1915

by Roger McDonald

  The cowboy was Robert Gillen. Gaucho, more properly. The balls and twine were a toy version of the Argentinian bolas collected on the trip with his father. They had been absent from Australia nearly all year inspecting properties held by the family. Though he and Billy had never met, the moment they were introduced they discovered a host of common acquaintances upstream from Condobolin. Minutes after showing himself and stepping inside the house Billy was calling him “Rob”, refilling his glass, quizzing him about distant places. Gillen showed Billy a postcard of a gaucho wayside shrine, a memorial to the heroic stand of one man against a recruiting sergeant. The gauchos fought in armies, he said, but on their own terms. Billy inspected the photograph in the brown light of the front parlour where Mrs Reilly had herded them for sherry.

  “To them it’s a sacred spot?”

  “They’re just station workers, but they’ve got their own way of looking at things. They’re fiercely proud.”

  “That’s what I’d like to see here,” said Billy, tapping the picture. “Little flags on long poles where you could rein in and think about things. Don’t you reckon?”

  Gillen laughed, and after a second Billy laughed too.

  From overhead came the knock of heels and once the pounding of stockinged feet as someone ran the full length of a corridor. (The women had excused themselves for a minute to clean up.) Harry said to Walter:

  “You look unhappy. Doesn’t army life suit?”

  “Why don’t you try it yourself?” He was about to smile at the man and make a joke of it, but Frances descended. Could she join them? Walter opened his mouth to say yes but she sidled between Gillen and Billy and contributed to a round of laughter. Then she turned to Billy and admired his uniform. A voice beside Walter hissed:

  “Jealous?”

  Walter flared: “No, you silly poof.”

  It was the wrong word.

  Harry’s reaction was remarkable. Walter had used an expression of contemptuous though not hostile rejection: a “poof” at school was someone who dressed smartly, a thoroughgoing dandy.

  The man’s face coloured through the range of a ripe peach, sunset red rising through yellow, and then came a determined fit of coughing. Frances reached over and banged him heartily on the back.

  “Get it up, Harry. What’s wrong?”

  “I just called him a —”

  “Er,” said Harry.

  “I threw away a match and it started a bushfire,” said Walter. “How was I to know?”

  “Look,” warned the man. But he was powerless.

  Frances had other fish to fry:

  “I keep meaning to ask,” she switched to Walter’s side, took his elbow. “Why didn’t you ever reply to my letter?”

  “Which one?” Stupid question. For months he had waited.

  “January? February?” She turned to Harry. “I gave it to you to post. Remember?”

  “I can’t exactly say.”

  “But Harry!”

  “Of course I sent it. Just teasing.”

  “It never arrived up home,” said Walter. “But Billy mentioned a letter when he told me he’d run into you. I blamed the local postmistress.”

  “I posted it.”

  “I wonder what really happened?” Her candour unmistakably blamed Harry. She held his eye.

  “This is rich.”

  But for the moment Harry was safe from further cross-examination. All were diverted by one of Billy’s guffaws: hoop, Hoop, HOOP!

  “They’re shaped like pumpkins,” Robert Gillen could be heard saying sotto voce, “and dance to the concertina. You’ll find the odd beauty among them — the type the men kill each other for, with knives.”

  “Then why marry one?” asked Billy.

  “Oh, no. She’s pure Spanish. Dark hair, flashing eyes. She went to school in England.”

  “Go on, England.”

  Frances whispered to Walter: “Billy turned mother’s head. Did he tell you?”

  Walter saw a skeleton’s fading handprint when Harry removed his clammy palm from the cedar sideboard.

  “When, just now?”

  “No, silly, when he called that time.”

  Something was building up, had built since that distant February — a cloud whose anvil head still towered high above them. What was Billy’s game? What was hers?

  After further polite chat concerning the future Mrs Gillen, Billy left the room saying, “Give me a minute”, and Robert stared out the window.

  “Billy came here?” asked Walter.

  “Where else — we haven’t moved.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “No, honest … As usual he tried to kiss me.”

  Harry sipped his sherry with a noise that could have meant anything.

