On long hauls there were always some passengers who presented more problems for the driver than others. The engineer was one of these. During the day he made himself felt by a certain cool detachment from the rest of the company, while at the same time he linked himself with the driver by means of a persistent and unprovoked hostility. It was not clear how or why the hostility had started, unless it was his instinct that the driver was a whole person in a way that he himself was not. He alone might make this comparison, but what was plain to every passenger was the driver’s feeling for completeness in everything he under-took. They trusted him. Whatever shocks or discomforts it might hold, the day would come full circle. The machine would not break down. The passengers would not break down. Each night’s destination was sure. And finally he would get them home. It made no difference that he was an anxious man and not the gayest character they had ever seen at a wheel. They relied on him to know their needs, and even their unspoken demands had been made clear. He was to give them their freedom without letting them get lost, to keep the peace without losing his temper. Above all, he was to go on liking them when they became unlikeable.
The man at the wheel did not make out to be a specialist in anything except driving. But from the first day, it became clear he knew what he was talking about when he described certain plants or pointed out rare birds. Even the geologist held his peace, listening with polite attention when the driver explained the origin of certain rock formations. It was only the back seat passenger who contradicted him at every turn and always with a devious insult. When the driver reported the mileage between stopping-places, named a tree, noted an explorer’s route or gave a date, the engineer would wait for a minute until the information had been taken in – then he would clearly pronounce to those around him another mileage, a different tree. The route taken by the explorer had been wrongly given. The date was out. He simply stated, and in a level voice, each different fact. The driver heard some of the corrections but not all. Any he failed to hear were passed on down the bus and usually reached him in some garbled version. But garbled or not, he could not fail to sense the hostility from behind.
There were more serious contradictions from that quarter. From time to time, in something the driver said or in the way he said it, there could be detected a profound pride in the country to which his forebears had come and where his parents and grandparents had worked all their lives. An almost painful emotion would come through as he related the struggles of its beginning. When he described the speed of this progress his voice changed. He breathed more deeply, as though to give himself enough air, enough space inside the chest to explain this spectacular expansion. Occasionally it was with the same deep breath that he described some peculiarity of the region they were travelling through – this wilderness, for instance, and its instantaneous flowering after rain. The man at the back was not slow to sense these things. Besides, he had felt such emotion himself. For the engineer knew a lot about this country and he had travelled widely in it. He gave the impression that he had loved it once to an excessive degree, that he had even had a wild, extravagant love affair with this land. This had gone sour on him. Now he stared at every person born and bred in the place and at every tree long-rooted here as though they were totally alien and in some cases hateful to him. He knew too that such emotion as the driver had allowed himself could not be countered only by facts and figures or by straight denials.
So the engineer laughed when the driver praised openly any part of his own country. It was not a loud laugh, but usually it reached the driving seat and every Australian between heard it too. He was asked to explain this laugh. Well, of course it was a long time since he’d lived in Britain, he said, or anywhere else for that matter. And God knew there was a lot wrong with that place. But if it was the new they were talking about – then over there it was the same as here. Every week in every city new buildings went up, in every part of the country – new roads, machinery, new bridges, new dams. But the most important thing was the mixture of new and old. History. That was the point he was after. The engineer talked at length about History – how at every step, and cheek by jowl with skyscrapers, you came across the mediaeval church, the Norman castle, the Gothic cathedral, the Elizabethan palace. He mentioned Roman baths. He spoke as if he had supervised their plumbing, stone by stone, with his own two eyes. The engineer talked of the culture of Great Britain, past, present and future. He spoke as though he himself had measured the depth, the height and the breadth of this culture with a measuring-rod and tape – and found it was all there. For, long ago the engineer had closed his ears to all talk of high accomplishment in the new continent, just as nowadays he shut his eyes to the tropical extravagance and splendour of its flowers and trees. He mentioned, finally, that he came from a country where all the trees were green – a true, deep green. And that went for the grass as well. The Australians could have made it tough for this man. But they were inclined to hold their hand, for it was not clear exactly what was bugging him.
They knew it was not lack of palaces or castles or green trees. They did not absolutely dislike him either, if only because he could do this very much better for himself. It was said, from what little could be gathered from his talk, that he was still outstanding at his job. It was said too that his former wife, his present girl friend, his son and daughter were now as far away from him as they could get – one in England, the other in northern Australia, his son and daughter in America. All day, under the watchful eye of the driver, he was as sober as a judge. His clothes were sober too, and formal, compared to the casual gear of all the rest. In the evenings, when they’d reached their stopping-point, the engineer would drink as much as he could take while still standing on his legs. Then, swivelling from the counter upon his heel in one smooth movement and moving away along a straight line like an artificially propelled puppet, he would walk to his bed, where he would continue to drink until he passed out. And just as in drinking and sleeping the aim was to knock himself out, so too his ears came in for a lambasting. Whenever he came in from the silent road, he wanted noise – the loudest voices and the loudest laughs, though he himself spoke little. He seemed to welcome the crash of glass and dish slammed down on counters, the impatient tramp of travellers’ feet moving from room to room. Very occasionally with certain hard-luck stories over drinks he could be sympathetic. The story that contained one breath of success or hinted at a boast he crushed with absolute indifference. He was not approached often, but he was not excluded. Sometimes, by chance, he was the centre of the indoor, night-time racket, and made no move to get away. Yet he spoke of silence, utter silence as being of heaven.
