“I don’t think he should be encouraged. My strong advice would be to take your time before replying. Intend to, of course.”
Frances looked obediently into her cup, but thought her mother hypocritical.
“At your age I was married. There’s a lesson I hope won’t escape you.”
Then Mrs Reilly rounded the table and kissed Frances on the crown of her head. She whispered: “You’ve got a guardian angel who’ll never stand in your way, darling.”
Frances stayed on, not moving, staring at the letter, too listless in the gathering heat to make an effort. She admired her mother. Yet now, perversely, she wished after all that she could have come to a less fair conclusion. An outright condemnation of Walter, a final shriek of forbidding, would have been exciting. That was her nature — to crave extremes. But the outlook indicated by those parting words left her once again drifting. She found it boring to be left holding a choice. She dropped the letter into the copious pocket of her pinafore, and after stacking the cups and saucers floated to the hall mirror and gazed at herself in the hot half-dark. Overhead the rattle of windows and knock of brooms proceeded among grunts and shouts, and soon Frances would join in. But her dark face in the mirror shifted intriguingly. She cupped her hair and raised it, turning almost side-on yet holding her own returning gaze. Now that a hint of Arabia was not unfashionable she liked her profile. As might a stranger’s, her face beckoned with the possibility of sensation, and brought her closer to an understanding of her inner nature.
Then in the midst of this reverie she heard the telephone give its faint click preliminary to ringing, and alertly she reached across to unhook the receiver.
“Mosman 343.”
“Hello,” drawled a male voice.
“Frances Reilly speaking.”
Then there was silence, and she realized that the voice had been hesitant. Now it seemed gone altogether: she heard other voices in the distance, as if the line were an empty tunnel crowded against busy ones.
“Hello-hello?” The exchange girl cut in. “Are you there?”
“Who is it?” asked a wide-awake Frances.
The voice had been familiar. She knew it from somewhere — Forbes? Climbing to help the others she found herself able to summon up an atmosphere. Cold air crowded against the outline of a figure in her mind, and she knew that floor polish, the squeak of hinges, and the creak of the Albion’s stairs were all involved.
“Mother!” At the top of the stairs she wanted to tell her, and almost did while accepting the cobweb broom.
“Do the ceilings and hurry along, then we can all have a rest.”
In all the houses up the hill wives and their maids sat hoarding the last puddles of coolness left over from the night before. At Mrs Reilly’s, as with the rest, blinds were drawn, curtains pulled, doors closed. But now and again, as if this house alone was incapable of containing the energy within, a door would fly open and a mop shake its head in the molten sunlight, or an upstairs window rattle wide to enable female head to call to female head somewhere down below.
In the afternoon they slept, the first pupil not being due until four. Frances had made up her mind: she would not reply to Walter’s letter. Why hurry? Why even bother. She parted the drapes and peered outside. When her eyes adjusted to the glare she could make out a smoulder of red tiles in the far distant eastern suburbs. In between, the harbour flowed nowhere, a broad stilled cauldron of heated glass. Then a ship hove into view, a passenger liner with the clear outlines of an Orient Line boat on a painted postcard. It seemed the only real object in the world. Frances perched on the windowsill oblivious to the heat. The ship made her feel remote, tiny, stranded at the most distant corner of the globe. She imagined a dotted line leading down the harbour, through the Heads, around the underside of Australia and across the Indian Ocean — gesturing towards Ceylon and India as it progressed — spilling in its wake successive, endless O’s of possibility: Orvieto, Orsova, Otway, Orantes, Osterley, Otranto, Orana, Omrah, Ormonde — then heading up through the Red Sea and Suez Canal where other lines jostled but failed to deter it, across the Mediterranean, past Gibraltar, until England loomed like a storybook illustration of a land in the sky, pastel-coloured and cool.
Over there, things happened. Would her parents let her go? With its smart lines and swept-back confident funnels, with its tiny figures of sailors stowing ropes or merely draped on the shaded port railings, the ship unbearably provoked her restlessness. She let the curtains flop and turned back the cover of the bed, and lay in her underclothes on the cool sheet. After a minute she took even these off.
