A Cry from the Dark

by Robert Barnard

  Hughie had no doubt noticed the swerve to another subject, but decided to go along with it.

  “I don’t think you’ll find London in the fifties and sixties can compete with Australia in the thirties for audience appeal.”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Bettina, who held her opinions obstinately. “They’re very entertaining, and there are lots of sketches in them of real people—actors, writers, and suchlike—and they are people readers always recognize.”

  “And most of them are dead, which is an advantage,” agreed Hughie.

  “Exactly.”

  “Still, Australia is remote. It isn’t just the popularity of the early-evening soaps—interest in it goes a lot further back than that. And the outback is remote and strange even for a Sydney or a Melbourne audience.”

  “True. No one in Sydney thought to take little Miss Probyn inland to show her what it’s like.”

  “I suppose,” said Hughie, after a moment for thought and remembrance, “that a lot of its appeal lies in the fact that on the one hand it’s strange, like nothing that people in cities know, and on the other it’s manageable and graspable.”

  Bettina thought about that.

  “I don’t quite see what you mean,” she said.

  “An outback town—what is it? One short street, a few shops, a café maybe, and a hotel which is mainly a watering hole. A few small properties immediately around it, and larger ones further away. Two hundred, three hundred people in all—people with their noses to the daily grindstone, people with incredibly limited horizons and no idea what is happening in the wider world of Australia, let alone the wider world of everything outside it. It’s easily knowable, like an English village a hundred years ago.”

  Oh no, it’s not, thought Bettina. You were an outsider, and you were treated as an outsider. You were there for six months at most, then you left. You thought you knew Bundaroo, but you hardly even scratched the surface.

  Bundaroo made damned sure it kept its secrets from the likes of you.

  Chapter 2

  Alien Body

  The next day, in midmorning, when Bettina was about to get to work on her memoirs—which she called in her mind her “Memories”—she was rung by her agent, Clare Tuckett.

  “Hello, darling. Did it go well yesterday?”

  Bettina raised her eyebrows at the handset.

  “I’m sure you know exactly how it went yesterday, Clare.”

  “Only because I can guess, and because I know you.”

  “I don’t see how knowing me could help,” said Bettina, bridling. “I don’t always hate eighteen-year-old girls. I just happened to hate this one.”

  “Yes, and I’d met her too, briefly, and I knew you’d hate her. But far be it from me to interfere with Corydon Films’s plans. In any case a raging feud between the author and the star of the film based on her novel is just as good PR as a love-fest and a meeting of minds would be. Better. You know that by now.”

  “Oh yes, I know that,” said Bettina, sighing at Clare’s mastery of the black arts. “But it certainly wasn’t in my mind…Clare, have you heard anything about Hughie’s financial situation?”

  “Hughie’s? I thought he was comfortably off…Hughie is not really in my line of interest, you know. Only incidentally an author, but really a newspaper-man, albeit of a rather grand kind.”

  “It’s Hughie who makes it grand—it’s one of his roles. Art critics aren’t by profession grand.”

  “They seem so to me. How do they see what they claim to see in dirty beds and piles of bricks? But let’s not get on to that. I can find out about Hughie’s finances. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t have plenty of contacts in the newspaper world. Why, in God’s name? Are you worried he’s on the rocks?”

  “It’s just the fact that he keeps going on about people battening on me, or being after my money when I die. It’s been coming on over the last six months or so. It’s made me wonder if he’s banking on something substantial for himself, though of course he says not. I’ve always thought he had piles stashed away after that television series, but there’s the new young wife, and—”

  “Darling, she’s nearly fifty, and they’ve been married nearly a decade. That’s swapsie’s time in Hughie’s circle. Well, I’ll make inquiries. If he’s made you think about money that’s probably useful. It’s time you faced up to the fact that you’re a rich woman.”

  “Oh, nonsense, Clare,” said Bettina in her brisk commonsense voice. “ ‘Rich’ doesn’t cover people like me these days.”

