The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall

by Alan Marshall

  ‘Mrs Jane Bryce-Forbes.’

  ‘Shit!’ he exclaimed.

  I immediately realised this man’s breeding only came from his Abbott buggy and pair.

  It was a horse that convinced me of Mrs Jane Bruce-Forbes’ breeding. He was a six-year-old gelding though father, after examining his mouth, said to me, ‘He’ll never see eight again.’ He also claimed that he’d been down and told me to look at his knees where the hair had grown awry. But they looked all right to me. She drove him in an expensive rubber-tyred jinker with long hickory shafts. It was exciting to see him in action with his free stride. He was by Warrior out of Gay Girl and had inherited some of his sire’s spirit. His mane was clipped and his tail was docked and he had a high lifting gait that suggested pride in movement. A martingale held his neck in a dignified arch and he often reefed at the bit and snorted when under restraint. Under the whip he could do a mile in three minutes.

  This was all evidence of his aristocratic lineage and it lifted Mrs Jane Bryce-Forbes and set her apart so that one imagined she must have been by Warrior out of Gay Girl herself. She always recognised me even when she was driving her horse, and though this was little enough it did succeed in increasing my importance. In fact several people saw her talking to me from the gig. She might only say, ‘Hello’ or something like that, but it put me on the map, so to speak. That was until I started riding Hairy Legs.

  Hairy Legs was lent to me by a farmer who wanted her exercised. She was in foal and trotting would do her good, he said. But I wasn’t to gallop her. I could understand that. She would have galloped badly even if she wasn’t in foal, but in foal she moved like a sailing ship in a rough sea. But trotting! There was never a trotter like her. She had won a trotting race down at South Ecklin, the farmer told me, and though this was only a bush settlement it lifted her from obscurity to a position of respect. However, no one believed this story except me. I think it was her appearance that made people discredit such a claim. She was what was known as a ‘light delivery’ type, a horse by a half-draught out of a bush hack and gave the impression of being humiliated by her breeding. Her legs were feathered like a draught and swung beneath her as if they were weighted. The straight line of her back continued along her neck to her ears. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, undisturbed by the promises of her condition. She stood perfectly still when being mounted and only returned to reality when the rider, after settling himself comfortably in the saddle, brought his heel against her side. According to the urgency of the heel she either set off at a walk, a trot or a canter.

  Hairy Legs had one peculiarity, the discovery of which came as a great shock to me. I was trotting her at a moderate speed when, to catch up with a school mate riding ahead, I urged her with heels and voice to a faster pace. She suddenly sank lower in height and broke into a pace and I found myself travelling at a speed of which I had never imagined her capable.

  Hairy Legs was not a natural pacer. She always walked, never ambled. A pace was a gait she had discovered she could do when the speed demanded of her was greater than a trot. It explained how she won the trot at South Ecklin. It was a delightful gait for the rider. One did not have to rise to the trot but just sat there moving swiftly while looking down at her speeding legs describing sweeps each side of her, first to the right and then to the left, that gave the impression of swaying to those who watched her.

  One day in early summer I was riding her home from school. She was walking with her head down and the reins slack on her neck. I concluded as I sat there that life was indeed hard on boys who rode disreputable horses. The drivers of the buggies and gigs that passed me with their spanking horses tossing contemptuous heads, hardly noticed me as I plodded along in the dust by the side of the road. I decided that some day I would own a horse like that of Mrs Jane Bryce-Forbes and I would drive it in a rubber-tyred gig with gleaming harness just as she did.

  I was considering how low you can get when burdened with a horse like Hairy Legs when I became conscious that a horse and gig were slowing up behind me. The vehicle drew level with me then the horse dropped into a walk. It was Mrs Jane Bryce-Forbes, stuffed bird and all. The bird was partly obscured by a white gossamer that went round the hat and was fastened in a loose knot beneath her chin. She looked better bred than I’d ever seen her. I tightened my reins to lift the head of Hairy Legs into a position that would suggest she still had some interest in life, but she quickly dropped it again. Hairy Legs had no quality whatsoever. She liked her head down.