Certainly it would be glorious to have a tragic blow struck by an enraged and madly obstructive parent — many artists sprang from such fires — but her parents? They loved her with too much kindness. Or perhaps they failed to love her enough, and finally would let her loose in a world where she’d struggle, cry for help, and disappear, and they wouldn’t care.
She woke when Helen arrived with a cup of tea, and propped herself on an elbow. From below came the rattle of a duster playing scales and the drum of cushions as her mother tidied the music room. From outside came the heat-oppressed scrape of sparrows. She sweated with the tea and felt cooler, stretching an arm and shaking globes of perspiration onto the sheet. She supposed Walter’s letter was intense enough. Her own brand of intensity seemed out of place in Australia, which loosened one’s grip on things, never allowing one to — she grabbed the letter and sank back on the bed to read it again — to fly?
She had put it to Diana, mentioning his reserve, his consideration, his manners. And under these things, had she actually spoken this out loud? — he’s very intense. He thinks. He’s got his own life going on somewhere underneath. And then he looks at you.
Respectful and dull. To be truthful, that had been her first impression.
When talking to Amy Castle, who was more hard-bitten than Diana and not really a friend, though someone to be impressed, Frances had replied to her question “Is he handsome?” with “Yes, no. He’ll be more handsome when he’s older.” Amy had been interested. “He laughs, he can see the funny side of things, but not the way those country boys usually do. When he laughs there’s something there to laugh about.” By then Frances was practically inventing him, and Amy was near enough bursting with curiosity. “When he laughs you don’t feel left out,” she said. “Oh, he’d create a stir at — the Governor’s Ball,” she managed, because that year Amy was going. And a final invention: “He does well at school. He could be anything he wanted.” Amy asked: “A rich lawyer or a rich farmer?” Frances had said: “I don’t know. Not a farmer.”
Yet there he had been at Parkes station just before Christmas, looking like one. Not a fully made farmer, but going that way. The physical change was not what Frances had minded. She had rather liked the definite thickening of the frame from the stringy schoolboy of a few months before. It was a kind of sullen wariness that she noticed. It may have been tiredness. But it might just as easily have been a shadow of his future self — the kind of man who sat on the bench outside the pub on sale days, a beer in one hand and a stick in the other, wide awake but drowsing. The kind of man who spent so much time mending the edges of his own world that he would never want to go any further. Who was balding at twenty-nine, who spat, who went to church but had no religion, who made no changes in his life and expected those around him to make none either.
I’m unfair, she suddenly decided as she dressed. Just like mother, who loves to take a person and lean and lean until cracks appear, then force those cracks apart until nothing survives in one piece.
But Frances was also uncertain, not just of Walter — who was practically invisible on those millions of acres of western plain. Suddenly she glimpsed a life of unhappiness, wherein the choice not-made invariably would be the exciting one after all. She ought to be taking care of herself and not existing on dreams alone! In the cushioned square of her yellow-painted room she experienced the beginnings of a turn
against herself, an unhappy dispersal not of fate, but of will.
I’ll write, she decided, and did so straight away.
The cool change arrived and because the five thirty pupil was ill, Mrs Reilly suggested a walk.
“Pat was awfully romantic once,” she took Frances’s arm. “At least I thought he was.” In an aside she said: “The mistakes women make about men populate the world” — and gave a bitter laugh, but then talked about secret mementos in locked drawers, hand-delivered letters brought in the dead of night, pebbles scattered on windows, even the dot-dot-dot from the signal lamp of a cutter on the bay … a load of silly talk about midnight occasions when anything could happen, though of course it never had.
“You don’t mean Daddy,” said Frances. They had reached their favourite seat by the harbour.
“To hear him talk you’d have thought so. It astonishes me what a man can get away with. I trusted him to be wild as the wind, and what happened?”