All through the afternoon the bus had been coming nearer to what, for most passengers, was the most astounding sight of the whole journey. For they were gradually approaching that part of the limestone plateau which broke down onto a point where, for the first time, a limitless east-west view could be seen – part of the five-hundred mile stretch of cliffs above the Great Australian Bight. they reached this point late in the afternoon when the bus turned down a chalky sidetrack and they came suddenly upon the expanse of blinding white sand marking the vicinity of the great cliffs.
‘Twenty minutes please!’ called the driver. ‘Read the warnings and mind your step. We can do a lot. What we can’t do is haul you up if you fall over!’
There was a rapid exodus from the bus, a slow walk across the sandy area with its warning notice, then a cautious and finally a crab-like approach to the crumbling cliff-edge. On either side – as far as the eye could see – a sheer white wall stretched, undulating, into the distance. At its foot the dark unbroken waves advanced, churned to a violent storm of foam where they met the rock and swirling on through white limestone crevasses, to narrow and divide in thin, clear streams of cobalt blue. But at certain deeper undercuttings, water raced up in long points and drew back again, raced in and drew back like the continuous thrust of a cruelly sharpened sword of dark green glass. Directly beneath the c
liffs, the waves struck in a series of massive thunderclaps followed by a roar which resounded along mile upon mile of the great wall and could be heard in the farthest distance as a heavy muffled boom. From underfoot came sharper sounds – explosive gulps of water down giant potholes, and a continuous sucking, knocking, hissing as the waves scoured through hidden caves deep inside the rock.
There was little chance here for the human voice. But few words could be said, for the place fitted no familiar concept of sea, sand and cliff. Some were glad enough to turn back to the haven of the bus before the time was up, and there were others – incomers never likely to see the place again – who stood as long as possible on this edge. But time was getting short. One by one those on the cliff drew back to find another place to view the sea or to take the final photo. The young men, each with one arm round his girl and the other round the metal warning-post, were being snapped by a fellow-passenger. The two unaccompanied women, a few steps apart, were making their way up towards the bus. The younger stopped suddenly, looked back, and for the second time that afternoon exclaimed:
‘Where is he?’
‘Still at the cliff-edge.’
‘I’m going back.’
‘To do what?’
‘Just to be there.’
‘Oh, go back then, go back!’ The older woman walked on briskly, impatiently, while the other turned, and went slowly back to where the engineer stood looking down on the hanging cliff’s edge curled back in a white stone wave from his feet. The woman waited until he saw her, then she came near and touched his wrist. A quick, warning touch.
‘What?’ shouted the engineer above the turmoil and raising his hand into the air. There was now some wind driving the spray sideways – hard as hail – but mixing with it soft balls and puffs of foam which rolled along the face of the cliff in smoke-rings, or piled up, clot upon clot, in quivering snow-white heaps upon ledges or inside black cracks of rock. The man and woman turned, and moved back some distance from the edge to a spot where there was a slight hollowing of the ground. Here it was quieter and the ferment at the cliff’s base was not visible, though the ground under their feet shook with a huge, rhythmic thud of water.
‘What is it?’ said the engineer, loudly again.
‘Nothing. Wondering what your impressions were, that’s all.’
‘My what? Impressions? Oh my God!’ Because of his white, protuberant eyeballs, the engineer – when once he began to take notice – could look either wildly expectant or very angry. He looked angry. The young woman screwed up her eyes as if rejecting her stilted words. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it was simply to show I’m around.’
The man bent his head and listened carefully to these words, as though making sense of something in a foreign tongue. ‘So you’re around? Yes, but what did you want to say – supposing you could have been heard at all, I mean?’
‘Nothing. “I’m here.” That was the whole of it.’
Again the man listened to these words as though to their last echo, his arms folded, his eyes roving around the piece of ground where they were standing.
‘Did you think I was on the brink? Oh, I was there all right, like all the rest of our joy-riders. What other brink, though? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?’
‘All right then – yes. Yes, for one single second I imagined you thinking – thinking how it would be. Common on edges. I did not imagine you doing it. Never!’
The engineer, still with folded arms and tracing patterns in the sand with the toe of his shoe, said: ‘And yet you can’t bring yourself to say what.’
‘It’s easy. Stepping over.’
‘It’s easy?’
‘Saying it’s easy.’
‘Now that the unreal danger’s past, you mean? As though simply because I haven’t thrown myself down I’m not on any brink at all.’
The woman was now looking back in the direction of the bus, willing it to sound the warning hoot though there were still eight minutes to go. Long ago the older passengers had climbed in and were peering impatiently from the windows.
