The Following (19 page)

A cracker or popper was the tail end of a whip, made from the horsehair of a stallion or gelding. It was a truth of physics that a stockwhip’s cracker broke the sound barrier, matching whipcrack to rifle fire. Powys saw the fate of Brody in a Japanese bullet hurled faster than sound towards the fragile shield of a man’s cranium:

Kyle, our eyes are on you

Coo-ee, the future’s sound

Hear, the stockwhip’s fracture

Kyle, you’re homeward bound.

After the war, a married man, Powys had returned to Australia talking like a Pom. He was that cliché of the Australian abroad, the Piccadilly bushman. Blame the war for taking him away, giving him English manners in officers’ messes and country houses, and marrying him to an English bride disdainful of colonial experience. But before the war, when he’d jackarooed on Inverarity, Powys already had that plum – the Wignalls and the Morrisons on his mother’s side all had one, an injection of elocution running through the Australian accent piercing as a hunting horn.

To Powys’s plum add tweeds, an affectationist limp, or what appeared to be one, if you didn’t know about the shattered ankle – Yenangyaung. Instead of a cane he used a shooting stick, which took the cake.

A phone call from his sister, Rosemary, followed by a letter proposing certain steps to be taken if he would be only so sensible as to agree with her jolted his thinking. She was in touch with lawyers and needed his signature.

Powys thought, ‘Time to go north and see Kyle again.’

W
HENEVER ELISABETH MET AN UNMARRIED
woman with spark, or a handsome widow, she thought of Powys in his high, cold flat, if not alone, then wrestling on a hard couch with the wrong sort of woman to make him happy.

She’d given Margaret Poole his phone number, suggesting they talk about his mother, Florence Wignall, the flower painter – a women’s interest topic if ever there was one.

Margaret read up on Lady Florence in the Consolidated Press archives – a hefty dame in an Edwardian cape who’d painted miniatures of bush vines and judged pumpkins and beetroot bunches at the Royal Easter Show. After looking into her Margaret was not sure she wanted to write about her – such an Establishment figure hardly her topic – but she rang Powys and he asked could they meet at the Piccolino.

It was a crowded, boxy cafe with the dead-mouse smell of toasted cheese rising from an electric grill, coffee aromas seething out from an Italian espresso machine.

‘I’ve come about the Easter Show judge,’ said Margaret, fixing on a rather startled, slab-faced joker commanding a corner. Getting up to greet her, his fists rocked the table, knuckles borne down with such heavy effort as to bump over chess pieces on the adjoining table. ‘Crumbs, he’s clumsy,’ a judgement Margaret then took back, as he grabbed for a stick.

Powys’s first impression of Margaret was of a blackbird in from the rain, a soggy sou’-wester wrenched from a head of wet hair, and a rather plain, peaky white face. Then off came the raincoat. With both hands she smoothed back her hair, pulling it tight. He felt a confusion around the judgement, which intensified as her animation of spirits took over. No, not plain at all. Colour came into her cheeks. Her smile thrown in his direction dazzled him. But it never entered his head to think of her as beautiful – not, at least, until a time came, and he couldn’t stop thinking about her at all.

‘
Maestro
.’ He turned rather pretentiously to the owner, who stepped from behind his steaming pipes and cleared a window table of receipts and papers, to seat them facing each other with a pane of rain-wet window glass between them and the street.

They talked about Kyle and Elisabeth. Margaret liked Powys for liking them – more, for loving them. She had met them only the once, she said, but they were part of her mother’s story since girlhood. They talked so much about the pair and the life they led on Inverarity with their rotating band of jackaroos and doleful social circle that they pretty much forgot to talk about Lady Wignall, and made another time.

A few days later Margaret went up to Powys’s flat to sort through Florence Wignall’s Easter Show clippings, to see the pressed flower collections held between boards with brass butterfly nuts. Powys showed her a photograph of his mother in St Vincent’s attended by Sisters of Mercy hoping for a conversion, such as Powys’s sister, Rosemary, had undergone on marrying Brian MacKinlay. Lady Wignall was like a she-bear in a cave with her furs and claw clasps, sitting up drinking Dom Pérignon between Irish nuns.

