I said to Julia, “I’ll be back tonight, if you like.” Visiting hours resumed at seven o’clock.
“I’ll be fine. You sort it out. See me tomorrow.”
Tomorrow she might have been sent off to Perth Hospital. I nodded. It would be easy enough to find out where she was. Perth was only a four-hour journey from Pelican River.
I heard light rain rattling against the corrugated iron roof, and at the windows. Julia was already asleep.
Rutherford drove us home, taking the roads with great care. We made slow progress. Rain spattered against the car. Gordon and I hardly spoke.
With his bare hands. I thought I had been shocked before. I was no stranger to other people’s anger towards me, but this? There were, in town, several people with grudges against me, none of which I took all that seriously. But it was one thing to have a grudge, to have had words, to have had a public argument with someone, to be full of resentment and even hatred, and quite another to be prepared to take that person’s life. How many marriages were there in town that seemed only held together by the mutual hatred of the man and woman? I knew there were a few. No-one said anything much about this. Women whom one might see going about their daily business sporting a poorly concealed set of facial bruises shrugged and muttered about clumsily hitting doorknobs or falling over a child’s toy and hitting a table corner. Some people, one could conclude, had extremely dangerous furniture. Some people should be persuaded, perhaps, that they needed new furniture.
I watched water run down the glass. Listened to it pounding the car’s steel roof. Inside, the car was warm, smelling of expensive leather and imported wood polish.
With his bare hands.
It was a striking thing to learn. Such an intimate way to kill a person, close enough to feel their warmth, smell their heated breath, reeking of passion and fear and whatever they’d last eaten.
Chills flashed through me, thinking about it. It seemed impossible. It seemed, in fact, like the kind of thing that might occur back in England, where extraordinary, operatic passions seethed beneath the veneer of polite and mannered discourse. Where a thoughtless remark could inspire the darkest revenge. Things were not like that out here in the colonies, I had always thought. That was why I had come here, why I had endured ten months at sea.
Yet the colonies were full of people who either had come from parts of Britain or who had been born here of British parents. How could I have been so stupid and blind? I had not left behind the raging passions and lethal intrigues of British society; these had come along with me, with all of us who had journeyed out here to start new lives. We could not help but have brought it with us; it was as much a part of our way of life as the food we preferred to eat, as the heavy and cumbersome clothing we preferred to wear, the songs we sang around the piano, the prayers we mumbled in church — and even those poor benighted wretches, the elves. Not that we’d stowed them in our ships like cargo; they’d come here in our dreams and idle thoughts and memories of childhood faerie stories. We’d brought them with us the way we brought our prejudices, our hatreds and loves and fears.
“Hatreds and fears.” There was a thought. Whilst it was true that several people in town held grudges against me for various largely imaginary infringements of their delicate sensibilities, one Father William Dennis certainly hated me. Indeed, he’d banished me from the premises, me and my ungodly ways.
I told Gordon the salient details. That I had gone to the church that day to inquire after service times, and for my trouble was sneered at, and the courage of my late husband impugned. He had been lost in thought, staring out the windows, perhaps watching for bands of elves by the side of the road. “I say,” he said.
I said, “What about Father William?”
He scratched at his head and frowned. “I hardly think so. If he were any more devout and pious, he’d turn to marble and become one of his precious bloody statues. Besides, I mean, look at him. He’s feeble. He’s old. He’s bitter, of course, about the War, and being stuck in a tiny country town, but he’s angry with his superiors, the bishops and archbishops, the entire ghastly superstructure of the Church itself. I’m sure his grievance with you is nothing so serious as those other matters.”
“I suppose … ”
“Besides, if he was your villain, how could he know anything personal about your father? He’s been in town, what, how long? Longer than you, for a start.”
That was an excellent point. My father’s identity — that I was the daughter of Sir Gustav Templesmith — was known to many in Pelican River, as such matters inevitably are in small towns. But I always considered my personal matters just that, and the circumstances of my father’s and Antony’s deaths, and their lives, for that matter, were not something I had shared with any but those closest to me. “Well, who then?”
Gordon shrugged. “Anybody at all. Every man, woman and child carries the potential for the most horrific violence. You mark my words.”
I had heard him say this before. Though he had been deemed unfit for military service due to back problems and flat feet, Gordon knew about the things that lay in the human heart. I did not agree with this bleak view of our fellow human beings. I believed, when one got right down to the nub of the matter, that we started out innocent and noble — and that the circumstances of our lives caused us to become what we became. We begin as blank slates. Gordon, on the other hand, pointed out cases from the newspaper and from history books which described brutal, unthinkable deeds committed by ordinary, peace-loving people, and even by children.
The huge car swerved; I was flung across at Gordon.
A terrible bumping sensation went through the front wheels, then, a moment later, the two sets of rear wheels.
“Rutherford?”
“God!” he said, working to slow the car to a stop on the side of the road.
“What … what hap …?” Gordon said, as I righted myself. I could still feel that bumping.
We stopped. “Ma’am — are you …?”
“Did we hit something?”
