by Thea Astley
Seated in their living-room, the whirring in the skull subsiding: ‘Dearest Lucy,’ Dorahy muses, ‘have I ever argued with you yet?’
He watches her setting the table, serving dinner, and he absorbs the gentleness of her hands. He knows why he had never married before, that other time, and seeing her now reaffirms his reasons. The fire within her is rarely suspected by those who see only the skin of another, but Dorahy had years ago caught glimpses of flame that alone served to underscore her perfection for him.
‘We’ll be going,’ he says. ‘The four of us.’
Boyd winces.
‘What sort of confrontation are you after?’ he demands. ‘Words or silence? Violence, is it? Something of what they have just done to you? Will you make a public accusation? It would harm you more, and you know it. Their tricky lawyers would see to that.’
‘I’m going to blast a way through the Alps with vinegar,’ he says. And then he laughs.
The protective warmth of the Boyds has an amniotic quality. Pain subsides. His soul is more swollen than the tenderness above his right eye; and amazement that the same bullish tactics are in vogue overwhelms him.
He eases himself upright on the sofa and, leaning over towards Lunt, says, ‘I brought this on you. I’m sorry.’ He is a man who finds it difficult to apologise. Squirming a way out, he berates himself, with the moist eye, the propitiatory throb in the voice! The insincerity of it! He cannot tolerate this self-revulsion, though it is a thing he feels more often as he grows older.
Lunt says, ‘I won’t be turned into a martyr against my will. But the bastards have roused me this time. I’ll go into that pompous ballyhoo with this whacking great headache and show I won’t be forced out.’
Boyd is pouring rums and there is immediate solace.
‘This will cut through more than the Alps,’ he says.
And he is right, after all, Dorahy recognises, as the bite of it melts the inner rage.
Snoggers Boyd, entering into the spirit of it at last, has pinned sarcastic pieces of bunting, tie-shaped, to their collars. Lunt enjoys, but Dorahy merely tolerates. They make a pretty picture, he thinks, posed here preparatory to entering the old School of Arts from whose pediment sad streamers hang in reply.
People are moving up from either side, blocking the stairs as they revive memories in passageways too narrow for them or their inflated nostalgia. One quick glance and there, just inside the doorway, is Buckmaster shaking hands with visitors in an air loud with greetings and cries of recognition. The hall is too voluble.
While they pause before the crowd, a red-haired fellow with a wide smile comes up to Dorahy.
‘How are you, sir?’ he asks slipping automatically into the language pattern of his school days, and equally familiarly Dorahy slips back twenty years and says, ‘Well, thank you, young Jenner.’ They both laugh.
Time, thinks Dorahy, time! How it has gouged out the tenderness of youth, though there is still much that is innocent about the youngish man before him—the steadiness of eye, the firmness of mouth.
‘I’ve come,’ Tim Jenner confesses, ‘to pave the way through Scylla and Charybdis. Barney Sweetman’s up there, too. The wandering rocks. I’ll release my father and we’ll sail through in his wake.’
Dorahy notices then the elderly man behind him. For the first flashing second he does not think ‘There go I’ but ‘How he has aged!’ Then he realises he is looking at a twin scarring of time. The paint has run on the masks, trickles that make the facsimile sour or disillusioned. Old Jenner looks frail now, but then so does Dorahy.
‘Good to see you, Tom,’ old Jenner says. ‘And you, Charlie. What a marvellous surprise!’ He takes both of Lunt’s hands and holds them warmly. ‘Wonderful to have you here with us—for whatever we’re celebrating. Maybe because we are at last a fading point on the map.’
He is partly right, for the town has steadily drained out its people for ten years since the boom. There is no talk of Separation Leagues now, though this evening has brought about a quorum. Dorahy’s head still throbs and he is giddy with yap and lights. He notices Lunt pass his hand wearily across his eyes and asks how he feels.
‘Pretty terrible,’ Lunt replies. ‘I’m beginning to feel sorry I came. There seems to be some sort of brigade at the top of the stairs, too. Do you think they’ll let us in?’
‘We’ll see,’ Dorahy says. ‘We’ll see. I wish I wasn’t feeling so foul.’
