A Cry from the Dark (4 page)

“Well, it could be. Yes—that might be interesting.”

“Betty would make a very good journalist,” said her father loyally. “She notices things.”

“So what do you think about the Czech situation?” the vicar asked, turning to Bill Cheveley.

“Oh, don't you worry about Czechoslovakia,” put in Paul Naismyth. “Country like that—only existed for twenty years. Nobody's going to rush in and fight for a country that's just a name. It's so remote nobody gives a damn about it.”

“So was Sarajevo,” said Betty's father. Now Betty knew for certain she thought Hughie's father a blatherskite. There was another awkward silence. Then the ill-assorted little group of men began to make their way to the Holden waiting outside.

Later that evening Betty's mother said to her, when she came in from putting little Oliver to bed, “When they said Sam Battersby wasn't coming tonight, you said ‘good.' ”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Betty waited for a while before replying.

“I don't like the way he looks at me.”

Betty's mother seemed about to say something, then thought better of it. The Grafton Hotel and what went on there was man's business. This was something that seemed to straddle her world and her husband's.

Thinking back on things later, Betty decided that that week was the one when matters began to crystallize. When what was to come was started on its accelerating course.

 

The phone call from her brother Oliver came two nights later. Bettina had been intending to ring him, and wished she had: she wanted to ask him if he'd like to stay for a few days, and it would have looked better if she had called especially to invite him. She realized she was appearing grudging, and blamed Mark for it. He was not the reason for her preferring not to have visitors who stayed in the flat, but he had certainly strengthened her dislike of it. And she had loved her baby brother, been so protective of him, in those long-ago days in Bundaroo.

“Ollie! I was just about to ring you. I get so confused about the time differences and was afraid I'd ring you when you were asleep.”

“It's early morning here, and I know you're something of a night owl, Betty. And it's Thursday—your tomorrow.”

“Oh, it
is
so confusing. I should know, and I'll try to remember.”

Bettina was very conscious that what she was saying revealed how occasional the contacts had been between them—between her and anyone from her Australian past. With Oliver the contacts had been, quite often, just once a year, and never more than twice. She launched herself into a spiel she had been preparing in advance, and, realizing that in her effort to appear welcoming, she was gabbling, tried to rein herself back.

“Ollie, I wanted to say that I'd love to have you to stay here for the first days of your holiday. You know how itchy I get if I can't get down to the writing in peace, but it's been so long, and it would be so nice if we could actually be together, really get to know each other.
Again
—because we really did know each other once.” Conscious that Oliver might point out that this was until he was about five, and that he'd developed a great deal since then, she began gabbling again. “And then we could plan what you'd like to see while you're over here. The London theater is not what it was, but it's still pretty good, and I'd need to know the sort of thing you like—and then of course other sorts of things: concerts I'm not too good on, but I can find out, and then there's art exhibitions, places of course—”

“Hold your horses, Betty! One thing at a time. Now as to plays, I'm old-fashioned, and I like good strong plays with meaty situations.”

“Ah…Maybe one of the Priestley revivals. Or Tennessee Williams? Strong plays don't get written much these days.”

“Either would be fine. And then I've
never
—I'm ashamed to say this—seen Shakespeare onstage. I suppose I've been saving it till I could see something really good.”

“Right. That should be possible—depending on what plays are being done.”

“I'm not fussy about the play.”

“Well, you should be, Ollie. If you've only one chance to see really well-done Shakespeare it shouldn't be, say,
Timon of Athens
or
Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Luckily they're not often done.”

“Then a concert at the Albert Hall, and an opera at Covent Garden. It's a question of experiencing the places as much as anything, but it would be nice if the opera is something mainline.”

“That might be a problem with opera. Mainline operas at Covent Garden tend to get booked up by corporate sponsors, I don't know why. The people who come find anything more complicated than ‘O Sole Mio' heavy, so you might just as well sit them down in front of a Stravinsky or a Berg as a Puccini. Still, I'll do my best.”

“And…” Here the hesitations became long enough to be awkward. “Going back to the staying with you in the flat…”

“You'd prefer to spend your time with Mark,” said Bettina, breaking in on him. “I really should have thought of that. You haven't seen him for yonks, and—”

“No, it's not that…Not entirely…It's just that…well, here goes: I've been hoping to have someone to travel with me. Judy couldn't face the long air trip, and Cathy couldn't get the time off work…” Those were Ollie's wife and daughter, women Bettina hardly knew. She waited, her stomach feeling oddly churned up. “Well, I've never told you this, but we've been seeing quite a lot of Sylvia these last few years. We've…come together, and got on very well.”

