Illywhacker (20 page)

Certainly there was an irritability, a temper, in the air, and Madame Ovlisky was not the only one who felt herself tugged by the sour wind that swept Geelong. It was a mournful, depressing wind, coming from across two hundred miles of denuded landscape to Corio Bay where the shells of cuttlefish lay abandoned in the sandy dark and where Sergeant Hieronymus House stood guard around the flimsy aeroplane that threatened to tip sideways before the stronger gusts. Hieronymus, known as Harry to all except the Clerk of Records, did not need to explain his temper by anything as questionable as the wind. He had been called to duty from the arms of a ready wife, a wife not always ready, not always happy, dragged back from bliss by a boy with a message from the station who had knocked loudly, persistently,
at the moment when he had taken the superior position and she had closed, at last, her staring eyes. He had left her bad-tempered and blotchy to sit and watch the fire in a smoky parlour.

And for what? To guard the property of a man who had caused a nuisance in a public place, been responsible for the death of a horse, and damage to a brand new auto. Sergeant House would have locked the bastard up in the cells at Johnston Street without a shit bucket. But the grovelling, forelock-tugging arse-licking police commissioner was closing the street and posting a guard.

Behind the lighted windows of Number 87 Western Avenue there were rich squatters. Their laughter made him feel sour and he did not wish to speak to anyone.

He did not like any of the people who lived in these grand houses in Western Avenue. He would have arrested them all, not the poor bloody swagman with the bag full of frogs they had sent him out to arrest last week. He had been doing nothing but sitting on the edge of a quiet footpath. He had two pounds five shillings and sixpence in his pocket and he said he was off to be a cook in Commaida. But the magistrate gave him three months because “three months might do you some good”.

Sergeant House watched Mrs Kentwell walk down the lighted steps of her house and come towards him. He turned his back. He did not wish to speak to her. She had a bad case of “officer’s back,” i.e., an appearance of a broomstick inserted in the anus with the aim of providing greater rectitude.

“I wish to lodge an official complaint,” the woman said. Her hair was done in a braid and she held a shawl tight across her shoulders. Her false teeth were slightly loose, a condition the Sergeant sympathized with, and his countenance softened before the whistling sibilants. He sucked in his ruddy cheeks and settled his own uncomfortable dentures into place.

“Yes, madam,” he said.

“This is not an isolated incident. The girl, the flapper, ran down my brother in a similar manner a fortnight ago.”

“In an aeroplane?” His hostility evaporated in the face of this unreported crime.

“Not in an aeroplane. Of course not. She ran him down.”

“In a jinker?” the Sergeant suggested. He took out his notebook and flicked briskly through the pages of careful copperplate.

“Not in a jinker, or cart, not a dray or an auto. Ran him down here,” she tapped her umbrella emphatically on the footpath, “on the street, pretending to break her arm.”

“And why should she wish to do such a thing?”

“Because she had fallen off the roof in a naked state,” whistled Mrs Kentwell, “and broke her arm then.”

“So now she ran down your brother, to break it a second time.”

“No, no, no. In order to
pretend
to break it.”

If he had not observed, through the slightly open curtain, a pretty young flapper with her arm in a sling, he would have thought the woman ready for the asylum. His pencil hovered over his notebook uncertainly.

“I will, of course, wish to speak to your superiors. Perhaps you could have a man call on me.”

I am a man, thought Sergeant House, and the police force is not a draper’s shop engaged in home deliveries. False teeth or no, he was on the brink of pointing this out when Mrs Kentwell tapped her umbrella for attention.

“My father was a Colonel McInlay,” she told the sergeant who had successfully conspired to shoot a major in Ypres. “We have lived in this house for one hundred years, before,
well
before this bullock driver and his flappers came and did this.”

And to add weight to her claim and to underline the detestable nature of the aeroplane which rocked frailly before her, she gave it a good poke with her umbrella.

The umbrella speared the fuselage and stuck there.

Mrs Kentwell stared at it with astonishment. Her teeth clacked inside her mouth.

“My brother is very ill,” she said defiantly. She withdrew her weapon, leaving a perfect round hole in the fuselage. She looked up at Sergeant House who thought she was going to smile. But she turned on her heel and retreated to the house.

