1915

by Roger McDonald

  “I love it here,” said Frances, conscious of using the same phrase every time she came. She believed Sydney Harbour to be a concentration of desirable — or bearable — Australianness: grand houses among gum trees, the glittering antipodean sunlight on desperately deep green water, all within sight of art galleries, theatres, institutes of music, literature, and languages. Here the freight of Europe was unloaded and displayed for the first time: hats and gowns, books, plays, dances, songs. And ideas. Diana, who was “all mind” no longer, had first interested her in talking about imponderables.

  “Di,” she heard herself saying, “aren’t we fools?”

  “Speak for yourself.” Diana the botanist scrutinized a tuft of banksia blossom.

  “Do you think we’re just meant for men?”

  “In natural respects, yes. Or them for us.” Down corkscrewed the blossom.

  “What a complication other people are.”

  “Oh, yes.” Now Diana sighed, seeing her multitude of eagerly pursued scientific rules float into society where they lost their power. In this resided a bitter magic. She cursed the way underlying rules were no help in dealing with the phenomena they sprang from.

  “I think Harry likes Mum.”

  “It’s plain.”

  “How pathetic. He’s reached the age, Mum says, when people feel sorry for a man.”

  “He’s kind of sapless.” They giggled, and glanced back through the park because church was well and truly over.

  “Boccaccio! Boccaccio!” sang Frances, alluding to the Mosman Musical Society’s production, in which Harry had played a stockinged, floppy-hatted, rather wet Leonetto, despite his muscular torso.

  “Nulli Secundus!” boomed Diana, the motto of the Alexander School of Arms and Physical Culture where Harry “toned up”. They had rendezvoused with him at its door the night of The Devil’s Disciple, Harry rougered from a vapour bath, and he had spoken of the atmosphere of “airy persiflage” with which his “fellow-scholars of Hercules” tackled their tasks. Frances had tripped along behind holding her nose, while her mother and Diana flanked and flattered him.

  Walking back to the house Frances suddenly thought of Walter Gilchrist. Diana knew all about Billy and the attempted kiss, she’d known right from the start of term; and she knew about Walter too. “He’s respectful,” Frances had said, “but dull.”

  “Oh gosh,” now in the middle of everything Frances jerked to a stop and bit her fingers. “He was there!”

  “Where? Who?”

  “Walter Gilchrist was at the play.” She saw again the frizzy-headed youth who had twice turned and stared at her during the brief interval before the last act.

  “Remember?”

  “Me? Why should I?”

  Frances again reviewed the train trip. He could have been — was! — handsome. On the train he had seemed boyish, angular, unformed. But his stare at the theatre really had cut through her. She had felt it as the steely investigation of a stranger. No words, no polite concessions: a cut so deep that only now, twelve hours later, did it arrive on her nerves.

  “Piffle,” said Diana at the gate.

  Frances creaked the hinges back and forth. “Mrs Stinson wanted me to like him.”

  “Is that important?” Diana disliked Mrs Stinson. The old lady had too much time for Frances. “Franny, you blow so hot and cold I can’t keep up.”

  “Here’s the remarkable pair!” beamed Harry as Frances and Diana burst through the door. The girls quizzed him, why “remarkable”? one on either side, elbows on table, faces mockingly up-close, while Mrs Reilly dispensed cold meat and tomatoes, relish, bread, butter, and thick-lipped teacups. She bubbled, a thin woman, brown, still with her daughter’s very black hair: “Yes Harry, you’ll have to tell them.”

  “Why, you’ll take on anyone, gods and kings.” For a moment his chair rocked backwards as he withdrew from their gaze.

  “Tell us about your God, Harry.”

  “Frances,” warned her mother from the pantry, but without force.

  “Describe him,” urged Diana.

  “How could I? He’s more, you know, everywhere.”

  “Like the wind? You’re one of us!”

  “A pantheist,” said Diana.

  “If I could put my finger on it I’d tell you.”

  “Has he ever spoken to you?”

  “Or you to him?”

  Diana giggled, spraying flecks of pink tomato on her white plate.

  Mrs Reilly cleared her throat. “Harry’s God lives in England, eh Harry?” She meant to be kind.

