A Cry from the Dark

by Robert Barnard

  “Betty! Stop! You’ve got to tell them—”

  “Get lost, dickhead. Now,” said Steve, and they both continued walking, Betty quickening her pace as she walked within a couple of feet of Sam, and Steve immediately following suit.

  “Betty, you’ve got to tell the police I had nothing to do with what happened to you. They’ve got this daft idea—”

  “Cut it out, will you?” shouted Steve.

  “—this daft idea that it was me. And you know we’ve always been friends, always had our little jokes together. Betty, you’ve got to tell them—”

  Betty turned around, and Steve put a restraining hand on her arm, but couldn’t stop her.

  “How can I tell them you didn’t do it? I don’t know you didn’t. I don’t know who it was. But I do know you make me want to throw up.”

  And she turned and almost ran till they were on the dirt track, past the last shop and house, Alice’s, and on the way to Fort George. Betty stopped, drew breath, and turned to Steve.

  “Thanks, Steve. I’m very grateful.”

  “No fuss, Betty. You told him, anyway. Bloody bull-shitter.”

  Suddenly Betty seemed to crumple, lose all her fire. She hid her face in her hands.

  “I can’t stay here. I can’t stay any longer.”

  “Don’t say that, Betty. It will get better, really. They’ll arrest that mongrel—”

  “They won’t. They’ve no evidence. He’ll always be here, leering at me…Tell the others, Steve: It’s nothing to do with what happened at the dance. Tell Hughie, too. I just can’t stay here any longer.”

  And when she got home she walked straight out to her mother, feeding the chickens.

  “Mum. I can’t stay here any longer.”

  Bettina’s second morning at the Prince Leopold was marked by a flying visit from her agent.

  “I heard this was where you were,” she gabbled, “though I could have guessed. Rellies still in Edinburgh? Do Australians call them rellies? No—well, that was a fair guess too. Now, I thought you’d want to work, so I rescued your tape recorder from the police.”

  Bettina was breathtaken by Clare’s barnstorming style.

  “That’s very kind of you, Clare,” she said quietly. “But yesterday I managed to write several pages longhand.”

  “Really? Really? Well, give them to me and I’ll photocopy them just to be on the safe side. I’m glad I brought the tape recorder though. I mean, if you’ve got arthritis you’ve got arthritis, haven’t you? I should stick to the tapes. They’re probably safer here than in the flat. You can put them in the hotel safe every night, can’t you?”

  “Oh yes. Along with my diamonds and Fabergé Easter eggs.”

  “Humor was never your style, was it, Bettina? Satire, yes, but not much in the way of fun in your books, is there? I hear Katie’s still hanging on.”

  “Yes. Katie’s a fighter.”

  “Is it worth it at her age, I wonder?”

  “It’s her nature. I don’t suppose she has a choice.”

  “Of course you have a choice. The most lively dog decides at some point that it’s not worth going on anymore…The police seem very interested in Mark.”

  “Mark? How do you know that?”

  “You know my wonderful hearing. Better than a bugging device any day. While I was unplugging the tape recorder and getting the whole caboodle into a bag, I heard the big chief—Murchison, is it?—talking on the phone in your sitting room. It was something about Mark having a police record back in—Victoria, is it?”

  “You know perfectly well Australia has a state called Victoria, Clare. You’re just trying to make it sound like Botswana or the Galápagos Islands. Yes, Ollie and Mark live in the suburbs of Melbourne, though I think Mark tries to spend most of his summers in Sydney or Surfers’ Paradise.”

  “Places as unknown to me as Samarkand or Xanadu, darling. Well, I have heard of Sydney, what with the Games and the bushfires. Pure magic, I’m sure, both places. Anyway, that’s who they’re interested in.”

  “Only as one of several possibilities, I’m sure. I don’t think if they’ve talked to Mark for long they’ll take him very seriously as a suspect.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too dim. And Mark is just weak. A bundle of trivial vanities. A child who doesn’t see why he shouldn’t have any- and everything he wants when he wants it. It’s not in the cards he could do anything like this.”

