A Boat Load of Home Folk

by Thea Astley

  Stevenson, after one forkful, hesitated and put his plate down. But the woman beside him, the bright-faced one he had observed in some passionate exchange of rage with her husband, kept eating steadily. She knew what was on her plate and, in trying to account for this, would not be won or beaten back. She ate evenly, pushing the swollen cardboard to one side and watching with pleasure as Gerald unknowingly gobbled the lot, talking vigorously to dispel the first doubts of his tongue, busy at being a charmer.

  Across the room in the twilight variations of humble light, Miss Latimer caught her eye and their secret knowledge was exchanged. Although Marie was horrified at the Medici that could produce this farce, she was amused, and the gutsy eating of Gerald satisfied her own quiet rage. I could almost think, she imagined, duplicating the thoughts of the wife, that this old witch had done it for me. And in the shadows Gerald was heard belching and proclaiming his cliché litany of thanks that that was that and now that the inner man and so on and so forth. Kathleen found herself miraculously unbound from the rock of twenty years of marriage and was once more the bed-time child observing the party through the chink in the door and, uninvolved, watching the incomprehensible and savage social antics of her elders with the grog and parts of each other’s persons, and the more tender parts of each other’s souls.

  When the roof went they threw themselves beneath the table which in the burst of wind wedged itself abruptly against the wall forming an A shape that protected their heads from the populated air. Their legs in a row stretched out upon the rain-soaked matting and involved themselves so inevitably and intimately it was useless to apologize, so that after a while, despite the cold and the frightening effects of turbulence, Stevenson fell asleep again with his head against the warm shoulder of this woman with the horrible husband from whose ever-readily protective arm Latimer leant back. This had folded about her shoulders involuntarily during the last splintering crash. He had offered, somewhat tardily, to protect Kathleen too, but in her new release she had declined, moving away from him until her soft untidy hair was brushing the thin face of the sleeping man.

  He was sick, she realized. Once in his uncomfortable mumbling sleep he had taken her hand. She could not know of course that he was writing a poem lashed across by bouts of quite unbelievable bitterness that made him think he might be dying. What he was writing took the vaguest form.

  Between two times, he managed to arrange on some invisible papyrus,

  The once looked-over

  Guest of all dear occasions holds

  Hand to hat, to heart, to other things

  Unsymbolic and reflects

  The hour is late.

  It was those last three words that Mrs Seabrook caught him chewing between cardboard and bile.

  At the Lantana there was only the bar-rail left.

  The jigsaw ruins of the residency’s cocktail party, of the Tête Héroique with its spilled cosmetics, of flat 2, 17 Erromango Street, of the hospital at Prison Hill, of the bishop’s residence, and the Malekula spitted on rock-fall across the bay, were like the spoils of a wake. Too much joy lay shattered everywhere, and in the native villages under the crushing admonitions of blown-down palms, natives awoke with a gritty feeling behind their eyes, if they had slept at all.

  Stevenson was the first awake in Erromango Street, fired into daylight by his own pain and the sound of breathing near his heart. His eyes discovered an unfamiliar fairness and turning his neck he saw, too, the quiet sucking of a thumb; beyond his stirring legs sodden bedding, a fractured window-pane and an arrangement of leaves. It was a re-birth. All their waking eyes discovered each other at the same time. The thumb was slowly withdrawn. Miss Latimer prodded the secretions of sleep from the corners of her eyes. Mr Seabrook hauled himself up from an unfortunate curve his body appeared to have made across Miss Latimer’s. And Miss Paradise, her orbs twitching from hangover, jerked into a vertical position. Then memory hit her.

  It was with them all, striking in its various fashions. Kathleen Seabrook, lifting her face which sleep had pressed into another shape, smiled up at Stevenson with the candour of a child.

  His heart would have, but for the pain, turned over.

  “It’s six.” Miss Paradise dealt in metallic words. Miss Latimer’s unabashed clock was spilling its sound all over the room.

