Watching the Climbers on the Mountain

by Miller, Alex

  ‘To a happy Christmas!’ they chorused in response, each of them reaching out eagerly now to clink glasses before drinking. They were suddenly all half-standing and laughing at once, the adults hesitating only for an instant before going along with the children’s superstitious fear that any glass not clinked with all the others must bring ill luck to the drinker and might even prevent unity among them. So the ritual was strictly observed; the goodwill was new and unflawed and had to be shared equally to become perfect.

  But even at such instants as these some obscure obstacles to perfection cannot be ignored. Had it not been for such obstacles Ward Rankin might have felt himself to be in possession of that civilised equilibrium he had always longed for in himself and in his life—the result of a calm restraint and certain active sympathies working together over a long period of years. An apprehension of that equilibrium hovered about him as he reached out to his wife and touched the rim of her glass with his, as she smiled in the golden light and as they wished each other a happy Christmas, as if all were well between them. The noise rose like a rapid tide of pleasure around them. ‘Clink’ their glasses touched lightly rim to rim for an instant and the pale yellow wine was cold and refreshing on their lips. ‘Happy Christmas,’ while the goodwill is new and unflawed.

  He carved the turkey, and the plates were passed up and down the length of the table. The celebration was underway. The small ritual had worked its magic; the link would hold for a while.

  ‘Oh, he’s given you a drumstick, Robert!’ Ida Rankin exclaimed as if it gave her extraordinary pleasure. She was laughing as she passed the stockman’s laden plate to him.

  And Gil shouted, ‘Good on you, Robert! To Robert’s first Aussie Christmas!’ and they all shouted at once, grabbing their glasses again, energy and generosity flowing from them as if it would never be checked.

  ‘To Robert’s first Aussie Christmas!’ they sang out, gazing eagerly at the stockman, forgetting everything else, certain that their offering would be well received. And Robert Crofts smiled and nodded and thanked them, and he tried to think of something special to say to fulfil the expectations of the moment. But there was no need. Their voices rose higher and nothing would hinder them.

  The lunch party continued noisily into the middle of the afternoon, by which time the verandah had become uncomfortably hot. The station owner was the first to leave; when it came to his turn again he excused himself from a fourth round of charades and retreated to the cool isolation of the sitting room which, increasingly, was serving as a private cell within his own household. After making a brief telephone call to Reg Waterhouse, the Secretary of the Red Cross Society in Springtown, he sat staring at the handset. He was still sitting there, worrying in an aimless fashion, when Janet came to rouse him around five o’clock for the excursion to Toby’s Hole—a Christmas Day event as unchallengeable in its tradition on the Rankin place as Christmas lunch itself.

  Gil Sturgiss had talked Ida Rankin into following her husband’s example and going for a siesta, proclaiming, in his rousing way, that he would organise everyone into a washing-up brigade to deal with the debris before she awoke. So she also gladly left the heat of the western verandah and went to the privacy of her own bedroom. Once there she paused for a moment with her back to the closed door, examining her reflection in the full-length cheval mirror, which was set at an angle close to the opposite wall—she had carefully adjusted it to this position so that she could see the tops of the ranges reflected in it from the window when she was lying in bed. She observed herself critically while she undressed now, and when she was naked she made a face at her reflection before lying down. She was not really unhappy with her appearance; the look of dissatisfaction was more by way of a very private self-congratulation. She lay on the bed gazing up at the bunched folds of the mosquito net gathered around the iron ring above her head.

  Never more at ease, usually, than when her brother was visiting, today she juggled for a long time with a dozen or so details of organisation relating to the carnival in Springtown tomorrow—none of them were of any great significance, and there was nothing she could do to resolve any of them now anyway. They persisted in preoccupying her nevertheless, fixed there stubbornly, riffling the surface of her mind and denying her the relaxed mood she had looked forward to.