  “Not your book earnings maybe, though they come to a very nice sum as I should know. But the flat is worth a fortune, and some of the pictures would bring you a tidy sum.”

  “Those are Hughie’s doing…Perhaps it’s them he’s got his eye on. As for the flat, when I bought it Holland Park was the sort of area you wouldn’t walk through at night.”

  “Don’t I know it! I’m a Londoner, remember. Now nobody walks there because people might wonder why you weren’t taking a taxi…I’ll make inquiries, darling. Meanwhile enjoy your newfound wealth.”

  “I will. But I enjoyed my flat and pictures when they weren’t worth half as much. I don’t see how their present value could make me love them any more.”

  “Work at it, darling. You’ll find it can. I’ll let you know as soon as I find out anything. Now get down to your memoirs.”

  “I am not writing my memoirs,” said Bettina automatically.

  “I’ll believe you, thousands wouldn’t. No. Amend that. Even if thousands believed you, I wouldn’t.”

  As she put the phone down Bettina smiled, but the smile had a tinge of anxiety in it. She put her hand across the desk and painfully pressed the PLAY button on her new recorder. It began playing the last part of the first chapter, which she had dictated two days earlier. The tape recorder was not quite a necessity yet, though the rheumatism in her hands would soon make it one. She had bought it to justify her assertion that she was not writing her memoirs. If she had not had this get-out she would have justified her assertion by the fact that she was writing her own story in the form of a novel, the only form she really knew. Both were pretty threadbare pretenses. Novel or not, she was aiming to tell the truth—though perhaps not the whole truth, and perhaps sometimes the truth with an element of deception built in. The Heart of the Land, published in 1953, was a vaguely autobiographical novel, like most of her early fiction set in Australia. From a teenage boy-girl interest that was never more than tepid and was never going to go anywhere she had made a bittersweet romantic novel. The new book, the “Memories,” would be much closer to the truth, though she was acutely aware that the whole truth was not in one person. Others would have different perspectives on the events she was narrating.

  Still, judging by the autobiographies she had read by politicians and actors, for example, she was aiming at a level of truthfulness that was quite beyond them—dominated as they were by egos and concern for their posthumous reputation. Those would not be her reasons if she was ever economical with the truth.

  The walk to school that day was a sad one. It wasn’t often that her parents rowed, but when they did it was fierce. The atmosphere in the house was electric, somehow weighted down with their bitterness. These rows always left Betty with a conflicting mass of emotions: she blamed herself, blamed Bundaroo, and for some reason got all emotional about her little brother. “Man is born unto trouble,” she said to herself, applying it to serious little Oliver, not remembering that if he was born unto trouble so was she herself. Self-pity was never one of her vices.

  The cause of the row was Bundaroo itself. Her mother had realized years ago that the soldier-settler land they had been allotted was never going to give them more than a precarious existence, and now that employment in the cities was becoming easier to find she was in favor of cutting their losses. Her father was very conscious that they were far from building up the reserves of money that would be necessary to tide them over against falling
world prices, crop diseases, climatological disasters, and all the other perils of outback agriculture, particularly for a cow cocky. But he believed that in the small world of outback New South Wales they were building up a network of mateships and mutual trust, whereas if they moved back into the city they would be friendless and anonymous if luck turned against them.

  Betty’s mother fought against this argument.

  “You forget that if you’re in strife out here all your mates will be in strife too,” Betty heard her hiss as she left the house.

  Though she was upset, she was also excited. When she grew up and went out into a wider world—and any world had to be wider than Bundaroo’s—Betty realized that the unexpected would always attract her, even if there was fear as she confronted it. Probably both emotions had their origins in the fact that anything out of the routine hardly ever happened in her tiny hometown. Her world was Fort George, Bundaroo, and the more distant world of Wilgandra, the biggest property locally, which she had only occasionally visited. She saw the school bus rattle along the track from Wilgandra, dump the children of the station workers on the road nearly a mile outside Bundaroo, then take the equally rutted track to the township of Corunna to fetch the schoolchildren from there. All as usual. Things that happened in Bundaroo happened every day. Today, though, an unusual thing occurred. Ahead of her on the road to town she saw a figure she did not recognize. It was a boy—she knew that by his walk, as well as by his short trousers—but not one of the boys from school. The trousers, the cut of them, struck her as out of the ordinary. She speeded up her steps so she caught him up with only a half mile still to go.