  ‘How are you, Alan?’ said Mrs Jane Bryce-Forbes as her horse pranced beside me on the metal. And although I say it myself, no woman could have been more gracious.

  ‘I am well, Mrs Bryce-Forbes,’ I said.

  I never forget my manners when speaking to a well-bred woman even though I was in a highly nervous state owing to her having spoken to me.

  ‘That’s a funny old horse you’re riding,’ she said. ‘What’s its name?’

  ‘Hairy Legs,’ I answered, and I can tell you it cost me an effort to get the words out.

  ‘Dear me!’ she exclaimed. ‘It certainly suits the horse doesn’t it. But I can see he’s quiet, that’s the main thing isn’t it. Ride carefully won’t you.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll do that Mrs Bryce-Forbes,’ I said, but I was getting fed up with this ‘Ride carefully’ business. What in the hell did she take me for? I was eleven years old and had ridden for years.

  ‘Well, I’m in a hurry and must be going,’ she said. ‘Look after yourself.’

  There she went again.

  ‘I’m in a hurry myself,’ I said. ‘Good-bye, Mrs Bryce-Forbes.’

  I kicked Hairy Legs into a trot. She flicked her bay with a whip and we trotted side by side. She smiled sweetly down at me. ‘My, you are riding well,’ she said.

  Hell!!

  She touched her bay with a whip and he really got down to it. I shoved the boots into Hairy Legs and she suddenly flattened into a pace. I didn’t give a damn whether she foaled on the road. I left Mrs Bryce-Forbes for dead. I covered her stuffed bird with dust and went down that road like a bat out of hell.

  Behind me I could hear the swish of her whip and the pounding feet of her bay. Then I was speeding on in silence and she was far behind me.

  She never spoke to me after that.

  Anyway, bugger Mrs Bryce-Forbes.

  Four Sunday Suits

  Beyond the township stretched the saltbush plain, a dry sea without movement, without sound, canopied by a sky bleached pale by sunlight. Through this empty immensity hawks drifted aimlessly, swinging their shadows across mobs of kangaroos grazing far back from the sandy track linking the township to a vague horizon.

  The township confronted this still spaciousness, shrank back from it behind the broken fences, the heaps of rubbish and the bleached grass surrounding the unpainted hovels that marked the town’s outskirts.

  Protected from the brooding hostility of the plain by the homes of half-castes the main street held the life and energy of the township between verandahed shops, offices and hotels. Saddled horses drooped at hitching posts. Sometimes a drover’s wagon with chained dogs straining at the axles moved slowly past the shops, ignored by the coatless men yarning at doorways. A few trucks and cars stood askew on the sloping kerbs that fronted the hotels.

  The town was an oasis in a loneliness of earth and sky where men found a need of company and where the destination of all who walked was the submerging group. In hotel bars, in stores they gathered. No man stood alone in this street, another always joined him.

  The women who in mid-morning shopped along the street were products of an isolation with which they had either come to terms or from which they longed to escape. The warring ones had brown, unsmiling faces, bare of cosmetics. They were burdened with responsibilities. They pushed prams or were followed by clamouring children. They wore floral frocks, puckered and strained over bodies in which they took no delight. The contented ones were proudly clad. They were held erect, established in conf
idence by a background of brick villas and carpeted floors, tangible evidence of their husbands’ successes in the drab business premises of the street.

  But Edna was different. She was the daughter of a rabbit trapper who lived in a shack on the town’s outskirts. Her mother was dead. She was eighteen years of age and had shy eyes and a gentle manner. Her expression never criticised; it reflected a wish to please and in some hidden way, an obeisance. She was slender with full legs and walked with an unstudied freedom and looseness of movement that suggested a body resenting the confinement of clothes. Men considered her pretty but her appeal went deeper than that.

  The business men along the street liked Edna. Each morning she walked the street’s length with her shopping bag. Each man greeted her:

  ‘Good morning, Edna.’