Bettina tried without success to put her voice into neutral.

“I take it this Sylvia is—”

“Sylvia Easton. Yes. And—well—the long and the short of it is, she's always wanted to make the England trip, but never felt like doing it on her own. And the upshot is, she's coming with me. Mark hasn't known about this. I've only just told him.”

“I see. This does rather change things, Ollie.”

“Yes. I can see that it does.”

Her voice took on a protesting tone. “It's not that I don't want to meet her, have her with us when we do the theaters”—though, I
don't,
she thought—“but staying here in the flat, that's a bit different.”

“Yes, I thought it mightn't be a good idea,” said Oliver. “After everything.”

After
nothing
would describe it better, Bettina thought.

“But perhaps I'd better have time to think about it,” she said.

“No—look, I feel I've rather landed you in it. Last thing we would be happy with is a fraught situation. We'll be perfectly all right at Mark's. He's got a mate on the floor above with a spare bedroom. I can sleep there.”

“And Sylvia will sleep in Mark's spare room?”

“You should hear your voice, Betty! Sylvia's not a young woman, you know. And Mark's perfectly safe with women. Doesn't have a lot of luck with them, if the truth be known.”

Not entirely sure what he meant, Bettina put the matter of Mark and Sylvia out of her mind. What she felt in the hour between the call and her bedtime was a sinking sensation of chickens coming home to roost.

The approaching arrival in London of her brother Oliver and the unknown woman to whom she had given birth long ago had the odd effect of seeming to spur Bettina on to greater, more concentrated work on the book of memoirs that was not her autobiography. She could not pinpoint exactly where this stimulus came from, since it would surely have been more logical to suspend work and see what the new Australian impulses likely to result—congenial impulses, at least as far as her brother was concerned—would do for the book. Then one day, over the large breakfast mug of tea with which she invariably started her day, she realized why it was: she wanted to get
her
memories of Bundaroo,
her
notion of what it was like, down on paper before her life was invaded by the Australia of today. She had no reason to think that Oliver was haunted by memories of the town in which he had spent his earliest years. The other visitor had never been there so far as she knew, nor lived in any comparable outback small town. She was aware that the changes to Australia since her youth had been enormous. What she had to capture was the outback of 1938—the heat, the smells, the poverty, above all the attitudes of mind. She had to get down the tiny details of what she could remember. Later on she could dust them off, like an archaeologist with his fragments of pottery, winkle out the dirt from the patterned surfaces, and display their purpose and significance.

 

The day Betty went out to visit Hughie at Wilgandra was a red-letter day for her. Any visit to Wilgandra would have been something to remember, for she had been taken there perhaps three or four times in her life, or since she had begun having memories. She had not been for three years, not since Mrs. Cheveley became something of an invalid. The day had been arranged by Hughie on their walks to school: Mr. Naismyth would borrow the Holden and come and get her on the next Saturday. She would spend the afternoon at the manager's house, have her tea there, and then he'd drive her home.

Betty had not relished the thought of two twenty-mile drives with Mr. Naismyth, whom she had not taken to, and she had exacted a promise from Hughie that he would come too.

“You needn't worry about my dad,” said Hughie. “He's harmless.”

“I'm not worried,” she said, not entirely truthfully. “I'd just rather talk to you.”

It was a fine day, the September sun glowing rather than beating on the dusty landscape.

When the Holden arrived soon after one, Mr. Naismyth raised his hand to Bettina's father on the other side of one of the near paddocks as if he were an old friend and nodded to her mother when she opened the door to them. It was Hughie's first time in Bettina's home, but he couldn't find much to say about it. On the drive to Wilgandra they chatted about their English homework (a short appreciation of “Oh, to Be in England,” for which Hughie had a definite advantage, Bettina felt), and about the forthcoming
Bulletin
competition for budding journalists.

“They wouldn't pick someone who's only been in the country for under a year,” said Hughie. “What could I write about? Though I would quite like to write about Australian art, if we can choose our own topic.”

“What do you know about Australian art?” asked Betty.