Their party moves towards the congestion at the foot of the stairs where Gracie Tilburn is holding preliminary court. Momentarily Dorahy closes his eyes, reasoning falsely that she won’t see him. He hopes blindness makes him invisible for the pounce, which comes, on the moment, with a richly pitched cry. She demands his recognition but her eyes are on Tim Jenner whose hands she seizes with palpable ardour. She is magnificent in puce, through the pink waves of which young Jenner is struggling towards a dream of pallid blue and lazy daisies. He cannot accept her at once, though her hands are demanding on his own.
He says, ‘Why, Gracie! Gracie!’ but his voice is limp.
‘When I sing,’ Gracie tells herself, ‘oh, when I sing it will be different.’
She is not so unsubtle that she cannot notice his hesitancy; but bravely the slim girl, who is still present inside this plump woman, greets Boyd’s little group with kisses all round, cheek after cheek. The grand gesture. ‘There,’ she reasons crazily, ‘I have put my mark on them.’ To her this means possession. Consequently she is all graciousness when they reach the small lobby in which Buckmaster and Sweetman are waiting.
They are overcome by puce.
Even their words, ‘I’m afraid this gentleman cannot—’, are confused and drowned as she sweeps by. But they still bail Lunt up.
‘Where’s your invitation?’ Buckmaster demands.
Lunt, still groggy from the head blow, looks up, recognises, and is silent.
‘I’m afraid this won’t do,’ Sweetman says, coming across. ‘It won’t really do at all. We’re sorry.’
Jenner and Boyd shove their faces into the group.
‘Nonsense,’ Snoggers says. ‘Of course it will do. They’re all my guests.’
Newcomers are impatient behind them.
‘Would you mind standing to one side?’ Sweetman asks. ‘Just till we get things sorted out. It won’t take long.’
‘Bloody nonsense!’ Dorahy cries. ‘We’re going in.’
The scuffle as Buckmaster and Sweetman converge on him and Lunt is a blunt parrying of arms at which more newcomers stare in delighted puzzlement. Buckmaster is almost bursting with the effort not to punch.
‘Come along, come along!’ Boyd says, edging his wife forward. And more softly, ‘You can’t afford to be seen like this. It won’t go well with the voters.’
A minion is tapping Buckmaster’s arm. It is almost time for the officials to go up on stage.
‘God bugger you,’ Buckmaster whispers to Dorahy. ‘Get in then. Get bloody in before I kill you.’
The hall is packed. As Dorahy fumbles his way along a row towards a group of empty chairs at the side, he is again amazed at the familiarity of faces like maps of countries he has once visited. The contours have subtly changed. The rivers have altered their flow. Hills are steeper. Yet they hold sufficient of their early selves to make recognition possible in the way one says, ‘And there was the corner store. There the newsagent. Once I ran along here where a hedge used to be.’ He takes his place beside Lunt who is managing his wooden leg awkwardly and observes Gracie Tilburn a row away twisting to catch his eye.
Gracie waves. She will be singing shortly and has no doubts about her magic. Like an empress, her bounds are infinite, and when Barney Sweetman spots her (he has glimpsed the wave) and invites her to join the official party, she concurs with statuesque magnificence.
Up here on stage, she decides, seated near the jug and the water glasses, is my true home. There are no corner stores in Gracie’s vision, no newsagent with dog-stained hoardings, no h
edges. There is only the blurred flow of faces and the noise made by hands.
A large lady arranges her behind at the piano. The queen is saved in a series of mundane chords. Everyone is standing for these moments, and when the anthem finishes Sweetman steps forward and waits like an old stager for all to be seated and all sound to subside. He’s used to this, anyone can see, catching with his eye every trout in the stream.
‘Dear old friends,’ he begins (and that’s a smasher), ‘for I know I can call all of you that, on looking around this hall I am amazed and touched—yes, touched—by the number of people who have responded to my invitation to come home. For this is home for many of us still and was home once for those of you who have gone away to make your lives elsewhere. But even to them I say this is still home, the place in which you took first steps to manhood, uttered your first meaningful words, made your first plans, indulged your first dreams.’
He pauses, having gauged the response to a nicety, as the applause breaks out.