  But when Clare had gone, Bettina sat thinking about Mark. She had classed him in her mind with Sergeant Malley and Sam Battersby and other body-oriented types she had met on three continents since her Bundaroo days—simpleminded, small-brained men devoted to their own obsessions and satisfactions. But Sergeant Malley had made it to inspector, as her father had more or less predicted he might, though his time in Grafton had been cut short by a case of evidence-fixing so blatant that even the NSW authorities couldn’t ignore it. And of course Sam Battersby…

  But Sam had signaled danger, even to an ignorant young girl. Mark had never done this. But should she have been alert to other signs, different messages? Was Mark more complex, more mixed-up—above all, more dangerous—than she had imagined?

  Everyone was very kind. Of course her parents were more than that: they were loving. And in fact when she thought about it after she had made her escape from Bundaroo, the kindness of most of the people close to her had been concerned, responsible, well-judged.

  Her father, when he got in from the paddocks, had gone into Bundaroo and talked to the Reverend Potter-Clowes. Unwilling to telephone from Grafton’s Hotel, the vicar had got on his bike early the next morning and cycled out to Wilgandra. As a consequence, soon after breakfast Bill Cheveley had appeared at the farm, and all four of them—Betty definitely included and listened to—held a council of war. After that, Jack Whitelaw had gone back with Bill and telephoned his sister in Armidale, at the department store, Cummings’s, where she worked. By the time Jack arrived back at Fort George it had been arranged that Betty would go and stay with Auntie Shirley for a while. Jack had established that there was a bus from Walgett to Brisbane that passed through Armidale, and ran every Saturday. Bill was with Jack when he came home and spoke very kindly to Betty.

  “I’d like to have loaned your dad the car so he could have driven you to Armidale,” he said. “I just don’t like being without it for too long—because of Peg.”

  “Of course Peg comes first,” said Betty, who was really fond of Bill’s wife, even if she did suspect that her illnesses were mostly imaginary. “And it’ll be rather exciting taking the bus.”

  As soon as she had said it she realized that excitement was about the last thing she wanted at that time. What did make Betty feel guilty was the general agreement that she was going to stay with her auntie Shirley “for a while.” That wasn’t her intention at all. If she had her way she would never come back to Bundaroo. Not “never” never, of course: she would come back, she thought, if her parents were ill, when Ollie got married—family events. She would come back for a few days, even a week or two, but never more than that. Armidale was the haven that beckoned at present, but it was only a stepping-stone on the road to Sydney, and to who knew where else?

  Before Saturday came she had a visit from Michael Potter-Clowes. Perhaps the vicar sensed the truth—that this was a real good-bye. They sat in the sweltering lounge and he stumbled to say how much knowing her had meant to him.

  “Having you to talk to, watching your mind develop, has been one of the pleasantest things in my life,” he said. “And it will be wonderful to watch you from afar. I know exciting things are going to happen to you.”

  She felt like saying that one just had, but she knew it would be the wrong note to sound.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said deprecatingly. But her smile said that she thought he might be right. “Will you—can I write to you?” Tentative as the suggestion was, she knew it was she who was conferring the favor.

  “Would you? Oh, I’d s
o like that. I’ve never had a real correspondence in my life.”

  Thus began an exchange of letters every three months or so that lasted till the end of Michael Potter-Clowes’s life, when Betty had published all of her Australian novels and gone on to London subjects. It was a correspondence that gave as much pleasure to her as it did to him.

  On Saturday Kevin Drayton arrived with the car before sunup, and Betty said good-bye to her mother and Ollie on the dirt road outside the farm, crying at losing them, crying at the end of one movement in her life—which had begun, unsymphonically, with a long slow movement, but which she was sure was now about to speed up. Then she and her father got into the car, drove through the silent landscape to drop Kevin back at Wilgandra, then continued on to Walgett. By nightfall she was in Armidale, being met by her aunt on Beardy Street. It was lucky she was the only girl of the right age unaccompanied on the bus or they would have had difficulty recognizing each other.

