‘Looks like you slept in.’
He roused himself to see Prowse standing in the doorway.
‘Didn’t wake yer the first morning. Lushington’s not an early riser. He’ll come down when ’e feels like it. So take yer time, Ed. Peggy’ll have yer breakfast ready if you let ’er know you’ve done yer fly up.’
The manager’s splendid teeth grinned before his manliness withdrew.
Thin white sunlight was glittering coldly on gritty boards. Eddie Twyborn revolved and wove himself deeper into the cocoon of army blanket. He was conscious of too supple arms, the tendrils of armpits, the manager’s image fading from the crude doorway.
He got up presently, and while forcing with trembling fingers metal buttons through holes a size too small for them, called out, ‘Hey—Mrs Tyrrell—what about breakfast?’ in a voice he hoped the manager might have approved.
‘… when you want ut …’ her toothless cavern reverberated through what sounded like a cascade of thick crockery.
Outside in the frost there was a shambling of hooves, champing of chaff-scented bits, and a more intense perfume from dung recently dropped on frozen ruts.
He looked out and saw the Men rolling cigarettes under the eaves of a thawing roof. They were waiting for the manager, or more formidable, the owner of the acres to which they were enslaved.
Eddy was finally presentable enough to face his ally Mrs Tyrrell. He wondered whether he should clean his teeth with paste from the ruptured tube, but didn’t. He went out smelling of sleep and the hairy blankets he had slept in.
No doubt taught by her football team of sons that this is a man’s world, Mrs Tyrrell didn’t turn a hair. She tossed several charred chops and a mountain of fried-up cabbage and potato on to the plate waiting for him.
‘Marcia didn’t bring me a gift.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Mr Edmonds come down with the meat and veggies.’
‘Perhaps she did, and he hasn’t found out.’
‘Everyone knows everythin’ at “Bogong”. Little enough happens—without Lushingtons come or go.’
With one hand, she sat stirring her pink tea, with the other slightly titivating the tiara of greasy little hair-rosettes which framed her forehead.
‘Well, that’s Marcia for yer,’ she munched, and added, ‘It’s ’umankind.’
‘I’d have brought you a present,’ said Eddie, somewhat hypocritical above his chops, ‘but didn’t know about you.’
‘Of course you didn’t, love!’ she giggled. ‘And anyways, you learn not to expect too much.’
‘I’ve never expected too much,’ he murmured, and knew it was a lie, his lips thick with mutton fat and what would probably remain unfulfilled longing.
He went outside presently, his hopes of fulfilment higher in that they were humbler. After stalking through clumps of horehound, he seated himself on one half of the two-seater dunny, among the faded smells of wood-ash, lime, hen-shit, and old yellowed newsprint. Lulled by suspension in time and surrender to natural functions, he felt comforted at last, chafed his goose-flesh thighs, wiped himself on a recipe for pumpkin scones, and prepared to receive the morning’s orders.
The stockmen comprised a father and son, Jim and Denny. They remained silent when faced with a new arrival, not to say jackeroo, but egged on by the manager, extended hard hands in a gesture of cold welcome. Jim the father was leaner, more ravaged, more taciturn by nature, perhaps more aware, though not all that older than Denny his son, who had obviously shot too early from his father’s loins probably as the result of an excruciating Monaro winter. Denny at least smiled, out of witlessness it seemed, as much as good will. His head was afflicted with the shakes. His eyes squinted from behind tin-rimmed spectacles, one wing mended with a length of greasy string. He was carrying a black stockwhip which, from moment to moment, he flicked, at a solitary blade of anaemic grass, or at one of his own cringing curs, as though proud of this symbol of his office in the ‘Bogong’ hierarchy.
Discouraged by their owners, Eddie squatted to convert the dogs, two narrow-headed mongrels distantly related to the deerhound, and a little faded kelpie bitch. One deerhound snapped, and each continued looking blank from behind lolling tongue and yellow fangs, but the little kelpie whined, and was on the way to prostrating herself, torn between convention and desire for affection. Tail between her legs, she compromised by daring to rest her paws on Jim the father’s knee, and was knocked back by the knee for her pains.
