The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall

by Alan Marshall

  It contained a soot-encrusted cast-iron kettle, hanging from a chain that disappeared up the chimney above the open fireplace. On the hearth littered with charcoal sat a huge frying pan, its inner surface gleaming from the rubbing of a crushed newspaper. A camp oven stood beside it. Rabbit traps and harness hung from nails in the walls. The table in the centre of the room, its stains still evident beneath a scrubbed surface, bore open tins of jam, their jagged lids bent upwards, smeared faces on cylindrical bodies clothed in coloured labels. Amid the eating utensils scattered upon it was a tin of rivets, a hammer, a pair of pliers, a brass door knob and a coverless copy of True Love Romances.

  Her father, sitting before the fire mending harness with copper rivets at which he hammered intently—he too represented confinement and frustration, even though she loved him. But at this moment she existed in another world, not here where trees leaped from darkness into the beams of the headlamps, gave a momentary acclaim then rushed into the past forever.

  Mr Simpson’s worries were his own. She could not accept them as hers. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose they would talk.’

  ‘I would like to meet you more than once a week,’ he said, moving his shoulders as if adjusting them to a weight. I’ve got to think of everything—my wife. You have no idea what I go through. I’m always thinking of you. I just can’t push you out of my mind; you’re always there.’

  He said it resentfully, as if Edna’s responsibility for his state was reprehensible and should be censured.

  It pleased Edna that he was always thinking of her. His tortures appeared before her as a variety of facial expression, all suggesting longing, desire and hopelessness. The picture gave her a feeling of contentment, achievement. She loved his love for her and wanted it to continue so that she could comfort him when she needed comfort.

  She wished she had beautiful clothes. It seemed to her there were frocks that would so transform her that her conversation would improve with the improvement in her appearance and she would become charming and irresistible. Then men would become awkward and shy in her presence and she could bestow love upon them, a gift from an inextinguishable store.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Simpson hopelessly, increasing his grip on the steering wheel. He could not imagine Edna as his wife. She was not suitable. He could not see her moving efficiently round a kitchen or acting as hostess to his friends.

  His dreams of Edna pictured her as his mistress, his home life still unchanged. He could put her in a flat, he thought, not here in this dead town but in Melbourne to where he imagined himself transferred and made Postmaster of a suburban post office. After he had left with his wife and family she could follow by train. He would meet her at Spencer Street railway station, drive her to the flat he had acquired for her then dash back to his own home. She would have to get work, of course—to keep herself occupied.

  He spent long periods at his desk working out exactly when and how he would visit the flat. He worked out on paper the cost of keeping her then in sudden frustration went off on a dream of winning a lottery after which there would be no problems, only a life of happiness.

  Mr Simpson, Mr Carpenter, Mr Johnston and Mr Salisbury always picked Edna up by a clump of mulga near her home. The house was situated on a back road along which, after dark, there was no traffic. Here she would never be observed moving from the shadows of the mulga trees towards the car door held open from the inside by either Mr Simpson, Mr Carpenter, Mr Johnston or Mr Salisbury.

  That is, no one but ‘Curly’ Martin, who didn’t matter. Curly was never likely to meet the friends of Edna’s lovers socially. He was young, twenty-two, and didn’t own a suit. He was a rabbiter like Edna’s father with whom he was friendly and with whom he shared the same problems of existence. He lived in a tent within sight of Edna’s home. He cooked for himself, sang maudlin songs with genuine emotion while preparing his meals and often visited Edna’s father for a yarn. They respected each other’s trapping areas and enjoyed each other’s company.

  The older man, whose name was Ben, liked Curly because he was a good ‘ear’. Curly listened intently to Ben’s tales, his mind stirred to attention by the sentimental nature of their content, by the actions and exclamations that accompanied the old man’s un-punctured flow of talk.

