Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The thought filled him with a curious pride. It would have been different, of course, if his wife had lived. She would have been able to give her so much more, but at least he had kept faith with her. In those last few, cruelly accelerated days in the hospital, they had been unable to talk although she knew exactly what was happening. All she had said about it was: “Look after her well, Jack”; and he had nodded, blinded by tears, unable to say anything himself.

  At school, where the standards were low and the teachers for the most part mediocre and complacent, she did passably well. She was particularly good at art, and was encouraged by the art teacher, who unlike her colleagues had imagination, to think of going on to art school.

  “You could get in,” she said. “You could get a place in Melbourne, maybe even Sydney. And then afterwards, if all went well, maybe you could go on somewhere else. You could go overseas. The Slade. Paris. Somewhere like that. Imagine.”

  The girl’s eyes shone; but she doubted that she would ever make it. She was a farm girl, raised out in the middle of nowhere, where you contended with ants, and foot rot in the sheep, and things like that. You couldn’t just get on a bus and be transported to Paris, or even to Melbourne. Who would pay for it? Who would pay the fares? There was hardly any money as it was, and there would never be enough for something like that.

  “Look,” said the teacher. “I’m not just saying this. You could be an artist. It’s a question of having the eye for it. And you’ve got it, you really have.”

  “Thank you.” She was unused to compliments, and was unsure how to respond.

  “Have you spoken to your father about it?” she pressed. “Have you discussed your future with him? What does he think you should do?”

  She looked at the floor. They had not talked about it. Nothing had been said.

  “Why don’t you talk to him? Why don’t you ask him about going off to Melbourne? There’s no harm in raising it with him.”

  The teacher knew, of course. She knew that Jack Cogdon was one of those lonely, rather pathetic cases, hanging on to a farm that he really wouldn’t be able to keep going forever, depending on his daughter to cook for him and keep house. She had seen cases like that before.

  But this one was different – this girl had talent. Some of the others were ideally suited for that sort of life – this one should be spared it.

  She mentioned it at supper one night, after she had placed the plate of oxtail stew and vegetables before him, and taken her place on the other side of the table.

  “I’ve got to think about what I’m going to do when I finish school,” she said. “I’ve only got two more months.”

  He was taken aback, but he smiled at her weakly.

  “It doesn’t seem like that,” he said. “Time flies.”

  She was silent for a moment, then: “Miss Williams – you know her, don’t you? – she thinks I should try for art school. Melbourne, maybe.”

  He dug his fork into his stew, avoiding meeting her gaze.

  “Why not?” he said. “You do what you want to do. It’s your life.”

  That was all he said, but she knew that he was unsettled. For the rest of the meal, he seemed anxious, although he tried to convey an impression of normality, raising small, unimportant subjects and moving quickly, inconsequentially from one to another. She knew, of course, what he was feeling. If she left, then he could never retire. He would work the farm until he was no longer capable of it, and then it would be sold. He would move to town, to one of those small houses that were filled with retired farmers who did nothing all day and hankered after their lost farms. What he wanted, of course, was for her to marry a farmer’s son, who would take over from him; a farm boy, a boy who knew how to handle a place like this; somebody, in fact, like the youngest Page boy, who would never have the chance of his own place, with two older brothers ahead of him. By all accounts, he was a farmer through and through.

  He said something to the father, over a beer in the Masonic Bar, where they occasionally met.

  “I’ll have to give up one of these days, I suppose. But I’m not as lucky as you, Ted. With your sons.”

  The other man smiled. “They can be tough little bastards to handle sometimes. You’ve had it easy, Jack.” He paused, awkwardly. This was the unspoken tragedy among farmers – no son.

  “Your youngest boy, though. You need to get him fixed up somehow. What’s he going to do?”

  The other man shook his head. “He’s under my feet at the moment. He’s been away working at Harrison’s place, but they couldn’t keep him on. There’s plenty he could do, of course. He’s a good mechanic. He can fix things. He could get taken on at some garage – serve his time …”

  “But he’s a farmer – bone deep.”

  “That’s right.”

  For a few moments neither said anything. Then Jack looked up from his glass of beer.

  “He might get on with my Alice. They might hit it off.” He laughed. “Kids don’t always see things the way we do, but why not …”

  The other man smiled.

  “They could do worse, couldn’t they? He could get mixed up with some flighty piece of work who’d lead him a merry dance. She could find somebody, well, somebody who …”

  “Your boy seems fine to me. I wouldn’t have to get my shotgun out.” He paused. “Couldn’t you drop the idea in there somewhere?”

  The other man looked dubious.

  “You don’t do that these days. Not in .”

  Jack put down his glass. “Send him round to me to work. I’ll take him on for a few months. I’ve got a lot of maintenance that needs doing. You said he could handle that.”

  “He could.”

  She wrote off to Melbourne, and they asked her to send them a portfolio of her work. This alarmed her, as she had kept very little, and had not really thought that anybody would ask to see her drawings.

