by Thea Astley
‘Part of boyhood!’ The jovial school curate had dismissed his timid complaint. ‘The rough and tumble of the male world, lad.’ (Had the curate licked his lips?) ‘It’s a kind of masculine freemasonry—fraternity as it were—you’ll grow out of the moment you enter the world at large. Believe me, boy. Mark my words.’
Not actually scarred for life but with a chilling indifference to genital tyranny of any sort at all, he had plunged into the which-way waters of romantic bards, caught up in the meretricious currents of anapaest and dactyl, the sexual beat of rhyme. For half an hour he had fallen in love with a frail ashen fellow student at St Andrew’s who had perched on the edge of a table in the students’ common-room and begun to sing ‘Die Forelle’ in a high light voice, her face a blurred lovely pale colour, straight blonde lashes blinking above grey, equally blurred, eyes. The downfall of her hair he remembered best and her sideways smile at him before she stopped, just as inexplicably, picked up her book-satchel and vanished. Where? He had never seen her again.
Apart from that two-minute emotional upheaval little had moved him. He finished his degree, found his elderly parents too old to care one way or the other as they wasted quietly in their Lake District cottage, and decided on a new vision, a new world. He migrated to Australia (there were always letters!) and trying to shake off mist and heather found himself trundling down the gangplank of the India Queen into a Sydney of summer dazzle and blue tides, and a junior mastership at a small private school on one of the harbour peninsulas that jutted its proboscis into a bustling waterway of ferries.
One year. Two. Three.
‘Now the great winds shoreward blow,/Now the salt tides seaward flow,’ he chanted, sometimes audibly, as he perched up the stern end of the ferry Lady Denman that he took to work. But was in more desperate moments to mutter, ‘Now I only hear/Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.’ If he said, ‘Sophocles long ago/Heard it on the Aegean,’ that would be to promote himself, Samuel Vine, to peaks of philosophic encounter and egotism. Sentiment made him favour ‘Ah, love, let us be true/To one another!’ (All that from a school inspector!) It had heartened him and he chucked a particularly terrible assignment from Jarvis, Form II, into the ferry wake and would later say, ‘I’m most frightfully sorry, Jarvis, but I’ve mislaid it somewhere. How about a pass pro tem, eh?’
All days become one day, looking back, involving nothing but the sweaty smell of boys, lunch packs, chalk, a life with no edges but the occasional feather-duster of a girl whose hand he clasped between exchanges of caramels in the sticky darkness of some rococo theatre palace.
One edge though. One. Ploughing through Livy’s milky prose with three senior students all anxious to matriculate in law, he had countered the boredom, their complaints of dead language, their eternal why-must-we’s. ‘One moment,’ he had said, the whimsical pedant. ‘One moment.’ And, ‘Quintus Horatius Flaccus,’ he further said and proceeded to read Ode XII, Book II, watching their glazed eyes as he intoned. He paused for explanation. ‘This was written to flatter a wealthy man, Maecenas, and in brief, boys, in brief, friend Horace suggests that prose is for history and poetry for lovers and that Maecenas wouldn’t barter a single hair of his wife’s head for all the riches of Arabia or the triumphs of war.’ He heard a voice whisper, ‘My old man would!’ and ignored it. ‘Try this,’ he said, ‘for a dead language.’ He reread the last stanza:
dum flagrantia detorquet ad oscula
cervicem aut facili saevitia negat,
quae poscente magis gaudeat eripi, interdum rapere occupet.
A yawning silence. Impudent nudgings. He smiled. ‘Well, here’s a translation. Perhaps you’ll change your mind about “dead”:’
For when she bends her neck to your hot kisses [delicate stress on ‘hot’]
or, playing coy, denies that you should catch
what she craves more than you, the more she misses,
why, her mouth’s first to snatch!
Later, a parent complained. There had been a summons to the headmaster’s office. ‘I am broadening their horizons, their cultural horizons,’ Vine had said.
‘That is not the sort of broadening we require,’ the stuffy head replied. ‘You will stick to set texts. I must say, I am rather disappointed in you.’
He was disappointed!
