Barley Patch (6 page)

My mother handed back to me the pages of my fiction. I destroyed them soon afterwards, but without having given my mother the satisfaction of knowing that I had done so.

When I thought of Huldah as being of marriageable age, I supposed that her hiding herself was not the result of some deformity but of the opposite. I supposed that Huldah might have been like the princess in many a so-called fairytale who was so beautiful and so talented that her father would give her in marriage only to some young man who could perform three impossible-seeming tasks. I also connected Huldah with a female character I had read about a few years earlier in a comic-strip named
Rod Craig
, in one or another Melbourne newspaper. I had little sympathy for the hero of the strip, Rod Craig himself, who was a muscular adventurer and yachtsman. But I was much interested in a certain female character in one of the episodes of the comic-strip.

Rod Craig was occupied with some or another important task on some or another island in the south-west of the Pacific Ocean. While he went about his task, he came to hear about a mysterious pale goddess who was venerated by a tribe of dark-skinned persons in some remote valley or on some remote outer islet. Rod, of course, resolved to meet up with the goddess. Her dark-skinned worshippers, of course, denied him access to her. I have long since forgotten the struggles that took place between Rod Craig and the dark-skinned persons, but I can still recall the line-drawing that appeared sometimes in the comic-strip during the fictional time when Rod Craig was trying to gain access to the pale goddess. The drawing was of a large, ornate building of grass or leaves or coconut fibre or some such material. On the side of the building facing the viewer was a doorway. Nothing was visible in the darkness on the other side of the doorway, but I understood that the space beyond the doorway was an antechamber, the first of many such vestibules or foyers that led through a maze of inner chambers towards the abode of the goddess. Again, I forget the details of the plot, so to call it, but I recall the line-drawing of the scene in one of the outer chambers of the elaborate building when Rod and the goddess met at last. Her costume was studded with hundreds of pearls that her followers had gathered for her over the years, and the few pen-strokes suggesting her features allowed me to believe that she was beautiful. She was, of course, the sole survivor of a shipwreck and had been rescued as a child by the dark-skinned ones, who had never seen a pale-skinned person. She readily agreed to return with Rod to the civilised world, so to call it, and the very last panel illustrating her story showed her dressed in a blouse and slacks and waving from the deck of Rod’s yacht to her former worshippers, who had seemingly accepted her departure from them. (The ghost of a story in which I was the ghost of a character had a different ending. Rod Craig was set upon and killed by the dark-skinned persons after he had committed the sacrilege of stepping across the outermost threshold of the goddess’s apartments. I was allowed to stay on among the goddess-worshippers after I had given them to understand that I wanted no more than to be able to learn at some future time the ground-plan of the goddess’s building and, perhaps, to erect a modest but not uncomplicated dwelling of my own within walking-distance of her abode.)

When I thought of Huldah as being of marriageable age, I had no way of knowing how much she might have learned about myself-the-ghostly-minor-character who loitered sometimes around the grounds or along the corridors of Kinie Ger. And even when I was able to suppose that she had learned something at least about me, how was I to know whether she felt towards me contempt or indifference or even such a warm interest that I ought to expect before too long some sort of message from her locked room?

When I thought of Huldah as being past marriageable age, which is to say when I thought as a child that Huldah might be forty or older, she was of no less interest to me than the young, marriageable Huldah.

In 1955, only a few years after I had first read about Huldah, I read in one of my secondary-school textbooks the poem “The Scholar Gipsy,” by Matthew Arnold. When I state that I have never since forgotten the poem, I mean, of course, not that I can recall whole lines or stanzas, much less the entire poem, but that I can see in my mind clearly today much of what I saw in my mind when I used to read the poem as a schoolboy and that I can feel today much of what I felt then. The scholar who had to give up his studies at Oxford on account of his poverty and who lived thereafter with gipsies on lonely back-roads or in remote woodlands—or, I should rather write, the imprecise images in my mind of a nameless, faceless figure skulking in the background of a few other images in my mind of a few landscapes of England, a country I have never seen, affect me still today somewhat as the original account of the lad from Oxford seemingly affected Matthew Arnold so that he came to write the poem. Even during the years when I was driven to give every free hour to the latest of my writing projects, I would sometimes be overtaken by a strong intimation that the true work of my life still awaited me: that I had still not discovered the precious enterprise that would occupy me wholly for the remainder of my life in some or another quiet room behind drawn blinds. During my teenage years, however, and during the many later years before any of my writing was published, the equivalent for me of the scholar’s research among the gipsies was always the latest of the poems or the pieces of fiction that I was trying to write. Even as a child in the years when I read such fiction as
The Glass Spear
, I mostly saw myself-the-adult as a reader or a writer in a house of two storeys overlooking rural landscapes, although I recall a period when I had a rather different vision of my future.

I had been interested in horse-racing from my early childhood, although I had learned early to conceal much of my interest, given that my father’s gambling had caused much hardship in our family. I read each week the copy of the
Sporting Globe
that my father had discarded but I read it out of sight of my parents. I began to notice in the
Globe
, as it was commonly called, advertisements for racing systems, as they were called. Each advertiser published the names and the odds of the winning horses selected on the previous Saturday by his system, which was for sale at no small price. In time, I began to envisage the advantages that I might enjoy if I myself were able to select every week several winners at generous odds. I was not interested in buying the sort of goods that many a person might have bought with sums of money won from betting. I wanted no more than to be free from having to work for my living; I wanted to go to the races each Saturday and then to spend the rest of the week in my room, working at my writerly or readerly tasks. And this was still several years before I had first read “The Scholar Gipsy.”

