by Thea Astley
Lunt is still chuckling as Freddie Buckmaster heaves his sweating bully-boy way towards them, stopping briefly every yard to pummel or shake other bully-boy paws.
‘Well?’ he asks, arriving on the tail-end of the chuckle and observing this limping stranger with an almost knowledge. ‘What’s the joke, eh? Good night, isn’t it? Wonderful night!’ His enthusiasm is fake-right at this moment as he glares into Lunt’s marvellously open eye. He shakes the firm hand of old Jenner, catches Gracie (‘Gracie, I’d know you after a thousand years!’) by the shoulders and gives her a smacking kiss on the cheek, says let bygones be bygones to young Jenner, and salutes his introduction to Lunt with the briefest nod. He is a practical man, and what cannot help him he refuses to acknowledge.
‘How are you feeling, Mr Lunt?’ he finally asks, driven by curiosity. ‘I heard you and Mr Dorahy had a spot of trouble earlier tonight.’
‘I’m getting too old for rough-house,’ Lunt says. ‘Does my presence alone incite?’ He doesn’t want an answer.
‘We’re a peaceable lot,’ Buckmaster says ambiguously. ‘We’re not after trouble.’
‘Nor am I.’
‘It’s not you. It’s your mate. Why can’t he keep his mouth shut, eh? What’s he got to start stirring things up for?’
‘We all have a destiny,’ Lunt says. He is feeling old and giddy and the stump of his leg throbs.
‘Twaddle!’ the ex-lieutenant says. ‘Where’s Snoggers?’
‘He’s taken Mr Dorahy back to his hotel.’
‘Well, now, has he? What was the trouble? Too much grog?’
‘Too much honesty,’ Lunt replies.
This sharp one goes home. A surly red shows on Fred Buckmaster’s cheeks, exceeding the rouging that liquor and climate have given his skin. He says slowly, ‘I don’t know about that.’
On cue Boyd returns and sticks his head into the circle, one arm lightly slung about his wife’s shoulders. He has a need to touch which no one has ever guessed at.
He says, ‘Know all about what?’
‘Forget it!’ Buckmaster says.
‘You’re not talking about old Tom Dorahy, are you? I’ve put him safely to bed feeling very frail.’ And continues thinking, ‘He’s not the stuff of martyrs but of fanatics.’
‘I don’t understand any of this,’ Gracie complains. Her coyness is being undermined by their intensity which she suspects but fails to digest. ‘Enough of this oblique talk! We’re here to enjoy ourselves. Freddie, tell me all, I insist, all that’s happened to you.’
His confidences will liberate hers which are choking her in their urgency to be freed. Yet she plays the game and waits. Lucy Boyd has gone back for more tea. Someone is offering limp biscuits and sandwiches.
Freddie Buckmaster proffers the sort of information that he hopes will give him absolution. He tells her he has two boys. He tells her of the pub on the Palmer. And finally he swings on Lunt and asks him what he is doing back in the old place after all this time. Lunt regards him speculatively. Buckmaster is not a wise man, Lunt knows, and there is a brutality about him still that makes the older man cautious.
‘Affection,’ he admits finally. ‘I liked the old place. I’m hoping for something. I don’t know what. Now I’m getting on and feel gentler about things it seemed right to return. Just to see.’
Freddie Buckmaster lets out a great guffaw, understanding nothing of what the old man has just said, but discovering some elusive effeminacy in the remarks.
‘You must tell my old man that,’ he says between splutters. ‘You must tell my old man.’
‘He knows.’
Young Buckmaster fails to understand this. He is obsessed with hard facts.
‘But you only live thirty or so miles away. You could have come back before this. For affection!’
‘No,’ Lunt says. ‘I was waiting to be asked. You see, I was driven out.’
Right across the township people are yawning and dragging from beds. In the Sea Rip Hotel Freddie Buckmaster gives one final look at Gracie Tilburn, who is too bloody fat for his taste anyway, and heaves his own porky body into daytime.
As he dresses he marvels how he happened to get here. It was after the reception, he groggily recalls, and after the country women’s supper, and after that his sulky to drive her home, a bit of spooning along the water-front—and then this. Well, he’d achieved it anyway after all these years. Beaten Tim Jenner to first base at last.
