by Thea Astley
‘Home-sick.’ She explains her face away. ‘For here and there.’
‘Coming back’s the devil, isn’t it?’ he comments, aware of her lie, and hesitates before he says, ‘Lucy and I won’t be able to join you here for dinner this evening after all.’ It seems like a blow to her already punched-silly face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Lucy sends her love.’
Gracie can feel the moulding of her face gradually return to its normal shape. She puts out both her hands. Words are never enough. Boyd catches them, though he had thought of giving them a miss—and begins to smile at the idea. Friendship is like trapeze artistry for gods of the high wire, he muses: one swings and the other, trusting in the first and in God, wheels over all sorts of abysses of mistrust to be caught firmly by welcoming hands. Or words. He would hate to let her drop, really. She is more vulnerable than ever with the lineal registrations of time upon her face.
‘Never mind!’ Gracie cries. ‘How kind of you to call! Would you care to have tea with me on the terrace before you go back?’
He doesn’t care to, but he will. He says so. Her eyes widen with pleasure. She had not believed he would. Some piece of male, she thinks thankfully, any piece, in dutiful attendance. She gathers her bag and goes out with him into the hall which is full of gothic gloom, green light and polished cedar. The stair-case is almost baronial. Its curves meet their obliquity, there is a momentary clash and they descend side by side.
Grade’s face is fully remoulded. She will be able to be coy soon, and by the time they arrive at the antithesis of all this—wide green front, palms, blue water—she is recovered in full. In white, she thinks with non-sequitur vanity. I’m at my best in white. Women should wear lots of it. Hers, though crumpled from a passionate hurling of herself upon the bed, is frail and lovely. The creases are natural enough. She steers him to a table beyond the others who are having pre-luncheon drinks. Leaves grow over this end of the terrace, broad, green and sharp with light where Boyd seats her absent-mindedly and drags over a cane chair for himself. All the morning he has been supervising the clean-up of the wreckage in his office and is still numb. Dorahy and Lunt proceed endlessly past him, the fiasco of them both.
They amble through pleasantries for ten minutes, Gracie pouring his tea with what she believes to be old-world charm, and they gaze at each other less stiffly above the cups.
‘Tell me, Gracie,’ he says, ‘do you remember the affair at Mandarana? I know you were only a girl then, but I thought perhaps you might.’
She is astonished at the change in him during the very utterance. The roly-poly cheeks lose their bluntness. The eyes narrow.
‘Of course. But it is twenty years ago now.’
‘That’s what everyone says. Did you know Charlie Lunt at all in those days?’
‘No. Not really. I knew who he was but that’s all.’
‘Did you ever hear any talk about what happened to him?’
‘Some. Some. But it’s so long ago,’ she repeats. ‘It’s hard to remember.’
‘What do you think really happened? I’m curious because my life’s work here was destroyed last night as a kind of bitter result.’ He takes a sip of tea and it too is bitter on his tongue. He has no use for sugar.
‘I only heard what you others heard. What Tim Jenner told me. How they cared for him. That sort of thing.’
‘Did he ever accuse anyone?’ Boyd muses aloud.
Gracie shifts her chair into a bigger shade patch. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Never. Tim told me he wouldn’t talk about it right from the very first.’
Useless, Boyd thinks. Hopeless. Why do I care? Have I caught the itch from Dorahy? Certainly he is mad with anger over last night’s disaster and now is beginning to assume the cloak of avenger as well. Is there no end to it?
Take this hotel. Any hotel. Place in it artificial scenes of welcome and farewell. Match the stain of easily wrung tears with the green wall-paint, and the laughter with glimpses of starched table linen, and still you have nothing. The impersonality is truly miraculous and you hate this for ever and all places like it. Against this backdrop Boyd prepares for a plunge.
He enlists Gracie’s moral aid. Can he count on her? Does she believe in the essential evil of men like Buckmaster? She nods, only half-willingly, but she nods. Is that all? The nodding head? The acquiescent shoulders? On the last evening of all these false evenings will she plead for Lunt through actions however indirect?
Gracie is accustomed to deviousness of a more polished kind with only herself at stake. She is ignorant of how to act for others.