  “Do be quiet,” snapped Frances. Harry allowed himself to take this — he was almost family. But when Walter said: “Why don’t you mind your own business?” he left the room.

  “Walter!” But Frances stifled a giggle and added, “You’re as bold as I am. Anyway, Harry deserves what he gets.”

  In a rush Walter asked: “Frances, I want you to come for a walk with me later on. Just you and me. Will you?” Another record broken: he had never before spoken her name aloud.

  Before she could answer Billy re-entered the room wearing the silver spurs and chaps of cowhide. He clasped the black gaucho hat across his heart and sang, “Be mine for everr, Ros-marr-eeta”. Gillen grabbed the hat and led him into a monotonous dance which he accompanied by buzzing through his teeth in imitation of a concertina. The others crowded the doorway — Sharon Keeley itching to be in the act, Mrs Reilly attacking the keys of the piano, randomly pounding as if she had never played the instrument in her life, and Diana red-faced taking the opportunity to stare at Walter and Frances. The dancers seemed prepared to circle the room endlessly — sleepwalkers with lolling tongues.

  “Please, let’s join in,” urged Frances. She tugged at Walter’s sleeve, but he refused. Gillen swooped on Sharon and caused her to squeal co-operatively, and Billy — bloody Billy — took no time at all to note what was going on between Walter and Frances. He bowed low and was extending his hand when a bell rang, a loud hard clang in the hall followed by the maid’s croaking, “Lunch is served”.

  “What’s all this?” asked Billy when they were seated. He had been steered by Mrs Reilly to a place opposite Diana. There had been savouries in the front room, a variety of “angels on horseback” which Billy munched hungrily in case things ran short at dinner. Now this; the tabletop resembling a bay crowded with many-coloured yachts nudged by glass barges, in every direction a horizon of china, clouds of flowers, and a scented breeze hanging over all. Billy called loudly to Walter: “What do you recognize, eh?” Sharon sat between then. Clockwise from Billy’s left the round table was arranged thus: Sharon, Walter, Mrs Reilly, Frances, Harry, Diana and Robert.

  Hoarsely Frances whispered: “Mum, why did you put me next to him?” and Harry heard. Even as he conversed with Diana, asking if the captain her father had yet packed his bags ready for the war, he shot Mrs Reilly a look — control your bitch.

  “Was the dance — I know you were making fun — but was the dance in the native manner?” asked Sharon.

  “No-o,” Robert reflected. “They do it slower.”

  “Furryfood,” said Billy, pointing a tiny fork at Robert’s joke. He swallowed painfully. “I mean, very good.” Then he laughed at himself, dangling the fork between two fingers like a cigarette.

  “There’s tons to eat,” said Frances. “This is only the start.”

  “We wanted to say how proud we were of Walter and Billy. But I’m not proposing a toast. We’ll save that for the champagne.”

  Harry asked about army food: “It’s all right,” said Billy, “bearing in mind the time it takes to flavour a rock and boil a horse.”

  Mrs Reilly struck a spoon against a silver dish: “Boys.” Then she shifted herself slightly forward to dominate the table, giving the impressi
on of floating above the seat of her chair. Frances touched her on the wrist, signalling we’re together. Her mother was enjoying the occasion. Somehow she was able to moderate the responses of others until they reached her level of expectation, which did not exclude a lot of fun: so the coarseness settled but not the hilarity.

  But were mother and daughter truly “together” on this occasion?

  “Good, rough old Pat,” Mrs Reilly had confessed of their absent provider the night she and her daughter talked about the marriage: “He has all the daintiness ascribed to woman when it comes to certain aspects of matrimony.” Then Frances asked: “Do you?” and her mother had laughed showing the insides of her mouth with all back teeth missing, upper and lower. She laughed the same way now, except with dentures restored. It was still rather ugly. Frances wondered if her own laugh was the same, and resolved to cultivate a different one. On looking to the end of the table she caught Walter gazing longingly in her direction, so in return she flashed a quick, sealed-lip smile (the new style) at which he switched his attention shyly to Sharon.

  Frances felt Harry’s touch: “Franny, could you pass the salt?”

  “I’m not Franny.”

