1915 (9 page)

“Blacky and Martha, are they, you know, engaged?”

“Well, they'll never marry,” observed Mrs Pepper tactfully, plunging her hands into a mountain of dough as she prepared the next day's bread.

Walter was asleep when the others arrived home, though behind a tattered dream of crouching against a fence while Blacky rode at him on his motorbike he was dimly aware of low voices, dropped boots, and the distant whine of an engine.

 

The next day they all complained of headaches, and worked sullenly and hard. Walter yarned with the Schulers at morning tea, at dinner and at afternoon tea as well. The Reids and Billy flopped into bed straight after the evening meal. Even between themselves sociability seemed to have evaporated, and the split that Blacky had opened with his jab at Walter mattered less, though it remained. Billy was not unfriendly, but he stopped short of the way things had been before. At the end of each day he rode in to see his mother, but refused to respond with more than a word even to Mrs Pepper's gentle enquiries.

Something had diverted them on their outing to Forbes with Eddie, but it was not until Walter and Billy rode home together at the end of the fourth and last day that Walter learned about it.

The horses, head to tail, held Billy's voice behind. Walter scanned the lumpy blackness ahead, or just looked up at the stars. A storm was coming. Intermittent sheet-lightning showed high above Canowindra, over thirty miles away.

“We settled into the pub. Later Eddie got so drunk that Ned had to drive back. But first Blacky started
roasting an old German, one of the Kaiser's crowd, you know, their king-bloke. Blacky told him all the Germans were sausage-eaters who'd put their mothers into sausages if they got half a chance. When the old German was hopping mad Blacky told him he knew for a fact he'd put his own mother into a sausage and brought her out to Australia in a suitcase. Things ran hot, Blacky nearly got a faceful of beer, but he bought the old geezer a drink — you know Blacky — they got to be good mates.”

Ginger followed Peapod in a wake of horse smells. Lightning flickered closer now, so that a hump of black cloud was outlined. A curlew called eerily from far off.

“He said there was going to be a war.”

“Who with?”

“Germany and England. He was all for England. For Australia, anyhow. He would not stick up for his own country at all — he spat.”

“Australia wouldn't be in it,” said Walter. “Never,” he repeated firmly, because he was suddenly nervous. Though the peaceable bush nearby had hushed, the curlew faintly cried away to the west, where the stars, streaks of ash, burnt themselves out.

Billy urged Ginger alongside. Spittle and iron, clanked teeth, and the kick of boot-leather on horsehide held him there.

“We're too far from anywhere,” Walter concluded.

“You could be right.”

Now they were at the crossroads, and Billy worked hard to hold in Ginger, who sensed the coming gallop along the sandy track. Walter said:

“There was nothing in what Blacky said about the Reilly girl, you know.”

“Good-oh.”

Though darkness was between them, and only the scrape of hoofs gave them away, Walter felt they saw each other clearly. And it wasn't friendship, nor was it shared interest that caused this peculiar flow of recognition. It was as though different nationalities had been declared. When had the declaration been made? The more Walter claimed to himself their differences didn't matter, the greater they loomed.

“The barmaid's just a trouble-maker.”

“She's that all right.”

Then they talked about Billy's mother — just a couple of words. Finally they agreed that hard work could kill a man, and they were dog tired. At last, each one echoing the sentiments of the other, they parted.

 

Both were home and asleep before the storm struck, though their parents saw everything. At the Gilchrists' the wind poured from the hills with the grinding sound of a huge axle. Over at the Mackenzies', Billy's father slammed doors and witnessed in a triple succession of lightning flashes the curtain of rain as it swayed just beyond the edge of the veranda.

That night in Parkes hospital Billy's mother died.

“Franny, this admirer of yours —”

“Admirer!”

“Walter whoever-he-is.”

“Gilchrist,” mouthed Frances, speaking at Walter's letter, which under its own power had raised two thick folds to form a triangle. Until this moment it had been paper alone. Now her mother was giving it importance. “He wrote, I didn't.”