‘For many of you, rather I think for each and every one of you’—‘Two,’ Dorahy murmurs to himself, counting clichés—‘those dreams were fulfilled. The point is that the memories and experiences you formulated here twenty years ago are still part of you and what you have become—part of this town. And the people who were in it when you were in it have become part of your blood.’
‘Hear hear!’ shouts derisive Dorahy who is losing control.
People turn to stare and smile. But it doesn’t rattle Sweetman.
‘Now this is a good thing,’ he continues, not stalling for a moment, ‘for the town owes all of you something and all of you are indebted to the town. It is a marriage of place and person that cannot be ignored.’
Strategy pause. The people watching him are subdued. This is not a moment for clapping. It is a tender moment made for silence, for seriousness. They all ache for his next words.
‘Before I go further I have on stage with me someone who needs no introduction’—‘Three,’ counts Dorahy—‘to any of you. I refer of course to our own Miss Gracie Tilburn who has come all the way back from the south to be with us on this happy occasion.’ (‘Four,’ he counts.) ‘She has graciously consented to sing for us once more, and those of you who remember her singing from twenty years back will know that is something for which we are indebted. It is moving to think that at the height of her fame and the peak of her career’—‘Oh, my God!’ says Dorahy, who has lost count—‘she chooses to return here, to her birth-place, to sing for us. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Miss Gracie Tilburn.’
The racket of applause. Gracie stands modestly during it, and now moves over to the piano where the pianist is shuffling sheets of music. The opening notes of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ are played and then Gracie, with ever so little trace of a throb, begins to sing. Her voice is richer, fuller, darker than in youth. The audience is emotionally stilled within its own darkness; but Dorahy whispers, ‘Say, eleven’, so audibly his neighbours frown and shush him.
With an effort he constrains himself from leaping up and roaring, ‘It’s nonsense! All nonsense!’
The applause is enormous at the end of the song. Hands are pulped. A huge and garish bouquet is rushed forward and Sweetman who is on his feet has taken the singer’s hand. Smiles fly through the air like rockets.
Sweetman finally raises an arm for silence.
‘Dear friends,’ he says again, ‘that response speaks for itself more than anything I can say. Thank you indeed, and thank you, Gracie—I may call you that?—for a wonderful opening of welcome. Those simple and unaffected words mean so much to us all. And now I’m going to call on James Buckmaster to say a few words. Ladies and gentlemen, James Buckmaster.’
Tim Jenner has been affected. He is sixteen and gulping in great gobbets of Gracie’s voice. He is down by the creek watching hat shadows alter the planes of her face. He is bashed outside the stock-and-station agent’s. And he remembers the purity of his adolescent love with an ache that will not leave him free to hear Buckmaster’s opening remarks. He only comes to during ‘… what we have done for this town is to build and strengthen it, to shape its future by the efforts of all who lived and worked here, some of us in small ways, perhaps; others in bigger ways—but all to the one purpose.’
He pauses. Tim Jenner glances along the row at Dorahy, who is wrestling with an inner devil.
‘This town has been built on sacrifice—self-sacrifice if you like—which is something that must take precedent when struggle and effort are required.’
Suddenly Dorahy is on his feet shouting, ‘That’s the word—sacrifice. How many? How many, eh, did you sacrifice?’
The hall is shocked. There are angry rumbles and two men come from the rear of the hall to seize the maniac by the arms. As they drag him out, he is still shouting, and when the porch is reached one of the bouncers whacks him hard across the side of the head.
‘The world of men,’ he murmurs, looking up at his guards.
Boyd has forced his own way out to the porch. ‘Leave him,’ he says to the bouncers. ‘I’ll get him home. He’s not well. Come on, old chap,’ he says.
But Dorahy, dazed from this second blow, flaps like a bird, unable to stand. He argues pitifully, ‘I’m perfectly well. Get back in there. Get back in and show those sycophants!’
Boyd’s hands and manner are firm. Somehow he steers him down the steps and across the road to where the buggy is hitched. The air is smelling of rain. ‘One blessing,’ thinks Boyd. Renewed hosannahs from the hall reach their ears and Dorahy frets again against Boyd’s arms. ‘It’s no use, Tom,’ Boyd says. ‘No use at all.’