  “It seems to be over,” Gerald said with his wild gift for the fatuous. Only his wife could not agree.

  The windows held stir and movement, but the sound had faded into the steady sea-throb. The rain had moved north.

  Their squalor now fixed them for ever at this point with each other, the glaucous eye aware. Some cries, like bird wings rattling, broke across the early morning.

  “I’m going out,” Stevenson said. “I want to see what needs doing.”

  “Passivity in crises.” Marie leant back. “Passivity. What on earth can be done?”

  “There are people. People besides us,” said Stevenson with the bite of dislike in his voice. He’d been a pretty good dog. “It could be—” He intended irony, but sharpness took his breath away for the moment and he stopped idiotically and stood looking at her strangely. Mrs Seabrook who had rested her head all night against his slackening heart sprang up and took his arm when he lifted it away. He removed her hand, but gently, for he wished to be alone on this last day, solitary, underlining the last gasp: this was, he felt, his last day. Miss Latimer dropped her eyes before the blue glare of his own and shifted a little distance from the man who had fondled her furtively all night. “That someone might be hurt, I was going to say.” He finished his statement with some difficulty, giving a hiss to the sibilants.

  In the gash of door he made a paused statement that was missed by everyone before he went down the battered gardenway to the street. At this precise moment, Gerald, fondling his bald spot, was contemplating an inner need for admiration and found himself unwillingly offering to help; but his wife’s eyes inspected this gesture with such dispassionateness he sensed his foolishness swell along his throat. He needed to be critic and challenger.

  Across the room Miss Paradise’s painted face had broken up suddenly into smudged areas of tears like a grief-stricken map whose boundaries had been changed by war. She sat weeping, her Milly Molly Mandy legs jutting forward under the gable, her hands by her side and her unconcealed face gazing out but not seeing through the raped walls across the bitter blue of the lagoon alive in the sunlight.

  The limp sunlight. This postcard was a bit of a failure. Half the littoral seemed to have been torn away and, above, the crater sent up the thinnest smoke trickle. Well-known landmarks were missing. From the veranda remnants, torn ribbons of palm draped across the blue vine flower that had become unlinked and was festering in the sun between bed-posts and scattered saucepans.

  No one cared to help Miss Paradise.

  But, “Don’t go without me,” Kathleen cried loudly down after him. The jungle trappings had fallen back behind the man who was walking slowly to the corner of the bay road. He carried part of the vine with him on his shoulders and was unsteady on his feet.

  “You’ve forgotten your shoes!” she heard herself call fatuously as, swinging them from her fingers, she ran after him in her own bare feet, anxious for something. Gerald was staring amazed. Her anxiety found purpose.

  “She is a Nightingale manqué,” he announced to the room. “She thrives on misfortunes.”

  Miss Latimer inspected him then with a good deal of lip twisting.

  “What a training you would have given!”

  “Unselfish people are the most goddam crashing bores.”

  Miss Latimer laughed harshly at this. “Do you mind shifting a teeny bit?” she pleaded. “You’re leaning on me again and I do have to start somewhere on the mess. It is my home home home.”

  Gerald stared insolently round the walls. The sterility of the house still showed through, but the breakages now added humanity. Some sunlight was even seeping in. “I wonder why. But of course, homes have to be
restored.” He was thinking of his wife now, pattering in the slush of the hurricane-rotten landscape bearing the saint’s shoes like an acolyte. Envy for the moment leant forward and, as if it were a string, pulled Stevenson and Kathleen back along the road, up the path, through leaves and into the room where she foraged foolishly for her own footwear. Though each of them could have walked barefoot across deserts.

