by Thea Astley
‘I’ll be out for about an hour. When McKay comes back tell him to hold the fort, will you? I’ll be back soon.’
The street is blistering but it is only a short distance to the Sea Rip. Glare and sun work away at him and even panama’d he feels the bite of northern light. His eyes squint. The heat does not lick but rasp. Excited, nervous at what he has done, looking forward to seeing the last of the town with his gesture so firmly behind him: he will be able to do nothing but leave.
He passes Buckmaster who is leaving some café on the main street and they wave cheerios that will never be waved again. Already he has a sense of homesickness and observes with the eyes of the newly arrived or the about to leave. There’s sadness in the docks at the end of the street, the boats pulled in from journeys on blue water, masts somehow thin.
Dorahy is only fifty yards ahead of him.
He saunters, then, to let him get back to the hotel. No point in having the day pronounce them to the roaring world. He wanders down to the water-front where peelings and papers wash round the piles and, watching the thick syrup of water slap and pull at the wharf, he has a slow smoke.
Dorahy, his glasses making him older and more benign, is lying on his bed reading when Boyd finally gets there. There was a gay party on the front terrace of the pub with Gracie Tilburn queening it over a bevy of drones. Waves. Cries. The party envisioned now as he gazes down on the solitary Dorahy who has uttered nothing but a little grunt since he said, ‘Come in.’
‘I’ve got something here you might like to read,’ Boyd says, pulling the envelope from his coat pocket, and tossing it, an unconsidered trifle, onto the counterpane.
Dorahy slings his long skinny legs over the side of the bed and sits up. ‘You’ve done it?’ he hopes aloud. Unfolding and then reading, his face changing with each line. The shock of it! Even the forgivable journalese! He reads the last few lines aloud and gives a great cry:
‘At last! And no one named. It’s a miracle of circumlocution. No. Hardly that. Of discretion. Oh, my God, Snoggers, it’s more than I wanted! More!’
There are tears somewhere. Each man looks away from the weakness in Dorahy, struck to the pith of him, and Dorahy gets up and goes to stand at the veranda door of his room. He is gazing across the water to the island. The dozens of blues. The island sky-floating above its own shadow. Isolated laughter from the terrace below. It is as if he is prepared to drown now in blue, the end being here at last.
‘You’ve done it for me,’ he says turning to look at Boyd, with the weakness safely out of sight.
‘No. Not for you, Tom. It’s my own gesture. Sorry to take the credit from you. But truly I have done it for me. Some rash beneath the skin. It is dying now, with this.’
‘What do you think will happen?’ Dorahy is eager as a child.
‘Who knows? There’s a final get-together in the hall tomorrow. Last night and all that. You and Lunt would be crazy to go. Buckmaster will have all the speeches organised. Stay out of it. You’ve made your point already.’
‘You’ve made it,’ Dorahy says. ‘I was only reporting. It will finish you, I suppose,’ he adds reflectively.
But Snoggers will be carrying a swag of victims with him.
‘Do you mind? Really mind?’
‘At the moment I’m too exalted with the excitement of it. Later, well, I don’t know about that. Can’t say. Already I feel the griefs of farewell.’
Dorahy is silent, then he says, ‘I feel guilty about that. Truly. But settled with God, somehow.’
‘Or the devil,’ Boyd suggests. ‘You are a real agent provocateur.’
‘Maybe. Who knows? Who really knows? … Would you like a drink? Have you time or isn’t it wise?’
‘It’s unwise, but I’ll have one.’
The darkness of the bar-room, its docile shadows, peels some of the age from their faces. They talk of nothings—the heat, the landscape, the last few days—and are halfway through their drinks when Sweetman and young Buckmaster walk in. They are the eclipse of the soul.
The noon door of Boyd’s office has, with its closed-for-lunch sign, a vulnerable innocence that persists even after he has let himself in. The street outside is practically empty except for a dog lifting its leg against one of the Gazette hoardings. A passing comment, thinks Boyd. Just wait till tomorrow. Madden is still folding in the back room and is half-way through the issue, perspiring languidly with his shifty rabbit face bent in a whitened concentration over his work.
