by Jem Poster
The climb back to the track left me breathless, but I was eager to press on immediately. The water was seething and churning in my gut, but I had been refreshed by it, and for some time I tramped steadily without any particular thought of my situation. ‘One foot in front of the other’, my father would say, urging me on when, as a child, I trailed behind, complaining that I could go no further; one foot in front of the other.
It was a fallen branch, lying at an angle across the track, that checked me in my stride. Literally, yes, but I mean more than that. As I raised my right leg to step over it, the loose cloth of my breeches snagged on a projecting twig and I heard the dry wood snap, sharp as a pistolshot. I staggered backward, physically unbalanced but startled, too, by a bewildering flash of recognition: I had stepped over the same branch earlier in the day.
My first thought was that I had turned the wrong way on rejoining the track and was now retracing my steps. But that explanation, I sensed darkly through a rising wave of panic, was at odds with the evidence. The memory triggered by the crack of the breaking twig was not a recollection of having approached the branch from the opposite direction, but one that conformed in every detail to the more recent event. Even the twig itself, hanging now by a thread of bark and swaying erratically to and fro, seemed obscurely familiar. I stared down at it, my mind reeling.
I stood for a long time, rigid in the middle of the track, not so much attempting to make sense of the aberration as waiting for some clue or signal that might make sense of it for me. The silence deepened around me; the twig stopped dancing on its thread and hung still.
I moved, in the end, simply because the alternative was unthinkable. I stepped over the branch and continued on my way, but more slowly now, dogged by uncertainty. I remember stopping at intervals and scanning the undergrowth at the edge of the track, the way a traveller might search an English roadside for a milestone smothered by meadowsweet or dog-roses; but if I had been asked what I was looking for, I should have had no answer.
I had grown used to the dappled shade of the trees, and the full sunlight, when I emerged into it, hit me like a fist. Here the cliff plunged sheer below the track on one side; on the other a stand of stringybarks, monumental columns of solid white light, dazzled and perplexed me. My eyes watered and the sweat poured from my skin.
Surely I remembered this from our outward journey? Looking backward as we stepped into the shade, Bullen and I together, to see Billy toiling up the slope behind us in the punishing glare, bent under his burden. The sweep of the cliff-top behind him as he rounded the track’s long curve. Or had that been somewhere else entirely? I struggled to hold and clarify the vision, but the equivocal fragments fused with the scene in front of me, and I gave up the attempt.
I edged back into the shade and sat down. My head throbbed, not painfully but heavily, and the landscape pulsed and shuddered. Like a living thing, I remember thinking queasily, squinting upward to where the stringybarks stood in loose formation, their pale limbs lifted to the sky; and it was at that moment that I saw the lories.
A small flock of the elegant creatures perching among the twigs, the whole tableau seeming, at the precise instant of my glancing up, so unnaturally still that I might have been looking at an extravagant example of the taxidermist’s art. Just for that instant; then a breeze lifted the loose strips of hanging bark, rattling them softly against the tree’s white bole, and everything was in intricate motion – the twigs and leaves dancing and shimmering while the birds wove their elaborate patterns of sound and colour among them. And as I followed their movements, something stirred in the cramped recesses of my heart, forcing a cry from my lips, a cry of exultation that rose through the branches above me and was absorbed in the luminous air. Praise at its purest – wordless, impassioned praise, flying straight as an arrow to heaven. Yes, and the birds rising too, flashing crimson and azure against the softer blue of the sky, and some part of myself caught up in the winnowed air so that I had to place the flat of my hand against the hot earth to remind myself where I belonged.
It was love that had lifted me, I realised, whirling me up among the beating wings; and love, I thought, looking down the track and seeing him standing there in a blaze of light, his white shirt fluttering in the breeze, that had brought Billy back from the world of the dead to guide me home. He was looking in my direction, one hand sweeping the dark curls clear of his face in a gesture at once familiar and disquieting. I called out and scrambled to my feet, but he started like a frightened deer and began to run back the way he had come.