‘I’ve known, I may say, quite a few agreeable women like yourself in the last few years,’ he went on, ‘not counting the other kind of course. And many more at a time when I was better-looking and a good deal more agreeable myself. They all had this restraining hand when they thought they sensed a drama. Every one of them. But with lesser brinks or dramas, pettier hells – they showed less interest. Most of them, in fact, took off.’
‘Dramas … ? I don’t see you like that.’
‘How then?’
‘Always in empty space – your own deserts and plains. Nobody gets near. Sooner or later everyone gets the push.’
Turning instantly, his hand gesturing from the wide horizon to herself, he exclaimed derisively: ‘These incomers! You! Always the same. Eight thousand miles from home – so now the sky’s the limit! Every spot can be explored, every person explained. They see the mirage, of course – the distant water, companions in empty places. Then they go back – and none the wiser for it. Wild enthusiasts or sour critics of the place – what does it matter? All of them – absolute beginners in this land! You will go back to your own small country one day soon no doubt, and no doubt thankfully too. The rest of us – those who’ve been here for years and years – know better. We’ll hate this place and love it for the rest of our lives!’
The woman turned abruptly and started up towards the distant bus, quickening her steps as she saw the last passengers climbing in and the driver standing on the steps with his left hand on his wrist-watch as though feeling an erratic pulse. The woman now took her place beside her travelling companion, the driver got into the driving seat and stared morosely out towards the cliffs. ‘We’re going to have to hoot for him,’ he warned the others over his shoulder. At the first blare of the horn, the engineer again folded his arms and took a long survey of the sea’s horizon from end to end, and from the sky’s zenith to some point on the water directly below. At the second blare, he was seen moving slowly in the direction of the bus, stopping to shift the crumbled stones with his foot, now and then picking one up, examining it and putting it down again.
‘Well, there’s always got to be one like that!’ said the driver. ‘They won’t hear, they won’t move, they won’t play. You just have to carry them along.’ He said nothing when the engineer finally got in, but for the first and only time the bus started with a jerk that nearly threw him off his feet as he went up the middle aisle.
Gradually they moved away from the vicinity of the cliffs until there was little evidence of them, except for the distant flash of white where sand, through aeons, had been flung and hardened on the headlands, and soon only the appearance of the sky far behind gave indication they had been near water. Again, mile after mile, the focus of their eye shifted from sandy scrub to landscapes of low bushes, to grass, to stones, to scrub again. Once, they got out and walked some distance to see a great hole which had formed under the limestone crust. ‘The whole place riddled with them!’ said the driver, as he let a few of them peer down into the black opening. The largest holes and vents, he told them, could blow out such great gasps of breath that anything above would be suspended, whirling, in midair, or sometimes instead of blowing they would breathe in and suck down to the very depths anything – wing, leaf or flying fur – that passed across. The passengers themselves blew out and drew in their breath as they looked, for this sudden cavity in the silent, endless plain appalled them. They got back into the bus again, some in a subdued and even melancholy mood, so much so that the driver, after a few silent miles, felt it his duty to bring them round again to a more normal outlook.
‘You’re not forgetting your hats, are you?’ he said with a weary attempt at enthusiasm, for talk at that hour was beginning to be an effort. ‘I want a funny hat,’ he said again, ‘on every single one of you tonight. Remember?’
Two or three of them had not only remembered – they were actually constructing hats. The attracti
ve widowed sisters sitting together near the front had been twisting up pink and blue paper napkins which they’d found at the last store ninety miles back. They were making rosettes sewn together with thread and a few safety pins. ‘I don’t know if they’re funny,’ one of them murmured, ‘but they’re going to be pretty.’ Behind them two husbands were discussing, across the aisle, the possibility of elastic straps stuck with bird feathers.
‘Birds? What birds are you expecting to catch before nightfall?’ said a wife.
‘Anyway, what’s the prize?’ somebody called out.
‘I don’t know yet. I’ll have to think about it,’ said the driver. ‘But there’ll be a prize all right – don’t you worry about that.’
He himself was worried about the time. There had been some unexpected stops; one to help a car in trouble on the road, another to let the youngest passenger off to be sick and to lie for a moment longer, chalk-faced, under a prickly bush. At one point, he’d got out to explore the origin of a rattling under the bus, and had had to unpack and repack several items of stuff, having found nothing more than a tin lid loose in the luggage hold. He’d also stopped for fifteen minutes to let the last half-dozen photos of the day be taken while the light was still good, and to let a few others get out at the same time to stretch their legs. Warmth was still rising from the ground but there was a slight coolness in the air. The sun was low, and so silent was it that the first click of a camera sounded like the whirr and tick of the first gigantic insect on the earth. One woman whispered to another that she would take the chance, before it was too late, to find something, anything at all in the landscape that might do for a hat. She made off at a run into the scrub, dodging spikes and stones and prickly grass to reach the taller bushes. ‘What the hell …?’ exclaimed the driver, bending over his wheel in desperation, closing his eyes, and opening them again to see her break a hard stalk of bristly green out of a bush with the aid of her foot, and come running back, running and throwing up her hand with its thorns against the enormous sky, just as though she were coming up to a bus-stop in a city street.
The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books Page 18