The sergeant regarded the hole in the fuselage, his pencil hovering over the notebook. Then he closed the book and put it away.

The other potential investor was Ian Oswald-Smith. He was tall, well built, olive-skinned and his red-lipped long-lashed face was saved from prettiness by the blue cast of his beard. He was also a
squatter and an Imaginary Englishman, but he was a different animal to the Cocky Abbots—irony was his great amusement and if it was not detected, so much the better.

He had never seen, in all his travels, such enthusiastic use of electricity. He had already quietly amused himself by drawing Molly on this very subject. He had prevailed upon her to speak of the virtues of all the electrical devices, beginning with the four-globe radiator of which she said: “To ignore the radiator, Mr Oswald-Smith, is to refuse to take advantage of the investment one has already made by installing electricity in the first place.” It seemed she was going to say more but was prevented by shortness of breath. She took her daughter’s hand, then sipped a glass of water.

The hostess, the aviator, the flapper, the bullocky and the two Cocky Abbots attacked their big unappetizing plates of goose and roast vegetables while he teased his hostess about the bills such a contrivance might accumulate. His teasing was as gentle as a caress and in spite of her simplicity, or because of it, he liked her. They managed to discuss the lighting, His Master’s Voice, the wireless, and the kettle on the ornate stand that she used to make tea at the table. And all the while his dark attractive eyes roamed the walls and floors where the hostess’s enthusiasm for the electric connection had crossed and recrossed the brown Victorian wallpaper, draped the high picture rails and fallen from the ceiling like crêpe-paper decorations for a progressive Christmas.

For a man with such potential for sarcasm, with such skill at asserting the superiority of his class, he spared his hosts and himself any scorn, drank the strong tea he was offered and did not mind that he was given four spoons of sugar without his tastes being inquired after. The McGraths seemed to him perfectly simple and honest people and he was memorizing them and memorizing the room so that in future he could entertain his friends with stories about their characters.

Whatever winds blew from the western coast affected his equanimity not at all. He studied their daughter, the flapper with the broken wing, and let his dark eyes and long lashes caress her in a discreet enough way. The whole room, their whole coming together, was a symbol of the modern age and when he noticed that the street lights were throwing the shadow of the aircraft on to the curtain, he drew this small wonder to the company’s attention and was surprised to find it was the host, the ex-bullocky,
who appreciated the poetry of it the most, not, he supposed, that one would have expected much from such dour Presbyterians as the Cocky Abbots who sat on their seats with the same dry, sly looks they would have brought to the sale-yards. The only thing he had in common with these two was that they were wealthy farmers from the same area. He did not give a lot of weight to the younger Cocky Abbot’s moustache or his old school tie. Whatever education he had enjoyed he had remained a barbarian and not even the cloaked vowels could hide it. The Cocky Abbots would not have the poetry to drape their homestead in electricity, if the electricity had been available to them. Any man who’d worked at “Bulgaroo” would tell you stories about the owner’s meanness. It was legend in the Western District. It was said that they wrote their correspondence on the back of used envelopes and that they would not so much as spare a candle, let alone a bar of soap, for the men. He was surprised to see them here to discuss anything as fanciful as an aeroplane but, watching the way the elder Cocky Abbot listened to Jack McGrath, he saw that he was accorded respect and the respect, he guessed, was based on the fact that Jack had made a lot of money. The old Cocky thought Jack McGrath was shrewd.

Jack McGrath scraped the last of the bread-and-butter pudding from his plate and gulped his scalding tea down his throat. He was in no mood for small talk, but a meal was a meal and hospitality must be offered. He thumped his big foot beneath the table and folded his crumpled napkin several times. He did not notice my mood. He was too concerned to get the subject started, to flick off the rubber band, and bring the talk around to factories and their construction. He was ready to explain how he would buy himself a team and bring the timbers out of the bush, who would mill it, who would season it. He wished to be practical. But Oswald-Smith wanted to discuss rabbits, so rabbits it would have to be, and all Jack could do was thump his foot and scald himself with steam from the electric kettle, the flex of which his anxious wife had wound around her wrist.

While Phoebe squeezed her mother’s perspiring hand, Oswald-Smith chose to argue in favour of the rabbit. He was one
of those men who like a talk so much he will take a contrary position just to get things started.

