by Thea Astley
“God, missie, what’d they all say, eh? What’d they say? This is a small town. Can’t afford to ruin me reputation.”
Insincerely I laugh heartily with him, perfect synchronization. No semitone apart here. He still believes he’s a dasher! I think of Mr. Bonsey and wince.
“You’re joking, aren’t you?” I suggest, still smiling round the words. “Please. Do come. You’ll be doing me a great favor. I feel so awful eating alone in a strange hotel. Look, we’re almost related, aren’t we? I mean Bonnie would love to know you’re taking care of me.” I try to look younger. “She’d be tickled pink.”
He turns away from me whacking his pipe out on the edge of the table. Tobacco ash falls all over the floor.
“Got no duds,” he says. “No good duds, not for dining out.”
“Who cares about duds,” I say. “They don’t in the city. And it’s your town, isn’t it? No one cares. We can have a drink first. You’d like that?”
He grunts some more and I can feel him slipping away. The box. My hands shuffle dozens of yellowed snaps like playing cards and I play my ace. It’s a group of three, two misty young women and an older man watched by a line of gumtrees.
“There,” I cry, phony inspiration, “there’s one of you with mother.” I hope it’s mother. It won’t do to peer too closely. I am not sure at all about Aunt Marie and only hope it is the younger version of this old man before me.
“Show me,” he orders, taking the snap from my fingers and bringing the foggy trio up close to his eyes. Is my luck gambler’s or is he merely pretending to a clarity of eyesight that has long deserted him? “By geez,” he admits. “You’re right. That must have been taken more than thirty years ago. Just before your mum and her sister went away. The girls came over with their folks for a bit of a bush picnic at the Flats after the show. Well, now, fancy that, eh? Fancy that.”
I am almost too busy marveling at my throw of the dice to boggle with him. I must admit that mother is barely recognizable in a flap-brimmed sunhat and I cannot afford to trip on the truth or lie of my wild hazard. He’s softening. His face is mushy with sentiment as he looks at this lost laughing self, avuncular hands on the shoulders of my aunt and my not-yet mother, gathering up all the girls on a sunny day by a riverbank, cicada-loud, the embroidered edges of the lunch cloth on the grass just glimpsed by the camera. I press further claims while he is befuddled with the past, suggesting he bring along that old box from the horse shed so that I can go through it and see what I can find of mother. I am hoping that by now he has forgotten the original excuse for my visit. “She would love to see this!” I cry. “Love to. She’s always talking about the old days, times when she was a girl. She’d be crazy for this.” My deceitful finger touches the old snap, gently, oh so gently. I am ashamed as he looks up tear-blearily and says, “You reckon?”
“Oh yes. I reckon.”
Trumped.
He hedges his bets. “If I don’t turn up,” he complains seeing me off, “it means the old truck’s had it. Bloody ol’ bomb.”
I accuse him of making excuses, threaten to come and fetch him. I draw the finest of lines between gravity and flirtatiousness.
“Gawd,” he reprimands, “don’t do that. Don’t come and fetch me. The whole place’d never let me hear the end of it. Always was a bit of a Casanova, eh? Kept me safe, after the wife. Safe and free.”
I look down the hall of his empty house, his dying grounds. The air vibrates with the shallowest, the thinnest of memories. How long now has he washed up one plate one mug one pan in that lonely kitchen with a static-warped radio flickering the news of cities through his evenings and the stirring whimpers of his dog?
“You bet it has,” I tell him.
A normal wall poster is about sixty inches by forty-eight.
Apart from the life-size ones I have already had made of Mr. Lockyer and family, one of which decorates the wall of my Brisbane flatette, I confess to another that is more like something seen in dictatorland—the people’s square in Moscow or Beijing. It caused my friendly developer enormous trouble and me enormous cost. He thinks I am mad and perhaps he is right. It is packed in the trunk of the car, carefully folded and tight-rolled, reinforcements at each corner with holes in the reinforcements through which I have threaded lengths of twine.
I am going to enter the picture. Put myself right through and beyond it. The trick is to do it within the click of a shutter.
