Beat Not the Bones

by Charlotte Jay

  They had left the road and faced the flight of steps that Stella had climbed two nights before. She looked up in surprise. The steps led straight ahead through the green, flat-topped trees.

  ‘It’s a nice spot, isn’t it?’ said Nyall, putting a hand under her elbow. ‘In a few weeks, round about Christmas time, these flame trees will be a picture. There’s nothing like a Marapai Christmas. You must spend it with us. The fun never stops. I believe someone came in to see me today when I was out. Who was it? What did he want?’

  But he seemed more interested in the trees and before she had time to answer, he said, ‘There, look at that one, isn’t it a beauty?’

  ‘It was a man. He didn’t leave his name. He came at about five to twelve. Didn’t you see him?’

  ‘No, I didn’t finish until 3.30. One of the girls told me he had been in. Did he leave his name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Didn’t say what he wanted?’ He had turned to look at her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Beautiful trees.’ He smiled around him. ‘The Grafton people boast about their jacarandas, but there’s nothing like the flame tree.’

  They had nearly reached the top of the steps. ‘Mr Nyall,’ said Stella, ‘I feel somehow that he isn’t the whole answer any more – Jobe, I mean. There’s more to it. I’ve found out that Sereva is dead.’

  ‘Sereva?’ he said vaguely. He took a long pace forward, and she had to spring up to keep level with him.

  ‘David’s assistant. They were the only two who went into Eola, and Sereva died before they got back to the station. Something happened out there that we will never find out from Jobe, and I think that’s where I must go. I will never find out what happened to David unless …’

  They had reached the top of the verandah steps. She had been talking so earnestly that she had hardly noticed that they were approaching the same house that she had been turned away from two nights before.

  ‘We’ll find Jobe,’ he said, pushing her up the steps ahead of him. ‘Don’t worry.’

  But Jobe had now become only a secondary goal. ‘I know we will,’ she said confidently. ‘But I must go to Eola, Mr Nyall.’

  The steps were narrow and she walked just ahead of him. She turned to look at him earnestly. His head was just below her shoulder. His eyes lifted, and looked for a moment fully into her own. Then she was forced to turn around again to watch where she was going. She had, now that the moment of contact was over, a peculiar impression of having looked into nothing, of having turned her gaze, not upon a man’s face, not upon eyes and lips, but upon a kind of void.

  ‘Eola,’ he repeated, speaking behind her. ‘Now you must go in and meet my wife.’

  His hand between her shoulder blades pressed her forward, and she entered again the bright, golden room with its drifting draperies, bamboo furniture and enchanting air of not being a room but an extension of a garden. The same soft breeze fluttered the hangings in the doorways and stirred the green, shiny leaves that reached in from the shrubs outside.

  Then she forgot the room and could only look at the woman who came to meet her. She hesitated, afraid of committing a social blunder. What was she doing here? She could not be Trevor Nyall’s wife. But the woman was coming forward with a hand outstretched and Trevor was saying, ‘Janet, this is Stella.’

  She looked some ten years older than Trevor, in spite of her hair, which was cut into a mass of short, frothy golden curls. Beneath this fantastic aureole her small pinched face looked shrunken and wizened. She was small and painfully thin, with tiny, white arms that reached out from the sleeves of her dress like the arms of a starved child. Her dress was made of some fine, transparent beige material patterned in green, and fashioned in a wispy style reminiscent of the 1920s. It fluttered like rags against her bony limbs. Stella felt that she had not walked forward but had been picked up by the breeze and wafted across the room like a withered leaf.

  Her eyes were large and wide-set. They must at one time have been beautiful, but beauty was now entirely submerged in nervous evasion. Her eyes disturbed Stella profoundly, though she did not know why. The woman did not speak, but pressed Stella’s fingers and then drew her hand quickly away, stepping back with a look of uncertainty about whether she should ever have stepped forward. Then she threw a glance at her husband and waited like a servant expecting an order.

