Siddon Rock (23 page)

By seven o'clock on the night of the Spring Ball there was no sign that the social event of the year was about to begin.

Hidden at the rear of the hall, the Central Allstars unloaded their instruments from the covered truck and let themselves in through the stage door. The band, consisting of piano, fiddle, clarinet and drums, was hired each year from the capital by the ball committee, and the
musicians knew well how Siddon Rock liked their Spring Ball dance programme, with waltzes and the Gay Gordons interspersed with the newer foxtrot and quickstep. At seven-thirty, there was a blast of sound from the hall as the band warmed up. This seemed to be the signal for pockmarks of light to move like will o' the wisps through the town, wavering towards the hall. As they came into Wickton Street the lights evolved into torches held low to illuminate the rough patches and potholes of the unsealed footpaths around the town.

Men in pressed dark suits and unfamiliar ties held the torches for women wrapped in coats or stoles against the chilly evening, as the women had both hands full holding their ball gowns high against the staining rub of gravel.
A mob of high-stepping possums, all fur and feet
, Bluey Redall remarked to Kelpie Crush as they leaned against the window counter, watching the parade down Wickton Street.

Why don't you go, Bluey?
Kelpie asked as he shone up his cufflinks with a bar cloth.

Had enough of that sort of thing in London
, Bluey said.
Can't be bothered now with all that dressing up stuff.

What were you doing in London?
Kelpie was vaguely interested.

Ah … bit of this, bit of that. Mainly what I know best. Bar work. I was born in this pub, ya know … was my dad's. I met Marge there, in London.
Bluey was unusually forthcoming about his past.
In a jazz club, it was. Boy, could she play that clarinet, she was really something. Anyway,
ancient history. Off you go, then. I can deal with the few that'll be in. I'll see you tomorrow.

In the hall, about this time of the evening David Aberline usually tested the microphone and joked around with the waiting band. But this year Fatman would do the job, and was yet to arrive.

Among the cars making their way into the town was the old Ford belonging to Young George Aberline. The car had been bought anonymously at the clearance sale and left at the Two Mile for him.

Young George had said to Brigid Connor, as he helped empty bags of superphosphate into the spreader ready for the spring sowing,
My heart just isn't in it. Don't think we'll go at all.

Don't want to tell you what to do
, Brigid replied,
but it seems to me that this is just the year you SHOULD go. Don't let the bastards get you down.

It's not that so much
, Young George said.
But it just won't be the same without David there. He loves all that hoopla – the dressing up and sashaying around.

Maybe Hettie needs it more than you do.
Brigid banged an empty superphosphate bag considerably harder than needed to get the dregs out.
It's been pretty rough on her too. And it's not like she had anything to do with it, is it? She just gets pulled along by whatever you want to do– always has done, always will do. So stop feeling sorry for yourself and take her to the ball.

So Young George and Hettie went to the ball. They were quiet and withdrawn from each other, both wishing
David was safely there with them instead of who-knows-where.

In the hall, greetings were formal.
Evening, Doctor Allen. Lovely night, Mrs Hinks, if a bit on the chilly side,
as if they had not seen each other shopping at the Co-op that morning, nor stopped for a chat at the post office when getting the mail. As people arrived, the hall gradually took on an air of festivity, if tempered a little by the absence of David Aberline –
Heard from young David yet, George? How's Hettie standing up to it all?

Just fine
, Young George said.
Everything's fine. David's heading to France, I think. Back soon, I'm sure.
But it all became too much to bear, and he bundled Hettie into the car and went back to the Two Mile before the first dance started.

Fatman Aberline arrived at eight o'clock sharp. He went straight to the stage and signalled for a roll of drums:
Gentlemen, take your partners for the first dance, the Pride of Erin.
The Spring Ball was underway.

Outside the hall, Alistair Meakins waited anxiously, watching for Catalin to come down the street from the hospital. As Matron Helith passed him on her way in, he asked diffidently if Catalin had said she was coming.
Oh yes
, Matron said,
she was getting ready quite early. I thought she'd be here by now.

No-one can guess what Catalin did in the hours after she found that her mother had died. As the town people barn
danced their way around the dance floor, was Catalin in shocked and tearful mourning? Maybe she sat dry-eyed, looking at her life and her mother's. It is known that the flow of time fluctuates at moments of great change, so maybe the six hours compressed into a few seconds; or they could have extended to encompass a whole life. Did she go to wake her son, to tell him that his grandmother had died? Unlikely, but who can know.

What is known, though, is that Catalin Morningstar walked into the Spring Ball with a battered cello case, into the gap between the Gypsy Tap that had just finished and the last waltz waiting to begin. There are various versions of the details, with some commenting on the elegance of her dress and wondering where she got it.
Much too European for a designer from the capital
, they said.
And that beautiful material in the gown. How could a kitchen-hand afford it, on her wage?
Others, more concerned with the non-reflective surfaces, thought she looked upset or even distraught, and rightly so, considering her mother had just died, but this was with the benefit of hindsight. Most agreed that she definitely did not look as if she belonged in Siddon Rock.
Much too exotic
, Martha Hinks said.
That wild black hair
, said Gloria Aberline.
It looked like she'd never combed it in her life.