Gracie rolls heavily over and looks up. She feels all flesh. Her eyes widen vaguely as she looks at this man dragging on a tie four feet from her bed, and then she remembers. ‘Oh, my God,’ she thinks, and is filled with self-disgust. His gross thighs in shirt-tails appal. She wonders, if he obliterates them with trousers, whether she might be able to deny the whole thing.
‘Darling,’ she lies, thinking of Tim Jenner, ‘what happened last night?’
He swings his coarse face on her and winks.
‘Come off it,’ he says. ‘Come off it! We just had a bit of a get together.’ He finishes with his tie and proceeds to drag on his trousers.
Gracie thinks ‘Thank God’ and smiles at him ravishingly. ‘I wish it hadn’t been you,’ she tells herself. And she goes on smiling at him while thinking of Tim Jenner.
‘Well,’ says this horror leaning over her, ‘I’ll be toddling.’
His reluctant kiss senses some of her own disgust.
‘How long are you down for?’ Gracie asks, feeling an insane need to make small talk.
‘Just for the week,’ he replies, buttoning up. ‘The wife will hold the fort. She can hold anything. Great woman, that. Even toss out the drunks.’
‘Really!’ Gracie yawns again and wishes he would go. ‘Then we’ll see each other again. Maybe tomorrow.’
‘Count on that.’ He is lying also.
Closing the door behind him after blowing one last vulgar smacking kiss, he is jaunty as a dog let out. Almost he cocks one leg and makes such speed down the hotel staircase he misses the breakfast gong by seconds and is out on the front wrapped in innocuousness.
Gracie lies there and in a conglomerate of memories inspects husbands one and two. George becomes Frank in this melting process where she recalls George’s blows and Frank’s greed as one and the same thing. George had been handsome not only for her, and had finally sped absent-mindedly under a dray between one adultery and another. It still hurt to see him, even if only in the mind, alerting like a pointer at any woman who entered the room. But Frank she had simply left and almost forgotten. His monetary stinginess, his management of her funds had made it easy. He had lived off her voice like some huge parasite, and while she sang for both their suppers he had resigned from or lost one job after another, putting his idleness down to her need to have a manager. Gracie’s mouth curls up in amusement at the thought of him on that last day when she had packed a smallish bag and left. He had been out buying himself a new suit and she had simply taken a boat south and stayed with friends. Oh, he had pestered her all right when he discovered her once after a concert; but she left for England, which was safer still since he didn’t have the fare, and though he wrote long pleading letters and short terse ones he had finally given up. ‘There,’ she murmurs in a motherly fashion, burrowing under the sheet. ‘There, there.’
At breakfast she is gay. Some weight has been lifted or curiosity sated. She talks rapidly and richly with Miss Charlton (relaxing morals) and Marge Ellis (rising food prices) and is conscious of a huge benignity as she hurls smiles and words, some of which are caught by Mr Armitage and Mr Romney at the next table. It’s all cosy. All hunkydory. They chat across space informally in this over-big white dining-room.
Mr Dorahy is late coming down.
Constraint devils them when he appears, for by now all know what happened at the hall. But despite his blackened eye, his good-morning and his gentle smile are the same as ever as he unfolds his napkin and peers at the menu.
‘Spot of bother last night?’ asks crass Armitage. He is a pot-belly
and large with nonsense.
‘Only a spot.’ Dorahy smiles again directly into the other man’s eyes.
‘What were you on about, mate?’
Dorahy hesitates. He doesn’t know whether to answer or not. Finally he says, ‘Something that happened here twenty years ago. You must remember.’
‘Bit long ago to rake up, isn’t it?’
‘No.’ He orders poached eggs.
Romney says, ‘It’s too bloody long ago.’ He marmalades his toast savagely. And the savagery is detected.
Dorahy accuses, ‘Then you know to what I’m referring.’
‘If you mean that bloody nonsense down at Mandarana, then yes, I do.’
‘You call it nonsense! Seven people were killed.’
‘Blacks!’ says Romney shortly. He takes a bite of his toast.
‘There were other things. Lunt…’ He stops himself. ‘Jesu Christe,’ he thinks. ‘Why go on?’ He reaches for the butter and spreads himself a piece of toast too.
‘Don’t talk to me about Lunt,’ Romney blurts. He takes a swig of tea and it dribbles. ‘No one but a fool would have held on to that property of his as long as he did. Got out far too late. A mug, he was. Plain mug.’