  She soon got on to her aunt’s rather spinsterly wavelength, and found the taboos in her worldview rather comforting. She registered to take the Leaving year over again at Armidale High School. This had been agreed with her parents before she left. They all knew she was in no mental or physical condition to start teachers’ college or university. The comparative coolness of the place—now and then, even in midsummer, feeling to the girl from the outback positively chilly—began the work of healing. Away from the roasting sun everything seemed more balanced, more understandable, more susceptible to rational solution.

  There was one thing, however, that she found it inconvenient not to be able to talk to her aunt about. As she met Shirley’s friends and neighbors in the next few days, though, she began to suspect that they all knew what had happened to her. She was bemused, because she couldn’t imagine her aunt sharing her knowledge around the town. She later found out that the woman on the switchboard at Cummings’s, who spent most of her day taking down orders from the surrounding graziers, listened in to every private conversation that promised to be interesting and spread the information gained. So Betty chose the most sympathetic of Auntie Shirley’s neighbors in Dangar Street and went to talk with her one pleasantly sunny afternoon when her aunt was back at work.

  “I think you know what happened to me, don’t you?” she said, over tea and biscuits. She ignored the look of apprehension that spread over Mrs. Brighthouse’s face. “How will I know—and how soon will I know—if I’m pregnant?”

  The neighbor was quiet for a few seconds. Even in Armidale, minds were not easily adapted to new situations, and giving sexual counseling to a victim of rape was way outside Mrs. Brighthouse’s experience. But she rose to the challenge, and the main sign of her nervousness was the fact that she sank her voice to a whisper, as if her weatherboard walls had ears. When she had finished, and answered Betty’s questions, she got off the subject as quickly as she could.

  “I hear you’re in for a competition in the Bulletin for a young journalist,” she said. “How exciting! And your auntie says you have a good chance of winning.”

  “Oh, that’s probably just Bundaroo talk,” said Betty, unconvincingly. False modesty never came easy to her, even before she was mildly famous.

  They talked happily, avoiding difficult subjects, until Mrs. Brighthouse’s son came home, dressed in flannels and carrying a cricket bat. He was to be in the Leaving year that Betty was joining at the high school, and they talked for a bit, beginning the very mild romance that occupied her first few months in Armidale. This provided the basis for the heroine’s romance in The Heart of the Land, where it became much less mild. But then fiction, including Bettina’s fiction, never tried to capture the lukewarmness and unformed nature of life as it is really lived.

  When Mrs. Brighthouse said good-bye at the front door she whispered, “In a few years you’ll find a husband and have a family, and all this horrible business will be forgotten.”

  No, I won’t, thought Betty. And it won’t be forgotten by me.

  Over Christmas and the weeks after it Betty began to settle down in Armidale. Everything there seemed attractive after the baking dusty summers in Bundaroo. She couldn’t wait for the two days in winter when the locals told her they would have snow. Every week, and sometimes more often, she got a letter from her mother or father. They told her which of her female classmates was said to be going with which of her male classmates. They told her that Miss Dampier had got a teaching post in Bathurst, and that her replacement had not been appointed yet. They told her (briefly, with no embroidery, as if their letters were read by a gauleiter or a commissar) that Sam Battersby had given up the Grafton’s Hotel and left the area for South Australia, and that his poor little wife had gone to live near her daughter, who was engaged to be married. They told her that Bill Cheveley had blown up when he had heard Paul Naismyth tearing a strip off a raw recruit to the property’s workforce. They had come to a parting of the ways, and the Naismyths had decided to return to Britain. Paul Naismyth had changed his mind about the likelihood of war, and decided that his country needed him. With his usual tact he had embroidered on this decision for all to hear in Phil’s.

  “We’ll be fighting by year’s end. And make no mistake, Australia won’t be with us this time. This country’s got no backbone. It’s rotten, it’s lazy, and it’s yellow to the core.”

