A Cry from the Dark

by Robert Barnard

  “We hadn’t thought of anywhere else but London when we were planning the trip,” said Ollie. “But now we’ve been wondering whether we couldn’t slip in a few days in Edinburgh.”

  This was news, and rather enticing news, to Bettina.

  “Edinburgh in April!” she said. “It could be lovely, depending on the weather. Much nicer anyway than Edinburgh in Festival time, though of course there won’t be as much to do.”

  “Do you know Edinburgh well?” asked Sylvia.

  “Once upon a time I went there fairly often. Now, I’m afraid, it’s many years since I was there. The usual thing: old age.”

  “Why don’t you come with us—if we can fit in the trip with all the theater and concert tickets.”

  “The tickets can be changed, or ignored,” said Bettina firmly.

  “Then you’ll come?”

  “I’m very tempted…But would you two want an old person with you? One who keeps having to cry off things and go back to her hotel to rest?”

  “Why should we mind?” said Ollie. “We’re old people ourselves. And if we do stand the pace, you can cry off: you get your rest and we plow on doing the sights.”

  When the bell went and they all began to troop back downstairs, Sylvia and Oliver in front, Clare whispered to Bettina, “If you are going to traipse off to Edinburgh, make sure I have all you’ve dictated of the book before you go.”

  Bettina looked at her, bewildered, then laughed. “I’m afraid I’ve passed on some of Hughie’s paranoia to you, Clare. Why on earth should I be under any sort of threat?”

  Clare didn’t answer, but gestured toward Ollie and Sylvia. Bettina felt something like anger rise in her, in spite of her long friendship with Clare.

  As they were sitting down, Bettina bent across over Ollie and said to Sylvia, “You’re quite right about translation. It’s the only way to really get the impact of anopera. Verdi refused to let the Paris Opera give the premiere of Otello in Italian. He knew it had to be in French to make its proper effect.”

  She was not making a contribution to the age-old debate about the proper language for opera performances. She was making, for Clare’s benefit, a gesture of solidarity with her daughter.

  She had a long history of making gestures of solidarity.

  As November advanced, the heat in Bundaroo began to assume its fierce summer glare. For some it was welcome. For others it was feared—Betty and Hughie among them. From early in the day armpits and the small of the back became itchy in the dry heat. All visible skin began to reassume the tan or the raw red of the previous summer. Tempers were frayed. Little things began to assume ridiculous importance, irritations festered and became grudges. It was summer again—the summer when Betty would leave school.

  As Bundaroo High moved toward Christmas and the end-of-year Leaving exams, feeling against Hughie crystallized. It wasn’t so much what was said—in fact an absolute minimum was said to him, and he wasn’t much discussed when he wasn’t there. The youngsters didn’t need to discuss him, because they knew what they thought about him. Their collective judgment was formed from a variety of impulses and time-honored reactions, but the main ones were the feeling that he was different, and was not making an effort to prove otherwise. Hughie was also affected by the wider feeling in the community that Paul Naismyth was a no-hoper posing as an efficient leader and manager, a man whose engagement had been one of Bill Cheveley’s few mistakes, one who would be taking the road to Sydney or Melbourne and the boat back to England before many months were over. That second judgment, at its most extreme, shaded off into the view that Naismyth was a smooth-talking crook. As often happens in schools, Hughie suffered for the reputation of his parents.

  Nobody, not even Betty, was quite sure how he was affected by the general hostility and contempt. Hughie walked nonchalantly to and from school, apparently quite unconcerned if he had no one of his own age to talk to. He made friends with the vicar, who was always happy to have some intelligent conversation, and he discussed art with Miss Dampier. The latter’s essay topic on “Oh, to Be in England” had resulted in special praise for Hughie’s effort, which in its turn led to muttering about his unfair advantage. Miss Dampier had tried to neutralize this by a follow-up topic on what pupils would choose to regret if they were away from Australia, what they would remember and long to experience again. Miss Dampier had long been frustrated by the fact that syllabuses for New South Wales schools dealt entirely with English history and English literature, with barely a nod to the nationality of most of the pupils. Hughie didn’t help matters, though, by muttering “endless mutton and the dunnee man calling” as she was elaborating her theme. Miss Dampier diagnosed a boy who was terribly unsure of himself, and who felt the need to make periodic aggressive gestures.