Restless Vine longed for new places. Could he plough? Muster? Angle on rocking waters? He needed a frontier challenge unsupplied by the shimmering glass shopfronts of Sydney town that reflected a man in a rut. Not even the war had provided that spurious pre-death sense of adventurous risk. University interrupted, deferred, he had spent the time (weak eyes, flat feet, a persistent pleurisy) shining his pants in the London War Office, reading with grim amusement the military miscalculations of generals and marvelling at the way they carelessly piled up the bodies of young men in Flanders and the Somme.
When he finished his degree he was elderly by student standards, twenty-eight, and already burdened with conventional responses against which he fought and fought. Passengers on the India Queen bolstered his belief in the testing qualities of the new land. ‘A hard place,’ the old hands warned him. ‘The heat. The flies.’ ‘To say nothing of the claypans,’ one added who was returning to a drought-stricken cattle property in the far west of Queensland. ‘Get yourself a wife, young man.’ (Was he young? He felt ancient at thirty-one.) ‘You’ll find it makes all the difference.’
‘Really?’
‘The boring bits. You know. Meals. Washing. Shopping. Kids. All that sort of thing. A man hasn’t time for that nonsense.’
‘Why not a housekeeper then?’
‘You are green. Costs too much. Marry and you get it for free. With other things, of course.’ The man leered, winking. ‘If you want it. You’ll learn, mate. But if it wasn’t for the boring bits—and God, you do need backup for them—I doubt whether any man in his right mind would contemplate marriage.’ He glanced cautiously at his drab spouse who was playing deck-quoits with another farmer’s wife. Vine couldn’t help thinking the two women looked as if they were having the best time they’d had in years.
He brooded over the grazier’s words but no one and nothing disturbed his celibate mould, though he admitted to a continuous searching. He refused to be diverted from the succulent promises of the romantic ideal.
Mug!
Clinger!
That’s what his fellow students had called him, and as if by some indefinable process of osmosis that agnomen pursued him across twelve thousand miles of ocean to his post as junior schoolmaster in this antipodean town. He could list his faults: hopeless at sport, no sort of disciplinarian. There was always one pack-leader who selected him for punishment, usually a muscle-bound rugger moron whose attacks were confined to farts, raspberries and the occasional crass one-liner hurled out for the gleeful response of the class. It was, he realised early, impossible to embarrass thick-wits. Brighter boys he could control with his tongue. Only the clever ones got the point.
When he first arrived there had been five men on staff in this school at the Taws: Doctor Henry Parsons, headmaster, B.A., D.D. (where? where?), classics when required; Oscar Pretorius, mathematics and science; Clarrie Somerdew, junior master of almost everything; Tony Shell, second junior master, sport and general dogsbody; and himself.
Himself surprised as senior master in English and history.
Various part-timers employed weekly to deliver choral and art classes, vanishing in dust-wakes on the unsealed road, were the lucky ones who spread their cultural empire over several townships but never endured the abrasiveness of day after day of deadly accountability. And now, twelve years on, there was a woman, her presence graciously conceded by Doctor Parsons, a Miss Laroche who taught French and music, organising choral classes for the indifferent lads.
He looked into the hand-basin mirror, watching his mouth say her name softly. Twice. Three times. He tried not to think of her.
Once more he was running foul of orthodoxy.
�
��You have radical notions for a history teacher,’ Doctor Parsons had reproved only a week before. ‘This is not the sort of place for such ideas to be spread among the lads.’
It is not only the rich who matter, he had argued, the privileged, the foreign names of upstart European royals who are, after all, merely the sanctioned descendants of thugs. In all literature, he persisted, head in hands, fingers scratching at thinning hair, for how long had the emphases been on the wealthy as if only they might concern a reader? Only the wealthy could read, Doctor Parsons replied with a crafty smile. Vine ignored him. Even the eighteenth-century writers, Fielding, Sterne, with attachments at least to the upper-middle class of squires, landowners and gentlemen rakes, gave lip-service only to the lower orders except as some kind of comic turn. Until Dickens, say, had had the guts, pardon me, headmaster, to credit the underprivileged with emotions, with humanity. Especially that. Tread carefully, Doctor Parsons warned, locking his fingers to end the discussion. Your remarks in history have been reported. There have been complaints.