  ‘I knew a bloke who lived in Yarrawonga by the livin’ Harry he could scrap though I say it myself and I’m not talkin’ but he sold horses my sister was dressmaking up there and this bloke could handle colts but bless my soul he got taken crook something to do with his guts doctors shut up when they reckon you’re going to slip your bridle but I’m tellin’ ya a better bloke never swung his leg across a horse and there he was with a sweat on his face and me beside his bed and a slab off the side of his hut where the cold wind came through God bless me I’ve never seen the likes of such a place to die in which he did with his dog howling outside between times ah I was sorry for him in his trouble the poor bastard.’

  Tales featuring love and death when told with feeling always blurred Curly’s eyes with tears. He was a cheerful man who laughed and sang more than most. He thus swung easily to tears. As a sad tale unfolded he became the recipient of poignant knowledge he imagined was denied to other men.

  On such evenings Edna sat with the two men before the fire. She had heard her father’s tales so never listened to his words but sat in the shadows looking at Curly’s strong unwrinkled neck or at his hands resting on his knees. His hands suggested an ability to lift and hold and grip with power; and looking at them her blood became alive, proclaiming its quickening in her flushed cheeks.

  Curly looked at her only when her father became silent for a space and then his glance was an amused one. He looked at her with tolerance and affection as if from his high seat of knowledge he reached down to pat her.

  He had watched her meet all her lovers. The opening of his tent faced the mulga clump. They were men who on the street regarded him as of no importance. It did not disturb him. His knowledge of their secret life lifted him out of their reach and he smiled as he passed them at their doorways, secure in a feeling of independence and freedom.

  Curly had broad shoulders and brown eyes. His dark hair was curled into a cap on his head. When he laughed his cheeks puckered and his eyes became cradled in radiating wrinkles. He wore a grey polo-neck sweater and blue denim trousers faded from many washings.

  Knowledge of Edna’s easy surrenders stirred in him an awareness of her body’s curves and warmth and roused in him dreams in which he imagined her as he would like her to be, free of desire for any man save himself.

  He didn’t ask her out. Her experiences with married men gave her the power of making comparisons and he shrank from offering himself to her judgment. He became awkward and uncertain in her presence but sought to conceal this by an attitude of indifference. It was this attitude that attracted Edna. The more he withdrew from her the greater became her desire. His apparent lack of emotional response to her presence gave her a feeling of inadequacy. The gestures and movements that stirred her married lovers to action had no apparent effect on Curly. But there were other ways.

  She always placed the cups of tea and plates of scones on the littered hearth in front of the men. This evening she had left the top button of her blouse undone. As she lowered herself into a crouch to find a place for Curly’s cup, her elbow pushed the hem of her frock high up on her leg. For a second Curly glimpsed the white inner skin of her thigh and her breasts drooping in the shadow of her blouse. His eyes grew still. Edna raised her head and looked into them. Her tranquil glance, held with strain, changed to one of comprehension.

  ‘Oh God!’ thought Curly in sudden distress. ‘She’ll think I’m a dirty bastard.’

  Edna pulled her skirt down, rose to her feet and clutched her blouse closer to her in a gesture she hoped would suggest an innocent girl in confusion.

  Curly always went round his traps about midnight collecting those inexperienced rabbits caught from the first lot to leave th
e burrows. He then re-set the traps for the dawn catch, gathering these rabbits when the first long beams of the sun lay flat on the tops of the saltbush.

  Edna was always delivered back to the mulga clump by her lover of the night long before Curly set out on his midnight round. He was often sitting with her father when she entered the door, meeting his glance of comprehension with a quick lowering of her eyes.

  On one occasion he was setting off on his round when she came walking along the narrow track to the house.

  ‘Come on for a ride,’ he called to her. ‘I’ll be back in an hour. You can carry the rabbits.’

  ‘I’d like to, Curly,’ said Edna.

  He walked ahead of her round the traps. He hummed and sang and she followed behind him carrying the limp rabbits. She looked up at the sky. Great happiness had suddenly swooped down upon her and she rose to its embrace as if it were a lover.

