A Boat Load of Home Folk

by Thea Astley

  It was too painful for him to stay with her and, putting his jacket over her hollowed chest and arms, he went back into the darkness and found a flying figure at last whose garments he noted made her a religious, and he took her thin arm firmly and requested.

  “The bishop went up to Erromango after lunch,” she told him. “Father Mulgrave took him up to the mission.”

  “What about Father Lake?” Even as he automatically asked he remembered. And even in the half-light from her hurricane-lamp saw the glaze on her eyes that showed she was determined to protect Lake.

  “He was flying out this afternoon.”

  “Yes. But the plane did not come. There was no plane.”

  She was silent. The viciousness of the wind caught them and bent them together and just behind them came the crash of a telephone pole and the whine of the wire tangle it dragged behind. The rain burst on them like a tap, and they cowered and ran for the hospital veranda.

  He said, “Where would he be?” His impatience demanded a brutal answer. “Would he be in the pub?”

  “I don’t know, Mr Stevenson.” She had recognized him finally and this small appeasement to his ego at such a point surprised but did not elate him, he realized in an access of charity; and he recognized, too, the dislike in her uninflected voice and knew that scandal concerning him coloured her response, so that the years of his petty despotic insistencies with the native boys working for the firm and the almost uncontrolled bigotry he had felt rose like Tongoa and filled him with regret now that he needed help. He began to explain again, while all the time the surf of rain beat in on them and the wind tore away at the iron roof. He explained slowly and carefully why he wanted a priest and the nun listened in the soaking tormented dark, for each had long ago ceased to care about bodily comfort.

  Back at the truck they found the open door which Miss Trumper in an ultimate charge of energy had forced back. The old woman was crumpled in a pool of water beside the truck.

  “I’d say leave her with us,” cried the nun, “but there’s nowhere. The roof went on the main building an hour back and we’ve been shifting patients and equipment over to the prison. Half the patients are still lying in the rain.”

  Around them everything was collapsing, or sounded so, and flogging as it fell.

  Stevenson bent down and levered the old woman up, cradled her somehow, and flopped her back onto the front seat.

  “Good night,” he said.

  The little nun’s veil had been torn off. She stood there in her soaking clothes with the jagged ends of her cropped boy hair hanging wetly round her face.

  “But where are you taking her?”

  “The Lantana. For the last sacraments. Spiritual or carnal.”

  His own pain devoured his right side. Miss Trumper twitched into stillness at last.

  IX

  7 p.m., 10th December

  IN front of the mirror at the Lantana, doing a small Folies Bergère and feeling hard and unforgiving, Miss Paradise was drinking herself silly, cuddling gin and ice at seven hundred francs a time, bitching at the lemon slices, and watching the day’s torpor melt into dark rain lines and wind scrawl. She felt every second of her sixty-two years, but was braving it out with parfums de bain and some raggedly applied lipstick whose end result was sad.

  She felt guilty but was fighting it and this pungent taste was new to a soul that had marched straight and crazed along preordained paths to the emptiness of old age. Remembering the hallway back at Condamine and the forage cap left there in hope of reclamation amid the blue glass baubles and the bead curtains and the recherché sculptures of lost friends. And remembering the garden paths between which she had trodden hopes under foot and the post-office arcades in Brisbane, the bitumen road-strips to the Paradise of Surfers, and along them all the geometric flowers or refuse bins or grass grew like five o’clock shadows.

  Time had closed in.

  She watched her vague reflected self claw the glass up with four flaming talons and she followed its course to the bitter mouth, observed clinically the contractions of her flabby neck and the movement of muscle. It was not so terrible as those moments when, walking past an unexpected mirror, the glimpse, the gasping glimpse, gives back to you the older, the much older stranger in the unsuitable frock, the scrawny neck, arms, cheek, and the sprayed out hair. Once in a restaurant lavatory she had had such an experience, goggling at her twin and thinking “Who’s that old thing? I know her.” And then being felled by the revelation of the overhead lights that scribbled her history carelessly on the blotched glass.

