Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  “Too much bone,” the young man said.

  “I'm not selling it for sausage meat,” the owner snapped, and they laughed.

  “What's that?” the Marchesa demanded. “What? What?”

  “Mr Surface is our leading family butcher,” somebody explained and laughed again alone while every one copied James and examined the horse intently.

  The young man became aware of their backs. Only the Marchesa continued to look at him, entomologically through her glasses. “My dad owned the mare, you see,” he explained. “She cracked up on him after five starts. You don't like to see one of the family rooked, do you? I wouldn't buy it for the cart.”

  It was a parting shot as he rejoined his friends. As his loud, goodnatured laugh dissolved into the crowd they heard him say, “Oh, my cousin. Too much of a toff to. . .”

  James made a point of buying the horse, off-hand, grandly, but when they got back to the paddock the Marchesa spotted someone she knew and that was the last James saw of her.

  Oh, HOW badly he wanted to win the race, but Cabell's Pride was not even placed. “Unless you count from the other end,” Julia said.

  The exasperation of a wretched day, of wretched months, coruscated around this harmless remark. Back in the hotel, before she had time to remove her gloves, he pounced. “You're pleased, aren't you? You've got no pride, no loyalty.”

  “You should try the other branch of the family,” she said. “They seem loyal enough.”

  He tried to get away from her. Again he felt things working to pieces inside, the strange disarticulation of his face as though a mask was slipping off it.

  “They might even buy Crowbait from you—for the cart.” She leant against the head of the lounge offering him her cheek.

  A shocking thing happened. James slapped the cheek, and finding a delight in doing so, a sudden freedom around the heart as though his too constricted chest had burst, slapped a brisk one-two on both cheeks. It was the most passionate contact they had ever had.

  Julia flopped on to the lounge, her face red, her eyes shining with pain, her features loosened around an expression of drunken astonishment. His blows had broken the glassy surface of her elegance: her hat hung over one ear, her hair was coming down, a tear left a little snail's track of silver along the side of her nose. She looked, all at once, miserably unhappy and defenceless as her lips trembled, her nose puckered up, and she began to blubber.

  “My God! Julia!” James cried, stricken by pity and tenderness at the sight. He sat down beside her and put his arm around her shoulders. He could hear his heart, like somebody walking on the carpeted floor overhead. Each beat was like a stone dropping into the pool of his blood and sending wave after wave of warmth against his skin. Then he was conscious of nothing except his compassion for her tears.

  She stopped blubbering and looked at him, not as she usually looked, through half-closed eyes, but through very wide and frightened eyes, with one hand pressing against his chest. . .

  Afterwards, when she sat on the lounge smoothing the creases out of her dress, her hair down, her hat crushed under the cushions, her stillgloved hands adding the last touch of bizarre abandon to the scene, he could not believe that it had happened.

  He sought in his chaotic mind for some formula of explanation or apology that would exonerate him, but found only an unspeakable selfdisgust. What a vile thing! What a vile feeling of brutal joy! It had overwhelmed him in a second as it did that night in Frogs' Hollow. As though to show the measure of this madness the door, carelessly halfshut, came slowly open in the draught. He had not even thought whether it was locked or not!

  Instinctively he turned to the mirror over the mantelshelf to straighten his tie and pat his hair into place, and the pale, melancholy, worried faced rising from the tall collar, the beautiful frock-coat out of Bond Street mouthed at him, “You hypocrite!”

  But feeling his collar tight around his neck again, the weight of the coat on his shoulders, he began to regain control of himself, as though the knowledge that those clothes, those accoutrements of a gentleman, were his, reinforced him. “I'm sorry,” he said, with frigid politeness, apologizing for a minor breach of good manners.

  Julia looping her hair up, smiled. It was the kind of smile he had often thought of her smiling if she knew what he had done in Frogs' Hollow. No reply was possible except to leave the room pretending that he was not sneaking away. . .

  Of course, after this he was more wooden than ever. . . for a while. But the devils in both of them had learnt a dangerous lesson. They were to repeat the scene with many variations before reaction completed the petrifaction of James and led Julia on to whatever was the next stage in the dissolution of her elegant sensibilities.

