1915

by Roger McDonald

  “After Mum died I felt low. I ended up at Wellington — d’you know it? — I knew a bloke’s name there and we got on well enough, so I helped him out for a couple of weeks. For money.” He jangled a hidden pocket. “I sold my horse. We was glad to see the last of each other. Nine pound, and the bloke must be hopping.” He laughed with a sniffle, and began eating his pie before the others, then remembered himself and settled his implements quietly.

  “What about your father?” asked Mrs Reilly.

  “He don’t need me, except,” and the bluntness softened, “as a hand.”

  “So you’re going back,” Frances spoke more easily.

  “Tomorrow,” said Billy, who had no such intention.

  He named a “swells’ hotel” in Sussex Street. Mrs Reilly happened to know of it, though she kept the knowledge to herself — it was a cheap and cramped last resort for debris from the bush.

  “It’s not as roomy as your old man’s place but it’s real snug.” He had been on the verge of lying expansively — just as the story of his stay at Wellington would need to be lies, if they wanted more details. Mrs Reilly’s smile was that of an ally — he could get away with murder in her company but he sensed the difference between distorting hard facts and the allowable charm of other whoppers. So he winked, and concluded: “Snug enough for this character.”

  From Frances’s point of view the wink practically froze: it created a multi-folded seal of flesh across Billy’s left eye, held long enough to shift from the quick and commonplace gesture it might have been, to something coarse and vociferous, then plain arrogant. She was astonished to hear her mother laugh and say, “I can imagine!”

  “Do you know Sydney well?” asked Frances.

  “Never been here before.”

  She watched him as he talked on. The roughness and the ignorance and the self-confidence, she saw, were not anything like they would be if Billy had been, say, a character on the stage. No Australian audience would believe in a person who was so originally from the bush, yet subtly in charge of himself — and others. Bert Bailey would have had him all at sea, knocking things over, fuddled with inferiority, chewing with his mouth open, gazing at everyday objects as if they’d dropped from the moon. Instead, his directness unsettled her. When he turned as he did every now and then to shoot her one of those enquiring looks she felt helpless in a way that was quite new. Lately Frances had sensed a third or fourth version of herself waiting deep-down. Billy, she could tell, saw her as a finished person: all her doubts and hesitations were held still. And the person he saw was one of those third- or fourth-level ones. It was a limiting regard, yet she was suddenly caught by it.

  At that moment both she and her mother shared the same feeling — Frances slowly becoming aware, her mother plainly aware of and even encouraging the queer pleasure to be got from Billy’s company.

  After the pudding, while Helen fetched tea, he talked about his mother. His clipped account of the funeral — “a wet day, Mum hated ’em” — gave the occasion a dignity which Walter’s long description had lacked. Plainly Walter had no deep feelings engaged in the burial, whereas Billy spoke as someone who had lost almost everything.

  “I — I —,” he fumbled for his cup, intending to confess without actually detailing the red panic that had sent him flying with only a change of clothes the day after the funeral, when his father had bellowed from the veranda an enraged order for his return — holding his beltless trousers with one hand and asking if Billy knew where his wife had put his gum-boots.

  Then Walter’s name came up, just as the doorbell rang and Helen went to usher the evening’s adult pupil into the music room. “Five minutes!” yelled Mrs Reilly, clutching her third cup of tea impatient for Billy’s opinion.

  “He’s not cut out for the farm.”

  “Oh?” Mrs Reilly let the query rise and fall through three syllables in the manner of someone who all in one receives desired information, ironically underlines it, then urges for more.

  “He’s always wanted to be a geologist. I’ve learnt a bit myself through talking to him. Any old rock,” he said in an aside to the ceiling, “can be millions of years old.”

  Frances breathed, “Truly?”

  “Wally’s always got a book somewhere handy. You can’t do that on a farm, can you?”

  “Geology books,” the daughter supposed.

  “All varieties — even Charles Dickens.”

  “Who hasn’t,” said Mrs Reilly in a tone of contest.

  “Me,” said Billy unabashed.