  “He’s rude,” whispered Harry of Walter, “but I think he’s a nice boy.” He dusted his plate of already salty oysters. She heard one descend. Then he turned to her and winked a reddish eye, proposing a truce.

  “Bosh,” she responded.

  Soon, Frances decided, she would tell her mother what she had learnt yesterday about Harry. The conversation around the table increased in intensity. Everyone except Harry and Frances seemed to be conducting two exchanges at once, with sentences flying across the table like streamers. Harry therefore took the opportunity to grab Frances by the wrist and command her suddenly frightened attention: “I know Sharon’s been feeding you a pack of lies about my private life,” he whispered hoarsely. “She’s trying to ruin me. Don’t you start, do you understand? Now your boy from the bush is treating me like a leper. It’s no fun, drop it.”

  His fingers left a taut bracelet of burning skin.

  “You hurt me.”

  When the soup started arriving Frances waved Helen to serve in the other direction, so that she herself would be last. She smiled and even feigned the giggles as the others progressively sniffed their plates and made noises of approval. Robert took his, Diana hers. Then as Helen advanced towards Harry there occurred one of those polite dining table pauses when with spoons grasped awaiting a signal from the hostess no-one speaks, and into the gap that occurs someone — who first? — needs must rush.

  It was Sharon. And the phrase she uttered just as Harry’s fluttering hand escorted (but did not touch) the plate toward its point of destination was enough to cause the hand to rebel. As Sharon spoke Frances saw what Sharon but no-one else seemed to notice, that with his thumb Harry tilted the plate causing it to flood the edge of the tablecloth and drip shimmeringly between himself and Diana, spotting a dress on one side, a trouser-leg on the other, before the amber tide ebbed.

  Sharon had said, quite casually, “Have you heard from Alf Taylor lately?” It was a public declaration of their private battle.

  Everyone laughed over the “accident” and resumed their soup, including Harry after performing an exaggerated acceptance of a fresh plate from the mortified Helen (who blamed herself).

  “Aren’t you going to say ‘sorry’?” Frances asked him.

  “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “Pooh,” she whispered.

  The name was just a name, but to Harry it must have been like a placard held aloft baring in crude letters the innermost secret of his soul. In the circumstances he made an admirable recovery: but it was Sharon, not Frances, who assisted by a brief but compassionate recoil from malice. She brushed a curtain of straight blonde hair back from an ear, looked at Harry with her peculiarly damp, blue-eyed stare (unfocused like a baby’s) and changed the subject.

  Frances condemned Harry more than ever, because in a way she hardly wished to understand he was now a force in shaping her life. She seemed unable to develop an idea or a feeling without relating it to pressure from somewhere, and the process, when it came to a head, as maddeningly it did now, made her wonder if her whole life was to be composed of these hectic and despairing dashes from one enforced commitment to another while glancing at monsters that bellowed and clawed from the pit below. No, it was not Harry so much as the story about him which threatened her composure. She mustn’t blame him: but she did. She could not help herself. She hated him for what Sharon had told her.

  Harry was not what he seemed. No-one was what they seemed. The whole world was building towards nothing but chaos — the war playing its erosive part as well, whereas till now she had thought of it as nothing but an entertaining occasion for males to dress up and go abroad. In Harry’s tale she witnessed not just the betrayal of affection, but its failure.

  The war, Sharon had giggled when embarking on her story, was having its effect on Harry. Not that he would or even could join the army. It was something almost too unbelievable, really quite sensational. Could Frances take it? They sat (it was only yesterday) in the sunroom at the rear of Sharon’s parents’ house, a projecting glass box hanging on spidery legs over a green gully thick with ferns and lantana, with an emerald glimpse of the harbour far below. Sharon smoked her cigarette from an enamelled holder. Frances smoked too, almost expertly. Already Harry was in line for a very senior position at the woolstores, but his friend, his dear friend whose place in Harry’s affections only Sharon knew about — whose name rarely sounded on Harry’s lips except when alone — had gone into uniform and cruelly disdained even to look in. Harry himself “fain would follow” (Sharon’s mocking words): but dangling below his trim-muscled torso one leg was shorter than the other. This was evident to his clubmates when they saw him at rest between swooping dives on the monkey bars, but it hardly ever showed at any other time because Harry buried his limp in an ornate set of affectations in which blazer, pipe and cane played their part, as did his theatrical training. When all else failed Harry would pull a personality from his thespian’s bag of tricks and make himself whole by dissimulation.