Dorahy is sick with the spasm of fury that takes him. He puts down his knife and grips hard at the seat of his chair. His fingers are digging wood. He swallows the leapt up words one by one as he tries to gauge the truth of the two faces opposite him. This gristle is too much. He chokes and coughs and the eggs arrive.
The fabric of what passes for his discretion he has ripped apart himself in this cool white room ungeared to fractious debate. He sees other rooms, teaching rooms where he has always exercised a mastery of self, meeting rooms with the Separation League in angry spate and himself cool. Now, cutting brutally into his eggs and watching the yolk spurt out, he is conscious of his sixty-odd years and failure at the end after all. Projects unfinished, projects contemplated but not even begun, rise like iron men to deride. But he would complete this, he now decides. He would have the town recognise its martyr, relegating himself to a serving position without pain, for he has never been of the stuff from which saints are made.
‘If there is one thing,’ he says, his innards constipatedly tight with tension, ‘that Lunt was not is mug. Not mug. He was unlucky from the start, but he never took his spleen out on others. He was generous, do you understand? Generous and forgiving. He could have given his life.’
Armitage shoves his chair back impatiently. ‘You talk a lot of shit!’ he retorts contemptuously. His belly swells with rage as well. Coming all this way to be preached at by some bloody unfrocked nun! A nancy. A bloodless man.
‘Girlie,’ he calls to the waitress, ‘more toast, please.’
‘HANDS UP,’ Dorahy had said, ‘the boys who have not prepared this prose.’
Eight hands were raised.
‘All of you!’ he marvelled. ‘Not one! Well,’ he said sadly, his snaggle teeth exposed in a disillusioned smile, ‘you will have to be punished. Line up!’
He rooted in the corner press and took out a cane which he wiped down with his right hand, lingeringly assessing the shape and the pliancy of it. It was all parody. All burlesque. The boys wore half-grins as comic Dorahy passed down the line of them giving the lightest of sarcastic taps to each outstretched palm.
When he reached young Buckmaster he did not even bother with the tap. Ironically, dismissively, he brushed him to one side with the most offensive of negligent plays of the stick. The boy turned scarlet as the master moved on flicking parodically at the next two outflung hands, and his hate, which had been till then a nebulous affair, crystallised into the stubborn matter that he would bear vengefully through to his middle age.
Dorahy was unaware. Perhaps. Their enmity, though tacit, had long been sensed mutually.
The boys returned to their places and Dorahy, wearily, despairingly, took up his chalk and began scribbling the work upon the board. The grains of it, the choking whiteness of it, saturated his whole being, and the phlegm he coughed anguishedly at the beginning of each day was a purging more of the spirit than the lungs. His hands dusty with it, he wiped drily along the seams of his trousers, slapped till small clouds arose. Looking through the classroom window for a moment while the boys painfully took down his fair copy, he could feel that the whole landscape, right down to the seaward fence, was chalk. He sighed.
He remembers this now, standing uncertainly outside the building where once . . . He debates entry, overcome by the newness of the teaching block, the horrible assurance of small garden plots and shrubs. The room where he had taught is still standing, a warped agglomeration of white-anted timber by the far fence, and he aches and does not ache to enter it once more and taste the flavour of lost baking summer days. Chanting comes from the rooms nearest him. The deadly Gregorian of rote. He pushes half-heartedly at the school gate, wondering how he will introduce himself, and walks slowly, sobered, along the gravel path towards the first of the buildings.
The headmaster is young. He is a mathematician. He lacks humour and poetry. When Dorahy has introduced himself, has explained himself, his stiffness wavers above the mess of time-tables and lesson-notes that form the lyric of his days. He offers a few minutes from his grudging muse and goes out with Dorahy into the hot sun.
‘We use it as a store-room now,’ he says looking at the tottering building towards which they are heading. ‘Old book stock, new supplies, craft material for the boys. But it’s had its day, I’m afraid. The school council recommends that it be pulled down next summer to make way for a new primary room.’
Dorahy wipes sweat from his forehead and gapes at his past. The headmaster unlocks the padlock and draws back the bolt and, as he pushes open the splintered door, a staleness of air and memory takes Dorahy by the throat. He walks past the dull young rules man at his side and stands, more or less, as packing-cases allow, in the approximate geography of the dream, gazing out the cobwebby window to the smartness of acalypha beds along the fence-line.