  In any shared moment of pleasure with her husband there was always an after-note of sadness and a feeling of regret about which she could do nothing. Such instants reminded her only too forcefully that vital connections still existed between them—connections that even a lifetime of separateness might never completely sever. She accepted that the past decade and a half of her life with him had ensured that, no matter what happened, henceforth there would always be something of Ward Rankin about Ida Sturgiss. And she was too intelligent to deny this, although it might have simplified things for her had she done so. She acknowledged, furthermore, that it was unlikely the same were true for him. For despite his apparent complexity, wasn’t there, she had asked herself, something finally impermeable about his nature? She had the awful sense sometimes that he was set unwillingly on a course from which no external influence or personal decision of his own could deflect him. And her heart went out to him then, as they looked at each other across a distance that did not seem to be of their own making. So the lingering sadness and the pointless regret.

  But today there was something else, besides this larger enduring concern, that was enlivening her thoughts when she would have preferred them dulled by a pleasant wooziness from the wine she had drunk. A small incident had altered the mood of the gathering just before her husband had left the verandah. She was not actively thinking about either this incident or her relations with her husband, but resonances from both were having an unsettling effect on her.

  For more than an hour she did not sleep.

  The heat hung over the house and silenced the world outside. Small stray noises penetrated to her from the kitchen. Gil, at least, had the clean-up well under control out there! She smiled to herself. He was being protective. Making sure his older sister was given due appreciation around the Rankin place. She knew this was how Gil saw it. She loved him for his mixture of old-fashioned Queensland chivalry and completely modern carelessness. Always patiently concerned with people, he had shown since his earliest childhood a profligate disregard for things and their cost.

  Ever since she could remember, Gil had careered from one short-lived enthusiasm to another, discarding along the way an expensive array of giant toys, from drum sets and electric guitars to powerful hunting bows. The most expensive of these, acquired last year just before he had set out for Gympie and the butter factory, had been a made-to-order western roping saddle and a quarter horse stallion. If anyone else had displayed such an interest it would have been contemptuously dismissed by his older brothers as, ‘Big gun pseudo-Yankee bullshit,’ but in Gil they found it enthralling, even discovering in themselves a taste for the hobby. Apparently Gary, the eldest by quite a few years and the one least inclined to experiment, was riding the horse and using the ‘alien’ saddle! Clearly Gil would have no further use for these things now that he had taken up the serious business of trophy shooting and had joined the Gympie Rifle Club.

  The episode was typical and it was why eccentric side-interests abounded among the otherwise conservative members of the Sturgiss family. Being the last child by a long way had presented Gil with opportunities the others had only dreamed about. And they had begrudged him none of it, but had pored over catalogues with him in the evenings, encouraging him to indulge his every whim, and supplying some from their own fancies, pretending they were his. They had all had a lot of fun through Gil. He had brought the unexpected into their lives.

  As she lay there gazing at the familiar reflected view of the distant hills in the mirror, her thoughts drifted to recollections of her own childhood. The view in the mirror was one she knew to be infinitely variable. This afternoon the dazzling white plumes of thunderclouds had begun s
oaring vertically thousands of metres into the sky and were now beginning to cast their huge shadows over the black basalt-capped spires of Ka Ka Mundi. She wondered if a storm would roll out of the ranges and sweep down the valley between the escarpments tonight. In that event, she thought—her mind turning to more practical considerations—the roads would be impassable and there would be no carnival. She wanted the carnival to go ahead. Not only because she had a share of responsibility for it, but also because of the incident on the verandah.

  She watched the clouds rising and conjured up the cool damp wind after storm rain, imagining its passage through the house, the creaking and subsiding of wood and iron—as the heated fabric of the place released its stored tensions. She must have dozed then for the banging of the screen door roused her. She looked at her watch; it was almost four o’clock. She lay still listening. The house was silent. And at last she slept, her body relaxed. A sheen of sweat glistened along the contours of her tanned skin and glided down in runnels here and there to dampen the sheet beneath her. Her breathing was slow and even and she seemed at peace with herself. But still something within her resisted, and she dreamed a kaleidoscope of brief and disconnected images; images that withdrew in the first moments of waking, tantalising her with their evanescence. Then she remembered the excursion to the creek and dismissed them, looking forward at once to a refreshing plunge into the cool depths of Toby’s Hole.