  Hughie’s best friend, however, was at this point Mr. Blackfeller, also known as Alfred, and by an aboriginal name no one could attempt to pronounce. He was generally genial, though a man of few words, and when Hughie went to talk to him after school and look at his pictures, the visits mostly consisted of them both sitting contentedly together in the little patch of garden in front of his shack while Mr. Blackfeller smoked his pipe and uttered the occasional monosyllable.

  The gift of Mr. Blackfeller which brought him most local recognition was not his painting but his prophecies. These prophecies (which, perhaps fortunately, were never about people, always about greater events) were passed around in Bundaroo and the nearby townships, generally scoffed at, but—if not believed—widely registered, referred to, kept in the back of people’s minds.

  “Mr. Blackfeller says we’ve got a big drought coming,” said Betty’s mother one day over breakfast. Jack Whitelaw’s cup went down with a crash on his saucer.

  “Bloody hell, Dot, you don’t believe that flaming con man, do you?” Jack Whitelaw’s language always became stronger when a nerve had been touched.

  “Oh, I don’t know—”

  “He’ll say anything for sixpence. It’s just made up, like those trashy romantic books you read.”

  “Well, if he’s saying there’s going to be a drought he’s not telling people what they want to hear, that’s for sure.”

  The justice of that had to be admitted.

  “Too right. He’ll not get many sixpences in his palm for forecasting a drought in this neck of the woods.”

  “Anyway, everyone says he foretold the Great War.”

  Jack slapped his knife across his plate. He never liked people talking about the Great War.

  “Oh yes? And what’s he supposed to have said? ‘Great storm cover whole world.’ ”

  “Well, it did, didn’t it?”

  “He could have been talking about another Great Flood. If people had believed him they’d have gone away and started building themselves flaming arks! Bloody hell, Dot, I’d’ve expected a bit more sense from you…What’s he said?”

  “Something about a great thirst on the way.”

  “There’s one of those every Saturday in Grafton’s.”

  “He’s a clever fellow,” protested Dot.

  “Oh, he’s that all right.”

  Mr. Blackfeller presumably did not fill Hughie’s head with his Cassandra-like prophecies. Hughie had read a book on Nostradamus. He said the prophecies of that sage were so vague you had to be downright cracked to believe them. Hughie just sat there with him, telling him things now and then (Mr. Blackfeller liked information), and sometimes being invited into his shack to see his latest paintings aimed at the Sydney market, and other more private ones that Hughie found much more interesting.

  “He’s got those ones that he does and sends to Sydney and Melbourne. Dealers of some kind there give him a few quid for them—it’s a market, and he knows what they want,” Hughie explained to Betty. “But he’s got these others, ones he keeps in an old cardboard box, and those are the real thing—strange, abstractlike pictures: not much color, and they seem at first to be just patterns, and then he points out things—the moon, trees,
stones, a snake. The ones he sells are quite good in their way, but the ones for himself are wonderful.”

  “Would he show them to me?” asked Betty.

  “I don’t know. This is for your article, I suppose?” Hughie sometimes spoke of her article as if he was jealous of it. “He might show them to you if you came to see him with me. The sad thing is, though, that the ones he values himself are the ones he can sell to Sydney and Melbourne. He doesn’t think anything of the real stuff. My dad gave me five pounds for my birthday and I bought three of them for that—he wanted to give them to me and not take any money, but I insisted he take it. The other ones may gain in value—no one’s giving their money away if they buy them. But it’s the strange ones that will be really valuable in fifty years’ time.”