“I saw a bit in Melbourne, after we landed. Most of it was on a level with Mr. Blackfeller's pictures—the ones he paints for the city shops—but there was some interesting stuff too.”

“We should do more Australian stuff at school,” said Bettina, who decades later was to greet the news that her novels were now set for the Leaving Certificate with a distinctly mixed reaction. “Just do the English stuff for a sort of background study.”

“Yes, we should,” said Hughie, as if he belonged there.

“Well, you have been setting the world to rights,” said Mr. Naismyth when they arrived at the manager's house, half a mile from Wilgandra itself. “I haven't heard Eugene talk so much since we left the Old Country.”

Clearly he hadn't been listening to them, only registering that they were talking.

In the kitchen Mrs. Naismyth welcomed them, but said she couldn't shake hands because hers were all eggy.

“I'm making some custard tarts for poor Mrs. Cheveley—doing them in the English way. She said she'd have loved to see you, dear, but she doesn't feel up to talking at the moment.”

That was all to the good. She was friendly enough, but a bit too ladylike for Bettina. She and Hughie retreated to the main room of the house, where Hughie had already wound up the gramophone and had the records of Beethoven's Seventh piled up beside it.

“It's rather dark and mysterious at first,” he said, with a touch of condescension, “then it becomes a sort of whirling dance.”

His words had the ring of something he'd read. The Naismyths must own books on music, Betty thought. She could hardly get her brain around the idea of
books
on
music.
They certainly didn't have any such thing in the Bundaroo library. In fact that tiny collection had so few books on anything that it only opened for two hours on Saturdays.

Hughie put the first of the records on the turntable and lifted the arm. When the music started Betty found it not really mysterious at all (she later found he'd confused it with something he'd read in the same book about Beethoven's Fourth). It was more sort of mathematical, she thought, as if getting ready for something. Only when that something started did she become gripped, and standing there in the middle of the floor she had the first of several visions of a dance, sparked off by Hughie's words, with powerful bodies first in joyful motion which gradually took on a feeling of controlled frenzy. She hardly noticed when Hughie changed the record or announced a new movement. The dance became full of slow-paced menace in the second movement, then gradually increased in Bac-chic fire for the last two. The bodies in her vision, now all but unclothed, were leaping and writhing and expressing a terrible, unnerving sort of rapture. When the music ended, Betty took a minute or two to recover her sense of who and where she was. Looking at her hands she found they were shaking, and she tried to hide them.

“Play it again,” she said. “Please, Hughie, play it again.”

Hughie sorted through the records, then put the first one on again.

This time the dancers appeared only intermittently in her brain, and she became more conscious of the shape of the music, the way the themes presented themselves, then changed and developed and intermingled. She was more conscious, too, of Hughie—of experiencing this wonderful music
with
someone. Of course, he knew the music and she didn't, but she had a sense of it beginning to etch itself on her brain, the tunes and the shapes of it becoming part of her as it must be part of him.

“That was even more wonderful,” she said when it finished. And she was about to beg him to play it again when Mrs. Naismyth's head appeared around the door.

“Can't you play something
nice
for your guest, Eugene? Beethoven isn't the thing for hot summer afternoons, surely? What about John McCormack or Richard Tauber? Or ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik'?”

“ ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik' isn't the thing for hot summer afternoons,” said Hughie. But he said it when his mother had shut the door again.

He put on “Fingal's Cave” and some Chopin. When they saw his mother disappearing in the direction of Wilgandra carrying a wicker basket with something wrapped in dazzling white cloth inside, he lifted the arm of the gramophone and they played the Seventh again. Betty couldn't remember when she had had a more thrilling day.

During the Mendelssohn and the Chopin, which she might have liked if they had been played after something other than the Beethoven, Betty looked at the pictures around the room. Most of them were watercolors of English landscapes, alternately lush and wild (“Lake District and Northumberland,” said Hughie). Betty thought the little pictures nice but rather ordinary. The only large picture in the room was an oil, depicting a jagged, prickly, unsettled landscape.

“It's mine,” said Hughie. “My grandad bought it for me. He said he wanted to give me something that would be valuable when I was thirty and had a family, but that my dad wouldn't be tempted to sell before then.”

That statement bowled Betty over. She didn't know what to say, so she said nothing, but she looked Hughie in the eye to show that she had registered it.