  As she pulled on her bathers and gathered the things she would take to the creek she wondered about the outcome of the incident at the lunch table. The prospect of watching Robert Crofts fight in the tournament marquee in Springtown tomorrow evening was giving a surprising lift to her day; it was something out of the ordinary to look forward to. She was taken a little off-guard, and felt pleasurably guilty at the same time, to discover the keen element of voyeurism in her reaction. But, aside from this, she was intrigued by the prospect of seeing the stockman in a situation where he would be forced to abandon his solitariness and reveal himself.

  She laughed as she took a final look at herself in the mirror; and as she left her room she felt uplifted by a lively sense of enjoyment, almost of irresponsibility. Changes in her life seemed about to take place. She felt ready for them. It was not a matter of calculation but of feeling, of expectation and inner excitement. It had been with her for some time. Perhaps six months, or even longer. In some ways, she recognised, it had always been with her, down there underneath the everyday feelings, working its way slowly up to the light. Now here it was, suddenly, today, visible to her at last, focused inexplicably on the fight the stockman was to have tomorrow evening at the Springtown carnival. Calm and self-assured, she now carried this feeling of excitement within her like a precious secret.

  •

  It was with reluctance that Ward Rankin had made the phone call to enter the stockman as well as Gil Sturgiss in the boxing tournament. He had been obliged to after the lunchtime incident that had intrigued each member of the Rankin family, without striking any of them as particularly crucial. It was only slowly, and with the unreal certainties of hindsight, that this incident came to be viewed by at least one of them as a turning point. Many years afterwards Janet Rankin would look back on this Christmas lunch as establishing the moment which irrevocably bound the stockman to her family. And she would always carry with her the troubling conviction that she had foreseen the significance of it all at the time. Though of course she had not.

  Even the positions of each of them at the lunch table remained clear in her memory. She was sitting opposite her father, his slim, slightly hunched figure sharply silhouetted against the streaming light at the head of the table. The smoke from his cigarette rose in a cloud around him and his expression was hidden in the dark shadows of his face. To her left was Gil Sturgiss and next to him, on her father’s right, Alistair. On her father’s left sat her mother and between her mother and herself was the stockman. Lunch was well over and a fourth round of charades was faltering for lack of enthusiasm. It was Alistair’s turn and they were waiting for him. All was quiet; the alcohol, the heat and the rich meal had weighed them down into a state of contentment, each of them induced to private thoughts despite the social nature of the game. Alistair’s remark cut through the mood and caught them unawares. Looking at the stockman, he said, ‘Are you going to fight tomorrow Gil?’

  For maybe two or three seconds everyone accepted the question as having something to do with the performance of his charade; then what he had said dawned on them and, with the exception of Gil Sturgiss, they all looked at Crofts. The stockman blushed and looked down, scraping at an imaginary remnant of plum pudding in his dessert bowl. Gil Sturgiss reached across the table and picked up the station owner’s brass lighter, flicking it with his thumb. The Rankins were all waiting, their attention on the stockman and Gil; and in Alistair Rankin’s eyes there was a peculiarly intense light.

  ‘We’ll bring home the golden eagles,’ Gil Sturgiss announced confidently, touching the flame to one of the thin Ritmeester cigars that Alistair had given him for Christmas. He leant back and blew out a huge cloud of smoke, aiming it up at the glass balls dangling above his head and making them twist and dance on their threads.

  ‘Robert’s not fighting,’ Alistair pronounced abruptly, and they all looked at the stockman again.

  ‘Well what’s this charade you’re going to do for us?’ Gil Sturgiss asked, puffing a spurt of smoke into the young boy’s face.

  ‘Ask him yourself!’ Alistair persisted.

  ‘That’ll do now,’ Ida Rankin admonished gently, and there was an uncertain pause.

  ‘Robert’ll have a go,’ her brother said then, backing up his new friend and making his trust in the stockman clear to all of them in order to silence their doubts.

