by Jem Poster
‘I don’t. Of course not. But when I hear you talk, I know where you stand – not in the clear light I want to stand in, but in some dark place, among all the other lost souls who’ve confused power with progress.’
Vane made a little lunge across the table, rapping lightly on the cloth with his knuckles. ‘It seems to me,’ he said with forced playfulness, ‘that the ladies might reasonably retire now.’
Eleanor glanced at her father with an expression of such undisguised contempt that I felt myself wince on his behalf. ‘I’ll retire when I’m ready,’ she said.
‘In that case,’ said Vane, reddening slightly but without faltering for a second, ‘may I suggest that the gentlemen retire.’ He drained his glass and rose unsteadily to his feet. ‘If you’d care to join me on the terrace …’
Bullen and I fell in behind him but, looking round as I stepped out on to the veranda, I saw that Merivale was still in his seat. With one hand gripping his sleeve, Eleanor was literally holding him there, addressing him in low, urgent tones, her eyes fixed on his as though defying him to move. It crossed my mind that-he might welcome my intervention but I couldn’t be sure, and after a moment’s hesitation I followed Vane and Bullen out into the darkness.
‘… a mind of her own,’Vane was saying as I rejoined them, ‘and I accepted that long ago. What I won’t tolerate is being made a fool of at my own table, or having my guests insulted.’ He turned as though to include me in the conversation, but seemed to think better of continuing. He felt in his breast pocket and withdrew his cigarette case.
‘I believe Merivale will be with us directly,’ I said after a moment, anxious to break the awkward silence. In the flare of his match I saw Vane’s eyes lift towards the house. ‘He’s been detained by Eleanor,’ I added.
‘Detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure,’ said Vane sardonically. ‘After an evening of my daughter’s nonsense, I should think you’ll be only too glad to get out into the bush for a couple of weeks.’
‘It was an excellent evening,’ I said.
Vane grunted and turned away, staring into the night. ‘Fatherhood,’ he said bitterly, ‘is a mixed blessing.’ And then, shifting his shoulders like a man easing away the afterweight of a slipped burden: ‘You’ll need the buggy early on Thursday, Bullen. What time shall we say?’
As they talked, I saw Merivale emerge on to the veranda, closely followed by Eleanor. The young man set his back against the rail and stood, starkly silhouetted against the french windows, his face turned towards his companion. As Eleanor closed in I lost sight of her behind his bulky form, but it was clear that she had not yet done with him: I heard her voice – not the words but the soft, insistent murmur of it – drifting out on the warm air. Merivale seemed to have little to say but his stance suggested that the girl had his undivided attention, and I was surprised when she broke abruptly away and stepped back into the house. He started after her, stumbling on the threshold so that he had to put out his hand to support himself.
What was it I saw then? I was tired and my mind was faintly clouded by the wine, but I thought Merivale reached out and grasped Eleanor by the shoulder, swinging her round – but her slight frame was scarcely visible at that point – to face him. I scarcely had time to register the movement before they were gone, passing swiftly across the windows and out of sight.
Bullen and Vane were discussing train times. ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ I said, ‘I think I’ll turn in for the night.’ My voice was thick in my throat and I was shaking with passion, as though the gripped shoulder or the grasping hand had been my own, but Vane, barely glancing my way as he bade me goodnight, appeared to notice nothing.
There was no sign of the couple in the dining-room, but as I stepped into the hallway I saw them there, in the half-light at the foot of the stairs. Merivale had been speaking but fell silent as I approached, shrinking further into the shadows, while Eleanor came towards me with a faint smile on her lips. I don’t know quite what I had expected, but something in the assurance of her movements surprised and disconcerted me.
‘I’m on my way to bed,’ I said awkwardly, as though it were my own actions that required an explanation.
‘Goodnight, Charles.’
Just that. I stood for a moment with one hand on the stair-rail, scanning her face for whatever clue might be visible in the dim lamplight. Not a flicker as she returned my gaze.