  Each of these backslidings—bouts of fever, as he thought of them, from an inherited virus—one may detect by the refreshed vigour with which James crusaded his father's good name. Returning from the Sydney Cup of Ninety-eight he inaugurated the Foundation Day ceremonies of 23 February, the anniversary of Cabell's arrival in the valley. He built a marble obelisk at the ford where Sambo said the landtakers had crossed their sheep and cattle and “had a swig.” A brass plate at the base of the obelisk said:

  DEREK CABELL (of Owerbury Court, Owerbury, Dorset, Eng.)

  And His Five Gallant Comrades

  Here Completed Their Arduous Trek From Moreton Bay

  And Opened New Lands to the Heritage of

  The British People

  on

  23 February, 1847

  On 23 February each year the school-children from the Derek Cabell Memorial Settlement marched to the obelisk and heard James deliver an oration on Our Legacy of The Pioneers:

  CHILDREN,—We have met here to honour the names of Great Men and in particular One Great Man, my Father, who fifty-two years ago today drove his small flocks across this river and suffered loneliness and hunger that you and I might live in This Great Land of Ours and enjoy its fruits. His achievement was all the greater because his birth and training had not prepared him for such hardships. He came of a family which had sent its sons for generations to the Church and the Army, where many of them had made the name of Cabell famous in the Homeland. One of his brothers was a Colonel of Hussars and another was a bishop. If Derek Cabell had chosen to follow in their footsteps there is no doubt that he would have won distinctions for himself in England too, but he preferred to serve his Queen and Country in another way, by spreading the light of Civilization into the dark corners of the earth and planting The Immortal British Traditions in the Fifth and Oldest Continent. He was an Empirebuilder, or as Mr Joseph Chamberlain calls him, “a Torch-bearer.” Withal he is a generous, just, and noblehearted man as any who have been privileged to know him intimately will agree. . .

  The Rev. Mr Tomlinson prayed that they should remain worthy of the heritage the pioneers had handed on to them and the children sang “Advance Australia Fair” and “God Save the Queen” and marched away to eat buns at James's expense.

  The more touching ceremony, in which ten little girls from the settlement school laid a wreath each year on Emma's grave, “so prettily set among the tall, silent gums beside the river,” as the Waterfall Gazette described it, came some time later—after a political crisis when one of the parties was depending on a by-election in the Cabell Valley district and James helped with liberal funds and got in return every scrap of paper which proved that one Emma Surface had ever been a guest in Her Majesty's penal settlements.

  Chapter Seven: Beginning of the End

  Unwitting of his slow but certain apotheosis the old man followed the sun along the veranda through hours no longer apprehended. Time was now a flicker of nights and days in his brain pausing upon attenuated instants—images mostly irrelevant. A smell of lilac, a girl's taut nipples staining faintly pink her wet muslin bodice blotted out a lifetime: or the remembered bite of water on a parched throat, or the dry touch of land under his feet in a swirling river, or a black ridge of gum-trees mirrored in a win
ter's crystal dawn, or a horse arching its back under him, or, as though it was yesterday not seventy-five years ago, a face leaning tenderly down to his. . .

  The beginning of the end.

  For a long time after James had finished clipping his old claws he had brooded over the singularly ordered pattern of his life, the pattern of a long retreating battle—from his young aspirations, from Owerbury, from his soft English skin, from his ideals of decency and honour, from his dream of seeing Owerbury again, from his plans for Harriet, from his power in the world—till the one thing left to evacuate was his body, and had demanded indignantly that James should try to grasp the pathos of this battle which was doomed to have only death for its fulfilment. James replied, soothingly, that he could be assured of an illustrious place in the Empire's roll of honour, that he was sending a paper to the Royal Colonial Society which would make clear what Imperialism owed to the Australian pioneer. In vain the old man damned the Empire, fumbling incoherently to make James perceive that the better colonist he had been the farther he had drifted from the little English village he had longed for. Oh, it wasn't the sea which lay between them, it wasn't even Emma, it was himself, the fellow he had become through murdering blacks, whacking the bush, fighting men, and keeping himself afloat in a land where the law was every one for himself and the devil take the hindmost. “Don't you see? Don't you understand?” But James had tiptoed away. He did not encourage these distorted memoirs of senility.