‘How?’ she asks. Boyd tells her. By refusing to sing. By giving reasons.
But the programme has been prepared, she counters. She can’t do this. But she can, Boyd insists. Not only can. Must. For Lunt. For Dorahy. For himself.
It’s male logic, she thinks. Totally self-involved.
‘You know, I don’t really like Tom Dorahy.’
‘You’re not doing it for him alone. It’s Lunt, Lunt.’
‘But I scarcely know Mr Lunt. And he doesn’t want it done for him—twenty years too late.’
‘There’s me,’ he says. ‘And the Jenners—Tim and his father believe in Lunt and the wrong done him. They were people you loved.’
She is silent. The tea has grown cold and is still undrunk. Her relationship with Tim was once the slowly unfolded rose of her. Now it’s the worm in the bud.
‘If I could talk it over with him—Tim, that is.’ She hopes and Boyd understands more than he displays.
‘I’ll arrange it.’
‘It’s too late now,’ she replies, meaning something else.
‘It’s never too late.’
She comes suddenly to her senses. The gut of her is disturbed, but there is a coherence about this man speaking with her that makes her loves and fears seem paltry. She understands that he is seeking now more than vengeance for last night’s blow, that he sees the town as seeded in disaster and brought forth as bitter fruit.
‘Forgive me,’ she says with honesty this one time at least, coyness put away and the trumpery of it. ‘I’m thinking too much of me. I’ll do whatever you wish.’
Boyd leans across the table and takes her hand. The table rocks and tea slops in both saucers. It is comic at this moment. Boyd is fat, shapeless and unheroic to look at. His virtue is in his voice or his smile. He gives her both.
The treacle of summer. It filled the courtroom in glutinous waves. Mr Sheridan had gone so far as to remove his coat—and that without diffidence. He did some paper-shuffling, refilled his water glass from the jug.
So far as can be ascertained, he said, peering hard through his spectacles at the packed room, there is no certain evidence that Lieutenant Frederick Buckmaster acted altogether improperly in the affair at Mandarana on the twenty-fourth of June.
He paused to glare at Dorahy who had let out a snort of rage. No certain evidence, I said, and that I mean. My colleagues and I have sifted all the evidence brought before this select committee and our findings are that, while there were certain irregularities in the proceedings of that day, the entire unhappy events were the result of wrongly placed enthusiasm, a perhaps too nice sense of injustice and the understandable grievance of men who found the difficulties of living—and I mean pioneer living—aggravated to an unbearable pitch by the extra annoyance the blacks posed to their efforts.
Annoyances! hissed Dorahy. His hands were clasped so hard the knuckles ached, and the ache spread up his arms till it touched the acute perimeters of his mind. Unheeded, sweat dribbled its way down the nape of his neck. From outside the fragmented words of passers-by floated improperly in, to the annoyance of the magistrate who frowned and cleared his throat.
Hideously, Dorahy became aware that Lieutenant Buckmaster, seated down from him two rows and to the right, was beginning to grin. A twitch, like some frightful tic, attacked the schoolmaster’s knee. He leant forward as Sheridan continued speaking.
While our findings tend to absolve L
ieutenant Buckmaster from deliberate malice in the matter, nevertheless the court feels it must warn him against acting uncircumspectly or with undue haste in other matters of this kind. Distance, and consequent delay with the arrival of official advice, have had an adverse effect in the whole unfortunate business. However, Lieutenant Buckmaster is warned that in future he must not act without due consultation with his superiors, even if the delay seems impossibly difficult in the circumstances.
Warned! cried Dorahy over the shocked and packed room. Warned! He was on his feet babbling.
Mr Sheridan glanced at the assisting constable, who shoved his way along the rows until he could reach Dorahy.
A travesty! A farce! Dorahy kept shouting. Strong arms were propelling him to the aisle. Within the blur of faces round him only Buckmaster’s shone with the greasy clarity of success. You! he cried incoherently. You you you!
As they got him outside into the brighter day, he could hear the magistrate resume his monotone summation.