  The air was full of hate, a warmth emanating from the spreadeagled Miss Paradise, Miss Latimer now on her feet, and the husband watching his wife in an action that excluded him. Stevenson leant heavily as he waited against the superbly surviving dresser, an oak piece of enduring quality that had got into the flat by mistake. Kathleen Seabrook straightened up finally and turned on Gerald an eye so cool it might have been part of the sea, but bleaker. If he had cared to look east he would have seen, too, that the Malekula had vanished.

  “Something will turn up,” Miss Latimer said in interpretation. “Planes will come in. Everything will resume as usual.”

  Not everything, Stevenson thought, conscious that this was his last day. And glad of it, until he remembered Timmy and, some time after that, his grown-up not-needing daughter. Timmy had become a vague blondness with spaghetti tube arms on a cricket bat that he whacked inexpertly this and that way, or practising googlies with empty hand and wide arm arc that stretched and stretched across his mind until everything vanished in a burst of pain that tore across his chest with banners flying and a triumphant bray of trumpets.

  Kathleen Seabrook was ahead of him now, walking down the path. He knew she only wanted to escape and his sympathy, had he the strength, would have moved him to take her hand. Instead he turned back from the veranda and on impulse went up to Marie and put his dry lips to her cheek.

  “Good-bye,” he said, the finality somehow charging everyone.

  She did not look up at once but delivered her last blow with covered eyes.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  XIII

  7 a.m., 11th December

  THE office was a shambles too.

  Some native boys were dragging the front wall off the mercery, which was ruined anyway, in the still-washing sea a foot high over the road and half that in the store. No one said I see you Mister Stevenson, sah. No one smiled. Every one of the boys had lost his hut the night before. Anyone hurt? Stevenson wanted to ask. Anyone? He had not the courage, and the components of grief were the impassive faces of the sweepers and haulers who moved stupidly among the sodden rubbish that was now dead loss.

  “I don’t think there’s anything you can do,” he said to Mrs Seabrook. “There’s nothing I can do for the moment. That’s my room there.”

  The sea moved gently across it.

  “You see,” she said a bit pitifully, “we didn’t need the shoes.”

  “We had,” he countered, recalling the last punch that had been delivered, “to go back for yours. It was my fate.”

  Kathleen felt her lips pucker over this sentimentality, but could only be banal.

  “Is that your desk?”

  “Yes.”

  He picked up the memo pad he had left there. The last entry said “Dravuni” and on the next page was a poem he had scribbled during the week before the cruise.

  The mind walk, out to the sward

  Where green on green, emphatic in this air,

  Involves the harbourside.

  It must not seem we tipple

  From office windows at the goffered view.

  They’d swab us for our drunken thoughts

  Reaching past this to that, if once they knew.

  He’d had trouble with the next bit. It was a mass of erasings and scribbled-over lines. But it was at least what he intended to say, if inept.

  The soul bounds back on its lead,

  A pretty good dog, at that, it would appear.

  Squats beside desk to guard

  What’s left of clerkly self.

  Here public service eyes watch through sly glass

  The free dogs and the lovers move

  Unreal upon the palpitating grass.

  Now, looking at his too-orderly hand-writing, he knew he was always and had only ever been clerkly self bound to Holly for ever by something that certainly wasn’t even affection, nor as definable, yet tugged him into line. There was a packet of pain-killer tablets in his drawer. He had been hoarding them for months against a day like this one. Now he took it out and emptied three of the little white pills into his sweating fingers. Mrs Seabrook watched him but said nothing.

  “I’m not well,” he explained as he palmed them into his mouth. How bitter they were. He remembered the courting park where, across the plane surface of yellow and green, rhomboids of shadow stretched emerald like blocks of music. Trees squatted solid. People moved under them aware of the body’s pleasure in the day, the wild health in the blood. How often, even younger, with jaws working at caramel, the fingers smoothed out the grease-proof wrapper for the eyes to devour as well, news about the latest stars. And then the fingers would discard paper pieces that said Pete Rivers, born March 1948, took up dancing at nine, was a gridiron player for Western United and starred in Dancin’ Demons. Has fair hair, grey eyes, and is five feet three out of his built-up shoes. The wind chews the papers.