  Ward Rankin recognised the stockman’s fear the moment Crofts blushed and started fiddling with his spoon. The sight gave him a sharp and unexpected pleasure; it was another precise connection between them. He knew the stockman’s fear well; he had grown up with such a fear and had carried it with him into adulthood until the incursions of middle age had finally eroded it. This was the same fear from which his English master had offered him a refuge at school: the very private fear of the boy who has never had a fight with another boy and who dreads the inevitable day when he will be left with no way out and will be forced to fight, or—if he has managed to elude the business for so long—to prove himself at last against another man. This was Crofts’ unenviable situation now. Rankin recognised the isolating dread which afflicts the lives of all boys—unless they belong to that minority who not only overcome the fear but who discover in themselves a sadistic pleasure in fighting and who seek out opportunities for it.

  Ward Rankin heard his son cross-examining the stockman now, and he misunderstood the boy, thinking him to be simply pinning Crofts down because of his own nervousness about this business. ‘You don’t have to go in for the tournament, Robert,’ he interrupted. ‘No one has to fight if they don’t want to.’ But even as he was saying the words he realised that they sounded foolish and that to the others it must seem as though he were really asserting the opposite. How could it seem otherwise? Old age is the only secure refuge from manhood. So he attempted to amend his words and explain himself to Crofts, but succeeded only in further alienating the stockman. In that eternity when he had believed he was about to die, just before his hand closed over the pig’s hard foot, when the heat of his hatred for Crofts was compressed into a brief fierce flame, he had understood the limits of his own fear and had passed beyond them. The intensity had receded, but the understanding had remained with him. ‘You’ve never had a fight, have you, Robert?’ he said.

  Crofts looked at him sharply, hurt and embarrassed. His miserable secret was out. ‘Of course I have!’ he claimed too vehemently as he glanced around nervously at their faces, scoffing at Rankin’s impossible suggestion. ‘Heaps of times!’ he added scornfully, compounding his wretched lie. Then he looked again at Rankin, who was
still watching him. He was puzzled and angered by his boss’s words but startled, too, that such a well-concealed secret could be guessed. He averted his eyes. Rankin’s searching gaze disturbed him. The stockman felt suddenly oppressed.

  Gil Sturgiss leaned forward onto the table, carefully clearing dishes aside to make room for his elbows, and pointed his cigar accusingly at the station owner. ‘And even supposing he hadn’t had a fight, Ward,’ he said deliberately, everyone’s attention on him, ‘it doesn’t mean he won’t be good at it when he does have one.’ He paused, allowing time for his meaning to sink in, nodded once at Ward Rankin and then sat back. ‘Take a look at him,’ he added significantly. They all looked at the stockman and saw the truth of Gil’s remark. ‘You just give Waterhouse or whatever-his-name-is a ring, Ward, and me and Robert’ll fight whoever they put up to us.’ Gil turned to Robert Crofts for the first time. ‘What do you weigh, about twelve and a half?’

  Crofts nodded, ‘Just under.’ He swallowed with difficulty and avoided looking directly at any of them.

  •

  Toby’s Hole was beyond the second bend in the creek, downstream from the house, a quarter of a kilometre or so below the grove of lime trees that grew along the edge of the horse paddock. Ward and Ida Rankin drove there in the jeep with the Li-Los and the banana lounges and the rest of the gear. The others walked along the top of the creek bank. Gil Sturgiss and Crofts were together in the lead; Gil carried his new rifle in its smart canvas case with the bright badges on it and Crofts had the old .303 slung over his shoulder. Alistair kept close to Gil, never more than a step or two behind him, listening carefully to his every word and observing his gestures—it was clear that his uncle represented for Alistair the most desirable condition of manhood he could imagine. He cradled his single-shot .22 in his arms, imitating Gil, and across his shoulder was slung an old army rucksack containing a supply of ammunition for each of them. A good twenty metres or more behind Alistair, Janet Rankin sauntered along on her own. She was the only one of this party without a rifle.