  The old man was left to talk with his ghosts, mutter, mutter, mutter all day and all night.

  “You treated me like a dog,” Emma said. “Don't you remember that night?”

  “I remember, woman. But it's been all I could do keeping my own head above water.”

  “Pooh, you were running after shadows.”

  “That's a fact—shadows. Like a donkey after his carrot, eh?” His cracked laughter echoed through the empty rooms of the house which James had deserted. “But you had your carrot too, didn't you? It was Larry. And you never caught up with it either. He he he! We all had our carrots. That's the way they keep you jogging, see? It's as simple as falling off a log. I discovered it once and forgot it again. I wanted to forget it, I wanted to live, and living is fighting for something. No, no, not for something, against something, against finding out what's at the end. D'you understand? It wasn't for the money, it wasn't to hurt Larry, it wasn't to beat you—that just happened.”

  “Pooh. And what did you get out of it?”

  “That's a fact—nothing.”

  “You could have lived like a king.”

  “That's a fact. I could've spent the money, eh? I never thought of that.” “Well, somebody else is spending it for you now.”

  “Yes, the squirt! Did you see what he eats? Oyster soup yesterday. That's the first oysters I've tasted for years. And cigars! He brings them from America. Two shillings each!”

  “It's him who got what you slaved for,” Emma said, and this time her laughter cackled in the dusty silence of the old rooms, where wasps nested and spiders hung their grey webs and the axe marks flaked off the walls and showed the great slabs powdered and honeycombed within. “It's him who hobnobs with the lords and ladies. It's him who wears fine clothes. It's him people bow and scrape to. Ha ha! Where's your goldmine? He's selling the shares in it. Where's your sheep you fought the crows and the dingoes for? He's got rid of them. Where's the land you lost an eye over? He's giving it away—to UNIONISTS. Ha ha—”

  “Shut your trap, woman. I'll live to see him sweat the starch out.”

  “You'll not live another year.”

  “I'll live to a hundred.”

  “Listen! Can't you hear it nibbling?”

  “That's mice.”

  “It's death. It's inside your own head, eating you up a little bit at a time while you sit there. That's how it goes—day and night, day and night.”

  “It's mice, I tell you. See, when I make a noise it stops.”

  “You think it stops. But it doesn't. Listen! Can't you hear it nibbling?”

  “You old witch, you get out of here. I've had enough of your gas.”

  He felt his way out on to the veranda, along the rotting veranda rail, until his foot touched the rocking-chair, and sat down. Her dress swished across the floor behind him, but he pretended not to notice. He sat on the edge of the chair with the rockers tipped up trying to push himself through the darkness, out into the sunlight, out into the valley; but there was nothing to grip. The smell of sheep was gone. The old voices were gone. The stockyard was gone with its happy hullabaloo of men breaking horses, cutting out, branding. Even the bush silence was gone. The clatter and buzz of a lawnmower, the hiss of steam from the engine-house where they generated electricity and made ice, the clerks skylarking in James's new model store and office, telephones ringing, the pit-pat, pitpat of tennis balls where the orange-grove used to be, women's voices, and James saying, “Mrs Astley, won't you try a game?” Mrs Astley? Who's she? By God, Curry's daughter in my house! I'll put a stop to this.

  The maid brought him his cup of tea.

  “Hey, you, what's the time?”

  “Who're you calling you? Ask civil and I'll tell you.”

  “By God! By God. . .”

  “It's four o'clock if you want to know. Now hurry up and finish the tea. I don't want to come all the way back here for the cup.”

  He finished it obediently. “Hey, you, what's for dinner?”

  “Wait and see.” The maid snatched the cup and went off.

  He slid back into the chair. “How long the days are!”

  “They've chopped all the orange-trees down,” Emma said. “Do you remember the day I planted them?”