Boyd takes the completed papers and piles them on a trestle slide against the back window, thinks better of it and locks them in a press.
‘When you’ve finished,’ he advises the crouching Madden, ‘lock the rest in as well, will you?’
He goes back to the front room and looks out the door at the dusty, decent street with its knobs of palms. Nothing moves. Is he imagining the lull? Then around the corner a dray rumbles and creaks past as he stands there watching and blinking. Just outside the horse drops its sweet-smelling dung. If he were a man searching for omens then he would find this lucky and could even grin. Chickens’ innards, the movement of wild stars, the way counters fall. But he recalls unexpectedly the whiteness of Madden’s down-bent face prosily withdrawn as he folds and stacks, folds and stacks, and on some uncrystallised impulse goes down the passage to the back room and stands regarding him for a few speculative moments. He does not look up. Why? Boyd wonders, with an unreasonable spurt of irritation.
‘Here,’ he says, testily, ‘I’ll give you a hand. We should get them finished by three,’ He curses McKay for being still out at the town picnic reporting the follies.
They work in the heat and the silence into which the clock drops its seconds like blows. The tap over the basin drips unrhythmically. Irritable, after fifteen minutes, with a kind of abrading curiosity, Boyd stops his automaton hands and regards his back-stop, notes the indifferent pallor, the sparse stringy hair, the unhealthy flush of some skin disorder erupting on the starved-looking angles of the jaw.
‘Have you had a look through it?’ he asks.
Madden’s spidery hands hesitate in their work, but he refuses to look up. He knows the reason behind the question and has not yet discovered his own true reaction in the matter. Stalling, he says carefully, ‘Had a glance.’ The hands have not once disrupted the rhymes of work—fold, press, fold, press, stack.
Boyd is cautious, too. This will test his loyalty, he decides, about which he has long had his doubts. The boy on the burning deck, Horatio at the bridge. All the troubadours of fealty singing together.
‘Tell me, Joe,’ he persists, ‘what did you think of my centre-page story? The one on Mandarana?’
At this moment, Madden is not anybody’s man, though he is a white-corpuscled fellow with the seeds of treachery bred into him. His pay is low enough for him to be suborned by anyone at all. Wageless and gutless. There have been past occasions when money has produced bogus red cells of a meretricious attachment. He grins uneasily, remembering.
‘Fair enough.’
‘Dangerous?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
Boyd places another folded paper very delicately on the pile: he is a man in whom the most vast of angers produces only the most antithetic response.
‘But you must have some idea,’ he argues softly. ‘Do you think I am pushing it too far?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Then you know the background of all this? The things I’ve left unstated?’
Madden’s pimples appear to flare. He says, ‘I’ve heard a thing or two.’
‘So.’
The hands resume their work while clock and tap wrestle it out and in the superficial air of truce Boyd gradually decides that he doesn’t trust Madden although they have worked five years together. ‘Printer’s devil!’ he decides.
He is right not to trust. At some unspecified hour of concealing dusk Madden, with a discarded copy of the next day’s Gazette folded small inside his shirt, seeks out Buckmaster to sa
tisfy unformulated notions of preferment that he bears like an inner rash. If he wanted outrage, then he has it, observing the passionate explosions on the face of the reading man. Foolishly, Buckmaster cannot control his rantings and Madden grows small with fear and satisfaction.
‘I won’t forget… will make amends… take my word … a promise a promise … very shortly you will be …’ he raves to his shrinking stooge. While despising.
Madden can only smile and tremble with the excitement of disloyalty that has never bought him anything really yet. As he returns to dusk, his devious compulsions satisfied, he is perplexed by the inner emptiness that overtakes him.
BETWEEN THE steak and the orange mousse, the flirtatious warblings of Gracie Tilburn and the more sombre conversation of the Jenners, Boyd becomes so conscious of an oppressive, almost sonorous quality of evil that he feels he cannot communicate, even on the flattest levels, with his guests. He pushes his chair back under his wife’s anxious eye and says, ‘You’ll have to excuse me for a little. I have this persistent feeling that things are not all right at the office. Don’t ask me to explain right now, but I’ll have to go back there to check up.’ His fat-creased eyes are unhappy.