  “Now that’s unfair.” He pointed his knife, not miffed but welcoming mature debate. “I’ve a great admiration for the English. Which of us here isn’t scrubbed by John Bull’s brush, heh?”

  “We’re Irish,” Frances asserted, choosing her father’s side of the family.

  “We’re — Italian!” announced Diana, choosing her great-grandfather’s.

  “Seriously,” asked Frances after a break. “Why is England superior?” She believed it herself, everyone did, but resented Harry’s bumbling arguments.

  “You ask me?” Now, excitedly, the pointing knife swung in his own direction. Butter smeared his waistcoat. “Without England, all of this” — he indicated the harbour which glittered through three of six windows — “might be French or German or Chinese!”

  During the baked custard Harry suddenly stopped eating. “You girls don’t like me, do you.” He held up a hand against their protests, “No” — folding his napkin, “Mrs Reilly” — scraping his chair and stiffly bowing, “I’d better be off, what-ho?” — making a last brave exit which Mrs Reilly pursued.

  They were ages at the gate. When Mrs Reilly came back she sat the girls down.

  “The world is full of Harrys. He means well, but you can’t expect him to be — intellectual.”

  Her choice of word flattered them.

  “What can’t stand must give way.” Frances used Diana’s phrase (from Evolution), though Diana wouldn’t have dared it herself, not at the moment.

  “No —” Diana wanted peace. She stirred the pages of an encyclopaedia, head down.

  “He’s mushy as wet bread.”

  “That’s Franny’s cruel streak,” said her mother, dealing coolly with a fact.

  Standing with her back to the room Frances looked at the harbour; Diana sat stranded between the forces of loyalty and those of politeness; Mrs Reilly, after her pronouncement, toyed with objects in the room — examined a painted glass vase, straightened a picture, plumped cushions. Then she raised the heavy shell of the piano lid and pounded (to Diana’s ears) a set of heavy scales. “Schubert,” she smiled. At first the notes seemed of the same length, firmness, colour, but they altered as they ascended, reaching a point where the lunch and its aftermath were taken care of — shaved flat, shaped anew, and distributed to the floor, the walls, the ceilings of a house made over again, bearing no trace of dissension.

  Hearing her mother play reconciled Frances to their differences. One mother retreated, the cloudy one, another advanced, the beautiful one: clear as her vases. The familiar Schubert impromptus did this, with their hesitations, their rollicking advances. And then the way Mum started again, Schubert started again — art started again! — swirling the tiny coloured pieces of the world’s vast jigsaw-puzzle into their correct positions. A cloud here, there the churned wake of a ferry — but soon the notes alone inhabited Frances’s head and she stopped thinking. She bobbed on a phrase, then stroked elatedly up harbour-reaches of sound to a place where emotion needed no object to fix on, but simply was.

  At four thirty Amos Hart came, a man more to their taste: solid as cedar, and intelligent under his uncomplicated manner. Monday being a holiday Diana was to stay on. Music had transformed their inner clashes, and seemed effective on the world as well: the late afternoon glowed deep as a domed jelly, now with lime and lemon, later with raspberry and the sunken port wine colours of evening.

  Amos was a traveller f
or a brewery, and had just come from Forbes where Pat Reilly had entertained him.

  “How was the menu?” asked Frances, who was able to conjure the mood of the kitchen, the shape of a day at the Albion, from the conjunction of entrée and main course, main course and pudding, pudding and its accompanying sauce.

  “As good as ever, but Mavis,” said Amos, “is not so good.”

  “Her heart,” Frances whispered to Diana, who had heard countless stories of the Albion’s saintly cook.

  “Now here’s the worst news about her, “not the heart, but her old man. He just can’t get work, and it’s killing him. Mavis has to find for all six kids and she won’t take a scrap from the hotel unless Pat forces it on her.”