‘Billy!’ I staggered into the sunlight and picked my way clumsily down the slope, calling and waving, but he neither slackened his pace nor looked back and, as I gazed after him, he rounded the bend in the track and was lost to view. Dazed by the glare and trembling with weakness, I should have been glad to return to my seat in the shade; but it was in my mind that he intended me to follow, and I drew myself together and stumbled after him.
By the time I reached the bend myself, I knew that such strength as I had been able to summon was failing. I remember thinking, carefully if not quite lucidly: I’m coming to the end. Perhaps I articulated the thought; at all events, I have a vivid but confused recollection of the words echoing through or around me as I raised my head and looked up the track to see Billy walking back towards me, no longer alone but accompanied by a taller figure. I stood staring into the light in a perplexity of hope and doubt.
If I was slow to recognise Preece, that was doubtless due in part to my own confused state, but also to the fact that the man himself appeared transfigured. He was bearing down on me with a force that seemed to disguise his halting gait, his mouth set in a thin, hard line and his eyes burning. Like an Old Testament prophet, I thought, as he drew up in front of me with his staff held menacingly before him, a prophet fired with rage against sinful humanity. And it struck me as a little absurd to be extending my hand to such a figure in such a place, but the formal greeting was, at that moment, all I was capable of imagining. He seemed barely to notice me.
‘Preece,’ I murmured, and my voice rang in my skull like a cracked bell. ‘I can’t tell you—’
‘It’s not you I want,’ he said curtly, glancing over my shoulder. ‘Where’s Bullen?’
I must have stood gawping like a fool. Preece leaned in close. ‘Bullen,’ he repeated. ‘Where is he? I tell you, Redbourne, I’ll have the hide off his back for what he did to Billy.’
‘Bullen’s dead,’ I said. I sank down at the side of the track, put my face between my hands and began to cry.
Water, I remember, fresh water from a tilted flask. And I remember them raising me to my feet, Preece on one side and Billy on the other, and helping me forward. I tried to keep step with them but my legs were weak and clumsy, and after a few paces my determination lapsed. We moved slowly. Sometimes the track narrowed, and one of my companions would drop behind; at one point I was obliged to negotiate a particularly difficult stretch unaided, and did so on my hands and knees. Billy spoke only to urge me on; Preece, as far as I can recollect, said nothing at all until we reached the upland clearing where the ponies were tethered. Then he turned to me, his gaze milder now and his voice soft. ‘You’ll take the lad’s mount, Mr Redbourne. Billy’s legs are good for a few miles yet.’
I wanted to thank them both, but the words wouldn’t come. Billy helped me up and I sat slumped in the saddle like the proverbial sack of meal while Preece adjusted the stirrups. ‘You’re a lucky man,’ he said. ‘Lucky we found you. And lucky’ – he straightened up and gestured back the way we had come – ‘the wind’s in the right quarter. If that bush-fire had been moving in this direction it’s ten to one you’d have been burned to a cinder.’
I twisted round and looked over my shoulder. The late sunlight was still bright on the nearer treetops, making them shine like polished copper, but out in the middle distance a long smudge of grey smoke hung above the forest, dulling the air for what must have been mile upon smothering mi
le. My head swam and I swayed forward, clutching at the pony’s mane. Preece swung himself, stifflegged, into his saddle. Then Billy clicked his tongue twice against his palate and we moved on.
26
I can’t fault Preece’s treatment of me. He took me back under his roof and surrendered his bed to me; he cooked the little portions of bland food my weakened body needed, and served them up at appropriate intervals; and when I woke crying and trembling in the dark, my skin slick with perspiration, he would rise from his mattress at the far end of the room, draw up a chair and sit at my side until I was able to sleep again. But there was a subtle constraint in his dealings with me now, a reticence that I interpreted as a form of reproach. I had the impression that he was waiting, courteously but with something less than complete equanimity, for the day I should be well enough to leave.
