A Kindness Cup

by Thea Astley

  To bring them up again now would—what?

  Despite himself he starts to chuckle. ‘We could run pictures as well,’ he says. ‘Freddie Buckmaster with caption “Vigilante Settles Down” or Barney Sweetman as the avenging power!’

  Dorahy says quietly, ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, my God, my dear Tom. It’s impossible. The laws of libel for one thing. The election for another. You don’t seem to realise the voters don’t want to be jolted. They’re happy with things as they are. Change is a threat, a worry. They’d resent me for it.’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  ‘The laws of libel matter.’

  ‘You could get around that. Do it without names—except for Lunt’s. After all, you were there with me. We came in on the end of things.’

  Boyd remembers the heat, the body, the high rock but can only protest, ‘In God’s name what good will all this serve?’

  ‘It will ease my itch.’

  ‘Your itch? What a bloody fake philanthropist are you! I suspect you don’t really give tuppence for Lunt. It’s a personal vendetta on Buckmaster and his mob.’

  Dorahy looks away from the other man across the water. He knows him to be right and admits, ‘You’re partly correct, you know. I confess. Mea culpa. But I do give more than tuppence for Charlie. Truly. His name has been shut out of the town as though he were a public sinner. Is that fair? Is it fair to force a man to make himself a hermit just to save the faces of others? Because that is what has happened.’

  ‘I know. I know all this. And it might be interesting to rock the boat at that.’ He keeps toying with the idea.

  ‘You’ve never rocked the boat.’

  ‘True. But if I were to—I say if—I wouldn’t be doing it for you. I don’t much like being—having been—a yes-man all these years. You grind my nose in it.’

  ‘Save your soul,’ Dorahy urges eagerly. ‘Go against the grain.’

  Boyd is pensive. He knocks out his pipe on the heel of his shoe.

  ‘I’m on the point of retirement,’ he says, ‘after a blameless thirty years. There’s nothing more they can do to me. We’ve thought of going south in another year or so.’ He is arguing aloud with himself with Dorahy straining for his predicate.

  ‘Then you’ll do it,’ he demands rather prematurely. The world is a giddy blue.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ Boyd says. ‘That’s all I promise you, but I promise you that.’

  LOST BETWEEN voyages in his own port, Snoggers sits, green eye-shaded, pencil at the ready, his inner man torn between doing and not-doing, between the validity of what Dorahy had demanded and the folly of it, the senselessness perhaps.

  He’d kept a column and a half blank for the last of his series and wanted, insipidly, to do the right thing by everybody. Lucy with her calm and candour had urged him. ‘Do it,’ she had said. ‘Make it your final testament.’ Which is what it would be, he muses, with Buckmaster’s re-election coming up.

  Perhaps Lucy is still in love with Lunt. He wonders about this, staring idly at the calendar facing him on the far wall, and writes a line or two, transposes its high-pitched winge down a third and re-reads. Balderdash! Slop! A minor irritant only unless he takes the bull by its ionic horns and slams home with all his power. Significance. That is the word. How tie in so that the significance of what he is doing with what he has already done has a total qualitative force like a battering ram’s?

  Ram all right, he recalls, grinning, thinking of Sweetman’s amorous but tangential approaches to Lucy one long-forgotten Christmas when Sweetman had drunkenly seemed all hands and phallus. She had laughed at him with such genuine amusement it still hurt to envision Sweetman’s crumpled foolish mask, the watery pathos of his myopic eyes.

  Munching his morning-tea biscuit Boyd tries again.

  His thick tongue pursues crumbs in teeth inlets and something begins to ache sharply and persistently—soul? tooth? Glancing out the office window, he takes solace from the hachured sky beyond the palm. The evident blue seems infinite, is so; and as he writes again the words wrenched out of amusement and pain come more easily. Comfortably he has the sense of the world itself being unreal, and that makes what he is doing easier. And without venom, he jubilates, decoding fluidly and reasonably from memories he had thought long lost. Reasonably, he reassures himself. It must move reasonably. And he has another biscuit that he bites absent-mindedly without realising he is eating at all.

