The Complete Stories (56 page)

Yes, he had rung the bell. Yes, it was a woman who had answered. She had been wearing a kimono. No, he hadn't seen into the house. Yes, he had delivered the envelope. What had she done? She'd laughed, that's what, and there was no answer.

Claude patted him on the shoulder, but when their eyes met he looked away, and Gerry, who had been glaring till that moment, was glad of it. There was something between them suddenly of which they were both, but for different reasons, ashamed.

“Thanks, Gerry,” Claude said wearily. “Thanks, mate. You done well. If I ever had another message I'd—”

He broke off, as if he had heard Gerry's fierce, unspoken Not me, you wouldn't! Not again!

“Come ‘n have tea,” Claude was saying in his smallest voice, "I made puftaloons. They're yer favourite.” He looked uncomfortably large in his grey flannel vest, but also beaten, and his tone was so wheedling and auntlike, so keen to make amends, that Gerry was torn between contempt and a kind of shameful pity. Without ceasing to be aggrieved he relented, and allowed himself to be drawn away.

“That's the style,” the man said, as if it were Gerry who had to be got over a rough patch. “I make good puftaloons, even if I say so meself Learned from a Chinese. Little feller with only one arm. It was out Charleville way …” And he was off on another of his tales.

That night they got drunk. Claude sat out in the moonlight on a stump, sucking a bottle of whisky, and the others, out of delicacy, kept away. Slinger the quarter-caste played his mouth organ.

“Wife-trouble,” Kev whispered, and nodded his head seriously.

Gerry didn't admit that he knew something of that already; had been out earlier in the day, subjecting the woman to some mild terrorism.

Kev, staring off into the darkness, was lost in his own story.

Is life so sad then? Gerry asked himself. And was aware, with a sharpness he had not felt before, of the immensity of the darkness that surrounded them: all those leaves holding up individual fragments of it shaped exactly like themselves, the grassblades taking it down into their roots, the birds folding it away under their wings. Sorrows and secrets. All these men had stories, were dense with the details of their lives, but kept them in the dark. Only odd words broke surface and spoke for more than could be said.

“That's a nice tune, Slinger. I remember that one from the navy,” Kev said. “Wartime.”

“Wrong colour f’ the navy,” Slinger let out between chords, barely breaking the line of what he was playing.

Claude meanwhile had gone off, and when he appeared again it was from the door of his storeroom. He was carrying jars of the homemade chutney they had eaten at every meal Gerry had had here. “Mango chutney,” Claude had explained, "off me own trees. I got two big ‘uns in the backyard, with more mangoes than you could eat in a month a’ Sundays. I make a big batch every year.”

Now, armful after armful, he was carrying the labelled jars out of the storeroom and setting them down on the moonlit earth. The others fell silent and watched. He stacked them solemnly, neatly, so that they made a high but solid pyramid, and when the last one was out he closed and locked the storeroom door.

“Now we'll have some fun,” he told them.

Standing bent-kneed and with his feet firmly apart, he balanced a jar on the palm of his hand, took it back over his shoulder, and hurled it against the storehouse wall. Moonlight splintered, and the dark golden stuff with its chunks of stringy fruit rolled slowly down.

“Here Slinger, Kev, Gerry—have a go!” He stooped and hurled another. “It's all right boys, this is on me, it's my bloody chutney. Nothin’ t’ do with McPhearson. I don't account t’ him f ‘ chutney.”

But the others, suddenly sober, did not join in. At last one of them went up to him.

“Come on, mate, time t’ turn in,” he said. “We've got a heavy day.”

It ended then. They went to bed. But were woken some time later by what sounded like another jar of chutney being smashed against the storeroom wall. They all started up at once and trooped out in their
underpants to see what it was. The clearing was empty, still. It was Kev who knocked, with embarrassed politeness, at the door to Claude's hut and pushed it open. They heard him gasp.

“Aw, the poor bugger!”

It hadn't sounded like a shot.

There was a note, and beside it an envelope, exactly like the one Gerry had carried earlier in the day. It was addressed to the woman and the house in town. The note asked Gerry to deliver it, and on this occasion to drive right up to the house on the bike. But when the police came they took charge of the envelope along with the body.