When the photographs were duly and diplomatically admired, her notes in order and put away, Margaret wondered if she could say something. Powys said of course she could. The corners of her eyes were drawn back almondish. She could say anything she liked.

‘I’m not sure you’ll want to hear it. I’m not sure I want to say it. Mind you, the
Weekly
would love her. But I need to give my heart and soul. I can’t do her, I am sorry.’

She saw from his face some sort of agreement – sons’ mothers, too huge a subject to comprehend at an ordinary level of assessment. Margaret caught something else – Powys enjoying her pronouncements. It made her blush.

‘Let’s have a drink,’ he said.

‘Tea would be good, but –’

At that, he planted a glass, a bottle of Scotch and a jug of water in front of them. He poured after lifting an eyebrow. ‘This will warm you,’ he said, the flat being impossible to heat, cold air coming up through varnished floorboards and around the faded, worn heirloom rugs. They drank and Powys shivered at a premonition of some sort, of the kind anyway that spirits always roused – a promise of grandness in just being oneself.

He brought his books over. She touched the dry, ridged lettering of the jackets. She apologised for not having ever heard of the publisher – only recently of Powys himself, it was needless to add.

Then and there she began reading – a gaze of concentration, a passing frown, a sudden grin, a sigh of exasperation – while sitting under the ivory-yellow lampshade on the first day with Powys on the top floor of The Condamine, in the winter of that year of changes, with Powys’s heart pumping his lifeblood around a little faster. Since the Piccolino he could only think of her with agitation. He wanted to slow down his eyesight, gather his thoughts, possess the idea of her before touch demanded he might wreck it. He’d never seen anyone read as fast. The grandfather clock went like a tack hammer; the china dogs, grey, glossy and cold, tinkled with vibrations of passing traffic. Add to which a feeling Powys had – something like the ‘flu’, something like fear, something like childhood over-excitement that always ended badly. It might be humiliating to give it a name, considering, just for a start, the age gap between them. She wore a home-knitted grey sweater, full of lumps and knots, and a pair of what looked like a man’s suit trousers. As she read she ran a hand up into her hair and pulled a twist around to her mouth and nibbled its ends abstractedly. With her ankles tucked up on the couch various expressions passed across her face, reflecting thoughts not always to Powys’s liking.

She looked up from the page, catching him – mask-like in his intensity – and delivered an opinion. She could hardly have done more than scan the pages and come up with it. She told him that his novels were obviously works of art but might not be properly read ‘because the words get in the way of the story’ and, she thought, because of a class assumption that bothered her.

Powys leaned back, drew breath.

‘Is this the way you tackle everything – old ladies, flower paintings, businessman-novelists and their productions?’ he said.

‘Look,’ she said to him. ‘The way you write’s smart, clever. It’s bold and beautiful, but there’s something wrong.’

‘Wrong? That’s a tough judgement.’

‘Does it go anywhere?’

‘That might be the point,’ he said.

‘Not in a good story.’

He was often called nerveless – reflexively dead-faced.

‘Where’s this from, your sword of Damocles?’ He wanted to know.

‘I was eighteen,’ said Margaret, ‘when I was made children’s editor on the
Auckland Star
. I had to write answers to all the most brilliant kids’ efforts up and down the country – read them, think about them, steer them on, encourage them and tell them the truth without crushing them – and I had Thursday mornings to do the whole lot, which included opening the mail and sorting it, replying and writing my column.’ She clutched the two books of Powys’s to her chest, then put them on a side table. ‘I’ll buy my own copies, of course.’

‘Good luck finding them – I’ve had friends and booksellers too, face them to the wall from extreme irritation. Take them.’ He hated what he said next. Such peevish needfulness. ‘The English reviewers had me writing from “the peak”.’

‘Golly.’

‘Well, there was one who did.’

‘What do you get when you write, what does it give you?’

The way she put the question implied that he did not need to write, as she did, for a living, but might have, if she capitalised it, a purpose.

‘The war’ was his two-word answer. A mental hell was subdued. That’s what it was on the page. Maybe not much else except something from childhood, a love of words. There’d been no leave from hell, but he’d learned to make one through words. He’d survived when others had not. Words had guided him through. Words kept on with their aliveness to changes. When it was all out of his system he might never write again.

