the edge of the table but after a few seconds started again.

“What if they guessed? I'd be so embarrassed.”

“What you're suffering from is funk,” said Frances,
who lately had found a philosophy to match her instincts. It had to do with having no regrets.

“You're so sure of yourself,” said Diana, who privately regarded Frances's newfound belief in herself as nothing but amorality. Then with trepidation, because there was now something awesome about her friend, she added: “As if you'd never done anything wrong.”

“Pride is something different.” But then Frances laughed: “Oh, come on, this is too funny to be serious.” And she considered again the amusing spot they were in, with Diana supposedly married to a Mr Benedetto (thus able to use her own surname) and acting as Frances's chaperon.

But there was nothing funny in the situation for Diana, who had been dragged to the Gillens against her will and unnecessarily exposed to possible shame, whereas Frances, she felt, had not a shred of shame left. So Diana sat there biting her lower lip and twisting her ring in fear of what might go wrong. At the sound of footsteps coming along the veranda they put their cups down and tried to look composed.

“May I?” Mr Gillen drew up a chair. The tea tray had all along carried an extra cup. “Rob's gone chasing sheep but he made me promise to look after you. What a night! I've sent a man into town for the mail, and who knows, if the river rises, someone,” he sneaked a look at Diana, “may just have the honour of a ‘Westbury' birthplace.”

“A flood?” asked Frances, while Diana, blushing, folded her hands in her lap.

“I'd say August,” said Mr Gillen, still addressing the mother-to-be.

“Or September,” Diana nodded.

“That wretched creek,” he went on. “If it backs up to billy-oh, then we're done. Do you mind? You can stay as long as you like, you know.” He rested his hand with its sprouting hairs and weathered liver spots on Frances's knee and gave a squeeze. It was an old man's hand but stronger and more certain of itself than any youth's. Frances felt suddenly trapped — floods, Rob gone off, the sprawling house like a raft sailing nowhere. Mr Gillen slid his thumb with exploratory pressure along the edge of her kneecap. Could all the family now know Diana's secret? Rob had sworn not to tell.

But then with grave fatherliness and without a trace of opportunism Mr Gillen led them, one on each arm, along the veranda of the guest wing and down to the dining room, where soon Mrs Gillen joined them for breakfast. And she too was friendly, full of plans for filling what would certainly be the wet days ahead — not at all the person who had shrieked at her son the previous midnight. She recalled the visit of the Archduke Ferdinand to Narromine, when they had all gone shooting with the Macks, and pretended to remember Frances's parents from that time. Imagine! The man whose death had touched off the war had actually shaken her hand. She had wondered for twenty years about the arrogance of someone who had never bothered to learn English. So recovered was Mrs Gillen from her night-time self that Diana immediately decided that a housemaid had done the unladylike screaming, or else it had been a fight in the married quarters across “the avenue” or even the black cockatoo screeching to be removed from the garden where its wire cage hung squeaking in the path of the storm.

Frances was not deceived by the heavy drinker's
morning brightness. She had seen it too many times. Yet to discover it here among such wealth and secure ownership was disturbing. Only Rob held her interest and he had gone galloping off in the mud without so much as a “good morning”.

 

The plan had been Mrs Reilly's, hatched in March when Diana was still at home with her mother and her condition still an easily kept secret (but only just). The two girls were to go to Forbes and stay with Pat Reilly. Frances was to look after her father and Diana as her companion would be safely removed from society. She was unknown in the district and would raise no eyebrows by being introduced as “Mrs” — there were plenty of young wives whose husbands with the finest of motives had upped and gone. In the meantime an attempt would be made to arrange a marriage with the farflung Billy — heaven alone knew how, but it was the only way. At the start they thought he might be back in time, but when the first lists of killed appeared in the papers and a gloomy appraisal of the position by Captain Benedetto followed, it seemed more likely that Billy would never be back.

Diana had faced her mother and undertaken to write to Billy immediately with news of “her state”. But she delayed, not wanting to risk a dream in which Billy was always as he had been in those weeks before departure: weeks that promised a lifetime of calm acceptance. So she told her mother yes, she
had
written: but arrived at the Gillens in mid-June with the task still undone.

Frances had happily declared that she would go to
Forbes, the closest town of any size to the Gillens' place, fifty miles distant. She stopped thinking about England and the stage and as early as March swore that she was in love “for the first time ever” and would do anything to be near him. If necessary, she told Diana, she would live in rags and cook hot dinners in that tin hut beloved of her mother, though with the Gillens, everyone knew, such a fate was unthinkable. Robert Gillen called regularly in the New Year and after two months Mrs Reilly noticed how Frances posted fewer and fewer letter overseas — the sombre Walter Gilchrist had passed from her life like a bout of fever. But when Mrs Reilly began to express her thoughts aloud and worry seriously about the South American fiancée Frances told her never to bring the subject up again,
never
. So, because Mrs Reilly had the next day peered through the trees and seen Robert and Frances kissing in a rowing boat as they bobbed along the inner side of the point, she decided to let events similarly take their course, and drift.