  ‘Good morning, Mr Johnston.’

  Her voice contained a quality that increased a man’s respect for himself. It established him as a superior person in whom age had failed to destroy a charm for women. It stirred him into romantic dreaming and as he watched her pass he was seized with a desire to hold her body in his arms, to carry her away to some idyllic spot where, free from the eyes of all who knew him, he could ravish her or reveal an unselfish devotion that would make her cling to him forever.

  Mr Carpenter, the stock and station agent, was sure she had a mind of great purity and sweetness. They were terms he considered seriously. He believed in purity and sweetness. He often pondered on the implications he felt sure were evident in the tone and emphasis of her morning greeting. Sometimes he was quite sure he attracted her strongly. At other times he was seized by the conviction he was a most unattractive man and that it was impossible for any girl as beautiful as Edna to love him. He compared her with his wife who treated him as a likeable child to be humoured. He was certain his wife was unaware of the fine qualities he possessed yet he was equally sure she loved him. And he loved her. Of this there was no doubt. Say she discovered Edna in his arms! How could he explain it? He shrank to a nucleus of suffering at the thought.

  But each morning found him standing at the doorway of his office waiting for Edna to pass.

  ‘I really have a pure and beautiful love for this girl,’ he told himself.

  Such an estimate of his feelings gave rise to exalted moments when he had an urge to protect her from the evil advances of other men. But there were times when he wanted to seize her and fling her on a bed and savagely take her. Because of the intensity of his passion he concluded he was a man of great virility, much greater than that of other men, and that his desires were desires that established him as superior to most men. He was sure the men he knew were incapable of any sex emotion other than an animal lust. The same feelings in himself were looked on as admirable manifestations of a noble unselfish love.

  He wished he had read more and could appreciate poetry. Formless poems of love strove for intelligibility in his mind as he sat at his desk recording the sales of sheep and cattle. Under the spell of his reveries the forms upon which he wrote dissolved and vanished and in their place was a long beach and the sea and Edna was in his arms as he strode to meet the waves.

  One morning, under the influence of a sudden compulsion, he asked her if she would come for a drive with him that night. It was summer and a full moon.

  ‘I’d like to, Mr Carpenter,’ said Edna.

  Mr Johnston, the ironmonger, did not love Edna in this way. Sometimes he disliked her. He was a stout man, abrupt, overbearing and dogmatic. These qualities formed the shell beneath which he quivered and palpitated with uncertainty.

  The men who gathered in his shop to talk were quite sure he was a well-educated man who could settle any argument provided the answer was to be found in a book.

  ‘I read every night before I go to sleep,’ he sometimes told a customer. ‘No matter how late I get home I must read for a little while. I’m always reading.’

  He had explained this habit of his to Edna as she stood before his counter making a purchase.

  ‘It’s a good way to send you off to sleep,’ said Edna.

  Edna is a fool, thought Mr Johnston sourly.

  But he wanted her to like him. He wanted all women to like him. Those women who showed pleasure in talking to him seemed to him desirable women and he strove to increase their regard for him. Sometimes he enumerated them in his mind, concluding there were five women he could have married had things been different. Musing on the figure gave him great pleasure. Not many men can say they’ve been loved by five women, he told himself.

  He would not have liked to marry Edna but he would have liked to humilate her. He felt she really didn’t admire him and he would have liked to punish her for this. He imagined himself brutally rejecting her pleading to be possessed then relenting and enjoying a conquest sharpened by a God-like contempt. To seduce her would be so easy. She was completely unguarded by experience.

  He went through a fortnight of indecision. He was restless in his home. He felt a need to travel and meet lots of girls. But Edna haunted the pleasure resorts his dreams fashioned.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked his wife who was dieting and eating a lot of lemons. ‘Why don’t you do something round the house? Paint the laundry; it’s got to be done before Christmas. The way you’re going on you make the house feel like a gaol. I’ve had it. I’ll write to Mum and ask her to come up and stay for a few weeks.’