It is one in the morning and old Mr. Lockyer’s box, dredged up from under a mound of rotting sacks and saddles behind a sulky with splintered shafts, is beginning to yield its heart. At first delve it was disappointing.
There are accounts, lists of farm needs, old copies of local newspapers, the Queenslander, the Ladies’ Home Journal on whose dog-eared corners my X-ray vision detects the fingerprints of Betsy Lockyer on candle-guttering evenings. I have a tenderness gland I did not suspect. Seeing her faint pencil notations on various pages (they can only be hers. I work from the dates on the magazines) and recognizing over-worn creases at certain fashion sections, the pencil tick beside the shirtwaist or the feathered hat that her up-country heart must have lusted after, I weep. God, it is one in the morning and I am weeping in this drab hotel room, unsated by an overcooked dinner, my guest, grandson Lockyer, deposited safe by now within his own crumbling walls. I am unable to sleep, kept awake by the urgency of my curiosity and a promise to return the box in the morning. There’s no time for sleep. The sifting must take place now.
There are dozens of meaningless photographs. Sometimes there is a barely decipherable penciled note on the back. There are too many formal groups of important people against studio velvet, their importance now nothing. Ah it’s sad, it’s sad. Some few are of Gaden Lockyer whose face in later photos has been enriched by a deep scar on the temple. These photos I purloin without a qualm. First lies, now thieving. Some riches. But there will be more. Right at the bottom of the box under a pile of school homework books whose “How I spent my holidays” and “The worst moment of my life” reveal in their round childish hands nothing of Mr. Gaden Lockyer, are several notebooks, their cheap cardboard covers moldy and split, their pages glued together by damp and despair.
I am my own stout Cortez silent upon a bed in Drenchings. Looking into Chapman’s Homer will be nothing to this.
January 2nd, I read. The journal is for the year 1898.
I deliberately turn page after page until I come to the day it is now, the day of my own Darien peak, the day my present and his past converge.
There is no entry.
I turn back a page.
June 10th, I read. I have been feeling strange all day. Betsy says it is the weather and maybe the pork we had last night which Mr. Percy sent over from his farm. I don’t think so. I have this sense of waiting, of attendance. Perhaps it is because I am beginning to think we should sell up. Is something about to happen to us all or just me? Betsy and the children are calm enough. I am so excited this evening and my heart raced so much when I went out on the veranda for my evening pipe, I had to go back in and take a nip of brandy to calm me down. Tomorrow? What will there be? What is it?
Mr. Lockyer has a firm and fading hand. I am relieved to note the fulsomeness of his sentences rather than the truncated statements one associates with diary jottings. Perhaps it is because he is using the same sort of notebooks his children used for their school assignments. Involuntarily my fingers caress the letters he has formed, lingering on a word here, a word there. I touch where he touched. The sweat would have dried out decades ago but I bend my face to sniff the paper and the whiff of humanity remains if only in the depositions of weather.
I turn the pages slowly. I am terrified it might all sound like Diary of a Nobody.
I move forward, assured I am moving into my own future.
There is silence for a week, then
June 24th. I must put this down in full. Last week has been the strangest of my life. On the Wednesday after breakfast I rode up to the
far corner of the farm a mile or so away to shift some of the milkers back into the next paddock where the feed is better down by the creek. It was a perfect day, blue and yellow, enough nip in the air for these latitudes to make me whistle. (Pucker up, Gaden, I urge.) Bluey was trotting beside the horse snapping at flies. I must get down all the details. I had no warning of what was to come. The track across the paddocks was clear. If I looked back I would see the smoke of the stove rising pencil straight above our farm roof. Then this woman. Walking straight from the grove of ironbarks towards me.
