Dithers decided to say nothing. He climbed into the Rolls, and when he opened his eyes after a brief nap, the plain still stretched on forever. It was as if they were standing still: the shadows of the gums shortened, then lengthened again, but nothing else changed.
As the sun sank low, a glint of green appeared on the horizon. Abotomy turned the Phantom off the dirt road, through a gate, and up a track lined with a splendid white post-and-rail fence and an avenue of newly planted elm saplings that cast shadows across the road. At the foot of a line of low hills Dithers could make out a habitation. As they neared it he beheld a scene of great industry. A mansion was rising in classic grandeur from the Australian landscape, and around it lakes, lawns and pleasure grounds were all taking shape.
They had reached Abotomy Hall.
Chapter 13
Dithers got out of the car and stretched his cramped legs. One wing of the mansion was already complete, and on its expansive verandah sat Portia Abotomy. Barefoot and in a white, ankle-length dress, from a distance she reminded him of an odalisque from a romantic biblical painting. As he neared, he could see that she was hot, bored and just beginning to show. She smiled shyly at the dashing visitor.
‘How’s things, old stick?’ said Abotomy.
It was clear that he was not going to introduce Dithers. The curator turned to Portia. ‘Madam, I’m Dr Courtenay Dithers, mammalogist at the museum. Congratulations on your news. Chumley told me in the car. I assure you that I’ll be as little bother as possible.’
‘Grab your luggage, old chap.’ Abotomy opened the boot, retrieving two parcels wrapped in cloth. ‘Now, what do you make of this statue, and this rather queer piece? Thought it might provide a bit of fun for the men after dinner.’
Dithers felt that the statue was mediocre—possibly a recent copy of the Venus de Medici. The bronze, though, was an exquisite piece of workmanship, if rather obscene.
‘Oh, darling, you remembered! How very thoughtful!’ exclaimed Portia, doubtfully eyeing the phallus.
‘Not entirely sure I got a good deal. But I’m glad you like them, dear.’
‘I’m no expert,’ Dithers chimed in. ‘But if you would like a valuation the best fellow is Harvey Herringbone-Trout, professor of classical archaeology at Sydney University. I’m sure he’d be delighted to assist a member of the museum board.’
‘Hmm. I’ll take them back to town so he can have a look,’ said Abotomy.
The dining room was grand, with a high ceiling and curtained sash windows along the wall opening onto the verandah. On the opposite wall a low walnut crockery cabinet formed a shelf at waist height. Above it hung elaborately framed, rather poor copies of Elizabethan and Restoration portraits.
‘Meet the family,’ Abotomy said, gesturing towards them.
‘I had no idea you could trace the line back to the sixteenth century,’ exclaimed Dithers.
‘Right back to the Conquest, actually. Some of the gents in the paintings may not be in the direct line, exactly, but they give the general idea. Picked ’em up on our honeymoon.’ He winked at Dithers.
Portia served an excellent roast lamb dinner, complete with vegetables from the garden. The wine had evidently been sourced on the European tour.
‘I haven’t eaten like this since mother cooked for us before the war,’ Courtenay said wistfully.
‘Mr Dithers, did you grow up in London?’ asked Portia.
‘We had a London house, but Kent was really home.’
‘So your family had an estate?’ Portia asked.
‘Not a great one. But we never lacked for anything. And my parents—one couldn’t have asked for better, really. But that all changed with the war, as I suppose it did here.’
‘I lost more uncles and cousins than I can bear thinking about, Mr Dithers.’
‘And I brothers,’ said Dithers. ‘All three of them. My parents never got over it.’
‘Our family got off rather more lightly,’ Abotomy broke in. ‘Someone had to supply the meat. And the wool. Crucial part of the war effort, you know.’
After dinner, Portia led Dithers to the guest bedroom.
‘I’m sorry that the guest bathroom is not yet plumbed. So it will have to be the outhouse, I’m afraid.’
Dithers removed his clothes, fell into bed, and was instantly asleep. He woke soon after dawn, deeply refreshed. After removing the balls of newspaper from his shoes, which were becoming a fixture, and enjoying a fortifying gasper, he walked across the frosted grass towards the ancient bark dunny, which Portia had euphemistically called the outhouse. Set among discarded tin sheeting and timber in the home paddock, it was accessed by a path the length of a cricket pitch. He closed the door. The walls were made of bark, and the toilet seat was roughly cut from an old hollow log. He unhitched his trousers and sat on the throne, and something caught his eye—a slow movement on the inside of the door. It was the leg of a great, hairy huntsman spider, camouflaged against the wood. Aghast, Dithers realised that it was the size of a dinner plate. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he saw that every surface was covered with the creatures. There were dozens of them. He hitched up his trousers and fled, unaccomplished.
After breakfast, Dithers asked Abotomy if he might explore the area.