There arose, however, whenever I daydreamed of a literary life supported by the proceeds of betting, the interesting complication that I might have to devote many years to the search for a lucrative way of betting before I could fulfil my daydream. I might have to spend year after year comparing the information and the predictions in each Saturday newspaper with the results in each subsequent Monday newspaper. (No newspapers were published on Sunday in those days.) For the time being, I might have to devote all my free time to the task of finding the means that would enable me to devote all my free time to the task that ought to occupy all my free time. In the meanwhile, I would work at some humble clerical job in the State Public Service or the Gas and Fuel Corporation or some such body, taking care each day to conserve my nervous energy for my all-important after-hours tasks.

In mid-1957, six months after I had passed the matriculation examination for the University of Melbourne and had been expected to go on to study arts or law, I was working as junior clerk in the offices of the State Electricity Commission. I was by no means discontented. I spent most of my free time in writing poetry. During most of my lunch-hours, I walked to the State Library of Victoria and read biographies of twentieth-century poets. Whenever I walked through the area reserved for newspapers and periodicals on my way to the central reading room, I used to notice a certain sort of reader. This person was always a male in early middle-age. He was dressed as the older males were dressed in the building where I worked. He read continually from newspaper after newspaper fetched for him by the sour-faced men in dust-coats who fetched and carried for the public. Always he read a Saturday newspaper followed by a Monday newspaper, making notes the while on a cheap note-pad. He was, of course, trying to unlock the secret of horse-racing; trying to discover the betting-method that would free him from daily employment and would allow him to follow his true task, whatever it might have been. As it happened, I was not then myself driven by the urge to find the perfect betting-method, the philosopher’s stone of the gambler. I was able to look calmly on those driven men, one or another of whom might have been the nearest I have ever seen during my lifetime to an embodiment of Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gipsy.

When I thought of Huldah as being past marriageable age, I supposed that she had discovered at an early age a project or an enterprise so manifold and so demanding and yet so inviting that she had given herself to it wholly. While her siblings and her contemporaries concerned themselves with courtships and careers, Huldah pulled down the blinds in her room and locked the door and then began the writing or the reading or the drawing of diagrams or maps that made up the outer, visible part of her life’s work. (I was never able to conceive of Huldah’s or the Scholar Gipsy’s tasks as not being concerned with texts or diagrams or maps.) Of course, if Huldah was busy in her room with her lifelong task, I was not likely to attract her interest by wandering around the grounds of Kinie Ger as though the visible world was all that I knew. My only hope of learning about her all-absorbing task was, perhaps, to lock myself in my own room in the sprawling homestead for months or even years until Huldah got to hear of my unusual ways and sent for me.

Huldah did sometimes receive people in her room. After the first of the murders that were the main items in the plot, so to call it, of
The Glass Spear
, two detectives from some or another far-away town interviewed her. I have long since forgotten whether or not the narrator of The Glass Spear was one of those unconvincing personages commonly occurring in fiction of the twentieth century: those narrators who claim to know the thoughts and feelings of more than one character in the work of fiction. I am therefore unable to explain how I learned the fictional fact that Huldah underwent her interview while sitting in an armchair in her room with a black (or was it a white?) veil covering her completely. Perhaps a crude illustration appeared on one of the pages of
The Australian Journal
. Certainly, the interview went well for Huldah. During the remainder of the story she was under no suspicion.

After I had read about Huldah’s having been interviewed, I surely hoped that I myself, ghost-character, might somehow be granted an audience. If I could have thought of myself as a cousin or a distant relative of Huldah, I might have dared to ask her some of the questions that I had for long wanted to ask her, but whenever I thought of myself as hearing only a female voice from behind a thick veil, I could only suppose that Huldah was a stern aunt of mine.

Huldah may not have been a murder-suspect, but
The Glass Spear
was one of those so-called mystery novels the narrator of which conceals essential information from the reader in order to surprise him or her at last, and so, for all that I can recall, Huldah herself might have stood revealed at last as the murderer or, at least, an accessory to the murders. The only details I remember from the day when my mother brought home the latest copy of
The Australian Journal
and read for herself the last episode of
The Glass Spear
, after having promised me that she would not let slip a word about the ending before I had been able to read it for myself—the only details relate to the unveiling of Huldah. Far from being a recluse in a locked room, Huldah spent most of her time in the open air. She was the Aboriginal woman who appeared as a minor character in the novel, the Mary whose epithet I have forgotten. The story of Huldah’s seeming dual identity was explained to the younger characters almost at the end of the book in a long passage purporting to come from the mouth of Huldah’s brother, who had known her secret all along. I seem to recall that I found this passage strained even as a child; that it brought to my mind an image of the author himself, he who had made up, as it were, Kinie Ger and all the characters who lived there. I was listening to the author while he tried to persuade me to believe that his characters could well have existed in the place commonly called the real world. (I long ago gave up trying to justify the reading or the writing of fiction on the grounds that either of those enterprises relates in some way to the so-called real world in which some persons write fictional texts. For the past fifty and more years, I have been more convinced of the fictional reality, so to call it, of Huldah, the recluse in the locked room, she who never existed, than I have been convinced of the existence of Huldah/Mary, she who can be said to have existed in
The Glass Spear
and who may well have been the fictional counterpart of someone who once existed in the world where I sit writing this sentence.)

Mercifully, the word
gene
was not yet in common usage in the early 1950s. Sidney Hobson Courtier was therefore unable to concoct the mock-scientific explanation that a novelist nowadays would use to explain the existence of Huldah/Mary. He could only claim that one of Huldah’s male forebears had fathered a child with an Aboriginal mother; that Huldah was a descendant of that child; that Huldah happened almost wholly to resemble her one Aboriginal forebear rather than her many Anglo-Celt ancestors; that Huldah’s appearance as a child had caused her parents and her siblings to be so ashamed of her that they and she had devised the way of life that she later led.