  “Hello,” she said. “Are you new?”

  The boy turned around. He was about her age or perhaps a bit younger, with fair-to-brown hair and a worried, uncertain expression which he tried to hide by a strutting style of walking.

  “Yes.” From the one word she knew he was English. “We’ve just moved here from Victoria. My dad’s the new manager of Wilgandra.”

  Betty had heard Wilgandra was about to get a new manager.

  Wilgandra’s owner, Bill Cheveley, loomed large in the horizons of Bundaroo people, and Bill was a friend of Bettina’s father—friend and patron, in fact, and one of those on whom he might have to rely if times of trouble were ahead.

  “My dad’s a friend of Bill Cheveley,” said Bettina, eager to form links. “Bill was one of his commanding officers during the war. They’re mates.”

  “Is your dad Jack Whitelaw?” the boy asked. Bettina nodded. “My dad says he’s fed up with hearing what a good bloke Jack Whitelaw is.”

  “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”

  “Well, he’s new, and he thinks people are comparing him…Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  “I suppose it is annoying, if he’s new. But my dad is a good bloke. I’m Bettina Whitelaw, by the way. Betty.”

  “And I’m Eugene Naismyth.”

  “I suppose you’re called Gene, are you?”

  “Not really. My mother thinks Eugene is a nice name and says I ought to be called by it.”

  “I don’t suppose what your mother thinks is likely to impress anyone at Bundaroo High, do you?”

  The boy looked shocked at her tartness, and then giggled.

  “I don’t suppose so.”

  “Still, on second thoughts I don’t think Gene is a good idea. It’s the same as Jean—and the boys might start singing ‘I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair.’ That would really be a bad start. We can’t call you Eu-ie though…But we could call you Hughie. That sounds perfectly all right.”

  “Except that it’s not my name. Surely the teachers will know that I’m Naismyth, E.?”

  “We’ll manage that. You’ve got to try to fit in. You’ve got that Pommie accent to live down.”

  Hughie looked crestfallen.

  “I thought I’d lost it.”

  “It’s sort of half and half,” said Bettina kindly. “I expect they took the mickey at your old school, didn’t they?”

  “A bit. But I had a lot of good mates there.” A conviction gripped Bettina that he had had no mates there at all.

  “And of course you’d still speak English English at home, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. My mother thinks—”

  “Forget your mother. She’s a bad influence. Parents usually are.”

  “It doesn’t sound as if yours are.”

  “Things are crook at home at the moment.”

  “They’re always crook at my home.”

  “Don’t change the subject. I’m not the problem. We’ll have you speaking properly in no time.”

  She sounded more confident than she was. There was something through-and-through non-Australian about Hughie. But she did her best, and introduced him to everybody as Hughie, including Miss Dampier and Mr. Copley as they walked through the playground.

  “This is Hughie Naismyth, Miss Dampier,” she said. “His real name is Eugene, but everyone calls him Hughie.”

  “Hello, Hughie. Welcome to Bundaroo. I’m sure you’ll soon settle in here. I’ll see you for English at eleven o’clock.”

  Hughie expressed his gratitude to Betty.

  “Don’t mention it. New schools are always difficult.”

  “I know. You can imagine what it was like at Benalla.”

  That, at any rate, was fair dinkum, more truthful than the claim to have had “good mates” there. She must tell him that he shouldn’t use the word “mate” until he could say it like an Australian.

  Friday night for Bettina, as often as not, was the Duke of Sussex pub in Holland Park Avenue. She walked to it as a rule, to prove that rheumatism hadn’t gained supremacy over the whole of her body. Anyway, to take the bus for just a couple of stops and then have a walk at the end of it was more trouble than it was worth. In spite of what Clare had said she had never been a taxi person by habit, only by occasional necessity. Anyway, she was one of those who had floated up with the property values of the area, not bought in at the current breathtaking prices. The newcomers’ habits were no doubt inbred, but she wasn’t going to change her own.