Again? Sex maniac? Anti-royalist commo sympathiser?
He stroked the side of his unshaven cheek and stared back at himself in the glass. He heard the thuds as Marcia, heavier with years, thumped along the passage to the sick bay where two first-formers were having bilious attacks.
His awakening, his epiphany, had come during his brief term on Doebin.
There he had drowned, fathoms under, in the poverty, hopelessness, wretchedness, gentleness, kindness and forgiveness of the island blacks. Despite his lack of skill in teaching six-and seven-year-olds who were sent to him to learn to sing ‘God Save The King’, despite the Protection Act, despite everything, he had learned much from them. They taught, he decided, and he listened. They offered a courtesy rarely extended by the white officials, and in return he managed to help a few of them, at least, read the primitive unsuitable readers supplied by government stock and do the simplest of sums. Back here, on home ground, so to speak, among the unmarked texts, the dried grass of the playing field, the boarders’ choir butchering the school song, comparisons crowded him.
As he travelled over from Doebin the mainland threatened, the Great Divide a prune-coloured backdrop to the stage horror. He had wondered what worse could lie beyond those mountain drapes! The others leaving the island with him had sat primly in the cabin, fingers marking, as it were, biblical phrases, minds concentrated on justice and justice’s revenge. Since the killings, everyone’s lips had compressed into white lines over the inexplicability of evil. A whole family! they had kept saying. A whole family! Vine had not dared suggest that perhaps he understood…That although he was not a passionate man…There but for the grace of God…et cetera. The others might have lynched him.
He had not looked back, not regarded the choppy waters, had ignored farewell assurances from deputy Leggat who was doing the right thing by staying on once the whole desperate event had been examined, his lying evidence sifted. Vine had stared ahead, traversing the claypans to his new posting. He hummed softly, maintaining across those ruffled waters an unruffled gaze that saw only into a future of preparation, supervision and classes of exquisitely mannered boys with public-school poise.
He was wrong.
As if they’d care. As if.
Who? Why, these unexquisitely mannered boys he had not really imagined.
School numbers were dropping in those first years.
‘The Depression, of course,’ Oscar Pretorius explained over a friendly cup of tea in what passed for the masters’ common-room. ‘Hard times on the farm, in the town stores. Parents don’t have the money for gentleman jinks. They’re sending their kids to high school on the coast and boarding them with relatives or friends. Or they’re simply taking them out of school altogether, mainly that, and counting their savings. No one knows which way the economy is going to jump. Could I draw you a little graph?’
Mr Pretorius was fond of that phrase. The boys called him Little Graph, a ludicrous bit of misnomer for that bulky pear of a man with his lumbering and deliberate movements and great shiny pate. His eyes glistened with a fierce but good-humoured interest in the world about him, even the tediousness of insolent adolescents. He worked in the most primitive of laboratories, and appeared to have little equipment beyond weights and pulleys, pipettes and Bunsen burners. Despite this he controlled his classes with a glassy jocularity and the sudden springing of novel experiments that caused eruptions of appreciative laughter. Vine envied him. He envied his easiness in the job. He envied his living out. Vine and the too handsome Tony Shell were the only resident masters, apart from the Head. Clarrie Somerdew boarded in the Lucky Chance and rode out on a pushbike daily. ‘Just look at us,’ Pretorius commented. ‘What a grab-bag!’
School numbers had dropped to forty. There were a mere twenty boarders.
‘Intimate,’ Vine murmured to Pretorius after the first month’s lunchtime stews. After all, the seating arrangements in the dining-room made more for the appearance of a large extended family than a boarding school. The headmaster, however, obliterated all hilarity with a prolonged grace before and after meals and an imposition of silence until the pudding.