The remaining jars of chutney, all shot through with gold as the sun struck them, were still stacked in a ruined pyramid in the grass. The police found them difficult to fit into the picture, and the others, faced with them and with the dried stains on the storehouse wall, which looked almost natural, as if the wood had experienced a new flow of thick golden sap, turned away in common embarrassment. At last one of the policemen unlocked the storehouse door with Claude's keys, and Gerry and Charlie took the jars back and set them neatly, darkly, on the shelf.

The sight of the storeroom, with everything fastidiously in place and even the chutney now restored, unnerved Gerry. If he were to go now into that space behind the partition, and note every detail, and add to it the final disordering of all its objects by the shot, nothing would be revealed, he thought, or added to what he knew.

He watched the younger of the two policemen slip Claude's letter into his breast pocket. The policeman wore a uniform: boots, cap, shirt with epaulettes and a flash—he was official. He would ring the bell just once. And if the door wasn't answered immediately he would ring a second time, and again and again until it was.

C
limbing to her seat in the organ gallery, up three flights of stairs, was such an arduous business, and she was so slow nowadays, that Clay had to begin early, even before the warning bells were sounded. She hated the thought of arriving breathless, of being locked out, or of looking, on the way up, like an old girl in need of aid. “He's cooked his goose—let him lie in it;" that was one of her sayings. Messy of course, but life is, you got used to it.

Clay McHugh had learned her survival tactics in Europe between the wars. She had studied there how to present an appearance that was never less than elegant and might be mistaken by snobs, and by the undiscerning and unworldly, for affluence. You lived in the best part of town, had one outfit of perfect cut that went to the cleaners each week, one piece of jewellery, and you never let anyone past the door.

Her present apartment was at Elizabeth Bay and she had spent all she had on it. Within its walls, among the last of her loot, she practised a frugality that would have surprised her neighbours and made social workers, and other Nosey Parkers, cry famine. Clay despised such terms. She ate a great deal of boiled rice, was careful with the lights, and on the pretext of keeping trim, she walked rather than took the bus. Her one outfit was black; her one piece of jewellery a chain of intimidating weight that chimed rather than tinkled but was too plain to suggest ostentation. Hung with mint-gold coins, seals, and medallions, it provoked questions and the answers told a story—in fact several stories, but never all. There was, each time, a little something-left-over.

This chain was her curriculum vitae. She shook it when she needed
to remind herself that whatever hole she was now in, she had once been in a different one and this was her choice. The chain spoke of attachments: of men young and old, back there in Europe, who had wanted at one time or another to present her with their blue eyes, their lives, their titles, or with little flats in Paris or London or country houses near Antwerp or Rome—all of which, for good reason, she had declined. The men had slipped away, leaving only a family seal or rare coin or medal. The weight on her wrist was bearable and she thought of it as a tribute to her intention to keep free.

That was one way of putting it. Put another way, you might say that the men had escaped and that these coins were the price they'd been willing to pay. Clay looked at it different ways on different occasions, but mostly she thought of herself as having come out of all this—of
life
—as well as could be expected: that is, badly. But her freedom was important to her. All those dull dogs and bushy-tailed buffers, if they were still kicking, would be as old now as herself. She would, if she had accepted their offers, be no more than an expensive nursemaid to an old man's incontinence—though she was not without affection and she wouldn't have complained, even of that, after a lifetime of some other devotion, if it had been her fate; or if the right man—Karel for instance—had asked it of her. Things had turned out otherwise, that's all. She was lying with the goose.

Besides, she told herself in her scarier moments, I'll soon be in that state myself, except that I won't be. I won't hang around to get up at three in the morning like poor Grandma and make scones for people who've been dead for thirty years. I'll finish it first. I'll take the bun and the pills …

(This grandmother had lived with them. As a grown girl of fifteen she had been sent out, burning with shame before the neighbours, but also before the old woman herself, to bring her in when she went aimlessly wandering. On several occasions that now seemed like one, they had stood shouting beside a fence in the overpowering smell of honeysuckle. The old woman whined, screeched, wheedled, tried to shake off the grip on her wrist; dogs barked, children stared, other old women shook their heads behind blinds—she could still feel the pain, the humiliation of it. But the centre of the occasion had shifted now from the unwilling and angry girl to the wilful old woman, who with her hair
awry and her gown open stood barefoot under the streetlamp saying over and over, "Why are you doing this to me?” The old woman was herself.)