I can hardly blame him. Heaven knows, I’ve reproached myself often enough for what I’ve come to think of as culpable inertia. In the course of our brief, abortive journey Billy had been routinely mistreated, and finally assaulted, by a man ostensibly in my employ. Although I had spoken up once or twice in the boy’s defence, I had done far too little for him: he owed his survival not to my half-hearted interventions but to a combination of good fortune and his own youthful agility. I was mortified to learn that he had been huddled on the ledge when I began my first descent of the rock face but had chosen to scurry away and conceal himself, judging me incapable – he said as much, and the accusation smarts even now – of protecting him from Bullen’s vindictive anger. That he should have considered it safer to return home alone under cover of darkness than to make the journey in our company reflects almost as poorly on me as it does on Bullen.
There was no refuge. Catching Preece’s eye for an instant as he stooped to tuck in my blanket, or hearing through the hot boards the lilt of a whistled tune as Billy went about his business in the garden, I would remember again, with undiminished shame, how I had failed the boy. And to make matters worse, the hatchet-faced constable who came to question me on the evening after my return seemed to be exercised at least as much by the attack on Billy as by Bullen’s death. ‘I’ve two of my own,’ he said grimly, ‘and heaven help anyone who laid a finger on either of them.’ He leaned forward in his chair, bringing his face uncomfortably close to mine.
‘Bullen was ill,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe he knew exactly what he was doing.’
‘Not so ill that he couldn’t throw a punch at the lad.’ I could see the sweat beading the man’s brow and upper lip; his short hair stuck out from his scalp in damp spikes. I leaned back wearily against the iron bars of the bed-head.
‘Mr Redbourne has been very sick himself,’ said Preece, stepping forward protectively.
The constable nodded. ‘I’ve almost done,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘If we should need to find you once you’ve left the mountains, Mr Redbourne …?’
I gave him Vane’s address, spelling it out slowly for him as he bent over his pocket-book. ‘And the dead man’s family?’ he asked.
‘I’m fairly certain there were no close relatives. I shall make …’ My head swam as I groped helplessly for the word. ‘Enquiries,’ I said at last. ‘I’ll let you know.’
‘Thank you, Mr Redbourne.’ The air around us seemed to flicker and dim; I could barely make him out as he stepped over the threshold and into the gathering dusk.
Just once, on the third morning of my enforced stay, the atmosphere lightened briefly. I was up and about for the first time since my return or, to put it more accurately, I was seated at the table with my pencil in my hand and my journal open in front of me, my mind as blank as the page I was staring at. Billy was sitting just inside the doorway with his shirt on his lap, carefully stitching the torn fabric, his eyes narrowed against the sunlight and his bare feet braced against the door-frame, while Preece busied himself with his broom, sweeping the dust into a small heap just in front of the boy’s chair.
‘It’s a strange thing,’ said Preece, straightening up with a smile, ‘how some people have a knack of putting themselves in other people’s way.’ He was looking in my direction, but I saw from his expression that his words were intended for Billy’s ears. Billy continued with his stitching, giving no sign of having heard.
‘I said,’ Preece persisted with humorous emphasis, leaning over the boy and ruffling his hair, ‘it’s a pity I can’t get to the doorway for the great lummock skewed across it.’ Billy let his needle fall and grasped his father’s wrist with his left hand, at the same time aiming a gentle punch at his ribs with his right. The broom clattered to the floor as Preece moved in close and held him in a lock or embrace, the two of them laughing as they struggled together. Watching their good-natured scuffling from across the room, I should have liked to laugh with them, but found myself instead on the point of tears.
I can’t say exactly what it was, the grief that welled up in me at that moment, but I know that I seemed to be standing at the boundary of some charmed enclosure, like a soul exiled from its true habitation, looking for a way in. And as Preece released Billy and turned back to his task, his face still creased with laughter and his eyes shining, I heard myself say, in a voice not quite my own, ‘Give him his due, Preece, he’s a fine young man,’ and then, following through with feigned nonchalance: ‘Clever, too. He might go far with a good education. If you wanted to send him to Sydney to continue his schooling, I’ve no doubt we could come to some arrangement.’
It was as though a cloud had passed across the sun. Preece’s features stiffened, the laughter fading from his eyes. ‘Thank you, Mr Redbourne,’ he said coldly. ‘Billy’s getting a good education here – better than any schoollearning could give him – and he’ll go as far as he needs to go.’