  Betty couldn’t think in terms of fifty years, though if anyone had told her that in fifty years’ time she would be an esteemed novelist living in London she would probably have thought that life was going to give her everything she had ever dreamed of. She said, “How can you know what they’ll be worth in fifty years’ time?”

  Hughie shrugged.

  “Twenty, maybe thirty. It all depends on when Australians wake up to what Australia really is.”

  Betty had this in common with her schoolmates: she didn’t like Hughie assuming, with Pommie over-confidence, that he knew what Australia really was. She certainly didn’t feel Hughie was one she needed to talk to as she meditated on her article for the Bulletin competition, which could account for the tone of voice he assumed when speaking about it. He was still one of her best friends, and she was still his only one, but as she got possessed by her subject he got sidelined in her life, and she hoped (without worrying too much about it) that he could get all the companionship he needed from his adult friends, more suitable matches for his sophistication. Betty wildly exaggerated in her mind the sophistication of a Northumberland farming community and had no idea how Hughie’s apparent cultivation and worldly wisdom had been patiently gleaned and put together from the wireless, from such newspapers as he could pick up, and from any relations, neighbors, and friends of his parents who might drop a relevant crumb in his path.

  So it was with schoolfriends other than Hughie that Betty sat down and communed when she was collecting and sifting material for her article. One day after school Betty sat on the playground with some of her best friends in the school and read them the draft of her first paragraph.

  “By nine the sun was beginning its daily blaze over Bundaroo…”

  When she came to the bit about “open landscapes and closed minds” she substituted on the spur of the moment the words “boundless hopes and limited prospects.” When the little group began discussing what the rest of the article should contain, one of her friends—Alice Carey, her best friend—suggested that she go and talk to Won Chi at the vegetable shop, and another that she should talk to Mr. Blackfeller about his prophecies, and describe the little aboriginal reserve two miles out of town. These suggestions seemed to justify the change she had made in the wording, but one voice demurred: “Surely you should be concentrating on the Australian-ness of the place, not on the outsiders.” The remark seemed to justify her original comment.

  “It’s a bit funny if aboriginals aren’t considered Australian enough to get in,” she said in a deceptively mild tone of voice.

  “Well, Australia like it is now,” said the boy, who was Steve Drayton.

  The subject of the Aborigines in the area came up again, from an anecdote told to her by Hughie one day on their walk to school. He had been buying a slab of fruitcake in Bob’s Café the day before when Bob had opened up the subject.

  “You the boy I see talking to Mr. Blackfeller all the time?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can’t see what you two have to talk about.”

  “Oh, we talk about his pictures, mostly.”

  Bob spat decorously behind the counter.

  “Them daubs. I don’t call them pictures…Still, I suppose he gets himself a living by them, unlike most of his bunch.”

  “He doesn’t charge enough for them,” said Hughie.

  “Is that right? You’d know, would you?…See here, young man, you want to be a bit more careful who you mix with. Mr. Blackfeller’s all very well in his own world and with his own people, but he wouldn’t be allowed in my café, and he wouldn’t be allowed in Grafton’s, and that tells you something, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh yes, it tells me something,” said Hughie.

  Betty relished the anecdote, but some part—some small part, she insisted to herself—wished it had not been Hughie that it had happened to, that he had not been the one to make that last, barbed remark. That part of her understood—even shared—the resentment of her schoolmates of the outsider, particularly the outsider who would say what he thought even if it meant assuming a superiority to the people of his adopted country. But Betty had glimmers of understanding of the personal uncertainties, the divided nature and loyalties, of the boy who said it. The exchange did not find its way into her article.

  It was a few days after this that Betty, at the end of the school day, was following some yards behind Hughie through the playground when she heard a little chorus from the younger children from the primary section, a glorified hut at the far end of the playground near the riverbank.