  Frances fought an impulse to side with such candour.

  “His dad sent him out to look for stragglers one shearing time, but he settled under a tree and read up on bones. He got whipped for that.”

  “Bones?” Mrs Reilly hastily concluded that Walter, and now Billy, was entirely boring.

  “Just about all the animals that ever lived,” Billy instructed her, “are dead.” They waited politely while he sorted out his meaning. “If you want to find out what the world was like before we come on it, how do you?” Again he worked hard at a thought but the thread dangled out of his reach, so Frances grabbed it. She spoke to her mother: “Of all the different species that have ever existed, most are extinct. Extinction” — she quoted Diana — “is the common fate of all species.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re on top of all that stuff,” Billy blurted. After his fair and even admiring account of Walter the outburst came as a surprise. Frances saw his hostility — it snared her together with Walter in the same net — so she stared back.

  “Franny’s got a science-mad friend,” explained Mrs Reilly. She consulted her watch and leapt up. “I mustn’t keep Mr Abbott.” Frances waited for her to say goodbye. But she took Billy’s hand and asked: “Shall you stay for supper?”

  “Too right.”

  Helen started the dishes but Frances took over, leaving Billy to shout at the deaf girl for a minute.

  “Do you live in?”

  “Here.”

  “Where’re you from?”

  “Here.” Kneeling at a cupboard, she looked up at him as though from a deep hole from which she would never emerge.

  “Holy smoke,” Billy threw to Frances. He stared at the maid as he had stared that afternoon at a negro off an American whaler.

  “You’d be surprised how much I hear,” said Helen suddenly, making one of her longer speeches, each word bent back on the previous one, but with a tortured kind of amusement in the tone.

  “Allow me,” Billy said when Helen picked up a tea towel. Helping with the dishes kept him close to Frances, enabling him to move round behind and rake her outline with a hungry gaze. He found himself caught again by the smoulder that had ignited at Forbes, and blazed many times since in his imagination. “This science-mad friend of yours — what’s his name?”

  “Diana.”

  “Ah. What’s she like?”

  “Do people interest you? I wouldn’t have thought so.”

  “Huh.”

  “She’s bright as a button. You ought to meet her.”

  “Is that so?” Pleased with himself, Billy fastidiously dabbed a floral tea towel around the inside of the crockery pie dish.

  “You’ve done that before,” observed Frances.

  “I like to take care.”

  “Diana is man-mad as well as a scientist. Scientiste,” she added experimentally.

  “She sounds dangerous.”

  “Only to herself — she doesn’t know she’s man-mad.”

  “She needs instruction, eh?” That coarseness again.

  “Only in self-protection.”

  “I told Wally you knew your onions,” said Billy complacently.

  “Onions?” Frances turned with dripping hands.

  Billy held a white shield of dinner-plate in rag fists. “You know what I mean — how many beans make five.”

  Frances flicked water from the dishmop in a vertical whipstroke, leaving a spatter of suds down his trousers. “Watch ou
t, Mr — Mr Fat Sheep.” The words spat, but hadn’t Billy meant the phrase as a mark of admiration? This low kind of regard sprang from the physical, and called up a physical response. It could scarcely be answered by a retreat into indignation.

  She went at him again, sloshing the mop on the plate when he parried. “Idiot,” she heard herself giggle. Suddenly close, Billy’s free arm snaked on an inside track to escape the mop, and tickled. Frances squirmed and hunched head down, defending herself like a child by a direct rush into the arms of the attacker. Still laughing, she dropped to one knee as the mop skidded senselessly away, and Billy found himself with his arms right round her.

  The piano’s rising clatter took care of the mother, and the maid had gone off upstairs. Therefore Billy made certain Frances knew what he was about. He urged one hand upwards, penetrating a fold of protecting limbs until it reached her chin: then he followed through for a kiss.

  “No —”

  This denial was a pretence, though forcefully spoken. Frances heard a distant voice — Diana’s — saying, “Go on, go on, you should have,” as if what she was allowing hadn’t happened, and already she was forward in the future regretting a lost chance at discovery.