‘Even so,’ I said, taken aback by the severity of his tone, ‘there would be certain advantages. With the right kind of schooling—’
‘How do you think the boy would fare, cooped up in a city classroom, learning by rote things that’ll draw him from the soil he’s rooted in and give him nothing worth having in exchange? Who knows what damage he might suffer?’
‘I shouldn’t have made the offer if I hadn’t believed it to be in Billy’s best interests.’
Preece’s gaze relaxed slightly, though his voice was still hard. ‘I believe you mean well, Mr Redbourne,’ he said, ‘but you’ve no call to concern yourself with such matters. It’s not your place.’
Billy rose silently, draped his shirt across the back of his chair and slipped away into the sunlight. I stared at the floor, rigid with misery. ‘You’re right,’ I said at last. ‘I shall leave tomorrow.’
We set off early, Preece and I on ponyback, Billy loping easily beside me, one hand on the bridle. I had been touched by the boy’s insistence on accompanying us and felt under some obligation to make conversation, but neither he nor I seemed able to strike the right note, and we soon lapsed into silence.
I was still far from well – frail and feverish, my eyes confused by the riddling interplay of glare and shadow on the dusty track in front of me and my mind troubled by elusive fragments of the night’s dreaming. By the time we reached the station, I was already exhausted. I remember Preece helping me down from the pony as though I had been a child, and holding me lightly by the arm as we made our way to the platform.
He had allowed ample time, and we had a good halfhour to wait. We sat in the shade, Preece on one side of me and Billy on the other, our talk sporadic and constrained, while the heat intensified around us. I stared down the track into a distance creased and distorted by the quivering air, and imagined the long, hot miles ahead.
It seemed to me that I had never known time pass so sluggishly, but at last I heard the wail of the whistle, and the train steamed in with a racket that set my raw nerves jangling. Preece helped me to my feet and across the platform to the nearest carriage. He threw open the door and held it back, hovering solicitously behind me as I hauled myself in.
I pulled the door t
o, lowered the window and rested my elbows on the frame, queasy with the stink of grease and sulphur. Preece lifted his eyes to mine. ‘I should think you’ll be glad to get back to your own world,’ he said.
It came to me that I should be hard put to it to locate my own world again but the notion, glimpsed through a dull haze of fatigue, refused to come into focus, and I let it pass. ‘I can’t thank you enough,’ I said – and the words fell dead from my lips, though I meant them sincerely – ‘for all you’ve done for me.’
Preece took a step backward and glanced away down the track. ‘I’ve done by you as I’d have done by any man,’ he said.
There was an awkward pause. I tugged my purse from my pocket and withdrew two sovereigns. ‘I must have been a drain on your resources,’ I said, proffering the coins. ‘I hope this will square accounts.’
He shook his head. ‘There’s no need.’ The train jerked into motion with a squeal and clash of couplings, and began to glide slowly forward.
‘For Billy,’ I said. ‘Take it for Billy.’
Preece made no move. Billy’s face was turned in my direction, but I couldn’t read his expression. Puzzlement, was it? Embarrassment? I leaned out in desperation as they began to slip away from me. ‘Billy,’ I cried, holding out the coins on my open palm; and then, almost beside myself with anguish, I lunged forward and tossed them on to the platform at his feet.
He didn’t stoop. His father reached out and placed one hand on his shoulder. I watched the two conjoined figures dwindling away down the shimmering platform as the train gathered speed. They might have been made of stone.
IV
27
I had imagined that I should quickly recover my health once I was back at Tresillian Villa, but I was wrong: my return precipitated a nervous collapse of paralysing severity. Even as I stepped down from the buggy into the punishing sunlight I could feel some deeper dissolution setting in. True, I was able to respond to Vane’s handshake with a firmness that might have passed for warmth, and as he ushered me into the house I answered or deflected his enquiries with what I imagine to have been a reasonable show of civility; but I felt that my body – my feet, my tongue, my prickling eyes – didn’t entirely belong to me, and I grew sick and giddy with the effort of controlling it. As soon as I decently could, I slipped away to my room and locked the door.