‘Goodnight, Eleanor. Goodnight, Merivale.’ I climbed slowly, my whole body suddenly slack with fatigue. As I reached the turn of the stair I almost looked back, but thought better of it.
12
I stretched out in extreme weariness but was unable to sleep for thinking of Eleanor down there with Merivale in the shadowed hallway. I told myself firmly that the girl’s conduct was no business of mine but I couldn’t settle, and after twenty minutes or so I rose from bed and seated myself at my desk with the idea that a little writing might steady my restless mind.
My journal, begun on shipboard as a simple aidememoire, had become increasingly important to me as the voyage progressed, and since my arrival in Australia I had begun to consider my writing in a new light. The field notes I had taken throughout the years of my youth and early manhood had been exemplary in their attention to detail but now, I realised,
I was looking for something more than scientific accuracy. I had been aware since childhood that the minutiae of the material world – the veining of a beech leaf, the whorl of a snail shell, a fox’s pad-mark in the silt at the river’s edge – were a kind of code, and I had sometimes had bewildering glimpses of the vast and infinitely complex truth they represented, but I had seldom attempted to find words to convey those insights. Now, as I wrote of the sheen on a beetle’s carapace, for example, or the patterns scribbled on the pale bark of a eucalyptus tree, I found myself working with a new refinement, honing my phrases to an edge I hoped might be sharp enough to slip beneath the dazzling surfaces of things.
I was describing the clearing I had entered late that afternoon, and the subtle agitation set up by a pair of wrens as they foraged through the undergrowth in the softening light, when I was startled by a shrill cry. I set down my pen and listened. A brief pause and then a thud, followed by a second cry. I took up my lamp, opened the door and stepped out into the corridor.
It was Eleanor’s voice, I knew, hearing it again as I approached her bedroom – a staccato phrase delivered in an intense undertone. I placed the lamp on the blanket-chest outside the room and rapped gently on the door.
‘Eleanor?’
No answer. I called again and heard a voice rasp out, breathy and urgent: ‘Tell him to go.’
I leaned against the door, my lips close to the keyhole. ‘Merivale? Merivale, is that you?’
Dead silence, except for the slow ticking of the clock from the hallway below. And in that instant, driven not only by anxiety for Eleanor but also by an obscure sense of outrage, I turned the handle and threw back the door.
The scene presents itself to me now as a static tableau, its detail simultaneously vivid and equivocal. Vane stands beside the washstand, one hand resting on the marble surface, the other held to the side of his face. His jacket and waistcoat are draped over the back of the bedside chair; his pocket-watch, lapped in the gleaming coils of its chain, is on the seat. On the rug at his feet, in two almost equal pieces, lies a broken jug; water has soaked the fawn pile, forming a dark, irregular stain. Eleanor faces her father, backed up against the bed, but bolt upright. She is clutching the neck of her loose white nightdress, gathering the fabric at her throat. Her hair is unbound and dishevelled, her eyes fixed in a wild stare.
Is it just a trick of the memory, that impression of breathless stasis? Maybe so, but the impression is all I have: the two of them locked together in a world somewhere beyond the ordinary flow of things, utterly oblivious to my presence. The air seemed to have thickened around them, dense with undischarged energy and the coppery reek of sweat. And then, with a muffled grunt, like a man waking himself with eff
ort from a disturbing dream, Vane swung round to confront me.
Never, before or since, have I experienced such acute embarrassment. Think of it: close on midnight, and a man of mature years and some social standing bursts into a young lady’s bedroom in his nightshirt to find himself face to face with her father. It was the stuff of farce, without the leaven of humour. I gawped; I mumbled. ‘I’m sorry. I thought I heard …’
‘It’s nothing.’Vane was breathing hard, his face and thick neck flushed, his brow gleaming with perspiration. ‘Eleanor dropped the water-jug, that’s all. There’s no great harm done.’ His face, I noticed as he lowered his hand, was marked, the cheekbone a darker, angrier red than the surrounding flesh. He squatted down on his heavy haunches and picked up the two pieces. Eleanor slumped on to the bed and sat there, shoulders hunched, hands thrust between her thighs, her face averted. She was trembling so violently that the bed-frame shook.