Mrs Reilly sat erect and prim, not at all herself. “I can see this Walter in a couple of years. He's ghastly enough now with his loathsome New Year dances and funerals and mud — heavens, he's trying so hard and all he can rise to is crudeness.”

Frances saw the letter as inoffensive, even dull, compared with her mother's own quick-tongued picture of things on other occasions. What about the “full story” of her marriage, which she'd revealed over the queer week following New Year when Pat Reilly had again left for Forbes? There had been moments then, many of them, when Frances had wanted to cry
Stop
, either because she couldn't bear to see her father so unfairly investigated, or because she was in stitches. But she said nothing now, not because of this shared “cruel streak”, but because staring at the letter she felt a need to rouse opposition, and form from the swirling nothingness of her emotions a definite attitude.

“Wide hat, red face, arms like sides of beef, thick shoes. Boots! Spilling tea all over the carpet,” Mrs Reilly paused — having splashed a drop herself.

“Here?”

“Nothing to talk about but the price of wool, or cattle, or rabbits or whatever it is they kill and sell off. Asking about your music, as if he cared, producing a couple of tickets for the theatre — something awful, you can be sure — and clod-hopping with you down Pitt Street. And then, like a bull at a gate, producing a ring and asking you to cook hot dinners for ever in a tin shed.”

“He's not like that,” said Frances, at last meeting the force which gave Walter a shape. “He
won't
be like that,” she added, surprising herself by thinking about him in the future.

“He'd ask you to play something for him in the living room. And after Debussy, if he were awake, he'd ask for something jolly. ‘Polly Wolly Doodle', or ‘Two Little Girls in Blue'.”

Frances giggled. Her mother's secret was exaggeration — she loved to pound the heavy notes. “He's much finer than you think.” She swallowed, and took more tea.

But her mother had not, as usual, taken this flight of fancy the extra distance and elevated it to the cosmically absurd, where peculiar figures with familiar faces were made to behave uproariously — Dad as an angel with dangling braces, Amos a possum with silver fur, Harry at the beach learning to talk under water.

“I don't think he should be encouraged. My strong advice would be to take your time before replying.
Intend
to, of course.”

Frances looked obediently into her cup, but thought her mother hypocritical.

“At your age I was married. There's a lesson I hope won't escape you.”

Then Mrs Reilly rounded the table and kissed Frances on the crown of her head. She whispered: “You've got a guardian angel who'll never stand in your way, darling.”

Frances stayed on, not moving, staring at the letter, too listless in the gathering heat to make an effort. She admired her mother. Yet now, perversely, she wished after all that she could have come to a less fair conclusion. An outright condemnation of Walter, a final shriek of forbidding, would have been exciting. That was her nature — to crave extremes. But the outlook indicated by those parting words left her once again drifting. She found it boring to be left holding a choice. She dropped the letter into the copious pocket of her pinafore, and after stacking the cups and saucers floated to the hall mirror and gazed at herself in the hot half-dark. Overhead the rattle of windows and knock of brooms proceeded among grunts and shouts, and soon Frances would join in. But her dark face in the mirror shifted intriguingly. She cupped her hair and raised it, turning almost side-on yet holding her own returning gaze. Now that a hint of Arabia was not unfashionable she liked her profile. As might a stranger's, her face beckoned with the possibility of sensation, and brought her closer to an understanding of her inner nature.

Then in the midst of this reverie she heard the telephone give its faint click preliminary to ringing, and alertly she reached across to unhook the receiver.

“Mosman 343.”

“Hello,” drawled a male voice.

“Frances Reilly speaking.”

Then there was silence, and she realized that the
voice had been hesitant. Now it seemed gone altogether: she heard other voices in the distance, as if the line were an empty tunnel crowded against busy ones.

“Hello-hello?” The exchange girl cut in. “Are you there?”

“Who is it?” asked a wide-awake Frances.

