A Cry from the Dark

by Robert Barnard

  “Hughie is convinced that everyone except him is after my money,” said Bettina.

  “Probably are,” said Katie. “You’ve got more o’ that than sense, like most of you intellect-u-orls.”

  “I would be after your fabulous wealth if there was any chance of getting it,” said Peter. “Correction: I would be if I was twenty years younger. At my time of life money’s just a bind. A burden, like.”

  “Come off it, Pete,” said Bettina. “You wouldn’t say no to a whacking increase in your pension.”

  “Course not. But lots would be a bore. Is Hughie hoping for the lot? That wife of his must be expensive.”

  “So far as I know Hughie has plenty and to spare. And in the past at least he’s always looked after it. People who grow up with not much of it usually do.”

  “If you come from the moneyed classes,” amended Pete. “If you come from the unmoneyed classes like I do you blue it as soon as you get it. Spend, spend, spend. Lovely!”

  “Well, that’s never been Hughie’s way.”

  “You bet it hasn’t. Too bloody arty-farty and airy-fairy for vulgar display. I often wondered whether he ever looked at anything except books and paintings, but going by the bits of fluff he somehow or other attracts he must do.”

  “Hughie’s never wanted for female companionship,” said Bettina primly. “But the turnover rate is high. I should think they quite quickly get bored.”

  “That’s a fair bet. When you introduced us I was nodding off within the first sixty seconds.”

  “You’re an extreme case. You’ve never read a book in your life, Pete.”

  “True. Not what you’d call a book, anyway. You should have told Hughie I don’t go much on talk about Olivia Manning’s spat with the literary editor of the Sunday Yawn.”

  “I’ve spent my life trying to get Hughie to fit in with other people, instead of expecting them to fit in with him. It’s never had more than a momentary effect. So you think there might be something in his idea that people are after my money?”

  Peter shrugged.

  “Where there’s money there’s people after it. Who does he suspect? That nephew of yours?”

  “Mark, you, Clare—everyone I know, I think. It’s a bit of an obsession with him.”

  “The remedy’s in your own hands. Tell everyone you know that you’re giving it to charity.”

  Bettina screwed up her face.

  “Oh, that sounds a good idea, but I can’t think of anything I feel that strongly about. I’m not the Lady Bountiful type. And I like to think of people having a bit of a blue-out after I’m gone.”

  “Well, tell them you’re leaving everyone a nice little token to remember you by and that’s that.”

  “That still leaves all the rest of the money. What am I to leave that to? The British Museum? The Society of Authors? The bloody government?”

  “Well, what about the Australian government?”

  “What has the Australian government ever done for me?”

  “You could do it just as a way of gaining time. When you find out who covets your dosh and is thinking of murdering you for it you could think again.”

  “Oh, I don’t think even Hughie’s feverish brain is entertaining the idea of murder.”

  But when she got back to the flat that night it wasn’t that part of the conversation she remembered—because, after all, if you didn’t care much about money while you were alive you couldn’t get hot under the collar about what happened to it after you were dead. It was the conversation about Hughie that stayed in her mind, and how she felt she had acted as his interpreter to the world, or had somehow stood guard between him and it, that she remembered. She stood at the window thinking about this, looking over the darkened expanse of Holland Park. Then, when she had sentences firmly in her mind, she went into her study and switched on the tape recorder.

  Betty walked home that afternoon with Hughie and her best friend, Alice, and when Alice went into her slightly run-down home on the outskirts of Bundaroo she walked on with Hughie alone. They talked about the day, the English class, the teachers, the other kids at the school. Somehow or other they got on to music, and Hughie told her that they had records of Beethoven’s Seventh at home, conducted by Toscanini. Betty very much wanted to hear them, wanted to play them over and over so that the music was imprinted on her soul (she thought like that in those days). Hughie said he’d ask her over when the family was properly settled in. But when his way parted from hers and he waited for the bus beside the dry, rutted track that led to Wilgandra she shouted after him, “I shouldn’t mention the Beethoven records at school.”