I leaned forward, trying to catch her eye. I was looking for a sign, for something that might tell me what kind of drama I had stumbled into, but her gaze was rigidly fixed on a point towards the far corner of the room and never so much as flickered in my direction. Awkward and uncertain, I turned back to her father.
Vane raised his arm and drew his shirt-sleeve across his forehead. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been disturbed,’ he said.
‘Please don’t concern yourself on my account. But Eleanor—’
‘Eleanor has been a little over-excited by the events of the day. She needs to rest.’ His breathing was returning to normal; his hand, cupping my elbow as he steered me round and guided me back to the door, conveyed nothing more than a host’s natural solicitude for his guest’s wellbeing. But as we reached the doorway, Eleanor cried out – a stifled yelp of pain or fury – and I turned to see her rise from the bed and launch herself towards us. Vane hustled me quickly into the corridor, slipping out with me and slamming the door behind him. An instant later she was there, rattling at the handle, but Vane was gripping it firmly from our side, and the door remained closed. I heard her strike the wood with the flat of her hand, just once; and then she called my name.
An expression of something like panic crossed Vane’s face, passing almost before I had time to register it. He jerked his head in the direction of my room. ‘I’d advise you to get to bed,’ he said. ‘You can leave this to me.’
Close up against the door, Eleanor drew a long, sobbing breath. I hesitated. ‘Perhaps I might have a word with her,’ I said.
‘Believe me, it’s better you don’t.’
I shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. ‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but I feel there may be some advantage in letting me speak with her. In my experience—’
‘I think,’ he interrupted coldly, ‘that I can be relied upon to know what’s best for my own daughter.’ And then, a little more civilly: ‘Take it from me, Redbourne, there’s nothing you can do for her.’
There seemed no point in persisting. ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I’ll wish you goodnight.’ I stooped to pick up the lamp and, as I did so, the rattling began again, followed by a heavy drumming against the panels. Vane flinched and tightened his grip on the door-handle. ‘Go on,’ he whispered hoarsely as I stood dithering.‘Get to your room.’
I was half-way back when she cried out again, the words ringing down the corridor with a terrible shrill clarity: ‘He knows. He knows.’ I turned to see Vane gesticulating wildly with his free hand, flapping me back as though I were a hen strayed from the coop. And then, even more stridently but no less distinctly, her voice cracking on my name: ‘You hear me, Charles? You’re my witness.’
Vane’s features convulsed suddenly: a wincing grin, lips drawn back from the teeth, the eyes narrowed to slits. And still that panicky flutter, the hand wafting me back down the corridor. The air seemed charged with a kind of madness, a jittery, disruptive energy threatening my own stability, and it was with a measure of relief that I finally withdrew and returned to my room.
I reseated myself at my desk, still listening to the sounds from the corridor: the thick murmur of Vane’s voice punctuated at intervals by his daughter’s lighter tones, pleading, perhaps, or remonstrating. After a few moments I heard Vane’s heavy tread on the boards as he drew closer. Then the door of his room creaking open; shut. The click as the catch snapped home.
I took up my pen again and wiped the clogged nib. There was something I had wanted to say about that moment in the clearing – something about the shifting, intricate patterns of sound and light set up around me as the birds flicked and piped among the leaves. I dipped the pen and wrote:
long-tailed and small-bodied, beautifully marked above. By good fortune, I was able to secure both with the same shot. The female died instantly but the male scurried across the dry litter and wedged itself tightly among the basal shoots of a small shrub. I thought I should be obliged to dispatch it, but by the time I had extricated it from its niche, it was already dead.
Even as I wrote, I knew that the moment was lost. I read back over my words with growing disappointment, then struck out the reference to my good fortune and paused for a moment over ‘beautifully marked’ before deciding to let the bland phrase stand. I left a two-inch space and then wrote again, more slowly now, and with some hesitancy:
I have just come from Eleanor’s room, where
I sat back and looked at the words for several minutes; then I took my ruler and drew two lines through them, rendering them illegible. Beneath these and extending across the full width of the page I drew a third, indicating in my usual fashion the conclusion of the day’s entry. I blotted the page carefully before closing the journal and retiring to bed.