  His mind keeps browsing among other pastures of the last two decades. That first ten years when he brought out the weekly broadsheet single-handed; the second when it became a daily and he had one man assist him with the press while he did all the reporting, writing, editing on his own. He has a backstop now and a cadet, but he is even more tired and is looking forward to the limbo of retirement.

  Shaking himself into the present, he is, getting up restless from his chair, scratching around and coming back to re-read what he has written. Words come readily to Boyd—and that is his problem—to prevent that free flow from becoming merely the banal or the trite. He scores out a phrase or two and reads again, a little smile curling his mouth. It is difficult not to make Lunt look like the sacrificial lamb.

  Mid-morning knocks on his sunny door bringing the head of Dorahy peering round. It is the fifth day and he is avoiding like the plague the hideous brouhaha of a grand picnic luncheon at the show-ground. Everyone seems to have gone while he is sticking it solitarily out for the week, enduring Romney and Armitage with their breakfast and dinner-time grunts. He is still a misfit and wears his blackened eye like a badge, while the town reinforces his Ishmael qualities after twenty years, stresses his unpalatability.

  ‘Well then,’ he says to Boyd, ‘a good morning to you. Am I disturbing anything?’

  ‘Nothing much.’ Boyd has decided not to tell Dorahy yet of his article. He slips the papers under a blotter. ‘Just routine stuff. Have a seat.’

  Dorahy pulls out the chair facing him. There are no arrière-pensées on the squarish face confronting him, no deviousness in the eye.

  ‘It must be all in the heart,’ he says, concluding his thoughts aloud.

  ‘What is?’ Boyd is transparently curious.

  ‘Nothing,’ Dorahy hesitates. ‘Have you given any more thought to what I asked?’

  ‘I have,’ Boyd says.

  ‘And are you going ahead?’

  ‘I haven’t decided.’

  ‘But there isn’t much time, man!’ Dorahy’s heart suddenly plunges into a panic beating. ‘Half the week’s over.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ve given it thought, Tom. Quite a lot of thought. But let me do things my own way, will you?’

  ‘It’s always ultimately been the thinkers or the writers who get things done,’ Dorahy says petulantly. ‘Men of violence hardly ever score.

  ‘True.’

  ‘And again well?’

  ‘Look,’ Boyd cries impatiently, resenting his conversion, ‘leave it will you? I’m still thinking about it. And by the way, Lucy has asked you for dinner tonight. Just a few people, the Jenners, Gracie. Lunt is staying over till the end of the week.’

  ‘It will be pleasant,’ Dorahy says, ‘not to watch Romney slopping his mess of pottage. Thank you. And don’t come for me. I’ll walk over.’

  Outside the office of the Gazette, the streets are flush with visitors who can be recognised by their curiosity and a happiness that comes from living there no longer, Dorahy ponders cynically as he steps along the pavement with them. Here and there—the face on the coin—he recognises and waves or occasionally pauses to go through the same questions and greetings, explain away his eye and say in chorus How long for? Since when? Oh, marvellous, marvellous to see you, Hasn’t changed much has she, the old town? and he cannot bear this Calvary.

  He returns to the tea-room he first visited, hoping to find the girl there who at last smiled. She’s still washing down the bar counter, but she knows him now and say
s, ‘Well, how’s it going?’

  Dorahy gives her his gappy smile and says, ‘I’m afraid not too well.’

  She is sympathetic. ‘That’s the trouble, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Things are never so good when you see them again.’

  There is a raw wisdom about her.

  ‘You’re so right,’ he says. ‘Nothing has changed really. I mean the people who were still here when I left so long ago. I had hoped for—well, something. A gentleness perhaps. Or richer thinking. Or penitence.’

  He is almost talking to himself and the girl says, ‘It’s tea you like, isn’t it? I’ll get you some.’