These days Mrs Reilly had her admirers, and though Frances mostly disliked them there was still an air of rivalry in the house. Harry Crowell, Amos Hart, Mr Tratinor the piano tuner whom Frances had caught one day with his chin resting un-innocently on the piano stool as if he’d just delivered it a kiss — not to mention the cheeky strangers who lifted their hats and won from the handsome music teacher a promising beam of recognition.
As they sat together in the park Frances twisted the corner of her handkerchief around her thumb, a nervous habit from childhood. Her mother tapped her on the hands.
“You mustn’t.”
“I wrote to him.”
“That was quick.”
“I kept it chatty. I told him about the concert last week, what we wore, the ice creams; coming home on the last ferry.”
“What about Harry?”
“Who’d want to know about old Harry? But I left it understood we must have gone with someone.”
“Understood! Harry arranged the whole evening — bought the tickets, the refreshments, the supper. He was the outing.”
Frances said slyly, “The full story might have been provoking.”
“Still —”
The ferry tooted twice as it surged into view, a bow wave curving back on either side like blades of ice. With the engine cut, the wave slid to a snowy streak which disintegrated as the boat knocked the heavy stumps of the wharf. In a grinding moment of contact the ferry chugged black smoke, creating a drowned giant of a cauliflower astern while rope thudded and a flimsy gangplank rattled to the shore.
“Harry Crowell!” called Mrs Reilly when one of the passengers raised his arms theatrically.
“Some surprise,” muttered Frances. Harry rarely failed to turn up on this ferry, but on weekdays he was a different-enough person to be bearable — dressed in a glum suit, with his idiotic flourishes kept in check by a day among the no-nonsense types at Goldsborough Mort’s.
“Ian Gillen was in,” said Harry, fidgeting with his red and gold ring.
“Who’s he?” asked Frances.
“He had his boy with him — by golly he’s a handsome type, smart as they come.” In some detail Harry described a person called Robert until Frances burst out: “Could he possibly be a Greek god?” — Harry’s enthusiasms ran on such lines.
“They own ‘Westbury’ near Condobolin, and innumerable places elsewhere,” explained Mrs Reilly.
“Clever and rich, damn them,” said Harry with a laugh.
“Pat and I knew them ages ago. Before you were born, when the Austrian prince went shooting with the Narromine Macks.”
The story of the prince had whiskers on it, but who had ever talked about these Gillens? “Why does Harry know these things when I don’t?”
“Any girl who marries into the Gillen crowd is in for a hot old time,” said Harry. “South America — they’re sailing today — you name it, interests everywhere.”
He then cupped an arm around two waists and they set off up the hill.
When the crowd dispersed from the ferry a lone figure had been left on the wharf. Any watcher who cared to observe would have seen straight away that this remaining passenger came from out of town. His concentration as he fixed a pipe was too nonchalantly oblivious to the diversions all round. A local would have given the ferry a long and approving look of farewell, and would have taken in the tableau of the two women and the man with frank interest. Certainly no-one but a stranger would have been downright furtive, and slipped as this one did into the shaded mouth of the shelter shed. Harry, tossing his head exaggeratedly to three points of the compass during a bout of laughter was the only one to notice. But if Frances had turned she would have recognized Billy Mackenzie immediately: he slouched with the same immobile expectancy that had characterized her last sight of him on Parkes station.
Yet after a minute this changed, and his manner became craftily decisive. When the trio moved another fifty yards he moved also, seeming to dawdle as he puffed his pipe and shifted his coat from the crook of one arm to the other. When the three slowed approaching the Reilly’s place he plumped himself on the stone fence of a for-sale house, thus becoming one of an elongated crowd: up the road other figures hung over gates or sat on fences enjoying the cool change. When Frances did in fact look straight at him she registered no-one at all, seeing just another inhabitant of a street turned inside out for coolness.