‘Best not to go too far from the homestead, old chap. The brigalow, wilga and leopardwood are thick hereabouts, as are the taipans and tiger snakes. I can’t spare a man to guide you. You’d be doing me a great favour if you stuck to the home paddock. Portia’s got an interest in birds. Maybe you could do a bit of birdspotting with her?’
That afternoon a rather costive Dithers set out across the paddock with Portia, who was armed with an enormous pair of binoculars. The bush behind the homestead was badly knocked about. Barbed wire and other rubbish made the going a little hazardous. But there were plenty of birds. Quite near the house they saw a family of blue wrens, the brilliant markings of the male almost metallic in the sun. The little fellow was so bold and sprightly that he made Portia laugh. She reached into her pocket for a few crumbs, and scattered them at her feet. To Dithers’ amazement, the creature came right up to her, its tail swinging from side to side as it pecked at the offering.
‘I’m worried for the birds, Courtenay,’ she lamented. ‘This battué could wipe out a lot of them.’
They walked back to the verandah, picking their way between piles of discarded kerosene drums, sheets of tin, and timber. ‘I wish Chumley would get the men to clean it up,’ Portia said, pointing to the debris. ‘It attracts snakes, and I’m terrified of them. Especially with the baby coming.’
The battué, it transpired, was a major undertaking. Nets had to be put in place, beaters gathered from the surrounding stations, and invitations sent to the local squattocracy. Dithers found himself with time on his hands. But what pleasures there were in Abotomy Hall! He revelled in the leisurely mornings spent lazing in his double bed with its silk sheets and eider-filled duvet. Through the wide French doors he could watch the changing shades of the Australian landscape as the sun rose.
And Portia was, if anything, too hospitable. She would invariably bring him breakfast in bed, then perch on the edge of the mattress and chat with him as he sipped his coffee and ate his fried eggs. The c
ooking must have been a priority for her, he thought, for she would arrive in her nightdress and dressing-gown, from which her full breasts seemed determined to escape. They provided, Dithers secretly thought, the most splendid sight of the entire property.
‘Courtenay, what’s happening in Sydney these days? What are the fashions at David Jones?’ Portia asked, her black eyes opening wider than ever. ‘And pleaase tell me about the opening of the harbour bridge. Was it really as fabulous as the radio reports made out?’
Courtenay was so touched by her yearning for the city that he invented things to entertain her: the scent of a perfume he’d detected in the crowd at the bridge opening, and a visit by a foreign dignitary to the museum. He described in detail the dresses, entertainments and chatter of the big smoke.
‘Oh, Courtenay, I miss it all so much,’ Portia exclaimed after one particularly vivid account. Leaning against him, she seemed almost to swoon.
It was, unfortunately, at this precise moment that Chumley Abotomy sauntered past the French windows. Portia did not see him, but Dithers caught the steel in his eyes.
That evening at dinner, Abotomy seemed to be in the best of spirits. ‘Early morning tomorrow, old chap,’ he said to Dithers after the meal. ‘Need your help with a job. Got to lighten off a horse.’
Dithers rose at dawn, and was a little surprised to find his shoes innocent of paper balls. He met Abotomy in the parlour, dressed in his work clothes. ‘Delighted to help with the unloading, old thing,’ Courtenay said, ‘but don’t you have hired help for that sort of work?’
‘There are some jobs, Dithers, that the man of the house must do himself,’ Chumly replied grimly as they walked towards the stockyards. ‘Like defending a wife’s reputation.’ He looked Dithers straight in the eye. This alarmed the curator, who felt that perhaps Abotomy had read too much into what he’d observed through the French windows.
They were now at the stockyard, where a beautiful black stallion was tied to a fence post. Two workers sat on their haunches beside a small fire. As Abotomy approached, they jumped into the enclosure, and threw the horse onto its side.
‘Come here, Dithers. I want you to see this.’
The men tied the horse’s legs. Abotomy crouched beside the creature and grasped its silken black scrotum in his left hand. To Courtenay’s horror, the squire took a blade from his pocket and cut deeply into the bulging purse. In a moment it was over. Two bloody spheres lay in the dust beside the screaming beast.
‘First and only warning, Dithers. If I ever see you near Portia again, I’ll take the greatest pleasure in slicing your balls out with this knife.’
Abotomy stomped off to breakfast, leaving Dithers stunned. A cur shot from the shadows, wolfed down the severed organs, and fled growling into the half-light.
Chapter 14
After this singular incident, Abotomy showed nothing but civility to his guest. But Dithers couldn’t relax. There was the problem with Portia, and the problem with the dunny. His perpetually costive state left him in a sort of delirium, and whatever sleep he found was filled with bizarre dreams. He would often close his eyes only to find himself wandering an enormous toilet block, inside which was hundreds of cubicles. He’d enter one to find that there was no toilet paper. Another lacked a seat, while another had no toilet bowl at all. But worst were the cubicles filled with spiders, or those in which Abotomy crouched, grinning maliciously, knife in hand. Dithers would wake with a whimper, grasping his crotch and wishing desperately for relief. Somehow, most mornings, the newspaper would be there in his shoes. He had no idea how Abotomy got into his room without waking him. What had started as an odd practical joke began to take on a terrifying aspect.