  “But that’s not so bad. Sharon, you’re evil,” said Frances blowing smoke. “I feel sorry for him. It’s touching. Poor Harry — lame all this time and putting a brave face on it.”

  Sharon raised her eyebrows and looked at Frances, making a vain attempt to cover her protuberant front teeth — which she said were her worst feature and had caused her to dislike herself to the extent that now, at the age of twenty-six, she had become “shameless”. (“All the stories you hear about me are true, my darling.”)

  Now she said, “Oh, you haven’t understood! I’m going to have to spell it out.”

  Could she not see that Harry liked men? Loved men? He was — the word sounded blind with sterile vowels — a homosexual.

  “What does that mean?” Frances had asked in shock, knowing full well.

  Then: “Does he … do anything?”

  “Of course he does. Yes, with his pals. Not Alf Taylor, though it was Alf who opened my eyes to him. Alf’s a scamp. There’s a story about Alf and me going the rounds. You’d better be warned — every word of it’s true.” Sharon circled the room, picking a fleck of tobacco from her tongue and affixing it to the window glass, which was like still water from where Frances sat (now collapsed on a cushion), blue deep and pure water encircling a world whose continents had disappeared and would have to be made all over again, because the previous ones had been only an illusion of wholeness.

  Sharon said with a malice Frances was as yet too green to detect: “Your place … He boasted to Alf about hanging around your place and pulling the wool over the eyes of your mother. Though he’s frightened, just a touch, that she might get ideas about him. Romantic ideas.”

  Frances felt ill.

  Sharon talked on, sticking pins in Harry, laughing about Alf Taylor, confessing to several affairs with l
eading men in the dramatic society (boasting about them, rather: and Frances in a deep cool part of herself thought, If I ever need to, I shall come to Sharon for advice). For at least an hour as she talked Frances slowly realized that her conveniently fatherless family was for Harry a form of cover. His preference for his own sex, being socially unacceptable, forced on Harry an adroitness, even an expertise in many arts including that of courting women. This art now threatened his cover: it was the very mystery of its termination short of a palpable objective (in a shower of roses, say) that had already aroused Frances’s hostility.

  In Sharon’s opinion such pressures on Harry had caused him to go slightly ga-ga.

  Even so, Frances could not pity him. She was furious at being used. She recalled dozens of occasions when Harry had dismissed her heedless teasing with cruel ferocity. Somehow she demanded of him the impossible: that he should have told them about himself from the start.

  After Sharon’s revelations Frances had had dreams in which right and wrong, male and female, truth and lies lay tangled, as on a sickbed, under the cloudy eye of an indifferent creator. In the morning Helen had brought a pot of tea, and from under the loose-fitting lid, when she poured, crept an amber tear. She lacked the will to stand alone, she told herself. She feared failure. She was no longer at an age when it was possible to do absolutely nothing about an ambition yet still dream of it securely. What had she done? Dreamed through an entire year, gossiped, read books, gone to the theatre, gazed at herself in a mirror. Would it not be wonderful, for relief, to surrender to something new?

  Now, at the table, Frances found herself looking at Robert Gillen, who with news of his foreign engagement had killed dead her mother’s matchmaking. He had hardly glanced at her, not that she cared. Frances most definitely was not property. (Though when the time came, and he looked, her wish was that he would be touched with chagrin at her unexpected beauty). Anyway, his face was too pale, and his ears stuck out at angles like stable doors, and he was too at ease. She wondered if he despised the whole lot of them. Sharon was making a fool of herself by playing up to him, but he seemed unable to make her out, giving her mildly puzzled, appraising looks in the brief moments when she was not fawning. Perhaps he was wondering about her age. Twenty-six? “Believe every rumour you hear about me,” Sharon had said. Well, one ran that she was actually a decade older, and had appeared as leading lady in a play at Orange before the turn of the century.