Rutherford looked back at us through the glass. He looked pale, quite unnerved, his dark eyes wide. He started to climb down to the road. I got out. I looked back.
We had hit something.
It lay spread out in the muddy gravel. I gasped, and crossed myself.
Several elves, perhaps nine or ten of them, stood either next to the body or by the side of the road. In the rain, their flimsy clothes, much of it stolen from local clotheslines, clung to their emaciated bodies. There was, almost literally, nothing to them.
They watched us approach, standing quite still, staring with eyes that were all white, but for the tiniest black pinprick pupils, as if even this overcast grey light was far too strong for them. Closer to, one could see suggestions of bones beneath their tissue-thin colourless flesh.
My heart sped. I felt sick. The smell was shocking.
Gordon said, “Is it dead?” He sounded close to tears.
Rutherford went up to the elves standing over the body. There were four children — I assumed they were children, as they were smaller, but I didn’t know — of various ages. Rutherford said, “I am so terribly, terribly sorry. Please, is there anything I can …?”
They stared at him. I could not describe the absence of expression on their alien faces. I could just barely make out the spiral tattoos etched into the peeling skin of their faces. They stared at him, and they stared at us.
Gordon was saying, “Oh God, we hit an elf … ” over and over.
He looked like he would be sick.
The cold rain fell hard.
Two elves — males, I think — scooped up the body. It was hard to watch.
They took the body to the other elves, by the side of the road.
It looked like they wanted to do something, but were waiting for us to leave.
“Look,” I said, “I’m … this is my fault. I shouldn’t have been out in this weather. I … Is there anything I can do, anything?”
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My words fell into a void. I knew they understood me. I knew they understood our feelings of horror and profound regret. I knew they could answer me had they wanted.
I could hear the car’s engine tick.
They stood there, holding the body, staring at us. Staring at me. They knew that the car was mine. They knew it was my fault.
“For God’s sake, speak to us!” I said. “Let us help!”
The body was dissolving in the rain. The rain was even dissolving the rags it had worn. Soon there would be nothing left. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Where did the body go? What happened to it?
Why wouldn’t they let us — let me — help?
“We can’t just stand here in the rain all day!”
But it looked like they could.
Rutherford, weeping silently, turned to me. “What should we do?”
They stood there like trees. They did not even blink. I could not see them breathe.
“Please! Please let us help! Can we take you back to town?” I did not know how we would put them all in the Bentley, but I was willing to try.
Rutherford took a step closer, close enough to touch them. “I am sorry. I didn’t mean to … It was the rain, I couldn’t see … ”
They glanced at him, then resumed staring at me. It seemed to me that the children showed more animation, but I could not say what it was — it could have been happiness; it could have been hatred.
This went on for some time. I don’t know how long. Trying to engage them, to apologise, to try to convey our horror and sadness, but it was hopeless. They wanted to be on their way. That much we understood. I said, at last, “Let’s go, Rutherford. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Come on, mate,” Gordon said to him. Rutherford looked terrible. His hands shook.
We got back aboard the car.
I turned to look back through the rear window. They were still there, part of the fabric of the world, and yet also not part of it, marooned here in this plane of reality, far from home. If anything, I imagined they envied their lost comrade.
Rutherford put the car in gear. We drove off.
I turned again to look.
They were gone.
13
All that afternoon, every time I closed my eyes, even simply to blink, I saw the elves, saw their unearthly faces and pinprick eyes, and felt again that awful series of bumps as the enormous Bentley rode over the elf’s body. I tried to keep busy. Sitting at my desk, the desk I had bought with proceeds from my first novel, Eliza Paine, I stared at the worn keys of the typewriter for a long time. At some point I rolled in some paper. After reading back over the previous three or four pages of Too Many Worlds, I started work. I’d missed too many days with all the panic and intrigue. So I started typing.
I lasted half an hour before giving up for the day. I had no concentration. There was no way to focus on my stricken protagonist and his make-believe troubles when my mind was full of the sight of dead elves dissolving in the rain. I cannot even recall now what happened in those pages.
Pulling out the completed pages without releasing the platen made a loud zipping noise; it startled me to hear it. By the time I quit for the day, I had done eight pages, double-spaced. But it was, as I say, all typing. There was no writing there.