  Stella was no more certain how to behave. Janet Nyall did not look actually deranged, but Stella sensed that she had a grip on life so limp that she might at any time drop her hold altogether. The woman moved back across the room, hovering uncertainly from chair to chair. She appeared to have a profound distrust of everything around her. For no apparent reason she put out a hand and touched a table, like a blind woman reassuring herself that she was on the right path. Then a man came forward from the back of the room, took her hand and led her to a chair. Stella, her gaze turned on Janet Nyall, had not seen him before.

  ‘And this,’ said Trevor, ‘is my brother, Tony.’

  He bowed slightly. ‘You!’ said Stella. ‘You are Mr Nyall’s brother?’

  She could see now how like he was to Trevor Nyall, and why Trevor when she met him had seemed familiar, like someone known years ago and met again, older and changed. Even though Anthony would be a younger brother, in many ways he did not look younger. Experience, suffering, frustration or disappointment had marked his face and left his brother’s smooth and clean. Sickness, too, had possibly attacked him and passed his brother by. But there was more that made him seem a shadow of the older man. All that was strongest, richest and happiest in the parents who had produced these men had gone into the making of Trevor Nyall. The younger brother looked to be battling against the liability of being the last, of being born when the best of life’s gifts, talents and powers had been bestowed elsewhere. And he wore these liabilities in his face with bitter resignation.

  Stella did not acknowledge his nod but stared at him coldly, her body rigid with aversion. The words that she had tried to cleanse from her mind over the past forty-eight hours spoke again. ‘You didn’t love him … you didn’t know him …’

  ‘So you’ve met before?’ said Trevor, looking at her with surprise.

  ‘Yes. I met him in the Department of Cultural Develop­ment yesterday afternoon. I knew he worked with David, but I didn’t know you were brothers.’

  This discovery struck her as being enormously significant. She had come here for comfort and peace, to be helped by her husband’s friend, to be looked after, to be guided and directed as she had always been, but the house was stirring uneasily with its own currents, and the origin of this strangeness was Anthony Nyall. She felt apprehensive and bewildered, as if she were on the brink of some sinister discovery. Remembering something that Sylvia had said, she looked around at the walls, the corners, the ceiling, and saw that in this beautiful room that had so charmed her, something of great importance was missing.

  Trevor laughed and thumped a hand twice on his brother’s shoulders. ‘That was the only reason he would put up with you, eh? Lounging around all day getting under everyone’s feet. We are a united family, aren’t we Tony? We stick together at all costs.’

  Anthony Nyall’s reply was a faint smile. Stella had never seen him smile before. She preferred him serious.

  ‘You won’t find in the whole of Australia, Stella, a more loyal family group than this.’ Trevor looked from his brother to his wife. The smile died from his face, and he turned away and went to a table set with glasses and drinks. Janet, who had been gazing up into his face, followed him with her eyes. She half rose to her feet and her wispy hand extended in a vague, unrealised gesture.

  ‘I’m pouring you a pink gin, Stella, is that all right?’ Trevor said from the table. He shook the bitters into the bottom of a glass. ‘You must excuse Janet, she’s been sick. Can’t take the climate. You’ve got to be husky in this place. It all looks pretty harmless, but it can be deadly.’

  He stood with his feet slightly apart,
his broad shoulders thrown back; his firm, deep voice rang out loudly. His white teeth and brilliant eyes flashed in the dusky light. He dominated the room, and his bitter-faced brother and faded wife looked insignificant beside him. ‘You wouldn’t believe what the tropics can do to people. Take Janet here’ – he pointed a hand at his wife, who sat with a fixed, bright smile – ‘you wouldn’t believe it, but six years ago she was a beauty, the loveliest woman in Marapai. She’s only forty-two. Ten years younger than me. You wouldn’t think it, would you?’

  ‘You wouldn’t think it, would you?’ said Janet, looking up at Stella with the same fixed smile. ‘It’s just as Trevor says, the tropics don’t agree with me at all.’

  ‘So you see, you’ll have to be careful,’ said Trevor. ‘You fair-skinned, delicate girls don’t wear well in the tropics.’ He threw back his shoulders, conscious of being one of those who had worn well.

  ‘I think on the whole that women look exceedingly youthful here,’ Anthony Nyall said quietly.