  The letter from the Bulletin came in mid-January, just after Betty had received her moderate-to-good Leaving results and before the start of the new school year. There was nothing on the envelope to say whom it was from, but the postmark was Sydney, and it was typed and addressed to Miss Bettina Whitelaw at Fort George, Bundaroo, NSW. Betty’s parents had decided that it could not be from a friend or relative, and had sent it on unopened, thinking she had a right to read it first.

  It congratulated her on winning the first prize. It said her article was evocative, mature, and beautifully written. It said what a wonderful tribute it was to Australian life and education that a tiny place like Bundaroo could produce the winner of a competition that had attracted more than a thousand entries. It said that the editorial board of the Bulletin thought it appropriate for a member of the journal’s staff to come out to Bundaroo and present Bettina with her prize of one hundred Australian pounds at the high school there.

  Before her aunt returned from work Betty had written a reply, expressing her joy and gratitude, but asking, since she had always longed to see Sydney and did not know when she would get another opportunity, if the prize could be presented to her there.

  Chapter 14

  Prophesying War

  That afternoon, phoning in advance to make sure a visit was acceptable, Murchison came to the Prince Leopold to see Bettina. He brought news that Katie Jackson had shown more than one slight sign that she responded to voices.

  “The other thing I wanted to tell you,” he said, settling down in the little armchair, “is that we’re finished with your flat. You can move back in whenever you feel like it.”

  From the upright desk chair, where she sat with a stiff, upright posture that Murchison ought to have envied, Bettina thought for a moment then screwed up her face.

  “I don’t know…Not yet, I think. I just can’t imagine settling down there, or getting a good night’s sleep…On the other hand, the longer I leave it the more difficult it will be…I’ve never been weak about making necessary decisions, but somehow everything has become very difficult.”

  “Anyway, it’s up to you. What about your brother, and—and the lady he’s with?”

  “She’s not his partner or anything like that. She’s my daughter. Unacknowledged.”

  “Actually, I did know that. That’s why I hesitated.”

  “Mark, of course.” Murchison gave a bob of his head. “Men are such awful gossips.”

  “Couldn’t she stay with you?”

  “Do you really think I can ask the daughter I abandoned to put herself out for me in that way? That flat won’t be pleasant for any one to sleep in until the whole horri
ble business is put out of all our minds. That will be months away, and Sylvia will be back in Australia by then.”

  “You say you can’t ask your daughter to do this. Does that mean that you don’t get on?”

  “No. We get on better than politely, better than I ever could have imagined. We’re friendly and interested in each other. But I can’t pretend we’re mother and daughter in any real sense. Maybe I can’t ask her because I feel guilty.”

  Murchison nodded.

  “It sounded like that…I gather you’re writing your memoirs.”

  “So people tell me. It’s news to me.”

  “Tell me what you are writing then.”

  Bettina paused, wishing to be as precise as possible.

  “I am writing a novel based on my life. I’ve kept all the names, or most of them, but it is essentially a novel. I go into thoughts, I give lots of dialogue when of course I can’t remember what was said sixty-five years ago. I probably get things wrong, put shops in the wrong streets in Armidale—not in Bundaroo—I couldn’t get little Bundaroo wrong. The book is my own life novelized.”

  “I see.” It was Murchison’s turn to think. “When my grandparents died I had to see to their effects. They had lots of books, some of them left over from their childhoods. I remember a series of titles like Lives of the British Queens, Lives of the Great Explorers, Lives of British Murderers. They were either sentimental or sensational, and they were told as stories, but I think essentially they tried to stick to the facts. Is that what the book you’re writing does?”

  Bettina laughed rather sharply.

  “You make it sound quite dreadful. I suppose you’re right. But you mustn’t think I’m sentimentalizing or sensationalizing the story of my life. I’m just writing it in the way I know best, re-creating it as a novel, hoping to make it more interesting, and to dig deeper than most autobiographies, by presenting it in the way that the modern reader knows best and feels happiest with. And I hope it will appeal more than an autobiography would to the younger reader, who knows nothing or very little about the period, and perhaps who gets her ideas about Australia from the early evening soaps.”