‘Take me with you,’ Dorahy suggests. There is a moment’s silence. Lunt questions with raised eyebrows, and finally, ‘No,’ says Boyd. ‘No. Not for this.’
He leaves them while the pudding wilts. Outside, beyond the curiosity of their eyes, his own tension runs wild for a few seconds. Only a mile from town, he decides quickly that saddling the horse will not be worth it and sets off at a fat man’s jog-trot, his heart knocking and his lungs soon announcing the pain. Gasping, he slows down to a walk and as he comes to the last straight stretch before the stores begin, he sees that which he has dreaded.
Fire is all rose and gold, excitement and orange joy, leaping and threatening, with blacker centres to flames than the heart could imagine. Its appetite increases with the reds and yellows, a hunger to paint colour all over a street’s canvas. Its sound is animal and high-pitched and Boyd, who has seen its menacing light long before he hears its voice, knows exactly where it is and why. There are ghoul watchers already by the time he arrives and he can see, even from across the road, that someone has bashed in the front door to his office and that the room at the back is fully ablaze. He races ahead of his throbbing shadow across to the pulse of it, but the heat is too strong and strikes him back again and again. The smell of spirits is still in the air.
He retreats to the knot of watchers and someone—friend?—says, ‘They’ve sent for the fire boys, Snoggers. The hoses should be here in a minute.’
Helpless he is, standing watching the work of a life-time gobbled in moments. They are all agape with it, and by now there are children in night-wear yelping with festival. Flames throw wild light on the faces of the crowd, and Boyd, illuminated like a saint, prays, ‘Christ, oh, Christ, let them hurry!’
Time crawls in deliberate collusion with the speed of the flames now mounting in spiralling peaks above the shop’s eaves. Boyd, who is insane with suspicion, wonders have the firemen been suborned, when suddenly the dray lurches round a bend of the street. When the water starts to pour the crowd gives out its bestial sigh. Of regret? Boyd wonders viciously, for the shop next to his had been starting to catch and the crowd was being denied its bread and circuses with every conquering hiss of water-play. The two hoses are turned against the scarlet heart of it all which burns and slows, burns and slows. It is controlled within minutes, but the hoses have come too late, Boyd knows. Slushing through puddles to his burnt-out front office, he is conscious only of black ash and water, the rubble of twenty-five years accumulating behind his rage and hopelessness. He would weep but for the watchers, and defiantly pushes his coughing way through smoke denser in the outer room, where he can still make out the ruined press and near it the clotted, reeking pile of the next day’s issue.
He gives the smouldering heap a kick and sparks and smoke fly out.
‘That’s all it would have been, anyway,’ he thinks sourly. ‘Sparks and smoke.’ A miserable fireworks at that, a fizzer, followed by a lot of political obscurantism.
He walks more slowly through the wreckage back to the front of the office and it is not amusing, not even faintly and hysterically funny, when a renewed blast from the hose hits him with such a wallop he is knocked to the ground.
Through this sour comedy he hears Buckmaster’s voice giving directions. ‘Hold it, you fellows,’ he is saying kindly. ‘You’ve hit Boyd. There now, spin it over this way.’
Boyd scrambles to his feet, his clothing a mush, and he walks to the sound of the voice on the edge of the crowd and his eyes catch Buckmaster’s and hold them.
‘Administering the sacraments, too,’ he says.
‘We should have insisted on going with him,’ Dorahy says, addressing himself to the Jenners and Lunt.
Dinner is over and he is standing in the long living-room facing the others who are seated near the window. They are all conscious of the revival of a long-lost warmth that both soothes and disturbs. Gracie has ceased examining young Jenner’s wife for flaws, and loves both of them, while Lucy for the second time in their lives takes Lunt’s hand and extends the other to Dorahy, embracing him as well. Her anxiety reaches out for the significance of hand-clasps, the touch of eyes.
Lunt says tiredly, ‘Will someone tell me exactly what is going on? I feel you others know.’
Lucy releases his hand and swings in her chair to face him, to disturb his resignation.