Jack, whose teams had ripped many an acre of land riddled with rabbit burrows, burying them, cutting them, suffocating them, was shocked to hear a successful farmer speak of rabbits in such terms.

I knew what Oswald-Smith was doing. He was getting me to talk and he laid his argument before me like a fisherman will drop a mud eye, ever so gently, and let it float downstream where a brown trout, old enough and smart enough to refuse such blatant tricks, takes the damn thing anyway.

“I’d have to say, Mr Smith,” I said, uncoiling my long bowed legs and stretching back in my chair, “that you are talking rot.”

Jack tried to flatten his creased napkin with the edge of his fist, back and forth like a widowed ironing woman.

“The rabbit has no place in this country,” I said. “The things that will ruin this country are things like the rabbit.”

The things that I had in mind were the Oswald-Smiths and the Cocky Abbots.

“Yes,” said Oswald-Smith pleasantly. “Please go on.”

“That’s it. Nothing else to say. The rabbit is a mongrel of a thing.”

I had said nothing new but they were all, except Jack who continued to iron his napkin, ridiculously pleased with me for having said it. It wasn’t so much that the subject was rabbits, but that I was addressing myself to it in a definite manner. I could see that the Cocky Abbots were pleased that I was speaking their thoughts.

Right in the middle of my irritation and confusion with everything I smelt a whiff of that interest that comes in every sale, like a wooden case cracking open to spill out honey: a heady, intoxicating aroma.

I tried to use this moment to cross the bridge from rabbits to aeroplanes, but the gap was wide and I misjudged the distance. “We’re going to have our own animals,” I said. I found myself in mid-air, not knowing exactly what I meant.

There was a silence as everybody tried to imagine what it was that I was trying to say.

“How do you mean?” asked Cocky Abbot Junior helpfully.

“Breed them,” I said recklessly.

“How?” asked Oswald-Smith.

“How do you think?” I said so lewdly that Phoebe and Molly,
for different reasons, grew bright red, and only Oswald-Smith, a man who enjoyed the picturesque, permitted himself a quick smile before his sense of diplomacy encouraged him to change the subject.

“I think,” he said, “it’s time we moved on to business.”

“My word,” cried Jack, and pushed back his chair loudly.

There was much fussing around as the women tried to clear the table and Molly became entangled in her wire and knocked over the stand of the electric kettle. She was close to tears as Phoebe untangled her but she wished us all luck before she left the room.

“Wireless,” she whispered to her daughter. “I’ll sit by the wireless.”

Bridget removed the tablecloth and Jack stamped around distributing writing pads to his visitors. He was so agitated that even Cocky Abbot Senior realized that the aeroplane factory was more than a casual venture for him.

There seemed to be nothing to prevent a successful meeting. There appeared to be a positive excess of goodwill on the part of the investors. When Cocky Abbot Senior resumed his seat at the table he sat opposite Jack McGrath and winked at him like a conspirator.

I spread out the plans on the table. Bradfield’s B3 was a beautiful craft and I had no trouble speaking enthusiastically about its function. I could feel some resistance from the older Cocky Abbot. I pushed against it with my enthusiasm. I discussed the purchase of steel from BHP and the method of bringing in timber from the bush. The young Cocky Abbot caught my eye and nodded. Oswald-Smith made notes on his writing pad. But the older farmer folded his arms against his chest and looked at me impassively.

The wind howled around the house and pushed its fingers under doors, through cracks in the floor, lifted rugs in the long passage so they rode the timber in ghostly waves. The women felt the wind and did not like it, but all I felt was this stubborn wall from Cocky Abbot Senior. I talked and talked, but I could not talk him down. I knew, before I sat down, that I had not made the sale.

“I knew your father,” said Cocky Abbot Senior, unfolding his arms at last. “He was a practical man, so I suppose you are too. Now what I want to know, Badgery—and I mentioned this to Jack down at ‘Bulgaroo’—why wouldn’t we set ourselves up as agents
and import the best the world has to offer? I don’t doubt you when you say there’s a future in the aircraft, but why should we risk all this capital to manufacture something when we can import the best the British Empire can produce?”