‘Gid down, yer bloody bitch!’
The corrected bitch slunk away, while Eddie was made to realise that it wasn’t done to touch dogs.
‘What’s her name?’ he asked with caution.
‘Dunno that she’s got a name. She’s just a dawg, ain’t she?’ her owner replied, and spat out a shred of tobacco.
Denny the son nearly laughed his head off. ‘My dawgs ’uv got names,’ he claimed. ‘This is Cis and that’s Captain.’
Jim the father turned away in disgust, but the dogs themselves seemed to join in Denny’s simple mirth, grinning, golloping, and snapping at the air.
Eddie might have felt unhappier if his attention hadn’t been diverted. Prowse re-appeared leading a horse of the same strain as those the stockmen had tethered to a rail, except that the mount which was to be his looked shaggier, wilder-eyed amongst his forelock, and from every angle worse put together. His colour might have been described as creamy, but smeared with Peggy Tyrrell’s frying pan.
‘This is yours, Eddie,’ said Prowse. ‘He’s no great shakes to look at. But quiet. We call ’im the Blue Mule.’
Even Jim saw fit to laugh. It was the laughter of experience over ignorance and city ways. He spat again, and smoothed the moustache hanging like two black bootlaces either side of his invisible lips.
At this moment there was a great gnashing and barking of dogs, sidling and fretting of wild-eyed horses, as a pack of little foxterriers shot round the corner of the shed where the ill-assorted company was assembled. The Blue Mule snorted and kicked when the leader of the terrier pack flung himself on the kelpie bitch in an attempt at rape.
Jim the father cracked his whip and caught the terrier in the balls just as the master of the pack arrived.
‘Now, now, Jim!’ complained the one who was the boss judging by the manager’s subservience. ‘Shouldn’t be such a bastard, should you?’
Another one in spectacles, the boss didn’t leave off smiling. Whereas Denny the stockman’s glasses were framed in inferior metal, Mr Lushington’s were gold-rimmed, their lenses so large and round his expression would have benefited by their shape had he been less benign than his manner suggested.
As the terrier was yelping for his slashed balls the manager tried to joke it off. ‘Looks like Jim didn’t get it from the missus last night. Eh, Mr Lushington? What ’ud you say?’
Mr Lushington only smiled. He was an elderly pear-shaped gentleman, seated on a chestnut taffy-tailed hack of considerable girth, which gleamed, as did his rider’s leggings, from constant attention by those who serve the rich. Across the pommel of his saddle, he carried, neatly rolled, an oilskin to protect him from the worst caprices of the weather. While at his heels, or those of the resplendent chestnut, skipped on wooden legs the terrier pack at various stages of growth and decay.
Prowse must have thought it time he impressed those under him with the confidential nature of his relationship with the boss, for he approached as close as the latter’s stirrup-iron allowed, and informed him in a lowered tone of voice, ‘This is Eddie—the cove we had the letter about. I expect you’ll like to have a word with ’im.’
The manager, the two stockmen, the jackeroo himself, all were looking to the owner to dissolve the state of impotence to which his position had reduced them. But Mr Lushington implied only obliquely, by a drawn-out whinnying sigh, that he had absorbed his manager’s information. Still smiling from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, he sat looking, not at the young man recommenhded to is patron
age, but at the chain of distant hills.
‘The Judge’s son,’ Eddie Twyborn thought he heard before the grazier turned his chestnut and, preceded by the terrier pack, made for the paddocks, the respectful manager and two stockmen leaping at their saddles, the jackeroo almost rupturing himself as he landed on a pommel, on the razor-back of his awkwardly articulated nag.
As a boy on holiday in the country Eddie sat ponies no better and no worse than others, but had lost his dignity astraddle the beast known as the Blue Mule. He took up a position at the rear of the Lushington cavalcade, thumping with his heels at unresponsive ribs.