The truth was that Frances still did not care about marriage. This annoyed Diana, whose advanced views were in retreat. She argued that Frances could easily be left out in the cold. What about Robert's flirtation with Sharon Keeley at the luncheon last November? Frances made no excuses. It was what he was like with her that mattered. He made her forget everything, she was happy. That was as much as she ever said, except to confess that all they had ever done was kiss. What did they talk about? Sheep, motor cars, polo, the theatre. Had he ever made any “improper” suggestions? None. She liked his strong steady hands, his blue eyes, the way he doubted nothing and seemed to know exactly why he had been placed on the earth.

So a strain had developed between the two friends. Each felt that the other was putting on something false — slipping into the disguises of adulthood. Diana saw a Frances no less spirited, but one who spent herself on a doubtful cause. If expressed, they would each have flung the same accusation at the other, the word would have been “uninteresting”. Neither Mrs Reilly nor Frances had blinked an eye the night when Frances played “Claire de Lune” and Robert had asked, as an encore, for “something jolly”. Money and position blinded the mother, but what had deflected Frances? She said: “He started noticing me. I suppose I wanted him to from the start, and didn't know it.”

“Poor Walter.”

“I don't even think about him.”

“Never?”

“You want me to say I'm sorry. I won't.”

“I never stop thinking about Billy in his great struggle. Aren't you sorry at least for that?”

“Just listen to yourself!”

But long ago for want of something to write Frances had adopted Diana's stuffy phrase in her last letter to Walter. It was true that she hardly thought about the war, whereas Diana had purchased the very latest “Seat of War” maps showing the Dardanelles, and even brought them with her to the Gillens, so that when Mrs Gillen at the breakfast table asked the distance from the battleground to Constantinople, she was able to look it up.

 

“What a shame I'm an old man,” said Mr Gillen, taking Frances's hand while Diana and his wife went
into conference at the far end of the table. “You make me wish I was twenty-five again.” But to Frances he belonged to the room, its spirit was his, dark and chilly, full of heavy furniture and silver plate. Prizewinning cups lined the sideboard and overflowed into glass-fronted cupboards. In summer this room might just possibly form a deep refuge from the heat. Now it was a cold heart. On the walls hung framed photographs of beribboned bulls and historic wheat stacks. There were thin ancestors, fat babies, and whole fleets of sailing ships. Flocks of sheep posed with their bulbous-necked sires. Over the fireplace hung an oil painting of a defiant stag captured among geometric rocks by three grimacing dogs. Suddenly Frances thought:
There's no place for me here
, and in the ponderous gloom she was surprised to feel lighthearted at the discovery.

The rain eased and they set off for a tour of the yards wearing oversized Wellingtons and heavy oilskins. Diana asked questions while Frances trailed behind. When Mr Gillen slipped away to find his manager Diana said: “We'll have pigs, they eat all the scraps. And wheat and Merino sheep.”

“We?”

“Me and Billy.”

On his return Mr Gillen asked: “Aren't your husband's people on the land? Rob said something about a place in Victoria.”

“He was in New South Wales when we met,” said Diana cheerily. She enjoyed lying about her supposed marriage only if the answers, like this one, came out as a kind of truth. Frances on the other hand had taken to lying expansively even when it did not matter.

“What's their place called?” asked Mr Gillen, shouldering open the door of a shed to reveal peacocks
pecking among the dusty wheat. A name had not occurred to them. Then from the grey rafters came a peacock's melodious shriek: “How beautiful!” said Frances, taking the old man by the arm and diverting him from enquiry. The birds clambered on taut wheat sacks and clasped uncertain claws on the iron parts of machines. Mr Gillen pointed out a seed drill, a harrow, innumerable implements stretching the dry length of the shed in orderly files. “Keith Fryer looked after all this, but now that he's joined the army, the devil, it's to be Rob's concern.”

They turned to discover a peacock standing just inside the propped-open doorway, fanning its tail in full display.

“Would you like a feather?” asked Mr Gillen. As he advanced towards the bird it folded away its tail and stalked aside.

“
From
the bird?” Frances protested. “Oh, no!” But Mr Gillen suddenly dropped to his knees and gathered it up. “Please don't” — then after a scuffle and a squawk he turned to hold the central eye out to her.

“Take it.”

“I can't.” Blood was visible at the point of the quill as if it had been dipped in watery red ink. The other peacocks posted themselves on struts. Mr Gillen was annoyed. He seemed about to snap the feather in two. Instead he thrust it at Diana and brusquely asked if they wished to see the pigs. “Yes,
please
,” (from Diana as she brushed her lips with the feather).