  ‘No, Tony,’ said Janet, ‘you can lose your looks in a day. You heard what Trevor said.’

  Tony looked down at Janet and smiled. It was, this time, a very different smile.

  Stella had been waiting for the right, dramatic moment to bring out her accusation. Your brother tried to stop me from seeing you, he lied to me, he drove me away. She had been savouring this delicious moment of retaliation. But in the meantime Tony had smiled and she knew she could not speak. She did not know what to think of him. In the moment of pinning him down, he had eluded her. This glance, cast towards a sick woman, had thrown dust in her eyes. She saw that an enemy could be tender and she could not battle with tenderness.

  ‘Where’s that boy?’ said Trevor suddenly. His voice rang with displeasure. ‘Where’s that boy? We want ice.’ He moved to a door and shouted, ‘Where the hell are you. Bring some ice!’

  Janet immediately began to flutter her hands. Her eyes were turned to her husband’s back. She half stood and sat down again. ‘I don’t know. I expect he’s in the boyhouse.’

  ‘Well, he ought to be here,’ said Trevor crisply. ‘Kora! Kora!’ He raised his voice. ‘He ought to be in the kitchen from six o’clock,’ he said, addressing his wife.

  Her eyes watched him frantically. Stella found her disturbing. She did not know why, but she suddenly wanted to leave, to go away and not see Janet Nyall again. Janet had touched a chord that revived a forgotten horror in her childhood.

  Janet stood up and made a few uncertain steps about the room. ‘He’s a good boy,’ she said vaguely. ‘A nice, polite boy.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Trevor in a tone of undisguised exasperation, and then went out calling, ‘Kora! Kora!’

  They waited. Janet was quiet now. She sat on the edge of her chair, her hands in her lap. Stella, feeling ill-at-ease, made an attempt at conversation, but was only answered with a vague yes or no. Anthony still held his stance behind the chair. He did not speak either, but Stella felt his eyes on her face. She stared out of the open louvres at the sky into which the stars were breaking, but once she glanced up and met his eyes. She looked quickly away. She was afraid, not just of Anthony, but of Janet too. They looked to her in that moment withered, twisted and pitiful. She felt that they were united in some devious partnership, and shared together a secret that cut them off from the normal world. If she looked at them long enough she might know what the secret was. She felt that Anthony Nyall, staring at her so fixedly, was attempting to communicate it, was actually trying to draw her into their mysterious intimacy. She kept her eyes turned away. She did not want to know what message he was sending her. She had forgotten that he had smiled so gently.

  When Trevor came back with a bucket of ice, she turned to him a face radiant with relief. Sanity, kindness and normality had taken over from sickness and despair.

  ‘You’ll have to be firmer with those boys,’ he said. ‘God knows you ought to be able to manage boys, you’ve been here long enough.’

  Janet visibly brightened. ‘I can’t manage boys,’ she said to Stella. ‘I should be able to. I’ve been here too long.’

  Trevor dropped a cube of ice in a glass and handed it to Stella. ‘You’re all very quiet,’ he said. ‘Stella expects to be entertained.’

  ‘Tony’s having a new house built,’ said Janet, drawing herself up. ‘Aren’t you Tony? He’s staying with us till it’s finished. It’s going to be very nice.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Trevor, ‘not as big as this.’ He handed a glass to his wife. She clutched it and held it tightly in her small white hand. She looked at it, raised it to her lips, glanced at her husband and put it down on the table in front of her. She clasped her hands in her lap.

  ‘But that’s to be expected, isn’t it?’ said Anthony.

  He’s jealous of his brother, thought Stella. She fastened on this fresh reason for disliking him. No wonder he didn’t like David, no wonder he didn’t want David to be loved. No wonder he couldn’t bear to see anyone loving David.

  Trevor laughed heartily. Turning to Stella, he waved a loose arm at his brother. ‘Tony suffers from the disease of all youngest sons,’ he said. ‘He thinks he always gets the short straw. He’s the defender of the weak. In every successful man he sees his big brother who always had the fattest potato.’ There was no irony in his words – he spoke charmingly, with the good nature and confidence of the invulnerable, and patted his brother on the shoulder.