The party crossed the jingling bridge, hooves spanking over loosely-linked planks, and headed out along the flat. An anus opened and disgorged, a vulva split and gushed. Only the ostracised Eddie Twyborn at the tail end was to any extent aware of such events. Greg Lushington and Don Prowse were turned in their saddles towards each other, exchanging esoteric information, the one wearing his normal protective smile, while the other had pinned on the bland badge of unashamed sycophancy. Between the head and the rear of the column rode the apathetic stockmen, blue-serge shoulder blades resigned to the action of their brumbies’ razor-cruppered, harsh-coated rumps.
Eddie’s nose began to run, his eyes to smart from the wind, and a little from humiliation. All he had experienced of life left him, not that it would have been of much use, reduced as he was to ignorant boyhood in remotest Patagonia. There was surely some dormant instinct he could summon up in self-defence. After all, he had been decorated, officially for valour, though actually for a desperate instinct which had carried him across no-man’s-land in what they considered the desired direction. Now, in a man’s world as opposed to no-man’s-land, with a litter of rational, unrevealing clues replacing the irrational signposts of nightmare, he found himself at a loss. In his boyhood he had shown a slight talent for wood-carving (a kookaburra on a cigar-box lid) and for tying some of the fancier knots. With another boy he had modelled a crusaders’ castle in plasticine; they had won a prize. These were all he could produce out of the waste-bin of memory to pit against the esoterica of Gregory Lushington and Don Prowse; even less open to human advances the two stockmen, whose silence and primitive forms suggested links with chthonic forces.
So Eddie Twyborn thumped desperately with his heels at the shaggy barrel of the Blue Mule, who refused to share his rider’s urge to keep up with the cavalcade, perhaps accepting disdain as the passport to a peaceful existence; while the rider was forced to admit that he had to shine, regardless of geography, climate, or whichever sexual role he was playing.
As he continued thumping automatically at his wholly unresponsive mount, loss of faith in himself was replaced by an affinity with the landscape surrounding him. It happened very gradually, in spite of a sadistic wind, the sour grass, deformed trees, rocks crouching like great animals petrified by time. A black wagtail swivelling on a grey-green fence-post might have been confusing an intruder had he not been directing one who knew the password. The red road winding through the lucerne flat into the scurfy interior seemed to originate in memory, along with the wood-carving, boy-scout knots, and plasticine castle. For all the contingent’s knowledgeable remarks on wool, scours, fluke and bluestone as they mounted the contours of Bald Hill, the scene’s subtler depths were reserved for the outcast-initiate.
He allowed his horse to convey him at last as the latter would have wished. The two of them furled in the gusty swaths of an autumn gale, snatched at by meagre, isolated trees, warned by the cawing of watchful crows, the animal seemed to maintain a logical distance between themselves and what is considered normality.
Whenever the cavalcade halted the laggards drew abreast to the tune of renewed outbursts of instruction from the boss and ‘yes yes Mr Lushington’ from his acquiescent manager, ‘bluestone the creeks termorrer,’ bluestone being the apparent panacea. In the keen air it glittered for Eddie-Eudoxia like a Byzantine jewel.
The stockmen had ridden off to muster the mob of Bald Hill wethers, the chief objective of this somewhat desultory expedition, Like a cluster of parasites infesting a hide of almost identical colour, the dirty fleeces of the sheep could be seen in slight motion in a cleft of the stony hillside.
Embracing the panorama with a Napoleonic gesture, the grazier announced, presumably for his protégé, ‘Wonderful sheep country. You wouldn’t find better on the Hunter, though the fellers up there don’t care to admit it.’
Eddie did not know what to do beyond grunt back in manly fashion. His boss seemed appeased.
By now the shouts of the stockmen had startled the mob of sheep, and the frantic exertions of the little faded kelpie were keeping them bunched as she drove them in the right direction.
On arrival, the sheep propped, milled in tight formation, then fanning out, stood coughing and staring, some of them stamping. Awaiting further orders from her tyrant, the kelpie flattened herself on the stones.
‘A wormy-lookin’ lot,’ their owner grumbled. ‘Need a good drenchin’. Drench ’em, Prowse.’
Though the manager may have felt his employer was intent this morning on thinking up jobs to impress a newcomer, he agreed that the sheep looked wormy and ought to be drenched; wasn’t it his mission in life to tell Mr Lushington what he wanted to hear?