You must try to keep calm, sir, the constable kept saying. He felt sorry for the silly coot. Try having a bit of a sit-down in the shade.
Dorahy was weeping hopelessly, the tears and the sweat griming his fanatic face. Let me back in there, he kept begging over and over, pushing beyond the constable’s barrier arm at the closed courthouse door. Let me back.
Sorry, sir, said the constable, who was firm and kind as well. If you don’t stop it, I’ll have to take you in charge. He steered him to a bench alongside the hall. Just sit there, like, for a bit, he said. It’s the bloody heat getting at us. That’s what it is.
He stepped back and took up a guard’s stance by the doorway.
Dorahy came to his senses slowly. He wiped his face off with the arm of his sleeve and sat there till the heart quietened. From the courthouse came the shuffling sounds of the assembly rising, but he didn’t move. He sat his shame stubbornly there and watched as they came out, watched and watched and found no words for it.
IT is the last night.
Take time over this, over the pathos engendered by the lamps, the slow rain on the iron roof of the hall, the wistfulness of streamers coming loose. There are too many people and by now some of them have lost the crack-hearty jauntiness of that first evening and have their faces settled into the lines that betray their age and a grief for it which they attribute to this last act of farewell.
They are wrong. They have simply regained themselves as they are, not as they used to be. They are simply a crowd of elderly people, disappointed by time, who are longing to get home. And this common denominator, home, is not what they have come to visit after all but that which they have left.
They are more critical of the place, too. Its shortcomings are beginning to be listed on their tongues. They know they could never settle here again. They are glad they got away. They are disappointed in each other: the fabled jokester, the hero of other years, is disguised by fat and wrinkles, is a feeble punster at that, who worries about his audience more than his words, is become a bore with ill-polished shoes and a suit that sags. The beauties have turned shrewish. God bless the lot of them, for the unpleasantnesses that once irritated are beginning to reassert themselves. Skins are peeled from eyes.
Barney Sweetman is chairing again. Buckmaster is by his side. Their wives are on stage as well, dried-out ladies who are over-powered by Gracie Tilburn, guest artist in lavender silk. The flowers in vases are all lies, and they are limp from strategy. The bunting is conscious of hypocrisy.
In this hall, noisy with conversation, last-minute recognitions and bogus promises to keep in touch are made. It is sizzling with an amity in the centre of which Boyd’s party is seated half-way from the door. Dorahy, pale with anticipation, can barely speak. Boyd, stocky as a bull, has his intransigent jaw set and jutting. He has the manic fanaticism of the recently converted.
When Sweetman stands and raises his hand for silence, the buzzing roar of the hall subsides as eyes focus on the big fellow who is more or less king of the kids, of the town, an infallible potentate. Up there he is speaking ex cathedra, and they prepare to hang on his lips.
‘Dear old friends,’ he begins and his audience, strangely enough, instead of melting, hardens. They are not aware of it themselves, but they have fought forward to a sort of self-truth which sees themselves as less than friends. There have been too many petty arguments, too many misplaced remarks, a lack of delicacy in reminiscence; too much has been forgotten and too much remembered. ‘You are probably feeling tonight as I feel, tremendously sad on looking about this room and seeing faces familiar and meaning so much.’
The crowd generously goes with him. After all it’s a bugger of a job, this speech-making. But they go only a little way.
‘We have had a week of recollections and memories, but more than that we have had a resurgence of the spirit—yes, the very spirit—that helped create this town. I find this moving, indeed.’ He pauses—it is a moment when he could have wiped his eyes but doubts the wisdom of the gesture coming too early. He goes on in a voice calculated to wring.
‘The soul, or rather the life-blood of this town is its people. Yes. I say it again—those people who gave all they had to the building of it.’ A more weak-minded claque cheers. Some women dab hankies. ‘All we have built here,’ Sweetman continues, seizing the moment by its straggly forelock, ‘comes more or less from nothing. What you see now is the result of our work, our work and all we put into making this town what it is. I could name those people who are sitting before me with us tonight. But that would mean naming every one of you—’ That’s clever!—‘and looking around at one another as you are now you see there, in the faces on each side of you, in front and behind, those who were the builders of the future.’