  The burden of her morning walk weighed down on her again as she walked the last half mile to home, and she decided to slip quietly to her tiny bedroom (though in that house all noises could be heard everywhere, even silences). However, as she went through the front door she heard the familiar voices, talking normally.

  “We’ve been married a while now, Dot. We’ve seen a lot of dry gullies. And we’ve always come through.”

  “I’ve always supported you, Jack. You’ve got to admit that.”

  “You have, Dot. I’d be the first to say it.”

  “And I’ve done it because I trust you.”

  “I just feel that if hard times come—”

  “Harder times.”

  “OK. Things haven’t been easy—too right they haven’t! But if things get tougher, you need mates about you. In the city no one has mates. They have acquaintances, neighbors, even family, but they don’t have mates. We’d be alone. We could become dolers, sundowners. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “I suppose you’re right, but—”

  The reluctance in her mother’s tone was palpable. Betty thought it was time to burst in on them all sunny and smiling, to show her gratitude for the end of the row.

  “Hello, Mum. Hello, Dad!”

  “Well, look at the time!” said her mother. “I haven’t even thought of tea. Have a good day at school, dear?”

  “Not bad…There was a new boy there.”

  “Who was that?” It was her father who spoke. He was always half-jealous when she spoke of boys.

  “His name is Naismyth. His father’s the new manager at Wilgandra.”

  “Oh yes?”

  Her father’s tone spoke volumes. Betty knew as well as if he had spelled it out in flowing sentences that Hughie’s father had not made a good start as Bill Cheveley’s manager, and probably that the family as a whole was not liked out at Wilgandra. His sense of fairness would not allow him to say any more, but he couldn’t keep the truth out of his tone.

  Soon all of Bundaroo would know it. And Hughie would have one more black mark against him, to add to his accent, his Englishness, his devotion to “culture,” and his total foreignness to outback customs and ways of looking at the world.

  Chapter 3

  Ghosts

  “Hello, Auntie Bet? You OK?”

  The voice was male, young, and broad Australian.

  “Hello, Mark.”

  She tried to inject some enthusiasm into her voice, though he probably wouldn’t notice one way or the other. Mark didn’t. If anyone was making a film on the narcissus myth, Mark would be a natural for the part.

  “I’ve been meaning to pop by and make sure you’re still in the land of the living, and I will do, this week or early next. I just haven’t had a minute recently.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” said Bettina, adding maliciously, “Are the parts beginning to come in?”

  “No, it’s more this personal trainer lark. It’s a soft cop—all perks and no work. Charging around from posh hotels to posh flats and houses, then on to posh gyms. Sounds a drag, doesn’t it? But I suppose that sort of thing’s not your scene, is it, Auntie Betty?”

  “It certainly doesn’t sound like it.”

  “You mentioned parts. I thought you might be able to help there, Auntie B.”

  Bettina left a silence. This was what she had been exp
ecting since she heard his voice.

  He was forced to come out with it explicitly, since she refused to ease the transition. “I hear they’re going to make a film of The Heat of the Land.”

  “The Heart of the Land. Since it’s set in Armidale the heat is fairly moderate. There is a part for a young man, but he’s quite a lot younger than you.”

  The heroine of her book had a brief and bittersweet romance with the school’s cricket captain. Bettina had portrayed him as a willowy young man perpetually in white flannels. She certainly hadn’t imagined him as a lumbering mass of muscle and self-love, which pretty well summed up her nephew Mark.

  “I can look anything from seventeen to forty, Auntie Bet.”

  “Maybe. I can mention you to the film company, but that’s all I can do. They’ll make their own decisions. And all the filming is going to take place in Australia.”