  “He’d have to,” Frances agreed. She loved Mavis, the warm slab of her body shuffling round the kitchen in slippers which she wrapped in newspaper and tucked beside the stove ready for the next day, the pink leather of her cheeks — above all Frances loved her good will, her unwillingness to be drawn, her slow refusal to be unkind — even when pecked. You couldn’t argue with Mavis, or even talk to her much. But the kitchen would be cold and practical without her: the objects there took on warmth, the scrubbed wooden handles she gripped, her particular care with knives, her chair and fraying cushion. Mavis counted, not to millions, but to her flock of children and her unlucky husband alone. Amos had seen the husband on the river road, axe on shoulder, a dray of shingles grating along behind. Mavis counted to the hotel too, but not momentously. Outside her family the world dived into darkness. Were the true saints those who never would be? No-one ever saw Mavis coming to work at five in the morning through frost leaving a hot breakfast at home for her family, few even saw her at nine at night heading back, a boulder of a woman in a man’s overcoat. Frances had caught her during her siesta on the daybed off the storeroom, panting like a dog at the end of a chase, and talked to her there. And it seemed that Mavis alone held the secret of goodness, closing her fingers around Frances’s unblemished wrist, gripping it for the blunt duration of a breath, saying, “Dear, don’t you never think I’m unhappy.” That was the only thing that ever passed between them, except for kitchen talk. Her burden showed up her goodness, and she treasured it, otherwise there would have been no test; and she thanked Frances with those few words for her recognition of the virtue that floweres in rough places. Frances needed her own test — longed for it — but it would occur a thousand miles from Mavis’s. It would have colour, romance, display, those things for sure. Certainly no silence. Stubbornness? But for setting-out, not for digging-in. Kindness? Now Frances reached difficult ground.

  She looked at her mother, at Diana, at the solid shape of Amos Hart as he talked. They don’t realize how worthless I am, she thought, these people who love me. Yet there was no self-condemnation in this feeling of worthlessness. It was a practical inadequacy — a mark of the distance ahead. Under everything Frances argued her way towards an outcome in which she would have pride. And the world — it must! — would spin its head around to take a look.

  5

  Shadows

  Examinations were over: Walter had taken his last tram ride from school. In the luggage room at Central station, dumping his bags, he thought of a momentous act to suit his circumstances — a lightning trip to Cremorne Point to say hello to Frances Reilly. He had two hours to kill, why not? But he bought a pie and a cup of tea and leaned on the counter, numbly alone, denying the warming impulse to go. By the time he finished he had reduced the thought by ridicule. Months ago at the theatre she had ignored him. He did not exist.

  On arrival that night he had nervously scanned the audience, knowing she would be there, but then the flute and drum began, the lights dipped, and the curtain split open: and Walter had gasped (as Buck the English master said he would) at those walls of pastel brick, the arbour of velvet roses, and stiff clouds floating across a fabric sky. The stage world was soft as a cushion: people when they sneaked on were gentle, their feet made no noise — only a whisper now and then, and a timbery thud when they leapt: the land of Illyria had been all female, and it instructed him.

  Then, in the brief interval before Act Five, Walter saw her. He’d been looking for a St Catherine’s uniform — but she wore blue velvet, looking somehow sunken and younger than he’d remembered. He stared across twelve rows and their gazes linked. He tried again after half a minute and by God she must have seen! Buck elbowed him, so he stopped, thankful for the fading lights and the stir of programmes. Darkness dissolved his alarm that hundreds of faces had seen him turn, and must have whispered to their companions about his predicament.

  When he looked again, at the end, she had gone.

  The Sunday after the play he had decided to write the promised letter to Billy. He told him everything, filling three pages with a blunt confession. But long before the end he knew the letter was not for posting. Still, he wrote furiously for his own benefit. How had it helped? It was like scratching at hives. During prep he’d smoothed the letter out, then screwed it up, compacting it like a stone, and thrust it deep in a pocket. It would never have done for anyone to find it, this erotic concentration, there in the senior’s room or anywhere. After the letter he’d attempted calculus — hopeless — and opened Guerber’s Myths for history revision, then flung it closed, but wait, there (he cut back to the page that caught his eye): “Diomedes, King of Thrace, a cruel and eccentric prince, was wont to feed his horses upon human flesh. The Eighth Labour of Herakles was to obtain and bring to Eurystheus these famous though fierce animals. This he accomplished …” Walter’s mind stuck on the strange words, now momentarily lucid, spoken by Mr Fox at the Parkes Show: “From Eurystheus I come.” He took out the letter and unwrinkled it.