  He imagined his own. James Thomas Stevenson born December nineteen thirteen or fourteen or something he was now vague about (although he felt it to be more), was a public servant of no particular ability, and with a niggling aptitude for regulations (but no real administrative powers) that kept him stuck up in latitude sixteen degrees south, longitude one hundred and fifty-eight degrees west with not much possibility of anything else now except retirement in another ten years or so, but he wasn’t going to last even a shade of that time. He had not much hair and blue eyes and stood five foot seven on his dignity and had once played a Roman soldier in a school production of Julius Caesar. He swallowed the last pill with trouble.

  “I know,” this woman with the disconcerting straight eyes said.

  He tore the top sheet off his memo pad and ripped the verse up, dropping the pieces one by one on the washing floor. They sailed round him.

  “You know, you can’t help really. I’ll have to get the boys into working order and start getting this place cleaned up. All you people can do is sit around for a day or two and wait till the plane services start, as they will.”

  He listened to his phone which was silent as old marriage.

  But the sea grumbled wildly and formlessly as it tried to follow the rags of wind across the island. Mrs Seabrook felt foolish all of a sudden, standing stupidly in this strange room with a man she did not know yet had nursed half the night out of some challenge to pity and a rejection of her husband. There was an emptiness everywhere, in each of them and the room as well, which, try as they might with worn ploys of talk, could not be filled.

  From the main room came the sounds of packing-cases being dragged or bumped. People came once or twice to the doorway and spoke to Stevenson but seemed anxious to go when they saw her. She felt so redundant she found her hands flapping uselessly at her side; she had not even the comfort of a bag to dangle.

  “I’ll go back,” she said rather pitifully. “There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do.”

  “Do you mind if I sit down?” Stevenson asked. The pills had not yet begun to work. He watched her for a minute baffled, trying to remember how she had got there. “Perhaps if you went up to the hospital—do you know where that is?—they could use you. Anyone hurt will be taken in there, I suppose. Other than that. . . .” His voice trailed away and he clutched the tablet box in his hand. He noticed at that point that it felt reassuringly full.

  “All right,” she said. But lost. “Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” he said, getting to his feet. His smile was as full as he could make it and he ignored her hand to put a kiss on her forehead. It was unbearable to see her eyes begin to formulate tears so easily and he turned away so that when he was back
in his chair she had gone.

  Like a child he began to take the tablets from his pill bottle and lay them in double rank along the edge of the desk. They were very tiny and there were a great many of them, so many they looked in their impartial way like some aloof cure-all. His absorbing task was to lay them from one end of the desk to the other and observe their tempting attractiveness as the pain took him from several points like a gale at sea. He had every intention of being brave and resisting them. He concentrated on thinking of his son and a variety of sharpened sentiments evolved by parenthood.

  It was still early, only seven, and more voices came down the road and the splish of wading feet and even laughter. He thought he could hear oars and from the hill behind him the thrum of a car engine.

  Slowly, out of consideration for his restless guest, he walked to the front of the store and began to wave duty and the day in together.

  Observing this monstrous sore upon the sleeping face next to him, Lake, elbow-propped, gave himself up to clean meditation as the morning umber slid across the sky to Prison Hill. Here was the one who, some weeks before, he had seen giggling over a comic, his misery abating in laughter and polished to keener gloss by the contrast of his daily enduring state. One patch of perfect skin was left below the eyes; the hair was curly and shiny; there was a shoulder and arm and side still tenderly young and unblemished. Other parts could not bear to be looked upon. Sisters were silent but aggressively attentive all about as he slouched in a swinish representation of morning ease. Yet during the night in some restless dream he had laid his hand upon the fevered skin of the man whose mattress he was sharing, a decadent who welcomed his touch as his own.

  Now the shame and the regret. It was, of course, too late.