A Cry from the Dark

by Robert Barnard

  Sylvia shook her head confidently.

  “I’ve told you, Mark is mildly heterosexual. So far as I can see he is interested in conquests to boost his own opinion of himself and his desirability. The conquests are always female. Whether he’d say no to an approach from a man I don’t know, but that’s different.”

  “True…You’ll be on your own tomorrow evening. Would you care to come out for a meal?”

  There was only a tiny pause before Sylvia answered.

  “You don’t have to, Bettina.”

  “I know I don’t have to. I’d like to.”

  They looked each other straight in the eye, something they did not do very often.

  “In that case I’d like it very much,” said Sylvia.

  Then Ollie came back, and by common and unspoken consent they kept their dinner date to themselves.

  Bettina chose for their first meeting on their own a new restaurant off Kensington High Street. It had not yet received extravagant plaudits or brickbats from the burgeoning tribe of restaurant critics, so it did not attract the crowds of punters that both kinds of notice bring with them. There were two or three empty tables between them and the next diners, so they could talk without that buttoning-up effect that closeness to strangers brings with it. They walked there, and Bettina, like many older people, welcomed the presence of someone to guide her, restrain her at crossings, and cope with the manifold hazards of the London streets.

  “Well, I hope Ollie is enjoying himself,” she said as they settled over their menus, “but I certainly wouldn’t bank on it. I’m sure Mark is going on his merry way without a thought for his father. He’s that sort.”

  “Probably,” agreed Sylvia. “But that may be what Ollie would prefer.”

  It occurred to Bettina that parents and children, in particular neglect of customary duties between them, was not the happiest choice of subject. They talked over the menu, which was fashionably eclectic, and Bettina ordered for both of them, with an Alsace wine to follow their gin and tonics.

  “Verdict so far on your trip?” Bettina asked, sipping her gin.

  “Fabulous. Enchanting. Exciting. All the words the advertisers and travel writers use. It’s been what I always had in mind, the thing I had to do eventually. A lot of younger Australians think in terms of visiting Asia these days—”

  “I suppose it’s cheaper,” said Bettina dryly.

  “Well, it is that, but I think they genuinely feel that that’s where Australia’s future is. I sympathize, but I can’t follow suit. I suppose I’m more interested in the past. Our past is here. It must be a generational thing.”

  “Both my parents talked of Britain as ‘home,’ ” said Bettina. “In my father’s case those feelings had been reinforced by the war—the First World War of course. That had an effect on me. When I felt the need to get out of Australia it was inevitably England I came to. It had to be an English-speaking country, and one I could relate to quite easily. Quite soon I felt confident enough to start writing about it. And don’t say I never returned to Australia, as a silly young actress said to me the other day. I have been back.”

  Sylvia left a second’s silence.

  “I know you’ve been back,” she said. “But they’ve always been duty visits, haven’t they? Deaths?”

  “Yes,” said Bettina bleakly, feeling cornered.

  “You’ve never been back to travel round, see what it’s like today, go to see areas you’ve never seen before.”

  “There are plenty of those. Dad and Mum never traveled. No, I haven’t been back for that sort of visit.”

  Sylvia left a silence again, obviously asking: why not?

  “A writer of my kind,” said Bettina, slowly and carefully, “stores up experiences. You conserve the old ones, and you go into new ones only if you think they might be useful. That’s why I’d never go with Mark to clubs, to listen to crap music and watch young people taking drugs. It would upset me, but more important: I would never use it. And you have to be careful not to complicate old experiences, so that you become unsure what is then and what is now. If I ever use Australia again it will be my Australia of the interwar years. To experience the Australia of today would unsettle me, and unsettle my memories. I know Bundaroo as it was then. Bundaroo as it is now is of no interest to me whatsoever.”

  “I think I see,” said Sylvia, equally carefully. “So it’s not just a question of…what happened then?”

  “The rape. No, it’s not just a question of the rape. Though I got out soon enough, and never regretted it. The thought that I might have lived on there, seeing him walk around the town as if nothing had happened, makes me shiver. Though as it turned out he left the town soon after anyway, the man who is thought to have done it. No, my Bundaroo is the sum of all my days up till the day of the rape.”

  “Were there any results of…of the rape?”

  Bettina looked at her, then shook her head.

  “Have you been listening to rumors? Ollie knows the truth.”

  “Ollie was so young at the time.”

  “There were no results, as you call it. I went to Armidale, to a sister of my father, because I couldn’t bear to go on living at Bundaroo with people being nice to me on the surface, but looking at me out of the corners of their eyes and talking about me out of the corners of their mouths. It wasn’t to have a baby or anything like that, though of course I was terrified at first…If there were results they were less…tangible. I certainly never went back to Bundaroo willingly.”

  Sylvia took a deep breath.

  “One of the results was that you didn’t want children, wasn’t it?”

  This was it. Truth-telling time.

  “Yes…All the first weeks I was in Armidale were a sort of preparation for if I was expecting. I tried on my Auntie Shirley’s makeup to see if I could look older—for a possible visit to an abortionist. Then I realized that if I did go to some backstreet fixer in Sydney or Newcastle I would need money. I broached the subject to my aunt, and she was shocked at first, but gradually she came round to my way of thinking. But by then it was becoming clear that I wasn’t pregnant.”

