The Following (21 page)

‘Families,’ he said. ‘My sister never ceases to amaze me. She is able, despite evident stupidity, to pull me into untangling the tangles she makes for herself, and to do it so cleverly that I never have any choice.’

Margaret thought,
There is never just one side to people’s story. He will always be the older brother
.

Did he pull Rosemary’s pigtails when he was fourteen and she was eight? Did he say he’d be somewhere and never come, putting someone else over her? At the same time a sister, as Margaret well knew, could be incomprehensible in a brother’s eyes except in the matter of love.

*

M
ARGARET COULD NOT WRITE ANYTHING
if she did not speak to somebody, listen to their story, tell that story. At the end of that day, their second, reaching another town, another rickety hotel, she phoned through pieces about a beekeeper’s wife, about a lonely haberdashery girl and an exchange telephonist who knew who everybody was on with.

For Powys, in his writing, it all had to be imagined or it wasn’t real. He followed atmospheres, silences. The guesses in between. He liked words because they joined the unjoinable, and only just. All was spirit and he chased it down with words. Words were his saving grace. He gave them the gift of life and they responded in kind.

When she finished phoning through her stories that night Powys made a trunk-line call. A subdued rumble came through the plywood partition as he spoke, barely without interruption from the party at the other end.

He brooded as they waited for their dinner.

‘That was difficult,’ he said. ‘It was Kyle.’

He told her the subject of his late-night conversation with his sister and brother-in-law. He’d been thinking about it all day. The Inverarity Pastoral Company was broke. A buyer was interested, ready to sign. The buyer was ‘all cashed up’.

Powys gave the phrase an American twang, disdainful but dependent. It was as good as decided. American cattleman married to an Australian. A Montana beef breeder named Frank Bohrmann buying up Down Under.

‘Rosemary acts as if she and Brian are the deciders. The fact is that Inverarity’s Pitt and Collins street partners are the ones who call the tune. They’ve found the buyer. No argument.’

‘Will they keep Kyle on?’ said Margaret.

‘No,’ said Powys.

‘What will Kyle and Elisabeth do? Where will they go?’

‘When the company bought Kyle out the first time there was nothing in there about the house. The Arcade Kyle built in a week – it’s become a great feature, it’s famous, it has
cachet
. The buyers are willing to pay extra, an amount for the house but really for the Arcade to give Kyle and Elisabeth a cut, not a handout or a humiliation.’

‘You put it so baldly, Powys.’

‘I let them down once. Now it’s business,’ he said, ‘though not without something improved.’

‘Improved?’

‘Ameliorated,’ he said.

In families Margaret met on the road, sought out, she found reminders of growing up as she had herself, loved through struggles and shortages and especially if they weren’t far from the rattle of trains going past, which happened the next day when they reached the Broken Hill Line. Property was not part of their lives. Avoiding the humiliation of charity was. Amelioration was a function of love.

P
OWYS COULD HARDLY CREDIT THE
number of vignettes Margaret squeezed from each day. He wrote barely one sentence a day and could not write at all while they were travelling. Some good lines she confessed came from him, ‘I mean from “Adrien”,’ she said as they belted through the bush in Australia’s Own Car. Her editor, on the phone, picking up on the deception of her companion’s sex, started teasing her unmercifully.

Powys, on the passenger side, found himself planning a story with Margaret in mind as reader. It would be straighter, simpler, more economical with words than his usual hash, communicable as a telegram blow-by-blow.

He would describe the house at Inverarity. The Arcade would stand out in starlight under the winged roof. Away beyond would be the horizon of the Swampland Block, a fringe of trees across the bare plain. The garden bedroom doors would be flung open to the stars. In the night would be the liquidly oily-perfumed scent of roses, incomparable after the day’s heat.

Powys described the homestead, the Arcade, the bedrooms to Margaret. She saw herself sitting up in that garden bedroom bed, rumpled and sleepy, a bed once occupied by the complaining Beverley, who on Powys’s postwar visit stayed there most days till lunch was called.

‘Lunchong tray delivered by Ah Sup the Chinese cook, velly knock-knock,’ said Powys.