  This time there are no apparitions of the spirit. Young Jenner does not emerge to counsel. Perhaps, reasons Dorahy, the present reality submerges memory. He sees young Jenner now as the man he has become, much of the eagerness rubbed off him so that he appears in the garb of all his thirty-six years merely as sober and sensible. Dorahy sighs for it, and his sigh is interrupted by the arrival of tea.

  Facing the door from one of the rickety tables, he sips and watches the street. The smallish palms down the centre of the road throw blue shadows and it is across one of these patches that he sees the older Buckmaster stride, ripping apart morning. Dorahy wishes himself invisible but the other has spotted him and comes to the doorway of the café.

  Yes. He knows them all. Booms to the girl and pockets her good-morning as his right. Exploding what little peace there was about Dorahy, he draws up an uninvited chair.

  ‘I thought you might have gone by now,’ he offers tactlessly. ‘Seen all you wanted to.’

  ‘You’re using the wrong verb,’ sour Dorahy says. ‘Done, not seen.’

  He regrets his spleen. It only serves to alert.

  Buckmaster is chewing this over.

  ‘Why don’t you go back?’ he asks, genuinely curious. ‘That or fall in with the spirit of it, eh? Why I’ve just left the happiest crowd I’ve seen in years out at the showground. Massive picnic. Ring events. Side shows. The lot. They love it and they’re loving each other.’ He presents himself reasonably, his large wine-stained face seeking sense for the moment.

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘But that’s over, a long time ago. God, you make it all repetitious. Can’t you see that? Not even Lunt wants it. You’re trying to make him something he rejects, a figure of pity twenty years too late. No man wants that.’

  ‘I don’t see him as a figure of pity. Nor myself. But I do see you and Sweetman as figures of violence.’

  Buckmaster’s complexion deepens. ‘Girlie,’ he calls, ‘bring us some more tea, will you?

  ‘Look,’ he says, turning a curiously worn countenance on Dorahy, ‘let’s talk this out, man to man. There are things I regret. Naturally. Every man has those. But I—all of us—have been trying to live those moments down. No one’s proud of them. They just happened in a natural course of events. It’s part of history.’

  ‘History has two faces.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean your view may not necessarily be the right view. There’s another side to it. I want the other side to be seen.’

  ‘After all this time you still believe that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Buckmaster gulps at his tea. ‘Then there’s nothing I can say that will bring you to your senses.’

  ‘I’m very much in them.’

  Buckmaster says gently, ‘You’re not, you know.’

  This seems to bring a temporary peace between them. Both of them smoke in silence; but it is a false peace and Dorahy is the one who cracks.

  He says, ‘There’s not much time left, is there? For living, I mean.’

  Buckmaster looks up at his fanatic face and there is a total weariness on his own.

  ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to say,’ he says.

  YOUR FULL name is Thomas Wade Dorahy? the magistrate asked.

  Yes.

  And you are teacher in charge of the provisional school at The Taws?

  Yes.

  And how long have you held this position?

  Three years.

  Have you been, the magistrate asked, his face keen with the prospect of a new witness, a member of the so-called Separation League?

  I have.

  And for how long?

  Two years.

  Would you consider two years, Mr Sheridan pursued, a long enough period in which to know the other members of the league?

  I thought we were here to discuss—

  In good time, Mr Dorahy, the magistrate said. I am asking you questions that may have pertinence. Please answer the question.

  Yes, I would, Mr Dorahy said. He was inclined to truculence.

  And did you consider that your membership of this group required certain loyalties from you?

  Mr Dorahy hesitated. It would depend on the nature of the matter.

  The nature?

  Yes. Whether the pursuits on which the league was engaged were likely to conflict with conscience.

  I see. Mr Sheridan took a long look at the dour string of a fellow. And was there ever such an occasion—where there was a conflict of conscience?

  Yes.