‘No more changes?’ she said.

Then she was gone, the books under her arm, down the stairs and around the corner. After finishing his drink Powys drained hers, which she’d hardly touched. Whenever he drank Ardberg now it would bring on the feel of her wool sweater itching the back of his hand when he passed her the glass. The sting of her opinions. The lightness, the clarity of her gaze although ever so mistrustful. And that last comment she made, with a touch of flirtation: ‘No more changes?’

He laughed – well, something was happening, gingered into existence by Elisabeth Morrison’s matchmaking. He lit a cigarette and stared out the window at the pimps, prostitutes and promenaders in their undersea world of the Cross. There were certainly enough young men at large in the world to catch any young woman up if she wanted to be, without an old man thinking he might be the one.

O
VER THE NEXT FEW DAYS
Margaret Poole asked around on the QT because she could not own to how she, Margaret Poole, had fallen into the circle of a decidedly non-socialist Powys Wignall. What was he like? It seemed that everyone knew him.

‘Powys,’ said her bohemian friends, ‘is frosty and up himself.’ He was said to have had an affair with Rhona Blumers, wife of the Polish count. The affair was presumed to be over, although when Rhona looked at Margaret she seemed to say,
Who do you think you know that I don’t, sweetie?

It could have been Margaret’s imagination except Rhona told a story around the urn. ‘In the middle of the night I heard him crossing the floor.
Tappa-tap, tappa-tap
. He pulled back the bedclothes, what could I say? “Oh, go on then, have a go.” ’

It was fairly ugly. It didn’t sound like an affair. But that was Rhona, it seemed. Yet could it be Powys? Would he betray a man friend, at the very least? – the Polish count, chess opponent, aficionado of the Piccolino, translator of the Russian moderns – and be so functional as it sounded?

Men did (betray). Women did (betray). He must have been (at the very least) being a man, functional.

He might not be very nice. But he was not the only one around with a cane, she was interested to learn. There was the short story writer from Melbourne who’d had polio as a child, a hard case known to Rhona, and Margaret supposed he might be admitted (or allowed) as a violator of her kindness, for Vincent Crashaw used polio as a rationale of deserving. Women disliked him. He was a married man and went everywhere with his wife, subjecting her to devotion.

Margaret and Rhona were members of the Socialist Writers’ International Friendship Committee. Powys was hardly of that ilk. He was known, but held in contemptuous awe – nobody knew what to make of him, was the summing up, a Wignall by definition being of the ruling class. True writers were progressive, party matched on the left, otherwise if they had style but no radical credentials were admitted to be somebodies, but only in a dispicable sort of way. In summary they were reactionaries without relation to time or place, so much so they might as well be shot, and were, in other countries, on occasion.

Yet just when the Friendships thought they had Powys as the example of a type, he’d written a letter to the
Sydney Morning Herald
confounding their views. It was on nuclear disarmament, how the West wasn’t playing the game, unfair to the world at large, and they remembered he had a friend in Pommyland, (Lord) Adam Sylvester, who spoke up for causes on platforms with the Red Dean of Canterbury. So they reserved final judgement for a while yet.

And just when Margaret was about to give up on Powys, because of the night with the cane, the thought of it so sickeningly detailed, Rhona told her something that proved it was the comrade from Melbourne, and in the telling made it pitiful – a man allowed his own estimate of himself.

At monthly Friendship meetings Margaret took the minutes in Pitman’s shorthand. When Rhona, the Countess Blumers, held the floor, a breathy silence fell among the men, their jaws and brains slack, her clotted red lipstick and tight sweaters making their own ineradicable points in their hot imaginations, certainly, but the way she spoke was electrifying. It was so honest and clear, and her phrasemaking had a touch of oratory. She was a playwright, and a good one, with a heart of fire. People came to her plays, such as Powys, who would never go near the Workers’ Theatre otherwise. Margaret liked her, but wasn’t like her. If there was a man in the room who didn’t want Rhona, Margaret would like to know who. She deferred to those ratbags. They voted her onto their delegations to Moscow and Peking. At supper those same men, with claret-blackened teeth and close, attentive hands, lectured Margaret on her sexual rights, how she should exercise them on their behalf, apparently.