Highways to a War (7 page)

My amusement had been caused by the fact that he thought I hadn’t been aware of his feeling, simply because he’d never said anything. He’d imagined I was unaware of his secret life.

But I knew about it. I’d caught glimpses of it, but had been tactful enough not to mention it to him. He would disappear at times, particularly in the early evenings, making it plain he wanted to get away on his own. Left to my own devices, I’d gone walking about the property; and one evening, venturing past the pickers’ huts, I’d seen an extraordinary domestic picture. In one of the glassless windows, a family was framed in kerosene lamplight, sitting around their table over a meal: a middle-aged man and woman, the red-haired girl (plainly their daughter, since the woman had similar red hair), two small boys, and Mike. He was laughing and talking with them easily, gesturing with one hand, a cup of tea in the other. They were all smiling at him, and the parents had pleasant, kindly faces. The young squire among his tenants, I thought. I’d reached the age of such silly witticisms; and as I’ve said, I envied him.

I was also awed. He was trespassing into one of John Langford’s most seriously forbidden zones. What if his father found out? I put this question to him now.

He won’t find out, Mike said. To hell with him if he does. Those pickers are good people; and they’ve got so bloody little, Ray. Dad says they thieve things; but the Maguires would never do that. I’ve started taking them eggs and vegetables that Mum lets me have.

Wouldn’t your mother tell your father? I asked.

No, he said. She won’t tell him. Only Luke Goddard might tell him.

Luke Goddard was a hermit. He had lived for years, with John Langford’s permission, in a dilapidated shack on the boundary of the property, not far from the pickers’ huts. No one knew what he had been or where he’d originally come from. He was a tall old man with a mane of white hair and deep-sunk, pale eyes whose stare was both shocked and shocking; I for one couldn’t meet it. He seemed always to be walking about, head bent, dressed in a Tasmanian bluey: the dark pea jacket worn by bush workers.

There used to be many such hermits in the country, and legends were invented giving them illustrious or tragic origins. Luke Goddard was variously said to have been a wealthy farmer who’d been ruined; an ex-sailor; a jilted lover; the disgraced son of an English nobleman. But no one really knew, since he seldom spoke, except in monosyllables, and ignored most greetings. Mike and I had seen him in conversation with the pickers, but old Goddard barely spoke to members of the Langford family—despite the fact that he sometimes wandered across the property. For some reason, John Langford tolerated him; even seemed to be amused by him. Mike and I would laugh at him as he went by when we were younger, and he would sometimes turn on us, waving his fist and shouting words that we couldn’t understand, making us afraid of him.

Luke Goddard? Why would Luke Goddard tell him? I asked. That’s crazy. He never talks to anyone. He wouldn’t talk to your father. Even if he did, your father wouldn’t listen to him.

Wouldn’t he? Mike’s tone was bitter. He’d sooner listen to Luke Goddard than me, he said.

 

 

The next night, we lay silent for a time. A high wind, an early warning of autumn, had come up outside, mourning through Clare’s front verandah and bumping into the door of our little closet.

It was a wind I associated with Luke Goddard: a wind of great loneliness. It had come out of the steep, dark hills of this country: the ranges that enclosed the town of New Norfolk and the valley of the Derwent. It had come from places like the Black Hills and Moogara, where the farms were few and poor; it had come from farther still, howling out of the valley of the Ouse, and from beyond Lake Echo; from the empty Highlands, the snow country, with its hundreds of lakes and tarns, cold, abstract mountains, and button-grass plains where nobody went.

Ray? You awake?

It was Mike. I’ll tell you something about my old man, he said. He’s got a locked room, where no one’s allowed to go. A storeroom. No one gets in there.

Where is it? I asked.

Down the end of the hall, Mike said; and I knew immediately which room he meant. A small hallway ran off at right angles from the main one that connected the two zones of the house. The sitting room was entered from this secondary hallway, and two of the bedrooms; and it ended at a dark-stained cedar door that was always closed. I had sometimes regarded the door with faint curiosity, but had never asked what its purpose was.