  “Oo-o-oh—really? I thought the interiors would be filmed here.”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Of course I want to go back to Australia—naturally I do. But all the action is here at the moment—”

  Being personal something-or-other to people with more money than sense, thought Bettina. She interrupted him.

  “Well, you have to make some sacrifices for your Art,” she said. “Or alternatively you could sacrifice your Art for the good life. The loss would be great to Art, but—”

  “Don’t be sarky, Auntie B,” said Mark, and she was surprised that he was actually listening. “And another thing. There’s Dad.”

  “Your father?”

  “He’s coming over. Should be here in a couple of weeks’ time. That’s if the bargain tickets work out.”

  “Oh, that will be nice,” said Bettina, genuinely pleased at the prospect of seeing her baby brother again.

  “That was what I was really ringing about,” said Mark, who clearly had had no interest in her well-being and little hope of a part in the film. “I was going to ask a favor of you, Auntie Betty.”

  “Ye-e-es?”

  “I know you don’t like people to stay for too long, and that’s fine—he’ll stay here with me. But I wondered if you could take him around the plays and operas and that sort of cra—thing, just now and again, could you? Save me. I mean, I would do it, but I’m busy most of the time, and I couldn’t afford to lose customers by standing them up. And you know it’s not my thing.”

  “Yes, I know it’s not your thing, Mark.”

  “That’s beaut, then. What with Dad being a bit of a culture-vulture and you being the same, that suits everyone, doesn’t it?”

  Bettina wondered what sort and degree of a culture-vulture Oliver could have turned out to be, and how he could have produced or nurtured a brainless lump like Mark. Perhaps she had better ring him up and sound him out on what he might like to see.

  “I’d be delighted to show him around and take him to things,” she announced gladly.

  “Gee, thanks, Auntie Betty. You’re a sport.”

  I hope not, she thought.

  As she pottered around the flat for the rest of the afternoon it occurred to her to wonder from time to time why she reacted so badly to her nephew. Things had got off onto the wrong foot when he had arrived in London eighteen months before. He had been warned that she was a working writer and never had guests in the flat for longer than a week, but he had made himself and his copious luggage at home in the flat and displayed a clear intention of staying there as long as he could string it out. In those first days in Britain he had made determined attempts to break into the acting business there. He was not without credentials, though nearly so. He had had three months ten years earlier in Neighbours, as the resident hunk. His contract had not been renewed. The experience had not cut much ice in Britain. Since then he had made a living as barman and bouncer, swimming instructor and rugby player with a minor side, PE teacher and “personal trainer”—with no doubt some extra income from selling his body to whomsoever was attracted by it.

  Bettina pulled herself up. She had no evidence whatever that Mark sold himself on the side. The only experience of him that had given her the idea that he might was his habit, in that one week in her flat, of going around the place in his briefs or—on one occasion only, when he had been the object of her wrath—in only a jockstrap. She had felt uneasy with him. It was as if he was offering himself to her—at her age!—in lieu of rent. That sort of aggressive male sexuality made her uneasy.

  Still made her uneasy. It made her realize that she had never got over that terrible night in Bundaroo. It wasn’t enough, never to have gone back. To put it forever behind her she would have had to have had no people like Mark who could remind her of it. In this day and age, she said to herself, that was unlikely.

  It was two weeks after Hughie began at Bundaroo High that Betty walked to school with him and Steve Drayton. Steve was from Wilgandra, where his father was a stockman, and he only walked with them because he had designs on Betty’s friend Alice Carey, and thought that through Betty he might attain what he coveted: Alice’s partnership at the Leavers’ Dance in December, her brilliant revision notes for the end-of-the-year examinations, slices of her mother’s well-thought-of passion-fruit sponge, and beyond that her heart—and beyond that still her bed, or at least access to her knickers. Betty rather liked Steve. He was down-to-earth in a way she approved of.