  Billy’s lips now settled on hers — the cold lips of the surly blockhead who had prowled after her in Forbes. His mouth scraped and tickled, articulating as though in speech, while a disturbing slide of spittle somewhere intruded.

  And yet —

  Her head, being ground by another person’s head smelling of tobacco and cheap soap, was no longer in command. Lack of air created a kind of drunken carelessness. Or was it that Billy’s immoderate manner simply cancelled her out, and she was no-one, merely this fluttering sensation that might have been a heartbeat wildly racing, except that her heart — it registered on her now — boomed separately a dispassionate accompaniment.

  Oh God — a hand of Billy’s was travelling serenely up the inside of a leg, advancing to the very mark where she felt sick and unrestrained at the same time: where her being fluttered. Where victim and captor, if this horrible wrestling was to continue, must unite in complicity.

  She heard Billy snort, snort! And it was over.

  “You pig!” she managed. The thistle-patterned linoleum stretched to infinity as she rolled and then kicked clear. The world sprang back to its correct social shape of four walls and a doorway, of a piano talking once in the firm tones of the teacher, then many times in those of the awkwardly-responding pupil. The hall clock dizzily bonged eight.

  Frances sat at the kitchen table straightening her dress, adjusting a tangled skein of hair, sniffing once and scratching the tip of her nose with a thumbnail. She felt as if she’d swum a creek which turned out to be wider and deeper than she’d imagined. There was also the pall of something murky in the air, not a smell — but a threatened mood oppressive as creek mud all the same.

  “How shameful,” she threw at Billy’s smug shape, which stood with its back to the wash basin regarding her. “How dare you?”

  Billy regarded the flushed and quick-breathing Frances without answering. She was less desirable now than before. His grab for her had been a lustful impulse overlain by something more calculating. By the time his lips touched hers he had been thinking: I’ve beaten Wally good and smart. So the pleasure he should have had from her was all absorbed in this vengeful impulse. Something else had intruded. On feeling the tell-tale acquiescence of Frances’s body — just a second or two of surrender had been enough — he’d been alarmed. His hand curving upwards did so almost unwillingly, and dreaded to reach its destination. The trouble was, having got this impudent girl where he wanted her, where he’d got plenty of other girls before, he baulked. What if she’d just gone on giving in? Hell, what a handful. It was then that he had snorted.

  Still … she was all right. His eyes couldn’t leave her alone.

  “Don’t,” she hissed.

  Frances’s thoughts narrowed to the problem of getting rid of him. He seemed unaware of any offence, having burst in uninvited to gulp a dinner and do what he liked. Was this all that men wanted from her — would ever want? At least Billy had done her the service of sneaking past the dithering and wasteful pretence of other men, but the bleak offering required of her at the end — to be a body — drew a curtain of despair over the future. Yet — there had been that sensational letting go.

  Billy straddled a chair, chin on folded forearms, regarding her as if from the top of a fence.

  “This isn’t a sale.”

  “Huh?”

  She hadn’t expected him to understand. Didn’t want him to. She just wanted him out. So she said with all the sourness she could muster:

  “I suppose you’re quite nice in your way.”

  He didn’t mistake her hostility, but the sharpest edge of her meaning all the same whizzed through the jammed-wide window at his back and disappeared into the harbour night.

  “Thanks,” mumbled Billy in an imitation of gentlemanly lack of complication.

  She spoke more softly: “Please, don’t ever do that again.” She had not intended to be conciliatory, but here she was — bother — almost making up.

  “I promise.”

  She could see he’d sworn the formula before. “I just don’t know what come over me — you’re a temptation,” he explained finally. His rancourless grin blamed her in a way she appeared to accept.

  “Don’t you think you should go? There’s a boat at nine,” suggested Frances. She heard her mother farewelling her pupil at the front door. Billy anticipated Mrs Reilly’s entry into the kitchen by standing, fingers drumming the back of his chair. The sexual contest died away to be once more replaced — on Billy’s side — by something larger: the set Frances and her kind seemed to have against his nature.