  But suddenly the letter’s heat had gone. Walter’s words were the scratch-marks of prodigal emotions lying in the shadow of something greater. Out in the darkness Mr Fox went about his burdensome task. For a moment Walter glimpsed the pain of a man for whom even a light remark demanded courage: he seemed bent over, with a wedge of the curved earth on his back, in a search for the key to something the rest of them — Walter, Billy, the town — already had in their keeping. The puzzle led further on, though its clues were carried in things as ordinary as horses and horsemen.

  That night Walter had written to Billy after all:

  Sunday

  29th September 1913

  Dear Billy,

  You asked me to write so here goes. Report: Regret to inform that young lady in question not overly conversational. In reference to your stay at Albion Hotel I would say doubtful if young lady’s view and yours match. Exchange limited by presence in carriage of ancient female and night passed uneventfully.

  Better luck next time round.

  Sincerely in friendship &

  anticipation of good times soon,

  Your spy,

  Wal.

  Billy’s reply shot back:

  W’day October the second ’13

  Dear Wal,

  Thanks for your trouble I smiled to read it. Why worry thats life. Country here-abouts green as can be.

  Until your return.

  Sincerely,

  Wm.

  After Walter’s all night train trip his father handed him the reins of the sulky and asked him to drive his mother home while he set off separately in a wagon loaded with twine, poison, and grease-clotted harvester parts. Down past the racecourse Walter gave the horse its head and ya-hooed until his mother objected, quietening him with news of district “developments”, reddening enthusiastically over the Bindogundra New Year Dance (he was expected), then describing a missionary meeting as she probed uncertainly towards a change of subject: Billy’s mother was in hospital with something serious. Billy — he’d been found drunk in a horse-trough in October — now had himself well in hand for the harvest, and Mr Mackenzie had been at church every week since Elsie’s illness. (What was wrong with her?). Oh yes you’ll be interested to hear that Mrs Scott at Cookamidgera has married one
of her late husband’s brothers.

  When Walter persisted she told him: a cancer.

  They were on a side-track because of the washaway at Cobblestone Creek. From here, half a mile off-centre, the familiar countryside looked strange, like somebody else’s. He missed none of the landmarks he knew — the six white ringbarked trees, the decayed cottage where rabbiters camped, the thirty-foot dip they called “the plate” where the soil changed and their wheat paddocks began — but farther off the suddenly — revealed distant view was altogether new. Where had the red gash in the hills come from? That lone pine standing above the rest, he’d never before seen it. And whose house was that, lying like a bent nail under the blue-hazed ridges?

  “Ours,” said his mother.

  The imminence of death, Billy’s mother’s death, distorted his apprehension of familiar places and things.

  Later, eating lunch without much appetite, Walter heard his mother say, “Elsie doesn’t have long. A month at best.” She performed plain tasks as she spoke: but the bread board, thought Walter, the cold mutton and the tea caddie would be remarkable to Mrs Mackenzie now.

  That afternoon Walter wandered for miles around the wheat, skirting the edges then plunging in. The harvest would soon bear it away, this stalk-town of heat and dust and pale light, but for the moment it was endless. On all fours no-one could tell where he was, except the quail that skimmed between glassy stems and disappeared, except the nesting rabbits, the mice, the worms in the dry ground, the sparrowhawk twitching overhead. Emerging under the box tree at the centre of the paddock he rested in its unrelieving iron shade, where in a week or two waterbags would hang dripping from branches. With his hat on his knees Walter was itchy from the straw, messing his hair as he scratched, still unsurprised that at nineteen he should be engrossed in a game that had absorbed him at ten. Someone else might have said that the paddock mur mured in the heat, but having crawled under its roof Walter heard each click and hiss and screech separately. The house was out of sight along with fences and outbuildings. Wheat alone dropped away in all directions: and he saw himself at an elevated point at the top of a ripening world. Soon the life of the paddock would go down before the blades of the harvester: then it would rise again. Here at least there was a pattern to hold to. Fear, which in the city was abstract and confusing and could conjure brick walls only, had ground to contend with in the bush, and on the ground life. It was good that Mrs Mackenzie would be able to see all that if she looked out the hospital window.