I thought at first it was a man, she was so outlandishly dressed. Trousers and shirt like a farm boy. But as I rode closer I could see her hair pulled back in a long fair tail, so fair it was almost white and her face delicate and singularly moulded. I thought I recognised her from my visit to Brisbane last year but when I called out to her my mouth seemed emptied of sound though I could hear that she was speaking, calling Good morning. She said something about it being a long way but even though she spoke and even though I clearly heard these words, nothing moved in her face, neither her mouth nor her eyes. Her eyes which were a clear and shining grey looked through me and though I could hear her words, mine were soundless. Here we were—her speaking though closed lips, me answering with open mouth and no words at all. ‘Can I help you?’ I asked. ‘Can I help?’ She walked straight past me down towards the cottage, right through Bluey’s yapping, and I watched her body moving briskly between grass clumps, striding like a boy. Betsy had come outside to empty the dishwater and I knew then I could get on with my task, though I did wonder as I turned and rode on what my wife would make of such a costume.
Tonight she told me she had not seen anyone, that no one called. I find this hard to believe, for I saw the young woman walk straight up our veranda steps and enter the front door without a pause.
Was I imagining the whole thing?
*
Well, this is an appetite-whetter.
I have to force myself not to look ahead.
Already I am deciding that for the moment at least I shall not return these notebooks.
I go back to the first of them. The earliest entries covered a couple of years, mundane mostly, in their datings of arguments with bankers, fencing problems with neighboring farmers, descriptions—hardly lavish—of family celebrations, the noting of illness or windfalls. He confides his political ambitions to these pages and the dirtier workings of the Jericho Flats Council, the scams, the favors. (Nothing has changed, Gaden. Nothing.) The girls have left home by now, married to farmers in the Burdekin. His son has settled on a small holding close by.
But I am getting no closer to the man himself with grocery lists and quarrels with fellow shire council members. Does his baritone no longer delight at local soirées? Then suddenly I come upon an entry (it is now two a.m.) some weeks or so after my first encounter with him in the archives. When I say some weeks I refer, of course, to that point of congruency, ninety years away to the day.
January 8th, 1899. Another year. Decision made at last. We must sell this place. Apart from bad seasons, I feel something pulling me away from farming. It’s a thankless business. Perhaps I am not suited for it after all. It was the sort of dream anyone might have who came from the sort of background that bred my parents in industrial England. It’s telling on me now, both those stories of deprivation back home and the social deprivation of the backblocks here. I have a hunger for a more active life among people. A better life. Politics is the place. It is not as if it will really affect Betsy. But it is as if forces beyond me are advising. How can a reasonable man write this way? Last night I lay awake half the night wondering how Betsy will react if we move to a town. Thank God it isn’t a question of the children. They were so used to running wild. That’s one thing about the country, the space. We’ll have to see how this season goes and if things don’t improve, I might even be forced back behind some bank counter. Percy told me I should have changed over to sheep in the last drought. When I finally went to sleep I dreamt Betsy walked into the council chambers wearing trousers and shocked everyone and even while I tried to lead her out she argued soundlessly with me, her lips moving but no words coming. I was reminded of that moment last year in the paddock.
I riffle pages.
That’s a lie.
I gobble every word.
However …
February 28th. Spent a week at the coast assessing job prospects, crawling to the bank who hold a mortgage on this place and trying to persuade Tomlins’ Stock Agency to come out next month and give me a fair valuation if I decide to put the farm on the market. Whatever I sell it for, our debts will wolf up profit. (Wolf up! I like that. A way with words.) I did notice how many farmers on the coast have changed from cattle to cane. They all tell me there’s better money to be made that way. But it’s backbreaking work, too, and now they’ve stopped importing Kanakas, it’s hard to get cutters cheap.
March 1st. I was very restless this morning on my last day in Rockhampton. What a hot little town it is, cradled among hills, gasping for a sea wind (Gaden, it could be me writing) it never seems to get. Walking the town’s streets this last week, I found myself dreading going back home even though R. is noisy and hot. I can’t understand this. I am longing to see the family again. The girls are visiting.