  Twenty years ago she would have tried to pick someone up. Thirty and she would have succeeded. She was resigned. She fumbled around in her carry-all for a cigarette and lit up and puffed smoke across the mirror screen and watched Mr Seabrook softly squabbling with Mrs Seabrook at the far end of the dining-room. The outer storm was beginning to match the inner one.

  At the table behind her there was a disgusting choking and coughing sound that made her turn to discover the black satin finish of a clerical stock shimmering below dog-collar and two outstretched arms plastered across the wet table. The instinctive predatory rhythms began in her until she observed the hungry, much younger face, unaware and unseeing. She flapped a hand at him and his eyes were not even disturbed. If I chose! she threatened inwardly. But she knew it was hopeless.

  Still, she wobbled back to his table, setting her own glass near his, moving towards him out of some freak motive of charity as well that found her prisoned self in others and tried to comfort, and she said as carefully as a drunk which she would pretend all night not to be, “May I talk to you?”

  “I have nothing to confess,” he said instantly without looking up and then he did raise his head, and behind the masks that time and error had placed like net across their faces was the prickle of recognition that referred to another country and another year. They were both sorting at memory, and outside the wind that had been pursuing the island all day caught up with it suddenly and exploded a set of wooden shutters on the harbour side veranda, the slats springing off like crackers, leaping in and over the window and bouncing along the sea-wall.

  “It’s my farewell party,” Lake said. He smiled his boyish smile, though now he consciously knew it to be so, into her terrible painted face. “It’s Henley on Lena. It’s cracker night. Did you know—?” and he leant across the table towards her, his elbows planted in slop, so that their drink-ruined eyes hooked in false friendship—“that I planned to blow up the Residency?”

  “Fun!” said Miss Paradise. With fashionable social gesture she flicked ash from the end of her cigarette. “Were they heretics?”

  “No. I am that. Actually, I’m a pariah. A pariah-heretic. And there’s a very classy hyphen. Say,” he added, sending himself up grotesquely, “haven’t we met some place?”

  “I have that feeling,” said Verna Paradise.

  “A long time ago?”

  “A very long time.”

  “I missed the plane, you know,” he went on, “and they sobered me up. So I’m all ready to start again and disgrace myself. Actually there wasn’t any plane.”

  “In the country somewhere?” Miss Paradise still searched.

  “No plane. So they have to put up with me another twenty-four hours, you see? Yes. It was somewhere like that. Streets with pubs and flies.”

  “Brisbane?” Miss Paradise inquired.

  “No. Not as big. Perhaps it was—no, never mind.”

  “Condamine?”

  “They cancelled the plane really at the other end. Some hurricane warning. Yes, I suppose that could be it. But I’ll be off in the morning unless the island is uprooted.”

  He waved at Monsieur Fricotte and pointed to his glass that now contained his heart. “To be pickled,” he added to himself.

  And “Allow me,” suggested Miss Paradise who then went icily poised to the bar and flapped and pointed her fingers at a boy.

  “Please,” Monsieur Fricotte whispered, lea
ning confidentially close. “Don’t give the Father another.”

  “Father who?”

  “Father Lake.”

  “Lake,” said Miss Paradise and repeated and tasted the name. “Years ago I knew of one. Two double scotches, please. Has he been here long?”

  “Since five years.” Fricotte glared at her suddenly. He hated women with too much paint. It revealed everything. “Do not let him make a fool of himself.”

  “Now I seriously doubt that,” Miss Paradise said, beginning to dislike this pudgy wine-vendor. “No more than I.”

  “You do not matter,” Fricotte said unkindly. “You do not count here. You are a visitor and a woman. He is a priest.”

  “Give me the whisky,” Miss Paradise commanded loudly, now fully revealed. And she seized the glasses in made-certain hands to take back to the priest like some sacrilegious communion. She watched happily as he halved the liquid.

  “It was Condamine,” she said. “I know your name.”

  “God bless you for that too,” he said. “I was almost happy then.” And he rode a long wave of recollection that took him in to a lost shore. He was gone from her so long she had to prod him. “I was younger and more innocent and I sang. Do you know what I sang? I crooned and warbled Gregorian and tenor arias and I was the life and the soul of the Hibernian evenings.”