  “Evening, Rod,” she said to the young Australian behind the bar. “Nice evening for a change. Peter been in?”

  “Been in half an hour, Mrs. Whitelaw,” said Rod. She didn’t correct his version of her name. She had been a Mrs. in her time, though so long ago it was something she often forgot. “He’s in the public having a game of darts. Want me to give him a shout?”

  “No, he’ll finish his game anyway. When he does, tell him I’m over there with Katie in her corner, will you?”

  Katie Jackson had been Bettina’s cleaning woman for twenty years before she retired and was replaced by a firm of contract cleaners who were not nearly as satisfactory, and not entertaining at all. Katie knew all Bettina’s business, and provided running commentaries and leading articles on events of thirty years ago as if they were yesterday.

  “Hello, Katie,” said Bettina, settling opposite her. “Got your corner tonight then.”

  “There was an American family come up wanting the other seats, but I give them the evil eye. Thought you’d be in, it being Friday. Is Peter here?”

  “Having a game of darts. He’ll be along soon, I expect.”

  “Good.” Katie always made it clear she liked Peter much better than she liked Bettina, and her former employer accepted this with equanimity. “Worse thing you ever did was when you showed ’im the door.”

  Bettina, for the umpteenth time, cleared up the matter of events of twenty years before.

  “I didn’t show him the door. He went off with a bit of skirt.”

  “He’d ’a’ come back when ’e was tired of ’er.”

  “I’m not a rest home for tired fornicators.”

  “Hmmm. Peter was never more than a length of prick to you.”

  “He was always a great deal more. I was very fond of Peter, and very upset when he walked out on me.”

 
“You threw ’is clothes out into the street.”

  “That’s what I mean about being upset. Ah—here he is.” She lowered her voice. “Thank God you’re here, Pete. We’d have been going through all that old news from the day you moved in to the day you moved out. Want a refill, you two?”

  “If you’re buying in,” said Pete, bending to kiss her. “Are you well? The rheumatics keeping at bay?”

  “They’re no worse anyway. But I’m having to use a tape recorder for the new book. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it. It’s not the same as writing.” She got herself up and to the bar with the three glasses held rather feebly in her hand. When she got back she said, “Katie’s been regaling me with her opinions on the rights and wrongs of my chucking you out.”

  Peter nodded.

  “Worst thing I ever did, walking out on you. She didn’t chuck me, love, I walked. And when all was said and done, she was a tart. I could have had her and stayed with you—no problem.”

  “That’s exackly what I bin saying,” said Katie. “You should ’a’ stayed together, or got together again.”

  Peter scratched his head. Bettina thought, he’s trying to imagine being with me for so long, and doesn’t altogether like it.

  “I dunno,” he said. “Can’t go back, can we? And if we’d come back together, who’s to say I wouldn’t have done it all over again? I’m daft enough.”

  “You are,” said Bettina. “And I certainly wouldn’t have had you back a second time. Hughie was saying only the other day that I should have finished with you entirely.”

  “Oh, Hughie,” said Peter with contempt.

  Peter Seddon was, or had been, a bus driver. He had been on Bettina’s route for six months before, one night, she was the last on the bus on his last run of the day, and he had driven off-route to her flat and stayed the night there. The double-decker parked outside had ruined Bettina’s local reputation. The next morning one of the residents had complained to London Transport, so Holland Park must have been on an upward curve even then. Peter had moved in, and had been loved—in Bettina’s way—because he was funny, unbookish, loving and uncomplicated, with a life centerd on his own preferences and pleasures. That he was not entirely faithful didn’t worry Bettina at all, and she would have winked at his final bit of skirt on the side if he hadn’t insisted on walking out on her. That had hurt. It had made her decide that her time for live-in relationships was over.