She shook her wrist and the chain clanked against the gallery rail, as leaning forward she allowed her eye, which was sharp, to sweep the crowded amphitheatre.

Eleanor had just come in, high up in the stalls. Tall, in an emerald cloak, she was waiting for the people in her row to get up and let her through.

How like her! There was stacks of room up there, not like these gallery boxes—stacks of it! But Eleanor continued to stand, and when at last the whole row had risen to its feet, the silly woman, holding her cloak about her, moved through, gracefully inclining her head and smiling and thanking people. Settled at last, with the cloak thrown back for later, when the air-conditioning would turn the place into an icebox, she looked about; then cast her gaze upwards to the gallery and waved.

Clay immediately relented. Oh God, she told herself, I'm such a
bitch.
It was touching really, Eleanor's little wave—a real leap in the dark. Too vain to wear glasses, and half-blind by habit (as who wouldn't be after forty years with the dreaded doctor) she could barely see her face in the glass.

Clay produced in response one of her brisk salutes, a real one made by bringing two fingers of her right hand up to the temple and flicking them sharply away. It was her trade-mark; from the days when she had modelled little suits of a military cut for Molyneux in Paris and was considered a sport. It too was a leap in the dark since Eleanor couldn't see it. But she made the gesture just the same—as an acknowledgement to herself of the old, the unkillable Clay McHugh, since there was, God knows, so little left of her.

(She had taken to avoiding herself in mirrors and in ghostly shop windows; her eyes were too sharp; she hadn't, like Eleanor, developed the habit of not-seeing-clearly-anymore. But at some point back there she had let her attention wander, lost her grip on things, and the spirit of disintegration had got in. Well, she was fighting it—tooth and claw— she was holding on; she got tired, that's all. Your attention wandered. You got tired.)

She came quickly to the alert now. Eleanor was making a play in the
air with her fingers that meant they should meet later and share a taxi home. They would—they always did—and Eleanor, who was generous and tactfully tactless, would see to it that they did not share the fare.

They were neighbours. Eleanor, Mrs. Adrian Murphy, lived in a unit-block three doors from her own, and once a week, on Fridays, they went down in the Daimler (Eleanor drove only in daylight now) and had coffee together: down among the heavy-eyed Viennese, all reading air-mail papers that were two weeks old, and those deeper exiles who had been born right here, in Burwood or Gulgong or Innisfail, North Queensland, but were dying of hunger for a few crumbs of Sacher Torte and of estrangement from a life they had never known. What a place! What a country!

Years ago, in Brisbane, where they had been at the same convent school, she and Eleanor Ure had hated one another. “That stuck up goody two-shoes" was the phrase she found herself repeating in her twelve-year-old's voice; though she couldn't recall how Eleanor, who had been mousey, could have deserved it—not then. It fitted her better twenty years later when the dreaded doctor appeared.

But that period too had passed; and now, with nearly sixty years between them and the girls they once were, she could accept Eleanor Murphy for what she was: a spoiled and frightened woman, too insistent on her own dignity, but generous, loyal, and very nearly these days a friend.

That first winter after they found themselves neighbours, Eleanor had slipped and broken her leg. Clay had gone across each afternoon to sit with her: not in the spirit of a little nursing-sister—she had none of that—but in a spirit of brisk cheerfulness, of keeping one's stoic end up, that revived the bossy schoolgirl in her. Eleanor was happy to be organised. They spent the afternoons playing cards (rummy) while the westering light touched with Queensland colours the baskets of maidenhair and the tree-orchids and staghorns of Eleanor's rainforest loggia, and Mrs. Thring, who came in to clean, and who served when Eleanor entertained, made them scones and tea.