‘We are fortunate,’ Doctor Parsons announced one evening five weeks after Vine’s arrival to the boys assembled for study, ‘in obtaining the services of a fully qualified matron,’ (Little Graph had told Vine of a scandal the previous year when a first-former who had broken his arm at football practice was allowed to linger in class for a week before his parents arrived and began shouting and threatening litigation), ‘to take charge of the infirmary.’ The headmaster paused to allow the importance of the occasion to sink in. ‘Notices will be handed out and boys are requested to include these in their letters home. My wife—’ a nod to Mrs Parsons who sat plumply mute on his left, ‘and I expect that all boys will treat Matron Tullman,’ (Tullman? Tullman?), ‘with the respect her position merits.’
Should they clap?
His fate was sealed, as they say, at that moment.
Marcia Tullman was installed in the eastern wing of the building which contained a flatette and infirmary with four beds. (‘Our lads are well fed and healthy’: a smiling Pretorius.) Vine’s own small room was on the far side of hers. Oh, the sheer forced excitement of his greetings and the unforced yelps of coincidence from her! Pretorius watched and continued to smile. Tony Shell was bored. Clarrie Somerdew was far too young to care, absorbed by his struggle with a correspondence course at university a thousand miles south. He thought constantly of leaving.
The weekends stretched long in that town. Vine’s supervisory duties were sometimes taken over by Mr Shell who seemed eager to relieve him—Shell at his boyish happiest punting balls with the older boys who formed a votary group as he dashed about in fresh creams or raced with them in shorts. There was always the reading room at the Labour Exchange where Vine could have spent time, that lofty-ceilinged place filled with unemployed men in caps sucking at pipe-comforters while they searched the Jobs Wanted columns of local newspapers. There was that. But often he was too tired, too—yes—uninterested to face the long trudge in and the lonely pot of tea in some fly-blown café. And admit it, there was more inducement to stay put.
From his narrow study he could assemble two sets of leaping scandal.
On the second Saturday of Matron Tullman’s residence, a car pulled up in a swirl of gravel and disgorged Doctor Quigley who had driven his mended body eighty-odd miles in from the coast to check on his former colleague, to pay court, perhaps, or pick up the slack. Or.
Their audible rough-and-tumble drove Vine out. On the first occasion he had walked to town and calmed himself with steak and eggs at the Inland Rose, timing his return to school to postdate the doctor’s departure. To postdate seeing Tony Shell sliding into dusk with the chummiest of the seniors, a blond boy with olive skin and cornflower eyes who made his own teaching life a maze of innuendo. (They were reading what Danny Chalk, master of pudendal metaphor, called The Frill o
n the Moss. ‘Sorry, sir. Bit of a spoonerism!’) Now he stayed, playing his gramophone at full bore. Could this be connivance? How long before Doctor Parsons suspected and intervened?
There could be no dodging a meeting with the doctor who ingratiated himself with speed, establishing a small surgery in town that he visited fortnightly and eventually—it took one term—becoming honorary medico for the school itself.
The walls between his room and Matron Tullman’s were unspeakably thin. Between changing records Vine occasionally heard soft argument after the cries of passion had ceased.
Was the good doctor tiring of the relationship? Was Matron Tullman too demanding? And then he had caught those words, ‘Can’t see you next week, ’cushla,’ with a malicious leap of the heart. He had regretted that leap for years.
How was it, he wondered, that light, this white light of the inland plains, could create such darkness. Or was it that his own black hole spread out and obliterated?
Nineteen thirty-two was the worst year, as if the accumulation of poverty since the crash of ’29 had amassed its reactions, not only in one little town but all over the country. Each week men on the dole passed through looking for work. There was none. The best they could hope for was a feed. Stores closed. The numbers fell even more at the school and idiotically Vine married.
Perhaps it was the furious campaign Matron Tullman conducted in the aftermath of rejection: those delicious hot meals whipped up in her kitchenette. Perhaps it was the way she sewed buttons on shirts, turned frayed collars and darned socks. Now and then he thought of that beefy grazier on the India Queen and realised that one of the most cunning ploys of eugenicists had been to promote male uselessness at the boring bits. Perhaps, too, this increased dependence—she played her cards with skill, withholding the aces—aroused the curiosity of a man who had flirted with sex only a dozen or so times and then as a paid proposition. Clinger!