  “Were you indeed now?” Miss Paradise said acidly. “I remember the man who was with you in those days. A Father Lingard.”

  Lake had the thrill of rediscovery flaring up in his mind and his eyes which had been blinkered opened wide for the first time in ten minutes as he focused to absorb the detail of the older human confronting him across the table. Her face was washed in light and shadow by the swinging lamps. Outside the wind had become crazed and was bashing the harbour into waves that broke over and over against the timber veranda wall. The rain had eaten its way through structural weaknesses and was puddling the floor all round them.

  “He was the kindest man,” Lake said, “I have ever known. I don’t know what happened to him. Perhaps he’s dead. Or in a home. A home for the religious.”

  Miss Paradise had stopped listening and was fumbling with a new sensation of guilt. “I have no conscience,” she used to boast to those with too much. And truly her face was never distressed except by the special madness of her own frustration. “I had a friend in Condamine. A Miss Trumper. Did you know her?”

  “No. I know no one.”

  “Back there. In Condamine.”

  “In Condamine?”

  “Yes. There was—” she paused, but not out of delicacy—“a scandal.”

  “I live with them, you know,” he said. “They are my business.”

  “I know.”

  “So one this or that way, more or less, would not impinge.”

  Miss Paradise drew a deep breath that whistled all the way into her hollow body.

  “It was rape,” she said. “A young boy.”

  Lake felt through the blurring drink that he was beginning to dislike her.

  “Why did she rape him?” he asked coldly.

  Miss Paradise clamped her teeth to the rag of her lower lip and the paint came away on her teeth.

  “He. Not she.” She suspected mockery.

  “Oh.” He looked away at the bulging shutters still withstanding the onslaught of wind.

  “We are on this trip together, you know.” He was not interested but she pushed away at it. “She needed a change. But she’s very difficult.”

  “I am very difficult,” Lake said. “I am very, very difficult. And you, too, I suspect.”

  “I must tell you,” Miss Paradise said. And stopped talking at once. Oh my God, thought Lake. I have to prod now. The unavoidable coyness of sinners. It makes me sick sick sick.

  “Tell me,” he said automatically, but his eyes were on the pulsing lamps and the level of his whisky and the bitten ends of his nails.

  “Well, we had a row this morning. It was my fault, really. I haven’t seen her since.”

  “Are you worried? About her feelings, I mean?”

  He’s mad, she thought, not for one moment suspecting herself. She said carefully, “She was going to walk to the crater. I would have gone too but we quarrelled.”

  Again she saw the unbelieving face of her friend with the features exploded apart by shock like a shattered balloon and she hated herself for once and wished undone what was irremediable. All afternoon, doom had been above the sky like cloud, pressing down on her as she lay in the stuffy two-bunk cabin just off the galley, praying from three until six that Kitty might reel in from the heat and the grasping trees she could observe clutching at the littoral a quarter of a mile in from the shore. Around seven the insane wind could not be ignored.

  The priest’s red-rimmed eyes inspected her as she sat, poor wretch he was now willing to admit, with her glass tipped stupidly. He wanted to raise his hand in blessing but his fingers only took his glass to his own mouth which wanted to placate her and he sucked in the last terrible juices and drowned his charity. The woman began to cry, quite softly, making sniffling sounds, her eyes open to the bustle and the swinging lights and the savagery of the wind across the front.

  “It’s right to worry,” Lake agreed. “I’ve stifled my own conscience, but you’ve still got yours.” He said brutally, “Why don’t you get out there and look for her?”

  This struck her as he meant it to and she pushed her chair back at the dramatically critical moment when there was a disturbance at the door where, in a complexity of rain, tree turbulence and latticed voices, the district agent was pleading for help.

  The power failed just as Fricotte and Stevenson staggered into the room bearing Miss Trumper between them.