  Anthony smiled faintly. ‘You misrepresent me,’ he said. ‘I have no quarrel with successful men, only with the world that’s taken in by them.’

  Stella forgot her pleasure in finding him out and her anger was rekindled. He’s talking about David, she thought, and about me.

  ‘You see, Trevor,’ he went on, still smiling, ‘I know so well what it is that goes to make a successful man. He’s composed for the most part of little drops and shreds of the brains and hearts of other people.’

  Trevor chuckled; his eyes still smiled and his tone was kindly. ‘Well now, that doesn’t only apply to successful men, does it? After all, we’ve all of us, haven’t we, surely, had our meals off brains and hearts – some of us more immoderately than others.’

  Stella did not see the expression on Anthony Nyall’s face because she was looking at Janet who had stretched out a slow, apparently almost reluctant hand and picked up her glass. She lifted it to her lips, tipped it back and put it down on the table. It was nearly empty.

  Stella stared at her, and a look of slow horror came over her face. She realised that Janet Nyall was drunk. She had seen women drunk before, though not often, but she knew instinctively that this woman was different. Janet drank all the time. There must be some dreadful reason.

  She found she could hardly bear to sit near her. Mentally and physically, she shrank from this deranged spectacle. She left as early as she could without being rude, and as she walked down the hill with Trevor Nyall beside her, the cool, night air washed the pollution from her body, or so she felt. She reasoned with herself, feeling that there was some abnormality in the violence of her reaction. But it was useless. At the thought of Janet Nyall her mind and body shuddered. For Trevor she felt pity and admiration. How bravely he had been through it all! One would think he did not care. How lighthearted he was when his spirit must be in misery. In consideration of his troubles she did not speak again of her own.

  When she reached the house it was only 10.30 and the light was still burning in Sylvia’s room. She knocked on the door and entered. Sylvia was lying on her bed in her black dressing-gown, her hair in pins. She was writing a letter.

  Stella sat down and stared before her. ‘I’ve been to dinner with the Nyalls,’ she said.

  Sylvia threw a glance at her pale, strained face, and smiled faintly. ‘You didn’t know what to expect?’

  Stella shook her head.

  ‘Don’t look so miserable. It’s not so unusual up here. Marapai is full of drunks, temporary and permanent.’

  ‘
But why her?’

  Sylvia shrugged her shoulders. ‘Philip swears Trevor beats her, but you can’t rely on him. He’s got a bee in his bonnet about Trevor, thinks he was done out of a job. He doesn’t realise that no one in their senses would give him anything to do. He’s very clever, brilliant really, but not in that way.’

  Stella was not listening. ‘Do you know anything about the younger brother ‘ – she hesitated over his name and brought it out reluctantly – ‘Anthony?’

  ‘Not really. Only what everyone knows, the big scandal. I’ve always thought he seemed a decent sort of fellow.’

  ‘What scandal?’

  ‘There was a hullabulloo about a year ago. Anthony made some frightful blunder. He was terribly enthusiastic and full of bright ideas – thought everyone else very conservative – and rushed around doing things without considering the consequences. He used to say that everything was too slow, that if we didn’t do something quickly it would be too late. He took some highland boys to a school in one of the coastal villages. I think there were about a dozen of them, and they all died in an influenza epidemic. Some Papuans are like orchids; they won’t stand transplanting, haven’t any resistance. Anthony, who didn’t anticipate anything like that, was devastated. There were some Sydney reporters up here, and they got hold of the story and made headlines out of it. They said we were murdering the locals for our own foul ends. The administration was in a spot and I think would have kicked him out if it hadn’t been for Trevor. I think he pulled some strings and fixed it so that Anthony was cleared of some of the blame. Anyway, he’s still with us.’

  ‘I see.’

  She had hoped for something different, and this, like the smile bent to Janet Nyall, only further confused her. She rose to leave, then hesitated. ‘Sylvia, I remembered what you said, and I looked around the room. It’s beautiful, like a pavilion in a garden, but there were no geckoes.’