  “That doesn’t matter,” said the art teacher. “Do something for them specially. Send that. A portfolio doesn’t mean a great heap of drawings. They just want to see what you can do.”

  So she did several pen and ink drawings – of the farmstead, of the silos, of still life, of one of her friends, and sent them off. She did not tell her father that she was applying; the discussion they had had was left curiously in the air, and she could not bring her herself to raise the matter again.

  Then she waited. The drawings had been posted from the school, and it was there that the reply would be received. Several weeks passed, and she imagined her drawings in Melbourne, in a pile from all over the country, completely lost. But at last they wrote back and said they liked her work, but that they thought perhaps that it needed time to mature. They were pressed for places that year anyway, but they would take her, conditionally, for the following year, if she got the marks they wanted in her examinations.

  “This means that you’re in,” said the art teacher. “You’ve got it, if you want. This business of waiting a year is probably quite a good idea. You can have a year out after school. A lot of people do it nowadays.”

  She took the letter home, buried between the pages of a text book, but could not bring herself to show it to her father. She extracted it, read it through again, and put it in her drawer, her private drawer where she kept her diary and her photographs. She would wait for the moment when she could discuss it with him – but it was a busy time at school, with the final examinations, and then the leaving dance. Somehow the time did not seem right, and her father, anyway, said nothing about what would happen after school came to an end.

  She found herself making her own arrangements for the year. The bank had sent a circular to the school saying that they had two temporary vacancies which might suit people who had “not made up their minds yet”. She went in to see the manager, who knew all about her, as everybody did of everybody else in the town, and who was quite happy to give her the job.

  She told her father, and then she broke the news about the art college, which really
could not be put off any further. He seemed unsurprised by what she said, almost as if he expected it, and told her that he would look into ways of finding the money for the fees.

  “We’ve got time to think about all that,” he said. “And you can save something from the bank. I’ll run you in there each morning, same as usual.”

  Then he told her that the Page boy was coming to work on the farm for a few months.

  “Do you remember him? The youngest Page boy?”

  She frowned. “I think so. I get them mixed up, though. They were all a few years ahead of me at school.”

  “He ’s going to help me with some work on the barns and the tractors too. Apparently he ’s pretty good mechanically.”

  She nodded.

  “What’s he called?

  “John,” he said. “There ’s Bill and Michael, the two older ones. Then there’s John.”

  He never had to tell him what to do. Without any help he stripped down the old harvester, which he had feared he might have to replace, and replaced all the engine rings. He scraped off rust, and dirt, and after a week or two had the engine running as sweetly as when it had been delivered, fifteen years ago. Then he started on the tractors, and he fixed them too, and painted the mudguards bright red, which was the colour he liked all his farm machinery to be.

  She saw little of him at first, as she was away from the farm first thing in the morning, to be at the bank in time, and John was still living on his father’s farm and driving over to work in a pick-up truck. Sometimes, though, he was still there when she arrived home at six, and she exchanged a few words with him.

  She had noticed him, of course – in that way. He was tall, rather slender, and had that particular combination of dark hair and blue eyes that always caught her attention. She noted him down as good-looking, but did not think much more about him. He was just another boy from some farm; like all the other boys she had met at school, nothing special.

  He was polite to her when he saw her, and stood up from his work and turned to talk to her, rubbing his dirty hands down the side of his work trousers. He spoke slowly, as if he was thinking carefully about what he was saying. He seemed to her to be rather old-fashioned, as if he were addressing an older woman, respectfully.

  On the third weekend after he had started, her father asked him to join them for Sunday lunch. John arrived smartly dressed – she had seen him before only in his working clothes – and he had combed and slicked his hair down. He sat stiffly at the table, and smiled each time she spoke to him, as if on his best behaviour. Did he ever frown, she wondered, or did he inevitably smile?

  After lunch, they drank tea on the verandah. Her father got up and went inside to make a telephone call, leaving the two of them alone.

  “I hope that he’s not working you too hard,” she said. “You always look tired when I get home.”

  “I’m used to it,” he said deliberately. “My old man has always worked us hard.”

  Then she looked at him, and he returned her stare, smiling.

  “What about the bank?” he said. “Is that hard work?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t have enough to do, and that’s worse, in a way. I sit there and wait to be given something. The time goes pretty slowly.”

  He nodded. There was a silence. She looked out, over their sad attempt at a lawn and the bedraggled bed of cannas. She could make out the silos through the line of gum trees, and the dark line of the railway line snaking off into the brown. Then there was nothing, but the brown earth and a huge bowl of sky. There was nothing to draw here, she thought, nothing. You could start with an empty page and after a few lines everything would be recorded. Emptiness.

  Suddenly he blurted out: “Would you like to go to a dance? There’s one at the hall on Saturday.”

  She had not expected this, and did not think before she answered.

  “Yes, I would.” Then, seeing him relax, she added: “Thank you.”

  He spoke more quickly now, as they heard her father’s footfall on the floorboards inside. “I’ll pick you up at seven. On Saturday. Here.”

  “That’s fine.”