‘Only Tom knows,’ she says. ‘It’s the paper. Tomorrow’s. There’s an article about you and the trouble at Mandarana.’
Lunt laughs harshly. ‘So long ago!’ he cries. ‘He didn’t ask me. Didn’t ask whether I’d mind.’
‘Should he have?’ someone asks.
‘I think so,’ Lunt says. ‘I do think so. I haven’t come back here to make trouble. Tom talked me into coming back, God knows how. I don’t want the mess it’s turned out to be.’
Dorahy says pacifically, ‘It’s no good going over all that. It’s done now and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s my fault. Was my suggestion. Blame me if you like.’
‘You’ve made a lot of trouble,’ Lunt agrees. ‘Who’s it going to help?’
For the first time in a week Dorahy is stringently honest.
‘It’s going to destroy,’ he admits. ‘Buckmaster. Sweetman. They’ll be exposed for what they are.’
‘Do you think anyone really cares at this stage?’ asks the older Jenner. ‘Do you?’ He is as persistent as Dorahy.
‘I hope so,’ Dorahy replies. ‘Oh, I hope so.’
‘An avenging angel,’ Lunt remarks. ‘You’re mad, Tom. I mean that. Crazed for a wrong cause.’ He frowns. ‘And now Boyd thinks they’ve got wind of it, eh? Can’t any of you realise that I’ve come back through love, not hate! Love!’
Dorahy’s explanation is pithy. Lamp-light makes anything possible with its antiphon and response of flicker and flow. The clear glass mantles give definite truths—which subdue. They sit in silence after his words, listening to the night outside where there is nothing but the noises of insects in the viscous air and the looming authority of trees whose branches reach out and touch the three wide verandas of the house.
Restless, Dorahy walks out to the head of the garden steps that plunge into night-dark with the assurance of a swimmer. Like everything about this house, the steps are firm and resolute. The township is a mile away on the northern road and, examining the sky for portents, Dorahy could swear to orange light. He ponders fire, dismisses and reponders. The glow swells and fades. He goes down into the steady dark of the trees and walks through the scent of cane and frangipani to the road that runs with few curves back to the hub of it all. He can see nothing.
Yet returning to the veranda and looking back into the lighted room he does see something after all.
Gracie Tilburn is seated at the piano and is playing and singing ‘Auld L
ang Syne’. Her voice floats like a miracle on the waiting air. Young Jenner is absorbed in her. He might be sixteen again. And in the corner of the window bay Lucy and Lunt are sitting with hands clasped. They look at each other and no words come.
GRACIE TILBURN is soggy with tears.
Lonely in her hotel room, unassuaged by the banalities of small talk that have sustained her throughout the week, she gives way to an urge to weep that has been pressing at the back of her heart all day. Once yielded to, its luxury becomes addictive and she weeps for having wept, groping through oceans of regret, a baffled swimmer who has lost track of the life-line. There has been a concert (successful), several women’s afternoon teas (tepid), and three private dinners at homes where the male guests were reluctant to flirt under their wives’ noses.
She is weeping for Tim Jenner and the loss of him—that is, the loss of the sensitivity of him. She won’t credit him with having aged and sees him devoured by family cares—though at the concert she could have sworn that he was regarding her as he had once regarded her while she sang. Blinkered, he is. Like some dray horse that looks neither right nor left, strains on the load, and pulls and pulls and goes forward between worlds of happening without a sideways glance. The fool!
But is she any happier for having glanced sideways too often? She gulps noisily at this thought and hears an unexpected knock on her bedroom door with rage. How terrible she must be looking with the practical ravages of grief all over her person registering a kind of monochrome complaint!
She does quick things to her face and hair before the spotty mirror, straightens skirt and blouse, dabs powder wherever, and re-thinks herself as she opens the door on Boyd, who is standing in an attitude of submission. To what? she wonders.
He is surprised by her puff-ball face, usually so elegantly clad in clichés. Flesh is making its own admissions and he drops his eyes to conceal their first flash of curiosity before inspecting her frankly.
‘Hullo,’ he says. ‘I’m lucky to find you.’