What does he keep in there?

He just says family papers.

Sounds boring.

Yes, he said. But why should he keep it locked?

I had no answer to this.

Listen, Mike said. I know how to get in there. I know where he keeps the keys. You want to come?

 

 

We went in the early afternoon, when the men were all down in the hop fields. It was around two-thirty: a bad time of day, I reflected later.

Two-thirty was a time of blank arrest; a time of tedium, with all the dangers tedium carries at its heart. Two-thirty on a hot January afternoon was a time when I no longer loved the farm. The bright dance of morning was gone, and the inviting shadows of deep afternoon had yet to appear. It was a passage without possibilities; a time when the stale, glaring exterior world promised nothing, and the mind recoiled. Tedium, almost visible, brooded in the glum little gully on the western side of the house, where stinging nettles grew: dark, malicious weeds that people were said to have eaten, in the other hemisphere. Tedium squatted in the yard on the wood-heap, where the sun gleamed dully on the abandoned axe. The axe, and all the other objects about the farmyard, appeared to be lying here for eternity, and to be stuck in a congealed light like fat. Inside tedium was no still center, but something else: something brutally restless and vicious, which occasionally caused grown men and women out here to become mad. Two years ago, it had caused Don Maxfield, on the next farm up the road, to batter old Arthur Baker to death with a crowbar in a quarrel over the sale of some stock. That would have happened, I felt sure, at around two-thirty. Yet this was the time that we chose to go into John Langford’s storeroom.

The key was on a ring with a number of others which Mike had watched his father push into a drawer in a rolltop desk in the sitting room. It was a simple matter (as one of the stories in his British boys’ books would have put it) for him to slip in there, get the keys, and bring them down the half-dark passage to the locked door of the storeroom. Deliberate and unhurried, he tried them one after another in the lock under the white, nineteenth-century china handle.

When he’d found the one that fitted, and we’d hurried inside, he quickly closed the door after us. There was a sort of glowing dimness in here that was strange; but superficially, nothing in the room appeared unusual. It simply looked like what it was: a storeroom, with tin trunks and cardboard cartons stacked against one wall, old pieces of furniture standing about haphazardly, and a long walnut table in the center piled with papers, files and books. But I knew immediately that we’d found the core of the house’s secrecy: the cell which contained its essence.

Secrecy sang in the static air, like an old valve radio with the volume turned down. It was air that seemed to have been trapped in here for decades, and which smelled of mildew. The faded wallpaper looked very old, and had a pattern of English wildflowers. The glow was created by a faded, parchment-yellow holland blind drawn over a single tall window at the far end, sealing the place completely. The sun of two-thirty, trying vainly to get in, was filtered and transmuted into a thick yellow substance like mustard: a half-light which I guessed was the only natural one the room ever knew. There was no electric bulb in the high ceiling; a kerosene lamp with a china base stood on the table by the books, and I imagined John Langford lighting it.

The thought of Mr. Langford made me nervous; but this nervousness, and the sense of trespassing, was not the only effect the room had on me. The past, I see now, waits always for us to open its doors; and once having done so, we can choose to open our spirits to its thin, helpless voices, or else turn away. Both choices have their consequences. Mike was indifferent; I was interested; and that was when the past enrolled me in its service.

At first, moving cautiously about beside Mike, I thought myself indifferent too—if not to the room’s atmosphere, at least to its contents, which were the sorts of objects that filled us with instant boredom. We fingered the files on the table, most of which contained depressing-looking documents and business letters we had no desire to read. There were mountains of old magazines —
The Bulletin
and
The Land
—which were of no interest either.

What bloody junk, Mike said. He looked disgusted.

There must be
something
here, I said. Otherwise why should he lock it?

Mike looked at me appreciatively; he lived in the hope of intrigue. Right, mate. Let’s keep looking.