Betty was an honorable girl, and she paid for her exciting afternoon by being especially nice and charming to the Naismyths over tea, which Mrs. Naismyth called “High Tea” (“You can't call it dinner because it's just cold, but with some quite nice things”). She offered Betty the bathroom to wash her hands, and she was glad she did, because she could use the wonderful toilet soap called Parma Violet, wrapped in a pretty little paper package, which had the most beautiful smell Betty had ever known. She knew that Phil Pollard at the shop stocked it only for Mrs. Cheveley, and had been quite disconcerted when Mrs. Naismyth bought the last bar for herself. He had had to apologize to the greater lady for having to send her a bar of Colgate instead. It had become a matter of comment in Bundaroo, as almost everything that happened there did.

Over cold ham and cold meat pies and custard tarts (which didn't taste any different from custard tarts made the Australian way, but Betty said it was very nice of Mrs. Naismyth to go to so much trouble for the invalid), Betty thanked the Naismyths for inviting her out and letting her listen to their wonderful gramophone records.

“I'm passionate about music,” said Hughie's mother. “With Eugene it's more art, but I'm passionate about
mu
sic.”

“I did like the pictures on the wall,” said Betty.

“They're by my Auntie Frances,” said Mrs. Naismyth. “She had a wonderful eye for a good watercolor subject. About Mr. Sutherland's ugly landscape, the less said the better. But Eugene says it's good, and Paul's father, who bought it for him, says it's good, so who am
I
to have an opinion? They're the experts.”

“He bought it for me because he knew I'd appreciate it,” said Hughie, and they looked at each other again. The censored version for family consumption, Betty thought. She found it difficult to come to terms with the fact that Hughie's father was distrusted by his own father, who in his turn had made this clear to Hughie himself. Betty herself was not overburdened with relatives and had always rather idealized the large family unit. She was invariably loyal to her own father and mother when speaking of them to the outside world. But then, she had never had any grounds for being anything else.

On the way home Betty and Hughie talked nonstop, except when Betty begged Hughie to sing her the tunes from Beethoven's Seventh so they stayed in her mind. Sometimes Mr. Naismyth joined in these, but mostly he kept quiet. Betty's father was outside the house when they pulled up, but Mr. Naismyth just raised his hand and said, “You've got a really bright kid there.”

“I know.” Betty's father tried to keep his voice neutral, but Betty knew that there was an unspoken “without being told it by a condescending Pommie bastard.”

“Got to get the car back to Bill,” said Mr. Naismyth, and drove off.

Sunday should have been an anticlimax—and was, but not so much as Betty expected. They all went to church, and Betty, as always, met up with lots of schoolfriends there. The Naismyths were there as well, and Mr. Naismyth, whose first time at the church this was, made no attempt to hide his boredom. Not many of his schoolmates spoke to Hughie. He had had a brief period of acceptance when he had taught a group of boys the rules of what they called soccer. By now they had reverted to their own game, which Hughie called rugby and they called football. Hughie was neither popular nor unpopular in the school, merely disregarded. He gave every appearance of not minding, but Betty thought it probably was an appearance. Hughie, she divined, was an actor. Actors needed audiences.

After the service, the Reverend Potter-Clowes singled out Betty in his greetings and farewells to his congregation at the door.

“Betty! I wondered if you'd like to come round when you've finished your Sunday dinner. I shall be off to Corunna to take a service about three, so you can have the place to yourself. I thought you ought to do a bit more prospecting into my old
Bulletin
s—see the sort of thing they like.”

“May I, Mum?”

“Of course, Betty.”

“Then I'd like to, please. But you wouldn't disturb me if you were there.”

“Oh, I do bumble in and out if I need things, as you know. And Corunna only gets a service once a month. I can't let them down, can I?”

Betty thought he probably could, but she just thanked him and said she'd be there by three.

When she got to the little weatherboard vicarage, the Reverend Potter-Clowes bumbled—as he called it—through to the study with her—a room, Betty always noticed, where the works of theology and spiritual speculation were outnumbered by volumes of the
Bulletin
and
Punch
(both, Betty suspected, sources for the jokes the vicar regularly injected into his sermons). He brought her tea, with a plate of biscuits and a slab of gingerbread, and pointed out, as he always did, the volumes of the
Bulletin
for the past fifteen years, and the pile of more recent editions loose in the corner.