She laughed, but it was awkward. He made Inverarity sound posh to a girl from Kiwi. Full of in-jokes and racial prejudices nobody questioned and the comfort of lofty-minded but thrifty, tired routines quite possibly on a par with the Queen’s in Buckingham Palace. And they would reach there on Sunday, she’d agreed, to the mess, confusion and tears of a lifetime’s uprooting.

It was difficult for Margaret working out whether Powys was unsentimental but helpful or lacking in some sort of feeling around the question of Kyle and Elisabeth’s fate. A business mind, she supposed, was useful in listing pros and cons without too much wringing of the hands over what was incalculable. A writer who was all feeling, however, would be torn. Kyle and Elisabeth were going to be marched off Inverarity, whatever happened, and their only choice it seemed was to go quietly or to make a stinking row and go anyway.

A
S THEY WENT ALONG
P
OWYS
treated the backblocks of New South Wales to a routine more fitted to the South of France or the Tuscan hills – Beverley lived there now, with an eyetie prince. He rated the parched, heat-battered landscapes around Ivanhoe and Wilcannia for hidden beauties he was getting back for himself, value for value and almost against his will.

Australia – it fitted the definition of being loved more than it loved back. Put your arms around the place and it withered. Turn your back and it called out with shy surprises.

Margaret thought,
Poor man, he’s still in love with that useless snob
. She didn’t think or realise or get the point, that he was looking at her when he said it, and thinking of her when he talked about surprises.

In hotel dining rooms, dinner at six, with entrees of baked beans and curried egg, Powys considered his chops, sausages and kidneys gleaming in sheep fat from the angle of a connoisseur. Making up to cooks, cocking an eye at Margaret, he asked for ‘
reins avec l’escalope attaches
’ – the chop with the kidney joined, a rural delicacy. All to impress her, she thought, to make her laugh. And did she laugh, till her ribs ached.

She liked Powys’s style of relating, his almost indecent level of curiosity. ‘You are the crony a girl could imagine,’ she objected – to the direction her emotions were taking her.

In relation to Alan Ward she knew she owed him nothing absolutely, now, and wanted to say it to Powys. But could not without turning red.

Powys’s table manners were perfect – meaning that his mother would have been proud of him – but she considered his manners weren’t all they should be. For example, when he barged into kitchens as of right, to know what was cooking or to complain, speaking his French cookery phrases just to fascinate himself at a motherly old cook’s confusion. There was an impudence, a bossy unkindness in that, which she defined as class related.

Her father, a fettler, to use the Australian word for navvy, had more finesse. ‘Never enter another man’s hovel without being invited, and take your hat off, mate,’ was his motto. The information when she passed it on silenced Powys.

‘I’d like to meet him,’ he said.

And so she blushed. ‘Yes, I would like it too.’

From those infernal, boxy, badly sound-proofed telephone cubicles under hotel stairways and from post office phone boxes standing in desolate patches of dust, Margaret dictated her copy. What she spelled out on one day was read across the state in the
Daily Telegraph
the next. ‘Adrien’ was emerging as a bit of a snob, statewide, who needed to be worked on.

Just how many ungendered pronouns were there, Margaret wondered to the point of exasperation, circumlocuting her editor, maintaining her travelling companion’s cover – ‘Adrien’ couldn’t last.

‘Can’t you just call him lover boy?’ her editor gibed at last, causing Margaret to pull back from liking Powys too much. She remembered how her father, every time she showed too much liking for a boy found some failing or invented something hostile and turned her off him. God knows what he’d say about Pommified Powys. In a letter home she kept the wraps around her travelling mate, her shiralee or burden was all she said, equivocal as to sex.

They battered the shock absorbers up to Louth on the Darling, on to Bourke, where the shocks were replaced, spares coming up expensively on the plane while they waited. Powys wrote hefty cheques without complaining. He was thinking about Kyle all the time. Of being the greatest friend and the messenger of doom. Amelioration didn’t come cheap.

It didn’t need much for someone to pass through Bourke leaving fame and glory in their wake. Henry Lawson was there in 1892. Now it was Margaret Poole of the
Tele
and
Weekly
.