The voice had been familiar. She knew it from somewhere — Forbes? Climbing to help the others she found herself able to summon up an atmosphere. Cold air crowded against the outline of a figure in her mind, and she knew that floor polish, the squeak of hinges, and the creak of the Albion's stairs were all involved.

“Mother!” At the top of the stairs she wanted to tell her, and almost did while accepting the cobweb broom.

“Do the ceilings and hurry along, then we can all have a rest.”

In all the houses up the hill wives and their maids sat hoarding the last puddles of coolness left over from the night before. At Mrs Reilly's, as with the rest, blinds were drawn, curtains pulled, doors closed. But now and again, as if this house alone was incapable of containing the energy within, a door would fly open and a mop shake its head in the molten sunlight, or an upstairs window rattle wide to enable female head to call to female head somewhere down below.

In the afternoon they slept, the first pupil not being due until four. Frances had made up her mind: she would not reply to Walter's letter. Why hurry? Why even bother. She parted the drapes and peered outside. When her eyes adjusted to the glare she could make out a smoulder of red tiles in the far distant eastern suburbs. In between, the harbour flowed nowhere, a broad stilled cauldron of heated glass. Then a ship hove into view, a passenger liner with the clear outlines of an
Orient Line boat on a painted postcard. It seemed the only real object in the world. Frances perched on the windowsill oblivious to the heat. The ship made her feel remote, tiny, stranded at the most distant corner of the globe. She imagined a dotted line leading down the harbour, through the Heads, around the underside of Australia and across the Indian Ocean — gesturing towards Ceylon and India as it progressed — spilling in its wake successive, endless
O's
of possibility:
Orvieto, Orsova, Otway, Orantes, Osterley, Otranto, Orana, Omrah, Ormonde
— then heading up through the Red Sea and Suez Canal where other lines jostled but failed to deter it, across the Mediterranean, past Gibraltar, until England loomed like a storybook illustration of a land in the sky, pastel-coloured and cool.

Over there, things
happened
. Would her parents let her go? With its smart lines and swept-back confident funnels, with its tiny figures of sailors stowing ropes or merely draped on the shaded port railings, the ship unbearably provoked her restlessness. She let the curtains flop and turned back the cover of the bed, and lay in her underclothes on the cool sheet. After a minute she took even these off.

Certainly it would be glorious to have a tragic blow struck by an enraged and madly obstructive parent — many artists sprang from such fires — but
her
parents? They loved her with too much kindness. Or perhaps they failed to love her enough, and finally would let her loose in a world where she'd struggle, cry for help, and disappear, and they wouldn't care.

She woke when Helen arrived with a cup of tea, and propped herself on an elbow. From below came the rattle of a duster playing scales and the drum of cushions as her mother tidied the music room. From
outside came the heat-oppressed scrape of sparrows. She sweated with the tea and felt cooler, stretching an arm and shaking globes of perspiration onto the sheet. She supposed Walter's letter was intense enough. Her own brand of intensity seemed out of place in Australia, which loosened one's grip on things, never allowing one to — she grabbed the letter and sank back on the bed to read it again — to fly?

 

She had put it to Diana, mentioning his reserve, his consideration, his manners. And under these things, had she actually spoken this out loud? — he's very intense. He thinks. He's got his own life going on somewhere underneath. And then he looks at you.

Respectful and dull. To be truthful, that had been her first impression.

When talking to Amy Castle, who was more hard-bitten than Diana and not really a friend, though someone to be impressed, Frances had replied to her question “Is he handsome?” with “Yes, no. He'll be more handsome when he's older.” Amy had been interested. “He laughs, he can see the funny side of things, but not the way those country boys usually do. When he laughs there's something there to laugh about.” By then Frances was practically inventing him, and Amy was near enough bursting with curiosity. “When he laughs you don't feel left out,” she said. “Oh, he'd create a stir at — the Governor's Ball,” she managed, because that year Amy was going. And a final invention: “He does well at school. He could be anything he wanted.” Amy asked: “A rich lawyer or a rich farmer?” Frances had said: “I don't know. Not a farmer.”