We began now to rummage about independently; and edging past the long table towards the right-hand corner of the room, I came on a painting. It was large—about four feet by two—in a heavy walnut frame, and stood propped on a small cedar table against the wall: a portrait of a man in his early thirties, in the clothing of the last century. The thick, filtered sun through the blind fell on it in such a way that the eyes and the skin had something of the gloss of life. Like all paintings of its period, it had a veiled quality, as though it were covered in dark gauze. Yet it was very real, being technically accomplished enough to resemble a photograph.

The man wasn’t looking at the viewer directly: he stared steadily past my shoulder to the right of the frame, which was my left. He wore a cravat and a dark, sober suit with wide lapels. His long brown hair was parted on the left, like that of a man of today, but grew so far down the sides that it covered his ears. His face appeared modern, being clean-shaven. His head was cocked a little to one side, his lips faintly smiling. At the same time, his full lower lip projected in a way that warned you to be careful. He looked from under his eyebrows, which were low-set, and the shrewd, humorous glint in his dark blue eyes made me feel that if I studied him long enough, I’d discover what he was thinking. His face was lean, his nose straight and narrow.

Who’s this? I asked.

Mike looked at the picture with little interest. Him? One of the great-grandfathers. I’m not sure which one.

He wandered off to the other side of the room; but I lingered. There was something not ordinary about the man: an intensity, coming out of the picture, that I hadn’t the knowledge to diagnose, at that age. Looked at in one way, he had the musing, neurasthenically refined expression of a Victorian poet. But then this began to seem wrong: the face had a blade-like readiness for action that I didn’t associate with poets: more with sportsmen or military officers, or the leading actors in films. Both possibilities existed, and strangely blended. He would be a man capable of lightheartedness; of all sorts of fancies—but one who would not tolerate fools, or fail to challenge annoyance. Getting closer, I saw the family likeness. Except for the color of his hair, the man was an adult version of Michael, and also resembled Ken. The eyes were the same blue, and the narrow nose was the Langford nose.

Faintly, through the closed window, I could hear the barking of Angus. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why Angus was up from the fields; I’d lost interest in the picture now, and was looking elsewhere. Michael had wandered off to pick up an old Minties tin with comic pictures on the side, and had began to chuckle at it.

There was an old-fashioned box standing on the table in front of the painting. It was about fifteen inches wide, of polished wood, and bound with brass clasps. Its top sloped, so that it looked rather like a miniature writing desk without legs. I couldn’t imagine its purpose, never having heard of a writing-slope, but it attracted me. I fingered it, and discovered that the top was secured by a brass lock. Turning the key in it, I was able to push the lid back. There were many compartments inside. Some of the small ones were ink-stained, and I realized that these had been for ink bottles and pens. In the main compartment were two very old-looking notebooks bound in calfskin; nothing else.

And here, coming up to me from the box’s interior, was the smell of the past.

It was a worrying smell; even faintly alarming. Since then, I’ve learned not to be deceived by it. The odor that comes up from that deep, dry shaft isn’t what you should attend to if you want to see the past as it really is. Nor am I misled any more by the faded, crimped and dried-up appearance of old objects. These provoke sadness, but that isn’t how things were, back then; we’re merely looking at corpses. The past is alive, and full of juices. It continues in a dimension which neither human wishes nor human indifference can affect, even if the relics it leaves behind are dead—just as our own precious objects will soon, soon be dead. But on that hot afternoon, as I fingered one of the notebooks, it was another matter; I felt vaguely threatened by the past, and was affected by its melancholy: a faint, dry perfume that came not only from the writing-slope, but seemed also to hang in the room itself—its likely point of origin being the drawn holland blind. Melancholy was given off like a constant shimmering from the blind’s warm surface; and the blatant sun of today, passing through that brittle linen, was being transformed; was turning into the dense mustard glow of the past itself.

I’d just begun to flick through one of the notebooks when I heard the door handle rattle.

Terror jolted through me, and I pushed the book back into the polished box, and slammed its lid shut. I had some notion of warning Mike, but it was too late. The door opened, and John Langford stood looking at us, holding the china handle. He wore his usual clean khaki shirt, and had on the rimless glasses he used only in the house, from behind which his slitted brown eyes examined us like those of a headmaster. He frowned.