  I take it you are referring to incidents on the twenty-fourth of June at Mount Mandarana?

  I am.

  Were you in fact a member of the reprisal team?

  No.

  Then you admit you would not have complete knowledge of the actual events of that day?

  Mr Dorahy squeezed his hands tightly together. I saw enough.

  That is not quite the same thing, you agree?

  Mr Dorahy was silent.

  Well, Mr Sheridan asked more loudly, do you agree?

  I suppose so.

  What actual events did you witness on that day, Mr Dorahy? Tell us in your own words.

  Mr Dorahy cleared his throat. He could feel a trembling beginning.

  On that morning on which I suspected there might be some active reprisal against the Lindeman tribe, we rode north to Mandarana to see if we could prevent what we imagined might happen.

  We?

  Mr Jenner, his son and myself.

  Go on.

  We came round by the western base of the mountain in time to see Mr Boyd who had been a member of the party bending over a dead lubra.

  And who was this?

  A young woman called Kowaha.

  You knew her? Mr Sheridan asked with horrible interest.

  Yes. I had given her food on a number of occasions.

  And for what reason?

  None—except that she asked. Mr Dorahy went red with indignation at the implication.

  And how had this lubra come to die, do you think?

  She appeared to have fallen from the cliff. She had her baby with her.

  And was the baby alive?

  It was.

  Would you imagine, Mr Dorahy, Mr Sheridan asked playing a small five-finger exercise on the edge of his desk, that the gin might have been helped to her death? Pushed say?

  I don’t know.

  But you must have some idea. You say you know these men well enough after two years to assess a situation.

  You are leading me, Dorahy protested. She was morally pushed, that’s all I can say.

  Ah! Then you admit you have no grounds for accusation of any violence at all against the members of the Separation League?

  No. That’s not true.

  In that case how many dead did you see?

  Only one.

  The woman?

  Yes.

  Then you had no knowledge of what had actually occurred on the peak of Mandarana?

  No. Yes. What I heard. Mr Dorahy was beginning to babble. You forget I found Lunt. Found him a week after these events. There was that as well. Violence like that. Oh, my God!

  You must control yourself, Mr Dorahy, the magistrate said. He took a slow and careful sip from a glass of water. Mr Lunt has declined to give evidence. Suspicions, opinions are not facts and must not be brought forwar
d in this court.

  This is rubbish, nonsense! Dorahy cried out. You cannot allow justice to miscarry like this.

  Mr Dorahy, the magistrate intervened, his face bright with anger, the court must not be addressed in this way. Unless you can control yourself I must ask you to stand down.

  Control myself! Dorahy cried. Oh, my God! Control! His face began to stream with tears.

  Through the glaze of them he observed young Buckmaster smiling at his father.

  Mr Sheridan was enormously embarrassed. I must ask the witness to stand down, he said.

  BOYD HAS put his press to sleep. ‘It’s done,’ he thinks and looks at a pull of his main story. Read in cold blood, it is far more drastic than he had imagined it would be. ‘Oh God,’ he thinks, ‘but it’s done now! The wolves will be onto my sled while Lucy and I brave it out.’ Sweetman smilingly benign before election time will have his face changed for him. But how will the public react, he wonders. Put their money on the old favourite? Sweetman is out there wearing Buckmaster’s colours and riding hard to win.

  He rubs his palms together a little at this, feels the sweat skate between them, mops his neck and face with his handkerchief and gives a tuneless little whistle. His backstop, Madden, is putting the next day’s issue together in the back room. Nothing can go back now. Only forward. Trumpets blaring, the troops on the move and Lunt, Dorahy and himself facing the blast of them alone on a high hill. Or valley, is it? Gully? Not even the dignity of height.

  ‘I’ve wanted,’ he thinks, ‘to do something like this for years.’

  He slips the pull into an envelope and shoves it in his coat pocket. He roars, ‘Madden!’ and the young rabbit face of his assistant peers gap-mouth round the door.