  The next day Mr Johnston asked Edna if she would like to drive out as far as Single Tree Bore with him; he had to deliver some parts for a mill out there but would not be able to leave until after dark.

  ‘I’d like to go, Mr Johnston,’ said Edna.

  Mr Salisbury, the farm machinery agent, was not troubled by his conscience when he asked Edna if she would like to go for a drive with him along Emu Creek. His intentions were honourable. Edna was a girl with many outstanding qualities, he had concluded after watching her each day as she walked down the street. She should be ‘given a chance’. What exactly this ‘chance’ was he had never quite worked out. But he was determined to give it to her. He prided himself on having a great understanding of people. (‘It comes natural to me.’) He often thought he should have been a psychologist. Or a sexologist. He was at home in either field. He had once read a book called Studies in Sexual Aberrations and the knowledge he had thus acquired made him feel superior to all the men that he met.

  ‘The average man knows nothing,’ he told Edna on their first drive together. ‘They don’t know what’s going on. They live all their lives in this joint and the people they meet know nothing either. They all lead dull lives, going to work and going home again. As for sex, half of them don’t know it exists. They have children and that’s the end of it. If they knew what goes on in the minds of people in big cities an’ that they’d drop dead. I could tell you things about men and women you’d never believe. Not that I would tell you, I wouldn’t. You’ve never come up against the hard facts of life. Part of your charm is your innocence. But I can tell you this, Edna,’ and Mr Salisbury placed his hand on her knee to give emphasis to his pronouncement, ‘innocence can be a danger.’

  Edna agreed that innocence could be a danger. As if in proof of the claim she made no attempt to remove Mr Salisbury’s hand from her knee. Mr Salisbury placed a different interpretation on her forbearance. She trusts me completely, he thought and reluctantly withdrew his hand. A feeling of humility had come over him. I am really privileged to be in this girl’s company, he thought sadly. There is a not an evil thought in her.

  ‘I’d like to take you out often,’ he said lighting a cigarette with a hand that trembled and drawing the smoke deep into his lungs, ‘but I can’t do that. I’ll meet you once a week. I’d like to put you on the right track.’

  Mr Salisbury had always kept on the right track. He attended his church regularly and had seven children. He didn’t believe in birth control.

  ‘What greater thing can a man contribute to his country than children,’ he was in the habi
t of saying when someone commented on the size of his family.

  His wife didn’t believe in birth control either. ‘Abstinence is the only answer,’ she informed her husband after the birth of their seventh child. Mr Salisbury was going to dispute this but his wife had just had a blood transfusion and was too confused to appreciate such an argument.

  When she returned to their home she had to work very hard, work that Mr Salisbury came to regard as an accusation. He decided he must also work very hard and he began returning to his office after the evening meal. It also left his wife free to look after the children. (‘Belle has enough to do without me getting in the way.’)

  Edna’s company took his mind off the worries of supporting a large family. It also, so he told himself, introduced into his life a sense of purpose and a joy of living that would in the end make him a happier and more tolerant husband.

  And, besides, no one knew about it. One thing about Edna, you could trust her.

  Mr Simpson, the Postmaster, trusted her completely.

  ‘You see, Edna,’ he explained to her, ‘you can’t rely on people in a town like this. They would take a delight in ruining a man. If I was seen out with you my wife would hear about it in no time. My friends would go out of their way to tell her. So you must understand how careful we must be not to be seen.’

  This protest against the duplicity of the townspeople did not disturb Edna’s pleasant reverie. She sat relaxed in Mr Simpson’s fat car, fleeing with it from responsibilities. She had stepped into it from a disintegrating, three-roomed house in which disorder gazed steadily at her with hypnotic eyes until will vanished and helplessness came. Two of the rooms were bedrooms. The third room was a portal to the world outside, a world of conflict, of pressures composed of rabbit traps, pleading men, the price of skins, cars and searching hands, beer, tired muscles and hope. In this room the first steps to survival were taken. To this room Edna and her father returned to replenish their strength with unspoken communion.