  That night, her bare arm enfolding the pillow, she wafted into fantasy dreaming made exciting by the conviction that the world she now created was attainable. The dreaming of past nights had left desolate mornings in their wake since these dreams could never be reconciled with the reality of her home. Dramatic entrances into night clubs on the arm of a favoured lover, the applause of well-dressed audiences to her singing, beautiful clothes, jewels, worshipped, loved, adored, needed—such dreams had comforted her even while they tortured her. Harnessed to them for support she yet found their weight intolerable.

  To have wings, to rise out of her home, lift herself up, up to the stars where she could shed this house like a constricting garment and find herself held in arms that were a protection! At times these desires racked her into tossing and turning or sent her curved arms up into the darkness where they paused in a tense, quivering appeal—‘Make it happen! Make it happen!’

  But now her dream was of a tent and her face upon the pillow was relaxed. No lines of tension surrounded her closed eyes. The corners of her lips curved gently upwards. Picture after picture wavered before her, eager for selection. Curly lay ill upon his bunk, his head on her shoulder. She leant over him gripped by the beauty of every feature. She nursed him with devotion. She washed him, fed him. He had called out for her, only her. ‘Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!’

  But the morning presented him differently. His need of her was uncommitted, denied involvement and this she felt in a wordless oppression. He always smiled when he looked at her or when listening to her answering one of his questions, a smile that disturbed her since it made her feel like a child.

  This feeling persisted when in the following weeks she sometimes accompanied him on his trapping rounds. It subdued her, drained her of power.

  ‘Why do you go out with these men?’ he asked her one night.

  She hardly knew, but a remark of Mr Johnston’s came to her mind and she repeated it as if it were an expression of her own conclusions. ‘When you are loved you are never lonely; any sort of love is better than loneliness.’

  Curly pondered this. ‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘I can understand that.’

  Edna became pregnant. She told no one. She walked down the street each day, her lifted face untouched by guilt. Even when her figure proclaimed her condition to all who saw her she still carried herself with the same unconcern, the same detachment.

  The realisation of her pregnancy came as a shock to Mr Simpson, Mr Carpenter, Mr Johnston and Mr Salisbury. They were beset with suffering. They withdrew from their doorways to the shadow of their premises when they saw Edna walking down the street. Each was unaware of the part the others played in Edna’s life and each was certain that he alone was responsible for her state. They ceased asking her to go for drives with them. They carried on their work in a continual state of worry and distress made more oppressive by the knowledge that their wives did not suspect them.

  ‘I see Edna is in the family way,’ Mr Simpson said to Mr Johnston, believing that this statement was convincing evidence of his innocence.

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed that,’ said Mr Johnston, introducing into his voice a tone of indifference. ‘I never thought she was a girl like that.’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Simpson, ‘neither did I. It just shows you. You never know what they’re like underneath.’

  They parted, each having lightened his burden for a space.

  Though Edna was now ignored by these men Curly continued taking her on his midnight round of the traps. Though aware that she was expecting a child he was quite incapable of mentioning it to her and she remained silent. He was certain he was not the father even though that possibility occurred to him. He had so conditioned himself to a pattern of thinking regarding Edna’s affairs, a pattern in which he moved on the periphery, that his relationship with her seemed incidental to the forces that were shaping her. He had no part in her joys, her sorrows, her hopes. They were reasons for his compassion, not demands to bear responsibility. In his passion there was no involvement, therefore no obligation.

  Yet there were moments when he wished that only he mattered and her affairs with others were of no consequence.

  When Edna’s time grew near Curly shifted his camp to another trapping area twenty miles away. He was not fleeing. From what did he have to flee! Let them settle it among themselves.

  The baby was born and grew. Edna carried it down the street each morning trailing behind her the clean perfume of soaps and powders and laundered baby clothes. She didn’t have the money to buy a pram. Though Mr Simpson, Mr Carpenter, Mr Johnston and Mr Salisbury, freed from worry by her silence, did not now avoid her on the street they avoided looking at the baby. They were afraid of what they might see in its face.