  “Yes, damn you, I remember.”

  She cackled through the house again. “You thought you wouldn't see them bear fruit, didn't you? You thought you'd be in England by then? And now he's cleared them out because they've stopped fruiting. Ha ha!”

  “Shut your trap.” Then he muttered peevishly, “I'm hungry.”

  Gradually, in a year, two years perhaps (he lost count), the pattern shifted, the links between its events dissolved, and before he could piece inexplicable hieroglyphs together again he dozed off in the sun. He awoke and tried to identify a nameless face with silky dragoon whiskers and account for the feeling of irritation they caused him and why they reminded him of Harriet crying and old Peppiott beating his wife with a stock-whip. Unbidden, unsorted, his memories flowed, bright and painfully moving. He started up in a rage to go somewhere, but before he touched the veranda rail he had forgotten where or why. He shook his head sadly and sighed, but already the scene had moved twenty years back or twenty years forward, or perhaps to something which had never happened, something he had only dreamed. To and fro, to and fro the pictures shuffled, like pebbles in a sieve, and every day some of them escaped, till only a few grey grains caught in the mesh, a few heavy, sharp stones. All the rest—gone, forgotten, except when some special stimulus charged the cells of his brain and the old masterful personality leapt out on his face and his tongue in a quick flare of anger or scorn. Sometimes it was Sambo's voice, sometimes when James or Julia tried to thwart him. He had begun to crave for the things he had denied himself all these years—wines and food and good cigars. He sat for hours thinking greedily of oyster patties, turkey stuffed with chestnuts, smoked salmon, grilled trout, scones heaped with jam and cream, the sucking pigs they ate in Owerbury at Easter, partridges and pheasants, haunches of venison, pickled herrings, the Westphalian ham his father used to cut in thin shavings and eat with sherry and olives. . .

  James had laid in a cellar of wines and kept a good cook. Obscenely the old man stuffed himself till the food ran out at the corners of his mouth and they led him away and shut him in his own stronghold yelling that they were trying to starve him.

  One night a governor on tour came to stay at the Reach. All the afternoon the old man sat in his chair sniffing excitedly and rubbing his hands. He could smell the poultr
y and fish and hear the ice-cream churner and the clink of bottles going to the freezer.

  James came and said, placatingly, “Now, Father, I've got a nice little dinner for you.”

  “Ah.”

  “There's whiting, grouse, roast lamb, asparagus, ice-cream, and a bottle of whatever you please. How's that?”

  The old man licked his lips.

  “I'll have Foo serve it in your room in half an hour.”

  “Eh?”

  “Now, Father, you'd be much more comfortable in your room. I'll see to it at once.”

  When he had gone the old man began to think, “What's he want to keep me away for? There's something he doesn't want me to have, something special. I can smell it. Roast pork—that's what it is, and he gives me roast lamb. The swipe. I won't have it. I'm going to the table.”

  Cunningly James had his father's meal served half an hour before dinner, knowing that he could not resist eating and that after eating he would go straight to sleep, but he underestimated the yet unsubdued fury of the old man. He ate his food all right, but when James came into the dining-room five minutes before the meal to see that everything was in order for a distinguished guest he found the old man sitting in the governor's place demanding roast pork and swearing that nothing short of dynamite would uproot him. It took five Chinamen to carry him to his room and lock him in. Fortunately his voice was not what it was: horses no longer pricked their ears down in the paddock when he roared. A remote hiss and whisper of blasphemy, inaudible, as far as James could see, to august ears, soon died away, and the servant left to watch at Cabell's door came to report SOTTO VOCE, “Boss he snore velly quiet now.”

  This was one of the grains which did not go down the sieve. It rolled around and around the old man's brain, collecting other grains, till it became the token of every affront he had suffered in the last sixty years. It was the burden of an incessant complaint to Sambo, the servants, whoever would listen: “He tried to keep me away from the table and starve me because he had some toff to dinner. That's the sort he is. Spends my money on roast pork and locks me up in my room so I won't get any. Him and the Chows—Chows, mind you!”