One morning Dithers awoke in the predawn light to a peculiar sound: ‘Faark, faark, faaaarkkkkkkk.’ Was it the dying cry of a foul-mouthed shearer?
‘My feelings exactly, old chap,’ he said as a large black bird flapped away.
Over breakfast he mentioned the strange call to Portia, who told him that it was the cry of the little crow.
‘Oh,’ said Dithers. ‘I’d been told that the crow sounds like Wagaa, wagaa.’
‘That,’ Portia replied, ‘sounds like the Australian raven to me. You find it further east. Our crows are not so civilised.’
She was secretly pleased to discover that Dithers was taking an interest in the feathered tribes.
The evening before the battué, men began arriving at Abotomy Park. The entire district had been invited. A few of the men (and the visitors were almost all men) wore suits of varying vintages and states of repair, but the majority were dungareed and check-shirted, their sartorial elegance extending at best to the occasional neckerchief. A beast had been slaughtered and an enormous roast sizzled in the oven. Cauldrons filled with boiled pumpkin and potatoes, and piles of tinned peas completed the feast. As the multitudes gathered on the verandah, beer, cooled in a Coolgardie safe, flowed freely.
‘I hear you’re a curator?’ asked an arrogant-looking young fellow, who had already downed several beers.
‘Yes,’ replied Dithers. ‘I’m here to assist Mr Abotomy with the preparation of scientific specimens. What’s your name?’
‘Duggerton, Denis Duggerton. We don’t see your type out here too often. You can start your collectin’ with the wild dogs. And the blacks, though the pioneers did a pretty good job with them in this district.’
‘So I hear.’
‘My family shot sixty bucks off the property. The does and pikininis got away, but we got ’em all later, with damper. The whole mob were feasting on stolen sheep.’
‘That, sir, is murder. Foul murder.’
‘It had to be done. Our forebears dealt with them and the wild dogs the same way. Shooting and poisoning. Just put the strychnine in a dead beast, rather than a sack of flour. If it hadn’t been done not a sheep would be left alive. And our claims to the land might have been doubted.’
Dithers thought back on the prickly pear, rabbits and foxes that afflicted the country. It was as if the land itself had been poisoned and was vomiting up great plagues of bile in its distress. But these colonials were surely the most pernicious plague of them all.
‘I am astonished that anything has survived your campaign of extermination,’ Dithers replied.
‘Not much has. Nowadays the wild blacks have been pushed back as far as the Alice, and the dingoes are pretty thin this side of the Darling. If it wasn’t for do-gooders like you, we’d have finished off the lot of them long ago.’
Duggerton walked off in search of another drink. Bastion, who had been listening, caught Dithers’ eye. He led him to a quiet corner.
‘My grandfather always said the blacks shot by old man Duggerton were the bravest souls that ever lived. They stood their ground against nine armed whites on horseback, for well over an hour. They fell one after another, giving the women and children time to get away. The last man standing died facing the foe, a spear hafted in his woomera, ready to let fly. They were braver than the Spartans, Grandad reckoned.’
The dinner gong sounded, and the men crowded around a trestle table stacked with food. Each took a plate and stood where he could on the verandah, wolfing down the tucker. As the crockery was cleared, Duggerton produced a violin. The strains of
‘The Lime-juice Tub’ were accompanied by wild cries, clapping and stomping, and soon the men were dancing jigs and reels. Portia and Chumley even managed a round to one of the more sedate tunes, to the applause of all.
At ten o’clock Abotomy cried out, ‘Men! Port and cigars in the smoking room!’
Dithers had no wish to follow. He went to his bed as guffaws and sniggers emanated from the room. The shooters were presumably admiring Abotomy’s antiquities.
When Dithers woke in the morning, he knew he could not participate in the battué before emptying his bowels. And that meant facing the spiders. Perhaps if he closed his eyes, he thought, he could relax sufficiently to perform in that den of venomous, eight-legged horrors. He made his way towards the dismal structure, opened the door, shut his eyes, and sat down. With growing anticipation he remembered the need for paper. Was there any in the place? He opened his eyes a crack. An old newspaper, ripped into squares and hung by a string from a nail on the back of the door. He went to grab a sheet, just to be ready, when he saw, crouched on its reverse side, the most horrid, hairy spider he’d ever encountered. He leapt up, throwing the sheet to the ground. Then the outhouse exploded.
The sound was still ringing in Dithers’s ears when he realised that he was painted with the contents of the can. Yet he was euphoric, for the shock of the explosion had finally loosened his bowels.
The door to the outhouse slowly opened—to reveal Portia Abotomy. She was dressed in her night attire, and was holding a shotgun.
‘Oh, Courtenay!’ she gasped. ‘My dear Courtenay! What have I done?’
The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish Page 12