Margaret interviewed a young woman she saw on the street, on the other side of the road, bent over and needing help with a bundle of belongings. From a distance she looked old, a crone, but closer she shed years and gained bruises – a lovely, soft-eyed girl hiding her shame under sweeps of long hair, turning her head aside as Margaret spoke to her. She’d spent the night sheltering in a church porch. Bottles were thrown at her. Punches swung. A minister watched through window curtains, besieged in his house. Now she was going home. Her name was Jenny Milburn.

They reached a street corner together, walked down a path through weeds and ruts, and Margaret found herself in a place with smoky fires and rubbish strewn about. Margaret took Jenny Milburn’s photo, face hidden, except her family might know her – and the one who biffed her might make the connection. Apparently it was a cousin.

‘He thinks I’m up myself,’ she said. She raised her chin in defiance.

It was here Margaret found evidence of her Wobbly. Alive.

She was in her eighties. Jenny Milburn’s great aunt. Mrs Timothy (Luana) Atkinson née Milburn. Marcus Friendly’s personal secretary. Wife of his greatest friend. She’d lived her life in full sight, in Canberra.

From the airport Margaret sent a roll of film away on the afternoon flight then came back to the post office and phoned her story through. It was about a town that was a slum even for whites, the end of the Western Line, a pair of buffers on the edge of the black soil mud and after that the huge, brooding sky. It was a white man’s town fringed by blacks’ camps where the worse-off lived, despised, profited from by publicans and grocers and divided for consciences’ sake between ministers of religion, tent mission evangelists, priests and nuns, who each considered the others’ denomination fell short – and hid behind curtains if they saw a young woman being biffed. And that young woman had connections to the highest in the land.

Margaret ached for understanding and included a quotation in her story:
Poverty and heartbreak have something to do with the wealth of the land
.

‘Put that in the
Tele
and you won’t be understood,’ said Powys.

‘Too late,’ she said.

Jenny Milburn told Margaret that she had a fiancé who loved her to the point of making her wonder if she could ever be worthy of him, but she was going to give him a try, whatever her cousins said or did to prevent her turning her back on them and getting too up herself.

Leaving Bourke they slammed corrugations and slewed through sand drifts. Other vehicles came at them with a spread of dust in a rolling wave not of red but of sickening grey. They slowed almost to a crawl, breathing through handkerchiefs pulled over their mouths and noses.

The Milburns. Powys knew all about them. They axed ridge poles and uprights from pollarded stumps and lived off the land. Year after year they came. Ate yabbies, drank hooch. Just about everything they owned was railway property, renovated and re-used. Their tents were stencilled NSWGR. Their long-drop dunny had a Crown signet in the ceramics. It had ceramics! The poultry enclosure was made from carriage doors. They’d arrive with their belongings on a flatbed railway truck, unload at Inverarity siding and cart everything over to the Block. Bounder tried to get them off there. Kyle allowed them. Not that he had any proper authority or say so.

‘And you knew them?’ said Margaret.

‘Not really,’ said Powys.

My goodness
, thought Margaret, glancing at Powys.
That might even be the truth
. Stiff and formal, he’d be like visiting royalty, sitting up on his thoroughbred being offered a mug of port – a stirrup cup, milord? – declining, oh so regretfully, with a thank you so awfully, mate. He and Kyle cut from the same cloth.

T
ATTERSALL’S HOTEL, WHERE THEY SPENT
the last night before reaching Inverarity, had an air of a district command headquarters. If you were anybody at all within a range of a hundred miles on the north-west plains it was your watering hole. Community clubs held their meetings there, setting the world to rights – Rotary, Lions, the Country Party – the right to rule within the ruling rural cliques in an upstairs meeting room lined with glass plate photographs of bullock wagons hauling wool bales through black soil mud to a railhead. In one of those pictures Bounder Morrison stood on a bale with his head thrown back like a bantam rooster crowing.

Not just the poet but schools’ inspectors, bank inspectors, Anglican bishops doing their rounds and retired generals promoting civil defence took rooms at Tatt’s and had their pictures on the walls. No Milburn, it was obvious, had ever darkened the door of the place. There were no rules over who could or could not stay there – except it was understood that you would know if you were the right sort to hammer the bell at reception and announce yourself, otherwise you ought to have the intelligence to go to the bottom pub, the bloodhouse – The George – the Petersens’ piss-alley, so-called.