Billy was ready to greet the females now, but preferred to see whether the man would go away. Also the harbourside evening had at last begun to work on him. He was strong willed enough to suspend his purpose in coming here and give himself over to a glimpsed extension of yellow rock just where a low shaft of sun illuminated the point, and wonder if it was a good fishing spot.
With Harry, Frances found herself enmeshed in ambiguous gestures. He was difficult. Not in manner, but in purpose. He seemed to want all the trappings of a close relationship — the roses, the theatre, the flirtatious gestures, the quick sexless kisses of farewell — but they merely duplicated themselves, becoming nothing sensible. And when he fell into one of his “slush” moods, losing all control of his pride as he had that night with Diana, he was impossibly weak, and all one could do was assist in his self-defeat.
Now irritated at the man’s hanging on, it was another Harry that spurred Billy’s envy — the man who on evenings like this could be fun of a sort. He was, as her mother said, “grand to be seen with”. Some of this reached Billy and he repeatedly chopped a swinging heel against the stone fence. After absorbing the remaining glory of the evening — an empty tram braking its hollow-lit shell to the water — he turned his glance with increasing impatience towards the women and their imposing companion. The fellow’s lithe physique would be handy in a fight.
Harry, who was never in a hurry, had by now started on scandalous stories of the theatre. He was not himself at such moments, but a mouthpiece for attenuated rumour. He whispered a name, and Frances skipped a couple of steps around to ask, “What? Who?” But they refused to say.
This evasiveness was pleasant.
It was almost dark and Mrs Reilly asked him in.
“Thanks, no. I’ve a man to see about a dog up at the Junction. Gotta be there now, won’t make it.” He consulted his watch and caught Frances’s eye for a rolling fraction of a second, and she thought: Weak old Harry, he’s only off because the cafe closes at seven and he wants a quick dinner, then he’ll go to his flat and iron collars all night. She was about to tease him, but thought better of it in case he changed his mind. Instead she asked:
“Will you post a letter for me?”
“Don’t bother Harry when he’s going.”
“No bother.”
“Right —” Frances streaked down the side path.
“She’s bored. And along comes a strange sheaf of writing from one of her train friends, urging a romance.”
“Well, well,” said Harry in his gossip’s voice as Frances reappeared.
The pale blue envelope was swallowed by the slit mouth of his
inside pocket — the last glimpse anyone was to have of it. “Top priority,” he assured the world, tapping his coat where the hollow rap of paper could be heard. He grinned at Frances, for once failing to hide his badly-aligned teeth, which were starch-white but “falling all over each other”, as Frances liked to say.
After the women had disappeared inside, and the tram had whined two stops uphill to collect Harry, Billy sauntered to the ornate brown door holding a lily ripped from the garden of the old Konrad place.
When Frances answered the doorbell she was quite unsurprised. “I knew it’d be you,” she said: yet even as she spoke the different sources of her intuition had barely clicked into place … the voice on the telephone, the coatless figure perched on the fence. “Our visitors usually let us know first,” she continued abruptly. Billy thrust the yellow flower into her hands, forgetting in the face of her rudeness the speech he’d prepared.
“Oh dear, come in.” And after a pause, “Mother?”
When Mrs Reilly bustled down the hall Billy knew at once how to treat her. She was an older version of Brigid Scott, right down to the way she took his hand at waist-level, and stayed close as she spoke.
“How nice you should know Pat,” she said after explanations. They tracked down the hall, Billy bumping his shins on a carved chest, and emerged in the kitchen where Helen was about to set the table for steak and kidney pudding. Mrs Reilly found Billy a glass of stout and took one herself. “I was sorry to hear about your mother.” She leaned across, she actually touched his hand.
“How did you know?”
“I heard from Walter Gilchrist,” said Frances, “we correspond, you know.”
Billy launched into a version of his visit to Sydney while Helen darted in at his elbow with a fistful of cutlery. “Tah,” said the visitor. Frances seemed bent on discovering the exact time needed for the smudged heat of her thumb to fade from the crook of a spoon handle: but all the while she wondered how Billy had landed so quickly at the heart of her family.
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