‘It was here,’ he says, ‘just here. I taught them Livy. A little Wordsworth. It seems so long ago. None of them particularly apt, you know, but I hoped it might have given them something.’
‘Hardly practical,’ the brash young headmaster says with a laugh, ‘for boys in a place like this.’
‘The sentimental old fool,’ he is thinking. ‘Taking up my morning.’ He fidgets impatiently.
Dorahy does not hear him. He is disturbed to the point of tears by it all, by the deadly melancholy of fusty textbook piles, the worn bladders of footballs, the stacks of broken unusable desks.
‘Just here,’ he repeats, recalling young Jenner’s scrubbed morning face and the middle-aged sobriety of him now. And he says, smiling directly into the headmaster’s eyes, ‘Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, Labuntur anni…’
‘Of course, of course,’ the younger man mouths, not understanding. And ‘Well?’ he says questioningly, giving a half-turn towards the door.
‘Could you leave me here? Just a few minutes?’ Dorahy asks. ‘I’d like to spend a little time. On my own,’ he adds.
The headmaster is appalled. He fears sentiment and mentally pig-roots like a nervous horse.
‘I’m afraid not,’ he replies. He dangles his key meaningfully, giving the hint, and smiles. There is a boy he has to punish, he remembers.
Opening the door wide so that it cannot be ignored, he waits for the older man who is still trapped in the pity of the past. Those firm, eager or reluctant faces, he recalls, the marrow of my mornings.
Young Jenner grins at him fleetingly and says, ‘It’s true, sir. You did add up,’ while Freddie Buckmaster scowls sulkily by the window. ‘Thank you, young Jenner,’ he says, and the mathematician, hearing his mumbles, squirms with shame for the old dodderer.
‘There’s nothing more you’d like to see?’ he asks hopefully as they walk back once more to the main building.
‘No. No. Thank you,’ Dorahy says.
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The building has disowned him, he knows, the very ground that knew his feet. The whole of the morning is a plague of sunlight that threatens to beat him senseless.
‘It’s a mistake to come back,’ he admits and points ambiguously to his blackened eye about which the unimaginative other had not even wondered.
Their hands meet in the most counterfeit of gestures and Dorahy, turning his back on it all, goes, almost at a stumble, into the decorous, unfeeling street.
On that fourth day Snoggers Boyd calls round at the Sea Rip Hotel.
He finds Dorahy once again mooning along the waterfront, a book in his hand. Some kind of tic obsesses his right eye as if it were a coefficient of anger. The blue of sky and water is violently peaceful and the island floating above the horizon looks like a close nirvana—except for the sun, which is a blistering outrage of heat.
They walk along the sandy front together to a seat under a couple of bunched palms.
‘I have another favour to ask.’ Dorahy looks humble and his blackened eye makes his face a comic mask.
‘Ah, yes,’ Boyd says, dreading. ‘What is it?’
‘I’ve been doing some hard thinking. No. I haven’t given up. Quite the reverse, in fact. I’d like you to publish an article for me.’
Boyd takes quite a time filling his pipe. ‘What about?’ he asks, then, ‘No. Don’t tell me. I can guess.’
Dorahy smiles. ‘The bile is low this morning. But only quiescent because of this—this idea. You could do it, you know. You’re running that series called “After Twenty Years” with all those low-keyed profiles of prominent figures. Fair enough, isn’t it, to include one on Lunt? It could be the most exciting of the lot. “Why I Left Town”, by a victim.’ Dorahy finds bitterness has an actual taste.
‘That’s up to Lunt, surely.’
‘Not really. It’s part of local history. You know it is.’
Boyd draws hard on his pipe. He is no lover of the town’s powers and, as a cool man, has always taken an onlooker’s part. He has only to report, and he has always been canny enough to report without bias. He knows well which side his bread is buttered. Yet something about the suggestion—after all he is Dorahy’s age—stirs unused wings. He sees headlines—‘A Little Incident at the Leap’, ‘Town Born in Violence’. All the trashy artifices of his employment could, with an almost amusing virulence, tear down the pretensions of Buckmaster and Sweetman. The interesting thing about it, he reflects, is that the whole town knew at the time but was never prepared to make outright challenges. It let things seep below the surface until they were finally covered with all the glosses of time.