Downstairs, restless, still with no appetite for dinner, I tried to read last week’s issue of the Pelican River Record. It was only a handful of pages, written, printed and distributed by Bill Cox. His mates called him “Blue” because of his receding red hair and freckled skin. The local news was, as ever, quiet. The Pelican River Association of War Veterans was holding public meetings over whether to join the national Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia; opinion seemed divided. Certain kinds of fish were running off certain parts of the local coast. There was a reminder from the local police that it was indeed an offence for stray cattle to roam through the town, and a further offence for said cattle to eat the posted signs pointing this out. That one made me smile. I had only seen roaming cattle on a few occasions. They made quite a mess that had to be cleaned up, but otherwise seemed harmless. A Mr Ronny Fitch fell from the estuary footbridge while on his way back to the Foreshore from the Commercial Hotel, out on the Point. This was the third time this month. There was a supplementary note suggesting it was high time the local Council decided “once and for all” just who was responsible for maintaining that footbridge. The police had caught some crab poachers. Mrs Violet Eglee, eighty-six, reported “funny noises” and “goings on” in her front yard last Monday night. Ted “Nobby” Mack was selling his booming fish-canning and export business, due to ill health. In the War he’d been exposed to mustard gas. His lungs had never been right since. It was understood a group of wealthy Perth investors was interested in taking over the business. The Lavelle family’s pet dog, a beagle named Max, had now been missing for four days. A reward of two pounds was offered. An article largely dictated by Pelican River Mayor Fred “Dipper” Trevaney, known throughout town to be “a top bloke,” reported, as always, that the town was “thriving,” and that in the last quarter four new families had moved here (names included) and five new businesses (same), and he urged the townsfolk to give the new arrivals a big Pelican River welcome. I recalled no such urgings when I moved here, nor any mentions in the local paper. On the other hand, the town’s richest farmer, Jack “Nugget” White, who had the biggest sheep station in the entire region, had placed an advertisement in the “Help Wanted” column for a “butler/driver. Decent wages. Two days off per week. Duties to include helping Mrs with grocery shopping and general errands.”
It occurred to me that Rutherford might be tempted by the job offer. I decided to have a quiet word with him, take a sounding. On the back page, where Bill Cox ran colourful coverage of local, national and overseas sport, I learned that the local football team, the Pelican River Pelicans, was poised to “cripple and maim” rival team, the Rockingham Warriors, this Saturday, which would take the Pelicans to a six-game winning streak. The rest of the local competition were said to be feeling “nervous”. And, the weekly chook raffle at the Commercial Hotel had been won by Mayor Dipper Trevaney again, for the eighteenth time this year. Trevaney was quoted as saying, “Crikey, what a turn-up for the books this is! You beauty!” He was then said to have shouted the bar, to general acclaim.
It all read like reports from a far-off land. There was nothing about the haughty rich Englishwoman whose enormously expensive car had run over a poor helpless elf. Not that I expected there to be anything. Most people had never seen an elf, let alone a whole group, and certainly almost no-one would have had any sort of encounter with them, as we had now. They avoided us; we avoided them. There were sometimes signs that you might be in an area occupied by a band of elves: dead or dying trees, failing crops, an absence of wildlife. Sometimes it was simply an overwhelming sense of dread. British anthropologists had, from time to time, attempted to study them, or even approach them, without success. I suspected scientists from outside the historical sphere of influence of the British Empire might do better. The elves were manifestations of everything we British had done wrong, of how we had violated the very Earth itself with our existence. I wondered if other historical empires had had similar shadows following them around the globe in their conquests? Had there been elves of some sort trailing after the Romans? After Alexander the Great? Or was this a manifestation of purely British shame? One could only imagine what the planet must have “felt” about the atrocity of world war raging across its face.
Sitting there on the sofa, not seeing anything, feeling numb, I realised I could hear voices in the kitchen. Rutherford was unburdening himself to Murray and Sally. They were listening, telling him, “It was just an accident. You couldn’t help it. It’s just like when you run over an animal. You didn’t mean to. It’s all right, John, it’s all right. Stiff upper lip, love. You’ll be right.” I could not quite make out what Rutherford was saying; his voice
was muffled; he sounded profoundly distressed. What should I do? Was it proper to provide a shoulder to cry on for a man in one’s employ? I could not imagine anyone in my family showing such compassion for an upset servant in similar circumstances — and that was the perspective I needed. I got up and went to the kitchen. Rutherford and I talked for half an hour. He looked like he appreciated it.
Why was I not crying, as he was? In a way, I felt far too upset for mere crying. The wet gloom of the day had infested my bones.
I wondered how Gordon was managing. If I knew Gordon, he was working extremely hard on his time machine, or on something, at least. That was how he managed. When we had spoken, briefly and just once, about his wife’s death, he told me that in the month following her loss, he designed and built nine new devices, including a scale model of a new sort of locomotive engine, powered by electricity transmitted through the air. I therefore expected, when I next saw Gordon, that his time machine, a bare framework and collections of odd components when last I visited, would be just about ready for a test jaunt.
I telephoned Gordon. The evening switchboard lady, June, hearing my voice, asked, “Mr Duncombe, ma’am?”
“Please, if you would.”
It took a very long time for Gordon to answer. When, at length, he did, he sounded as if he had just woken up. “Mmm …? Ruth? Is that you?” Even though June would have just told him that I was calling. This wasn’t like Gordon.
“Gordon, I was just … are you quite all right?”
There was a long pause. I could hear his slow, heavy breathing. “Mmm. I’m … I’m fine. Just fine. And you, my dear?”
My dear? Gordon didn’t speak like that to me. Concerned, I said, “I thought you might need some company … ”
“No, no, that’s fine, no. I’m fine.”
“Perhaps I’ll just pop over, say hello. I could bring some sort of afternoon tea?”
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