  Curly had not seen the baby. He had moved his camp several times but he had no reason to return to the area near Edna’s home. Rabbits were more plentiful in other places. But he returned when he received a lawyer’s letter stating that Miss Edna Green was claiming maintenance for his child and that her claim was to be heard before a visiting magistrate in the local courthouse in a month’s time.

  ‘Listen,’ he said to the lawyer in whose office he found himself the day before the hearing of the case,’ she’s putting one over you. I’m not the father; there were other blokes. She’s trying to hang it on me because I’m the only one who’s single. She’s not going to get away with it.’

  The lawyer was not helpful. ‘She says you are the father. You slept with her, didn’t you?’

  ‘Sleep’s hardly the word,’ said Curly, ‘but I’ll go along with that.’ He paused, then added abruptly, ‘All right; I could be the father but Pm not. And I’ll drag in a few others before I’m finished, see if I don’t.’ He was feeling an angry resentment against authority, which seemed to be threatening him from the silent dusty books bound in leather that leaned askew on the office shelves. The law was his enemy, not this unsmiling man in front of him who, captive beneath a roof, had never known the freedom under stars. Arguing with him was a waste of time.

  ‘Who’s your lawyer—Bradbury?’ asked the lawyer, naming his rival in the town.

  ‘I’m handling this myself,’ said Curly who had little knowledge of court procedure and saw the hearing of the charge against him as an opportunity for discussion in which he was free to make counter accusations without hindrance. ‘I’ll show the bastards.’

  Out on the street he stood looking around him for a while. He had no feelings of resentment against Edna. She had picked on him because he was the easiest mark, that’s all. She wouldn’t want to put the boots into him out of revenge. He could imagine her naming him almost with pride while at the same time being sorry she was getting him into trouble. She would think he had shot through out of fear. He wished he could convince her he hadn’t, that he had gone away to leave her settle it with those other four bastards who had started all this. He wondered which one was the father.

  Anger rose and fell within him like a tide, flung itself against the images he had created of the four men who had seduced her. These images had little to do wit
h reality. He did not see them as lonely frustrated men wrenching at bars. Loneliness to him came from isolation and had no part in the lives of men with homes, wives and children. It was not being unneeded that motivated them as it did him. That age calculated by years brought no change in dreams and was not empty of a longing for future fulfilment was incomprehensible to him. He saw these men as ruthless, coldly calculating, untouched by longings to serve or feelings of devotion. He wanted to humiliate them, bring them down as a pursuing dog would a kangaroo.

  He walked down the street until he stood before the doorway of Mr Carpenter’s office. He waited until a customer had left then stepped in and beckoned Mr Carpenter to the entrance where he awaited him, his face expressionless.

  ‘Good morning, Curly,’ said Mr Carpenter.

  ‘Mr Carpenter,’ said Curly, speaking softly as if the information he was about to convey was sinisterly secret. ‘Edna Green is taking me to court tomorrow. She is having me up for maintenance of her baby. I am not the father, Mr Carpenter, you are. I am going to name you in court. I think it would be a good idea if you were there.’

  Curly turned and walked out. Mr Carpenter had not spoken. He stood completely still even though his body was suddenly occupied by a formless panic that writhed and struggled to free itself from his shell and drag itself upwards to the wide security of the sky. He slumped into a chair and stared at the desk.

  Curly entered Mr Johnston’s store. Mr Johnston was explaining to an attentive and deferential man that the local council was composed of men whose only concern was to get something out of it for themselves.

  ‘If I get in Pll stir things up,’ he said emphasising each word by the tap of a finger on the man’s shoulder.

  Curly called him aside and spoke his piece in the same conspiratorial tone he had used with Mr Carpenter.

  ‘Mr Johnston, Edna Green is taking me to court tomorrow—maintenance of her baby. I am not the father of the child, Mr Johnston; you are. I am going to name you in court. I think it would be a good idea if you attended.’