  “Here comes the nancy boy, here comes the homo!” the angelic voices sang out in unison. It was the development that Betty had most feared, but one she had known in her heart was bound to come. Hughie gave no sign of reacting to the children, beyond a stiffening of the shoulders. Betty considered whether to stop and say something to the children, but then wondered what on earth she could say. They didn’t even understand what the words meant that they were using.

  She speeded up her walking and linked arms with Hughie just outside the gate.

  The performance of Tosca stayed with Bettina when her arthritis kept her awake that night, and over her breakfast of scrambled eggs. She dwelt particularly on the second act, with Scarpia’s study so conveniently situated next to the torture chamber. How Puccini, for all his horrible hang-ups, did sometimes ring the bell: the apparently innocuous setting, concealing something monstrous. The unspeakable being done while around it normal civilized life seemed to flow on as usual.

  There had been no Scarpia in Bundaroo. Though what Sam Battersby had been after was not so different.

  She walked slowly through to her study and sat down at her desk. The events she was chronicling, the small-town feeling against Hughie, against all the Naismyths, was so apparently petty, so insignificant set against the Grand Guignol of torture and summary executions that had lodged in her mind since last night. But it was the same feeling that in the Southern states of the United States had led to lynchings, and in Nazi Germany and the Eastern European countries had led to consequences which her mind, most minds, could not yet grasp the full horror of.

  She leaned forward to turn on her tape recorder. Then she stopped and sat back in her seat. The machine was not where it should be. It had been moved. Not by much, by maybe two or three inches, but moved it had been. It was no longer in exactly the best position for her old arthritic hands. The cleaning firm had not been in since the previous morning, and in any case were sternly forbidden to do anything about her desk. She remembered coming out in the night to go to the lavatory. The light had been on in the study, and thinking she was becoming forgetful in old age she had come over and switched it off. She shivered at the memory.

  The machine had not moved itself. Someone had been in.

  Chapter 8

  At Sundown

  “I’m taking Dad to a club tomorrow night,” said Mark to Bettina when she called in at his flat in Earl’s Court to collect Oliver and Sylvia to take them to the Barbican.

  “To a club?” said Bettina, her mind toying with all sorts of possibilities about the sort of club concerned.

  “Yeah—show him a bit of the London scene. Sylvia thought she�
��d give it a miss.”

  “I’m not surprised. I’d give it a big miss myself. Do you think your father can cope with more than ten minutes of the sort of club I think you mean?”

  “Course he can, Auntie Bet. He’s a tough old bird, and he’s very young at heart.”

  “But is he young at ear?”

  Mark looked at her, his thought processes almost audible, then decided it was a joke and laughed.

  “Dad’ll cope, you’ll see. And if he doesn’t like it he can slip out as soon as he wants. There’s plenty of pubs in the vicinity, not to mention other amenities.”

  In the interval of Julius Caesar, when Ollie had slipped off to the gents, Bettina said to Sylvia, “I can’t think why Mark would want to take his father clubbing.”

  Sylvia shrugged.

  “Oh, I’m sure he’ll take it in his stride. The pill popping and drug taking won’t faze him—if he notices it.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to stand the music. Mark says there are plenty of pubs around. I don’t think drinking alone in a London pub while your son tries to chat up the birds in a nearby club is much of a night out.”

  “I think Oliver just likes knowing what sorts of things are going on. Like a novelist, maybe.”

  Bettina laughed.

  “At my age I’ve become very choosy about the sort of experience I can be bothered to cultivate…Mark seems to be quite unfazed by the curb-crawling charge.”

  “He is. He just says it’s a good way to pull in the chicks. The fact that it’s illegal he says is ‘just silly.’ Mark is very unfazable on the surface.”

  “I’d like him more if I was sure it was only on the surface. What goes on under the surface? Does anything? I wondered when he told me he was taking Ollie to a club what sort of club he was talking about. I discarded the Garrick or the Athenaeum, but I did wonder if he meant a gay club.”