There were others who thought differently. Marge Redall, if any comment was made to her later, always said,
Well, I thought she was just magnificent.
Sybil Barber, too, saw a woman of steel and tension. Granna, ensconced on a lounge chair at the supper room door, saw what she
saw, but never did comment to anyone about it.

Kelpie Crush, leaning watchfully against the back wall, thought she looked like the tiny bright moth that was on the table in the Strangers' Room at the hotel, and he slipped quietly away.

In the hushing hall, Catalin placed a chair at the front of the stage. She opened the cello case, took out the instrument, and stood waiting until the room was quiet enough for her to speak.

This cello was my mother's and my mother's mother's
, she said,
back further than I know.
She spun it around on its spike so that the paintings on the back could be seen.
The pictures on it are from places where it has been and people who have played it.

My mother died tonight. I know because her picture is here
– she touched the picture.
How this happens I do not know. It just does. Neither do I know where she was when she died. Our house in Budapest was destroyed; she wanted me to leave but she wouldn't go with me. This is my place, she said. I'll find somewhere here. Until tonight I knew she was alive somewhere, because our cello told me this.

Catalin spun the cello again and took the bow from the case.
It is always played by the daughter when her mother dies – in celebration of her life, you see, in mourning. There have been no sons in my family for as long as memory, so I do not know about sons. I do not know if my Jos will play when I die. But that is a long time in the future. Tonight, for you, the people of my new place, I play my music of my mother in Hungary.

Catalin stepped out of her shoes and sat on the chair, pulling back the full skirt of her dress so she could hold the cello between her knees, leaning forward and over it slightly with her cheek touching its neck. She raised the bow and drew it across the strings, and from the cello came a wailing cry the like of which had never before been heard in Siddon Rock. The note filled the hall, then flew out into the street. It soared over the rock and the salt lake towards the inland where it died in the ancient silence. At the war memorial, where Nell sat listening to the music of the ball, the dingoes recognised the sound and joined the lament.

Catalin touched other strings, finding the flattened notes of the minor F key, and her music became her mourning. Gradually the listeners heard other threads in the music. The sounds of a city were dominant with the clanging rhythms of trams and trains, the shuffle and bustle of people in the street, and even the tinkle of teaspoons against cups in a café.

Then the music darkened, changing to the whistle and thump-boom of bombs, the roar of a building falling, and the tramp of many marching feet. There was no
leitmotif
of Catalin in Berlin, nor of Jos being born. This was not their story, but that of Viktoria Morgenstern.

For Macha, on her nightly patrol around the town, the music breached her protective shell and she marched through a gap in the sound and into a dark place. There, a cacophony of death filled the space – the bullets that, in another place and another time, could have been the
angry buzzing of bees or wasps; the dull crump-thump of mortar shells damaging the earth; the animal screams of wounded and dying humans. She deserted the guarding of her town and fled to her shelter in the Yackoo where she felt safe in the seeming innocence of the bush.

Marge Redall walked across the vast emptiness of the dance floor and onto the stage where she picked up the clarinet of the band-player. For a moment she hesitated, but her blue notes, sending off sparks like a striking match, sounded the key, and she stood next to Catalin and played the story of Siddon Rock, improvising around the formal, structured music of old Europe.

The cello hesitated, and then followed the clarinet's lead, and their separate sounds ravelled together until it was not possible to tell where the music of one ended and the other began. The dominant sound was of the town itself. The melancholy of Henry Aberline, camped under his jam-tree on the rock, was relieved by the laughter of the women who visited him. Sounds of trees being felled, the roar of tractors and harvesters and the cockadoodledoo of the train coming to the station gave another rhythm, as did the toc-toc of balls bouncing: footballs from the showground oval, tennis balls thudding on rolled anthill courts, the distinctive thwack of cricket balls on willow, softballs connecting with round bats in the school ground.

Individual themes joined the music. Granna shuddered when the dissonance of Bert Truro's thread disrupted
the harmony; but Marge Redall's clarinet soothed the discord and the music soared on.

On played the women, and slowly and irrevocably they wove the town's stories into a fabric as delicate and strong as parachute silk, a fabric that billowed into Wickton Street as it grew too large for the confines of the hall. It hovered over the houses until it was caught by the breeze and drifted off towards the inland.

Granna, in her chair by the door, heard the missing things: the sudden disappearance of the bouncing theme that she thought was Jos's thread, and the lack of a story that could have been Kelpie Crush's.

Nell, from the war memorial shadows, saw the fabric of the town rise from the hall. She alone saw the ripped hole where her own story should have been.

What happened at the Railway and Traveller's Hotel that night can only be conjectured, but for the rest of her life Catalin would keep returning to the variations, worrying at them like a dog with a bone.