  Mrs Reilly entered to take his arm and steer him through to the parlour. She called back to Frances who replied, “Coming!” in the brightest tone she could manage, though by then tears were streaming down her cheeks and she sat gulping helplessly in an attempt to thrust back a threatened downpour.

  Part Two

  9

  Late Quaternary

  At the Gilchrists’ polite table a new Billy chewed open-mouthed without caution. He had arrived at tea time with the latest talk from town. Half was about a social event, the Roller Skaters Fancy Dress Ball. The rest was war talk.

  Until the week before Billy had rarely opened a newspaper. Now he read even the “extraordinaries” pasted up outside the Champion office, and had become a political expert, though nobody pressed him to say exactly where these suddenly luminous European places were.

  “With Austria and Serbia at each other’s throats it’s just a matter of time. We’ll be in it.”

  Between courses Mr Gilchrist and Billy rehearsed a sequence of events using salt cellar, butter dish, knife, fork, spoon and plate. Austria struck Serbia chimed Russia gonged Germany rang France roused Britain.

  “See?”

  Alan Gilchrist threatened the table with a knife (Germany). It shifted from his wife to Walter, who nodded.

  But until this minute, when the knife flashed under his chin, the goings-on in the papers hadn’t touched Walter at all. One fact followed the other all year, but remotely, dry as a time chart in a history lesson. Now it occured to Walter that his own standpoint was closest to Billy’s. He’d wanted change — here it came! Mountains in the northern hemisphere were already rising, falling, clashing. Shock waves bowled through the oceans, struck the coastal cities and cracked the glass calm of the everyday, shooting up-country to craze towns and remote homesteads all in a matter of minutes. Incredible that a distant quarrel between foreigners could wreak such an astonishing transformation, yet leave a person feeling expectant!

  Billy described how a hundred costumed skaters had rumbled and squeaked their way round the hall, which was so full that couples even used the stage. Eddie Harkness had skated right off the edge. At nine thirty they had squeezed against the walls to watch Mr Harley Dav
idson, the world champ, leap over three chairs. Mr Farlow won the best costume with “Aboriginal Chief’, and the comic prize went to Mr Deal’s “Dark Town Barber”. But who got the loudest cheers? Miss Finity as “Britannia” and Jack McGee as “The Admiral”.

  After the meal the men sat in front of the fire. Mr Gilchrist studied Billy’s Herald in the yellow lamplight while Billy and Walter sprawled at his feet smoking their pipes.

  “It looks a certainty. If England goes in we’ll be in it too.”

  “If,” reflected Billy. “It’d be just our luck if she don’t.”

  “I say she will,” said Walter. “If distant places like Australia are ready, why should the old country hesitate?”

  They toyed with differing opinions, not because they held them, but because the facts were so few.

  “What the pommies want is to call Australia in and sit back.”

  “One in, all in.”

  “I reckon we’re gamer.”

  “They’ve got the army. We’d just be extra. Wouldn’t we?”

  “We’ve got the fight,” concluded Billy. He heaved a log to the centre of the fire and admired a tower of sparks.

  For a while, in the intensified firelight, all talk ceased. Alan Gilchrist dropped the paper to his lap — the flames chopped his face with hard shadows. He barely knew why, but war would be welcome.

  Silent before the fire, he thought of his land as a bastion — nothing less — from which he would willingly send forth magnificent confirmations of title. Yet earlier, questioned by his wife, he had turned red in an effort to explain: “The thing is to get on with it!”

  Billy watched miniature cliffs of red-hot wood collapsing. Fire absorbed him. It was strange that war had never occured to him before. He was made for it! If all the excitement fizzled out he’d be desperate.

  Other more practical needs drove him. If war came, he could escape. Away from his father, stone-hearted now, and a drunk. Away from the silent churchyard that haunted him, yet was not itself haunted. Away from the consequences of news from Wellington which lay in a crumpled letter in his pocket. Trouble was brewing there, though not with his name attached to it. Not yet.