The latter had lost interest in his sheep. He was leading his entourage in another direction, when Denny’s mongrel deerhounds put up a rabbit. They gave chase. The leader snapped. Between them they tore their squealing prey to bits, and devoured it down to the last inch of opalescent entrail and bloodied fur.
Mr Lushington had slowed down his chestnut until on a level with his jackeroo’s nag. ‘Bit boring for you,’ he said somewhat surprisingly, ‘until you learn what it’s all about.’ He dug with his whip-handle at the Blue Mule’s withers. ‘Perhaps you never will. Perhaps you aren’t for it.’
Eddie suspected Gregory Lushington was endowed with more perception than he realised, but mumbled back, ‘It’s what I’m here for,’ and was immediately depressed by the lack of logic in his remark.
The logic of those with whom he had been brought together was as simple and direct as the glimpses of illogic in the landscape around them were subtly diffused. But Mr Lushington’s next remark made it hard to decide where he, or indeed, anybody stood. Turning his full gaze on his new acquisition as he had not up till now, he told him, ‘In Sweden they boil a piece of fish skin in the coffee. It’s supposed to bring out the flavour.
‘And does it?’
‘Opinions vary,’ Mr Lushington said.
He continued staring full face at his protégé from behind the gold-framed spectacles with a solemnity the younger man could only return.
Till simultaneously each burst out laughing.
It was too much for the manager. He had lost control of his star puppets. He began to scowl. There was a smell of class in the air.
Greg Lushington had turned his back on the present. ‘Your dad used to come down here. Do a bit of fishin’. When we were younger …’ From his fixed stare and muted tone of voice, old Lushington was re-living it visually. ‘A good looker in those days. Still is—the Judge. And you’ve inherited the looks—if I may say so without turning a young man’s head.’
It was positively a courtship. The manager would have felt more disgusted if at that moment Captain and Cis had not put up another couple of rabbits, which took refuge in a nearby warren.
Returning to the present Mr Lushington grumbled, ‘Eaten out by rabbits. Dig ’em out, Prowse. That’s something for the winter months. Break Eddie’s back, I expect. But that’s the way to break ’em in.’ Again he dug his stockwhip at the Blue Mule’s smudged withers.
‘Yes, Mr Lushington,’ Prowse agreed. ‘We’ll get young Eddie on to that.’ At the same time he gripped his mare’s belly so hard with his spurs that the poor beast let out a fart and curvetted sideways.
Mr Lushington grinned.
‘Did you know my mother?’ Eddie asked in
the absence of other inspiration.
‘Your mother? No.’
‘I thought you might have met her.’
‘No,’ he said very firmly. ‘Never.’
They rode a little.
‘My wife’s met her,’ he said, ‘I think. Yes, I’m pretty sure Marcia knows Eadie Twyborn.’ They rode some more. ‘There’s a lot of a woman’s life a man doesn’t know about. I mean,’ he hastened to add, ‘all those lunches—and afternoon teas—and the letters they write one another—and the telephone conversations. We wouldn’t want to know, would we?’
Eddie agreed because it was expected of him. Actually he would have liked to know some more about Marcia Lushington of the beige eyelids and fringe of monkey fur. But realised he must keep her separate from Greg. Perhaps later on he would crossquestion the manager.
Prowse was looking grimmer and grimmer. ‘Talking of lunches, Mr Lushington—what about a bite of tucker ourselves?’ he mentioned, and laughed.
The boss did not reject the suggestion, nor did he satisfy the man he employed by accepting it outright.
They had descended from the slopes and were riding amongst the white tussock and briar patches which fringed the river before the emerald lucerne stands took over farther down.
On reaching an overhang of sheltering rock Mr Lushington asked, ‘This suit you, Don?’
It was the first time Eddie had heard the boss call the manager by his first name. He wondered when you did and when you didn’t; perhaps it was allowed when you knocked off for lunch.
‘Fine, Mr Lushington. A pretty decent windbreak.’ Though he did not attempt to return the familiarity, Prowse had jumped down, and was rubbing his hands together with boyish and at the same time passionate informality.
The Twyborn Affair Page 20