  Monsieur Fricotte, split in two by her misted vision, appeared to be indicating her, and between sips of whisky and exclamations in the blood Miss Paradise, discovering fear in addition to guilt, staggered away from her drunken chair and lurched towards the rocking hallway. But eyes moved past her like a shoal of fish.

  It was not she whom they wanted but the sodden heap of cleric washed up on the waves of his own despair.

  Above them the first section of the roof began to go.

  Under the rending of iron and the tearing of beams that bled nails and plaster onto the diners, Stevenson’s pleas fell without effect.

  “I want Lake,” he kept saying. “She asked specially. But I don’t think it matters now.”

  Miss Paradise tottered under the collapsing room.

  “Who did?” she cried into a no-hearingness. “Who?” And she began to drag at his sleeve, only to encounter the nervous response of nervous arm beneath. But it was as if the man were deaf for he dragged her after him across the room towards Lake.

  “Could you come?” he was asking, his hand out shaking the shoulder of the slopped down figure.

  It wobbled its head.

  “Can’t.”

  “You must. It’s a woman. She’s dying. I think she’s dead.”

  “I’m no good,” Lake said. “No good. Why the hell didn’t you try the presbytery? The pub’s not the place for priests.”

  “I tried there, you fool. The whole damn building’s gone. And in the darkness I couldn’t find anyone except a sister. She didn’t know where anyone was.”

  Lake groaned.

  “Did she ask for me specially?”

  “Who?” Miss Paradise screamed between them. “Who, who?”

  Stevenson noticed her then, painted and crazy and criss-crossed with some mad grief.

  “Your friend,” he said between the throbbing of a loose shutter. “I picked her up on the road.”

  “Oh, my God,” Miss Paradise whispered. “Can I see her?”

  “Please,” Stevenson said. “Just a minute. I don’t know what to do. The hospital roof’s gone. They were shifting patients across to the prison to get them out of the rain. She might have to go up there.”

  Lake staggered to his stranger feet. This is my last kindness
, he thought, to destroy with a final sacrilege. So he went after the other man and the woman followed them both.

  X

  3.30 p.m., 10th December

  IT had begun pleasantly enough.

  In the three-o’clock passion of sun, a taxi-man had been persuaded to drive them to Ebouli Sands.

  “Stage-props,” murmured Gerald. “One million coconut palms all bending the same way. A chorus of nut-trees by C. B. De Mille. Blue water. White sand. Outrigger canoe.”

  He drew a cross on the beach with his heel.

  “What’s that?” Kathleen asked.

  “It’s a postcard,” he said. “That’s where we’re staying.” (Memories of the trip—of shuttered rooms and open drains in the hot dusty French island town with date-palm square, of flamboyants along a port side, of bickerings on corners, near churches and in upstairs cafés where the wine had been watered. And later, after the rows, after the attempts at reconciliation, more days like the preceding, unwinding like a film of tiny black and white pictures.)

  An acidly green finger thrust through distance into the sea, a finger towards which their compelled feet smacking the shelving beach took them to discovery of a tidal inlet and three old native men with bottles of beer. The five of them were held in the heat and silence until one of the old fellows laughed and handed his bottle to Gerald. Gerald hesitated. They were dirty men, and not altogether pleasant. The native, explanatory, raised the bottle to his own mouth and swallowed, then offered.

  “Go on!” Kathleen whispered.

  “I don’t really. . . .”

  “You have to.”

  Gerald pushed the neck of the bottle aside. “Thanks, old man, but no. Not at the moment.”

  Under the pigmentation and the dirt of age some hurt was apparent. The old man with the beer bottle pushed it forward once more at Gerald’s negating head and then dropped his arm. One of the other two said something angry and quick and spat.

  “Come on!” Gerald ordered Kathleen. He swung her about by the arm and commenced walking her back along the beach, feeling idiotic in his bathing trunks with his sunburnt and skinny legs propelling him bandily away. Behind them came elderly hoots and mirth, came cries. Bantam Gerald was all a-ruffle and diagonally Kathleen began to move away from him up the beach to the sandmound where they had left their wraps. These failed to disguise their sulks as they trudged sullenly back the long road between the plantations towards the port.