  Her father rejoined them, lowering himself slowly into the decrepit wicker chair.

  “I’m going over to Ballarat next Saturday,” he said. “To play bowls. It’s all arranged.”

  She nodded. “I’m going to go to a dance. John has just asked me. Is that all right?”

  “Yes,” he said, glancing at the young man, then quickly looking away again. “Fine.”

  She did not see him that week. He was doing some fencing work, and it kept him out on one of the far blocks. She thought of the dance, and wondered whether she should have accepted his invitation. Was he asking her out – on a date – or was this just a dance, to which everybody went, in a party or alone – it didn’t matter very much.

  What if it led to another invitation – to the cinema, for instance – which was less ambiguous? Should she go? Did she want to go? In one sense, she did. He was good-looking, and she liked the idea of going out with a boy whom her friends would notice. But she hardly knew him, she reflected. They had hardly spoken very much, and she realised that she knew nothing about him, other than his name, and that he could fix harvesters and tractors.

  He arrived earlier than he had said he would. Her father was not due back from bowls until much later, as they always had a drink after a competition. So she was alone in the house, and she called out to him from down the corridor, asking him to wait in the living room.

  When she came in, he sprang up, his hands holding the sides of his jacket. He looked at her, and smiled, as always; he was pleased with the way she looked, she could tell; and she was flattered. He gestured towards the door, and they left, leaving a light burning in the sitting room for her father’s return. In the cab of the pick-up it was cold, and there was a smell of dust. She hoped that he would drive slowly, so that dust would not come up from the road below and ruin her dress.

  They travelled in silence. The road was empty, as it always was at night, and the lights of the town in the distance were all that relieved the darkness. She fingered the strap of her handbag and thought: It is a date. This is it. This is going out with a boy.

  The hall was lit up, and there were cars parked down each side of the street for the entire block. He nosed the pick-up into a space, and they went in, in to the light and the sound of the band tuning up. The women peeled off as they entered, and queued for the single, fly-specked mirror. She took a perfunctory glance, and went back to him, where he was waiting, awkwardly, at the entrance.

  They found a table and sat down. He bought her a drink from the makeshift bar, a glass of cider, and poured himself a beer from a can. She glanced around her; she knew everybody, of course; there was nobody unexpected there. Even the band looked familiar; one of them, the drummer, worked in the bank. He caught her eye and winked. She smiled back.

  The music started in earnest, and they danced. At the end of the first tune, she waited expectantly, but John did nothing. He just stood where he was, waiting for the music to start again. Then they resumed their dancing.

  When they sat a number out, it was too loud to talk, and so they just sat at their table and looked around them. He mouthed something at her, but she could not make it out, and so she shrugged her shoulders. He bought her another cider, and she drank this, feeling thirsty from the dancing. Alcohol made her light-headed, quickly, and she felt the effect of the drink. It was not unpleasant.

  At eleven o’clock, people began to drift away. John looked at his watch, and she nodded. In the cloakroom, while she retrieved her coat, she saw a girl sitting on the single chair provided, sobbing, her friend standing above her.

  “He didn’t mean it,” the friend said. “He couldn’t have meant it that way.”

  “He did,” sobbed the other. “He did.”

  The friend looked up and caught her eye, sharing a moment of fellow feeling, as if to say: this is our lot. This is
what we have to put up with. Men.

  They drove back and parked the pick-up in front of the house. There was no light from inside, and the darkness was complete. They sat for a moment in an intimacy which she found not uncomfortable, but the words what now? went through her mind. The end of the date. What next?

  He said: “I enjoyed the dance. Did you?”

  “Yes. It was … It was great. I enjoyed it.”

  Then, suddenly he moved over towards her, and she felt his shoulder against her. He reached for her hand, and took it in his. She shivered, not knowing what to do. This was what was next.

  She felt him manoeuvre himself closer. He had moved her hand back, and it was lying against her chest. She felt his breath against her cheek, and then his lips. It’s very strange, she thought. It’s exciting. It’s strange.

  Now he was whispering to her: “Can we go inside? We could be quiet. We needn’t wake up your old man.”

  She said, without thinking: “Yes. We can.”

  He said: “Don’t turn on any lights. I’ll take my shoes off.”

  They went into the living room, feeling their way round the furniture, and as they came to the couch, he reached for her and pulled her down with him. She let out a cry of surprise, but checked herself. Now they were on the couch, and he was smothering her with kisses, which she returned, putting her hands against the back of his neck. She felt his hands upon her, upon her shoulders, beneath her dress, and she wanted to stop him, but wanted him not to stop.

  “Can we go to your room,” he whispered. “It would be better there.”

  Again she wanted to say no, but did not, and they tiptoed down the corridor, past the shut door of her father’s room. Then, still in the darkness, they lay down on the bed.

  She came to, astonished, frightened. It was morning and he was still there, an arm across her shoulder, still asleep. She closed her eyes again, and then opened them, and he was still there, his chest rising and falling in sleep, his dark hair tousled. She shifted his arm from her shoulder and he stirred.