The hotel is like a shell cast up by the sea. Its only sound is the breathy echo of waves clamped against the listening ear. Boyd stumbles with him up the stairs and to his room, where Dorahy lies flopped on his bed and looks up vaguely.
‘God!’ is all he can say. ‘Oh, my God!’
Boyd uncaps a whisky flask. ‘Try this,’ he says. But it only strengthens Dorahy’s tongue which lashes again and again, coiling like a whip round the same topic.
‘I’ll have to return soon,’ Boyd says at last. ‘Don’t worry about Lunt. We’ll put him up. Try to get some sleep.’
Boyd is not a big man, but, rising, finds himself towering over this rinsed-out fellow. Dorahy’s cheek has swollen. The eye is already darkening.
LUNT is not interested in retribution. He is a simple man and curious, with the inquisitiveness of the newly hatched. Yet there is no mischief in him.
After Dorahy has been hustled from the hall he continues sitting, stolidly listening to another three speeches, all kindred, and a final bracket of nostalgic songs from Gracie Tilburn. Ultimately the audience, an unintelligent monster, shoves its grotesque way to a room at the back of the hall where trestle tables support a sandwich supper. In the middle of this turmoil of recognition and reminiscence, the wave forming, breaking and petering out, the Jenners, Lucy Boyd and Lunt form a hard little knot which many of those present attempt to untie.
Sweetman pushes through the room to this boil lest it erupt. He cannot believe in the tolerance of others.
‘Sorry we had to do that,’ He is referring to Dorahy. Old Jenner permits himself a smile while his son looks grave. ‘It could have been much worse. We have to think of the guests, the visitors. It’s not pleasant to have someone going on like that at a reunion that should be friendly and warm. Not pleasant at all. We owe the others something.’
Young Jenner says quietly, ‘A lot is owed to many people in this place.’
‘True. But we must live and let live.’
‘Especially with the elections coming up next month.’
Sweetman replies with a poise that earns respect. ‘Right again. I won’t pretend with you. When have I ever pretended? I feel I contribute something to the welfare of this place and I intend to go on contributing.’
He is speaking more softly. All round them mouths are gobbling and gabbling. His back is slapped as he is h
ailed by wolfish passers and his smile of unutterable sweetness comes again and again between trivia utterances that for him have the utmost seriousness. He wears his geniality like a coat that he slips on and off with ease.
Tim Jenner is amused by such public-man antics and is still smiling at his own thoughts as Gracie Tilburn pushes to his side in the crush and slips an arm through his.
‘Hullo,’ she carols. There is a faint whiff about her of lost summer days. Her face has plumped out and strengthened. ‘Remember?’
Too well, he thinks, twitching with the beginnings of a small pain that recaptures her voice and her throat, the sun-warmed hands of her by the creek. These subtleties are almost lost now as life has hardened the externals. He could weep for innocence, but says instead, ‘Of course. Your voice is still wonderful. Better, if anything.’
‘Tim,’ she says. ‘Oh, Tim.’ And she remembers one special day when she sang for him and Freddie Buckmaster in a summer-filled living-room and the voice, as if no longer part of her, made patterns like tapestry that she wove at exquisite will. Sad it is, thinks young middle-aged Jenner now, to hear that wistfulness from this stouter woman with a carapace of assurance. Losing as one grows. And the longing growing greater as one lives.
‘I suppose you’re married now?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ he replies simply. ‘And you?’
‘Was,’ she says. ‘Twice.’ And giggles like a girl. ‘The last is over now. Five years. A mistake.’
Stagily she makes tiny mouths. Turns down the corners bravado style. Raises them. She is tempted to ask him if he is happy but senses his answer; and the heaviness of Sweetman’s presence, and that of the father, the quiet confidence of Lucy Boyd—all oppress her. Deciding on gaiety, she tralas a little, asks after Fred Buckmaster and has him pointed out to her across the room. Her waves attract him.
‘The gang’s all here,’ Tim Jenner says. ‘God Almighty!’ And Sweetman frowns at this and allows himself to be caught by another prodigal and drawn away.