Glimpses, repeated, of a young woman whose face is familiar and unknown at the same time. That moment in the paddock? Her hair is almost white. I tried to catch up with her yesterday as she walked along the road by the river but to no avail. She turned into a side lane before I could reach her. What drew my eye, I suppose, were the clothes she was wearing—a flowered blouse like Betsy’s best and a hat with the same sort of ribbons. Then an even stranger thing happened. As I sat in the River Rose restaurant having scones and a pot of tea, there she was again at the end of the room, facing me at a table near the street door, sipping a glass of water and staring past me. Through me, is what I mean, to the kitchen section at the back. I looked away for a moment to speak to the waitress who was bringing me some jam for my scones and when I looked back the table by the door was empty, cleared of all traces of customer. “Miss,” I asked the waitress, “miss, was there a customer at the front?” The poor thing looked at me blankly. “Near the door,” I insisted. “Just a minute ago.” She shook her head. “You must be seeing things,” she said.
I felt dizzy. Had I imagined this? Is it the heat? Am I coming down with some illness? I couldn’t help being sure because her dress, when I was up closer, was so like yet somehow different from Betsy’s. The pattern on the blouse was much the same but the sleeves were short. She had them rolled well up and the skirt was high above the ankles. Outrageous really. (Do I write “outrageous” because one day Betsy might read this? She knows I have an eye for a pretty ankle. Perhaps that was why this stranger drew my eye in the first place.) Outside that steamy little café the sun was like a curse. I have never really grown acclimatised. The rank grass on the footpaths stank of horse dung. Too close a reminder of the farm. Something must be done.
Was it that day in the paddock?
Yes, I whisper in this stuffy hotel bedroom. Yes, it was then.
I read on. I am beyond sleep.
March. April. May.
June 12th. Yesterday the mailman brought a letter with good news. Sold up at last! In two or three weeks Betsy and the boys who have come over to help will leave for Mackay and I’ll follow in a week after the new owner has settled in. Poor chap. He’s a raw fellow who seemed to know very little about farming when he came out to inspect the place. I feel deeply for him and his family, but it’s dog eat dog in this country I’ve discovered. Every man for himself. I have a fortnight before beginning my new job with the shire council. I suppose those years in the bank persuaded them and the work I did as a councillor for Jericho Flats. Will I be able to perform well? I think so. Oh I do think so. My nights are crammed with dreams of a future that opens out into a great township. Brisbane, perhaps, and houses, so man
y houses it is almost a nightmare. And shopping mobs—that is the only word—rushing blindly about. Now and again in these dream crowds I catch sight of sunburnt arms and a swatch of fair hair and that strangely distanced young woman’s face. I am certain now about where I saw her first. Certain. It was that morning as I rode out to shift the milkers. The morning I saw her walk straight into our house.
My dreams worry me. I am beginning to feel disloyal to Betsy. Oh for a new start. I am longing for it. It’s not as if the girl exists. I badly need this change.
It is nearly three in the morning. Mr. Lockyer is farewelled at the Percys’ farm with a supper party for all the neighbors. Persuaded to sing, he launches into “Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes,” with Mrs. Percy on keyboard. I see him, I see him, one hand resting lightly on the piano in the manner of the time, the other thrust into waistcoat. Men appear most vulnerable when singing, and I am hoping for an innocent abroad.
My eyes keep closing on this man’s destiny that I am determined to make my own. I fall asleep in a pointillism of memories and wake up as a huge question.
How did Mr. Gaden Lockyer achieve his wife?
How does anyone achieve a wife?
It’s ridiculous, when you think of it rationally, that women rush so gladly like Gadarene sows into a life of servitude. It’s not that you need marriage for sex or breeding. Is it because men have cunningly put about the notion that spinsterhood is a bad joke, the old maid to be pitied? Who wants to be a butt? Who wants to be the fall guy?
Seb said to me a month or so after we had worn the candlelit dinner ploy to a frazzle, “My dear”—and I can recall each one of his devastating words with the chill I should have experienced on hearing them—“given the fact that I am thirty-seven and assuming I have forty years ahead of me, would you be prepared on a permanent basis to cook me fourteen thousand six hundred dinners, the same number of breakfasts, give or take a few? I’ll see to my own lunch,” the generous fellow added. “And do approximately two thousand loads of washing and ironing, housecleans and shopping?”