Dorahy thinks he might vomit.
‘In those days,’ Sweetman says, ‘you might remember the struggles we had with the south. You might recall the Separation League. The struggles to get coloured labour. The opposition from those who understood little and felt less about those problems peculiar to this part of the world. And all the time—I repeat, all the time—in the face of these difficulties, we pushed ahead doing what we believed to be right, sacrificing all for the sake of those who would come after.’
Prolonged cheers. They are melting again.
‘Yes,’ he continues when the blast subsides, ‘we were unpopular boys in the Separation League.’ He allows himself a roguish grin, but it comes out crooked. ‘We were firebrands then. Younger, of course. But firebrands. And I choose that word especially because we were burning with zeal to promote the interests of this town.’
His choice of word stuns Boyd and Dorahy. The monstrous cheek of it, and Sweetman, legs apart, braced before his world!
‘We were interested only in what concerned the good of us all. Dear friends, tonight, as you are on the eve of departure, I want you to take away memories of those times and remember how we fought together. No battle against the nation’s enemies has more sincerity and strength than the battles we fought. There is no greater comradeship than that which we had.’ He stops to allow them all to dry their eyes. ‘Now that we are all of us nearing the twilight of our years, there is this we can remember—what I have said tonight will shine as youngly for you now as it did then.’
The applause is sickeningly tremendous. People can drown in shallows. Dorahy is coughing into his wet hands while Sweetman smiles like a Messiah.
‘And now,’ he says, ‘once again I have pleasure in asking your own Miss Gracie Tilburn to sing for you—as she sang earlier in the week—directly to your hearts.’
There is another storm of clapping and the pianist comes on stage to the worn upright. Gracie, splendid in that fluid silk, moves to the front of the rostrum, inwardly hesitant despite that outer assurance, and Dorahy and Boyd hold their breaths. She is torn between what she has been asked to do and what the crowd expects—and it is a wink that does it.
Centre front, Freddie Buckmaster catches her eye and closes
one of his in a huge and vulgar implication. Her disgust rejects him afresh, and she hears her own voice saying firmly and richly through the pianist’s opening chords, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, before I sing to you tonight, I ask you to give up a few minutes of your time to listen to Mr William Boyd. He has something to say to you all.’
The audience is rattled. The pianist half turns. Sweetman, who has regained his seat in showers of light, starts up, but not before he sees in the heart of the hall Snoggers Boyd standing on his chair and circling so that he takes the entire gathering into his compelling eye.
There is some uncertain clapping and a lot of murmuring. As Gracie resumes her seat, an isolated cry of ‘Shame!’ rings out.
Boyd is standing perched there above the goggling crowd, an unimpressive man except for his voice, which will have profound and resonant convictions. Carefully he waits until the silence of speculation has deepened and then he begins, speaking quietly.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I will not take up much of your time.’ He knows there isn’t much. From the corner of his eye he can see Buckmaster père on stage gesturing to his son. ‘As you know I have been writing a series of articles for you each day on the very people who have loomed large in the progress of this town.’ The silence has a trembling quality. The air quivers. ‘You are all aware,’ Boyd continues, ‘of the misadventure that overtook the Gazette last Wednesday evening, when not only the next day’s issue was destroyed but also the plates to set it up. When Mr Sweetman chose to speak of firebrands he couldn’t have chosen a more apposite word, for the firebrands are still with us.’
He lets his allegation rest in half a minute’s tension. The hall rustles. They get it. There are shouts of ‘Sit down, old man!’ from the Buckmaster claque, and Barney Sweetman is observed leaving the stage. But Boyd merely pitches his voice above the beginning din.
‘My offices were destroyed, there is no doubt about this, deliberately’—he emphasises the word—‘and perhaps by the very spirit which Mr Sweetman said animated some of us in past years. Who would do this, I do not know for certain. But I do suspect. What I do know is that I was going to tell you all of a humbler soul than those who waged battle in the Separation League, a humbler spirit than those who fought to use coloured labour cheap, a meeker spirit than those who waged unceasing war against the blacks. I am referring to Charles Lunt who is with us in the hall this evening.’