Yet there he had been at Parkes station just before Christmas, looking like one. Not a fully made farmer, but going that way. The physical change was not what Frances had minded. She had rather liked the definite thickening of the frame from the stringy schoolboy of a few months before. It was a kind of sullen wariness that she noticed. It may have been tiredness. But it might just as easily have been a shadow of his future self — the kind of man who sat on the bench outside the pub on sale days, a beer in one hand and a stick in the other, wide awake but drowsing. The kind of man who spent so much time mending the edges of his own world that he would never want to go any further. Who was balding at twenty-nine, who spat, who went to church but had no religion, who made no changes in his life and expected those around him to make none either.

I'm unfair, she suddenly decided as she dressed. Just like mother, who loves to take a person and lean and lean until cracks appear, then force those cracks apart until nothing survives in one piece.

But Frances was also uncertain, not just of Walter — who was practically invisible on those millions of acres of western plain. Suddenly she glimpsed a life of unhappiness, wherein the choice not-made invariably would be the exciting one after all. She ought to be taking care of herself and not existing on dreams alone! In the cushioned square of her yellow-painted room she experienced the beginnings of a turn against herself, an unhappy dispersal not of fate, but of will.

I'll write, she decided, and did so straight away.

The cool change arrived and because the five thirty pupil was ill, Mrs Reilly suggested a walk.

“Pat was awfully romantic once,” she took Frances's arm. “At least I thought he was.” In an aside she said: “The mistakes women make about men populate the world” — and gave a bitter laugh, but then talked about secret mementos in locked drawers, hand-delivered letters brought in the dead of night, pebbles scattered on windows, even the dot-dot-dot from the signal lamp of a cutter on the bay … a load of silly talk about midnight occasions when anything could happen, though of course it never had.

“You don't mean Daddy,” said Frances. They had reached their favourite seat by the harbour.

“To hear him talk you'd have thought so. It astonishes me what a man can get away with. I trusted him to be wild as the wind, and what happened?”

These days Mrs Reilly had her admirers, and though Frances mostly disliked them there was still an air of rivalry in the house. Harry Crowell, Amos Hart, Mr Tratinor the piano tuner whom Frances had caught one day with his chin resting un-innocently on the piano stool as if he'd just delivered it a kiss — not to mention the cheeky strangers who lifted their hats and won from the handsome music teacher a promising beam of recognition.

As they sat together in the park Frances twisted the corner of her handkerchief around her thumb, a nervous habit from childhood. Her mother tapped her on the hands.

“You mustn't.”

“I wrote to him.”

“That was quick.”

“I kept it chatty. I told him about the concert last
week, what we wore, the ice creams; coming home on the last ferry.”

“What about Harry?”

“Who'd want to know about old Harry? But I left it understood we must have gone with someone.”

“Understood! Harry arranged the whole evening — bought the tickets, the refreshments, the supper. He
was
the outing.”

Frances said slyly, “The full story might have been provoking.”

“Still —”

The ferry tooted twice as it surged into view, a bow wave curving back on either side like blades of ice. With the engine cut, the wave slid to a snowy streak which disintegrated as the boat knocked the heavy stumps of the wharf. In a grinding moment of contact the ferry chugged black smoke, creating a drowned giant of a cauliflower astern while rope thudded and a flimsy gangplank rattled to the shore.

“Harry Crowell!” called Mrs Reilly when one of the passengers raised his arms theatrically.

“Some surprise,” muttered Frances. Harry rarely failed to turn up on this ferry, but on weekdays he was a different-enough person to be bearable — dressed in a glum suit, with his idiotic flourishes kept in check by a day among the no-nonsense types at Goldsborough Mort's.

“Ian Gillen was in,” said Harry, fidgeting with his red and gold ring.