13
I had anticipated a restless night but in fact I slept deeply, waking only at the sound of the breakfastgong. By the time I came down, Vane had already served himself and was seated at the table cutting vigorously at a thick wedge of gammon.
‘Help yourself, Redbourne. This’ – he held up a pink sliver on the end of his fork – ‘is excellent. We rear and cure our own and, if I may say so, we do it rather better than most.’
I chose the eggs and joined him at the table. ‘About last night—’
‘Please,’ he cut in briskly, his mouth full. ‘Please don’t apologise. You acted, I know, with the best of intentions and you’ve no reason to reproach yourself.’ He swallowed hurriedly, dabbed at his mouth with his napkin and reached for the coffee-pot. ‘May I?’
‘Thank you.’ I pushed my cup towards him. ‘Where’s Eleanor?’
‘Still in bed, I imagine.’ He gestured towards my plate. ‘That’s not much of a breakfast. Let me help you to a little more.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s not like her to lie in so late. I’m wondering whether last night’s disturbance—’
‘Don’t concern yourself. Eleanor’s an excitable girl – some taint on her mother’s side – but she calms down quickly enough if left alone.’
‘This has happened before, then?’
‘Episodes of this kind, yes.’ He sat back in his chair, slightly flushed, and took a deep breath. ‘Listen, Redbourne, I must urge you not to involve yourself in any way. The worst thing we can do – I have this on sound medical advice – is to appear to sanction her follies or to give credence to her fantasies. Last night’s display’ – he gingerly fingered the bruise on his cheek – ‘was an extreme form of the hysteria that has afflicted her periodically since her mother’s death. No cause for alarm, you understand, but the situation requires careful handling. I hope I can rely on you.’
Something in his speech struck me as faintly artificial, as though he were delivering lines rehearsed in advance, and whether for this or some other reason, I was slow to respond to his implicit appeal.
He leaned forward again, jabbing at the air with his fork, his eyes fixed on mine. ‘I said, I hope I can rely on you, Redbourne. The girl’s health depends on it.’
‘I can assure you,’ I said, ‘that I would do anything
in my power to safeguard your daughter’s well-being.’
He held me with his gaze a moment longer and then addressed himself once more to his breakfast, hacking at the gammon with renewed energy, chewing noisily on each mouthful. The conversation was clearly at an end, and as soon as I decently could I excused myself from the table and stepped out into the garden.
It was a morning of exquisite serenity, clear but not yet hot, the air rich with the scents of the warming earth. A small flock of finches moved erratically among the glossy leaves of the citrus trees, their white breasts gleaming as they caught the light. I watched the birds intently, hoping for that fleeting release I sometimes experience in such circumstances: the mind – or spirit if you like – vibrating for a moment in sympathy with the stir and shimmer of the natural world. But the events of the night were still with me, a dark, distracting undertone, and my concentration lapsed.
Although I considered returning to the house and knocking on the door of Eleanor’s room, it seemed wiser, on reflection, to go down to the barn and await her arrival. But as I approached the building, I heard the clatter of something dropped or overset, and I knew she was already there. I hurried to the entrance and peered round the door.
I thought at first that she was praying, down on her knees on the dirt floor, her head bent forward, her lips moving spasmodically, spitting out broken, unintelligible phrases. But both hands were at the back of her neck, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I saw what she was up to – hacking with a pair of rusted sheepshears at her dishevelled hair. I stepped forward, crying out her name, but as she raised her head and looked towards me I saw that the tresses which should have mantled her right shoulder were already gone. She dropped her hands to her lap, sat back on her heels and stared up at me, her lips wet with spittle, her eyes lit with a terrible wildness. I thought of her father’s injunction against involvement, but I could see that it would be a grave mistake to leave her, in such a state, to her own devices.