  “Alice Carey’s brilliant at geography,” Steve was saying. “I can never make head nor tail of it. I wish it was just maps, and ‘What’s the capital of Austria?’ ”

  They were approaching the bitumen strip of Bundaroo’s main street, and Betty saw the brawny form of Sam Battersby outside the Grafton’s Hotel, rolling empty barrels around to the strip of wasteland at the back. She changed her position so that the boys were between her and the hotel.

  “Whatcher doin’ that for?” demanded Steve. “I was talkin’ to you.”

  “I don’t like the way Sam Battersby looks at me,” said Betty, keeping her voice low.

  “Looks at you? Listen to ya!” said Steve, taking no such precautions. “He’s just lookin’ at the kids goin’ to school. Not much happens in Bundaroo.”

  “This happens every day,” said Betty.

  “Betty’s right,” said Hughie. “He does look at her.”

  Steve seemed about to make some jeer at the newcomer, but he bit it back. Sam Battersby had upended a barrel on a low dray outside the front entrance to his hotel, and had planted his big fleshy arms on it, and his beer belly against it, and was gazing at them as they walked past.

  “See?” said Betty.

  “Come off it! It’s just ordin’ry,” said Steve, but not with great conviction.

  “It’s not ordinary. It’s horrible. Watch the side window at Bob’s Café. It reflects the Grafton’s.”

  As they walked they gazed surreptitiously at the little café’s window. Sam Battersby had not changed his position, but his head was turned in their direction, and his protruding eyes were watching, fixed on Betty’s retreating back.

  “Well,” said Steve. “I suppose you’re right. But I’ve never noticed it before.”

  “He doesn’t watch you,” said Betty.

  The next weekend it was Masonic Night in Walgett. Betty’s father had been sponsored as a Mason by Bill Cheveley, so that he could drive him there and—more to the point—back. Bill had never much liked driving, since four long years as an ambulance man during the war. He had once driven into a tree on the way back from Walgett when he’d drunk too much. Bill paid for Jack’s services as a chauffeur by making his car available to him whenever he had need of it. Jack only had to go into Bundaroo and phone Wilgandra from the Grafton’s Hotel and it was brought over by one of the stockmen. Whether he would have joined the Masons if left to himself was doubtful. Betty had heard him ridiculing the ritual one night when he’d thought she was asleep. “Grown men dressing up like high-class waitresses,” he’d said. “Makes me split a gut laughing.” But Bill Cheveley was more than a mate
. The two men admired each other, and they had between them something that was almost as intimate as a marriage.

  That evening Bill Cheveley brought along a guest. Hughie’s dad, Paul Naismyth, was a Mason, initiated back home in the north of England, and Bill, who was a man who took obligations seriously, had felt obliged to ask him as his special guest. To him the Masons were about fellowship.

  “Good to meet you at last,” said Naismyth, shaking Jack Whitelaw’s hand. “Heard a lot about you from Bill—all good, of course.”

  “Is tea all right for you?” said Dot, not expecting to be introduced, and not being. “It’s what Jack and Bill usually have before the drive.”

  “Whatever comes out of the pot,” said Paul Naismyth. “And this will be the young lady my son Eugene’s been talking about, is it?”

  Betty just smiled, and Naismyth stretched his arms above his head, then took up his cup and drank.

  “I needed this,” he said. “I’ve been all day trying to get a hand’s turn of work out of that lazy hound Kevin Drayton.”

  Betty felt immediately an access of tension in the room. Paul Naismyth had transgressed, had passed over one of those unmarked boundaries. He was too new, and too English, to criticize one of the established members of their little community. And since Kevin Drayton did not have the reputation of being idle, everyone in the room could have guessed that he was probably engaged in some kind of passive resistance to the new manager.

  “Now we’re just waiting for the Rev,” said Bill Cheveley, stepping into the silence, “and then we’ll get going.”

  “Oh, is the vicar a Mason?” asked Paul Naismyth. “We have a vicar in the Hexham lodge, but mostly the C. of E. people steer clear of us.”