  “But the experience got you used to the idea that you didn’t want children?”

  Bettina thought, wondering whether to protest that this was too bald a statement, then decided against it.

  “Yes, it did. I knew precisely by then what I wanted to do in life, wanted to be. Though I went to Europe, later joined up, went through as much of the war as my age allowed, it was all a question of getting experience, and going through or getting to know about things I could use. I was going to be a writer, and that was that. When I got pregnant with you it coincided with a telegram to say that my mother had cancer. Cecil, my husband—your father—didn’t have many uses, but he had some influence in military transport. He got me on a flight to India via Egypt. There was a wait for the first plane, then one for the second. Another wait in Bombay for a boat to Perth—that took a fortnight—then the train across the Nullarbor Plain. By the time I’d seen my mother, talked, tried to bring my dad out of his misery, the pregnancy was…well-established.”

  “Too late to have an abortion, you mean?”

  “I suppose so. But anyway I was so used to it that I was reconciled to having it…you. Not to bringing you up or anything but to having a baby. In any case, getting an abortion then, in Australia or England, wasn’t easy. To be honest, I don’t think I thought about it much that time around.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t. I’ve had a good life, on the whole.”

  Her gratitude seemed misplaced. Bettina hurried on.

  “But, as I say, I knew I didn’t want a child for life, with all that that entails. You probably know what happened. Bill Cheveley had friends—your parents, people who couldn’t have children of their own. I trusted Bill absolutely on people he knew. He went wrong with the Naismyths senior, but that was because he took someone else’s recommendation. My dad arranged it and came to Europe with his sister to fetch
you—still a small baby. I’m afraid I didn’t feel much. Not the sort of emotions a mother is meant to feel.”

  “Too late for you to agonize about that now,” said Sylvia.

  “Much too late. Funnily enough, the thing I remember most from that time has nothing to do with being pregnant. It was something my mother told me, in bed, in the hospital at Walgett. She was in great pain from the cancer, but all the time I had had the idea of something on her mind, something she wanted to tell me. Then one day, when the pain was a little easier, she did.”

  “What was it?”

  “She told me that she and Dad had met through a lonely hearts column in the local newspaper. She was working as a waitress in a café in Grafton. He was just back from the war, and living in Lismore. They met up, liked each other, and went on from there. She was afraid I would find it ridiculous, but I didn’t. It seemed rather touching. ‘I couldn’t have got a better man,’ she said, ‘not anyone straighter or more faithful. I’ve been a lucky woman.’ It taught me—if I needed teaching—that there were other kinds of marriages than the kinds you read of in romantic novels. After the funeral I went straight back to Europe and sued for a divorce. As I said, Dad and Auntie Shirley came over and got you in 1947, when you were still a baby…I’m glad, so very glad, that you’ve had a good life. But please remember you’ve nothing to thank me for. Quite the reverse. Thank your real parents—that’s what they were—thank Bill Cheveley, thank my dad, who took it up with him when he knew I was pregnant. But don’t, ever, shame me by thanking me.”

  By the middle of November the heat in Bundaroo was dominating everyone’s daytime and nighttime existence. Temperatures reached the hundreds, and the sun blazed down with a ferocious intensity. The inhabitants of Bundaroo who were not born there wished they could wear more clothes, not fewer, to protect their skins from the scorching and incessant attentions of that tormenting orb, burning and desiccating all the exposed skin. Like a dictator arrogant from years of power it ruled their lives—this in the run-up to examinations and the end of the school year. And with the sun came the flies—always around, always an irritant. And the flies were just the most all-pervasive of an upsurge in insect and animal life that was seldom joyous, seldom cause for celebration, but more often an intrusion that most people wanted to be free of. Everyone at Bundaroo High was on edge—Hughie and Betty not the least, though they both made endeavors to hide it.

  “There must be something you could do to help Hughie,” said Betty.

  She had gone to see Miss Dampier about a knotty grammatical problem in her article: “each of the shopkeepers has their own speciality” she wanted to say, to avoid the awkwardness of “his or her” (though, truth to tell, there were no female shopkeepers in Bundaroo apart from Mrs. Won, standing in for her husband when he was away setting up a Chinese restaurant in Lismore), but she had an awkward sense that this was not allowable, and might be the sort of thing that someone at the Bulletin head office might seize on. There was a lot about the Bulletin that she did not understand, such as its determination to refer to New Zealand as Maoriland, and even to abbreviate it to ML rather than NZ.

  “Don’t you think that might do more harm than good?” asked Miss Dampier. “It might work in junior school, but Hughie is a bit old to have a teacher fighting his battles for him.”

  “I don’t want there to be any fighting,” said Betty.

  “I was speaking metaphorically,” said Miss Dampier. “I think you could help Hughie more than I could. Try to persuade him to fit in better.”

  “Why should he fit in?” asked Betty, uneasily conscious that this was precisely what she had tried to accomplish. “He’s grown up in a different country, and been educated at a different sort of school. Of course he’s different. We could learn from him.”

  “But he really doesn’t make much effort—”

  “What should he do? Play football—what he calls rugby—and get his teeth knocked out so as to be one of the boys? Or hit sixes to the boundary in white flannels?”

  “You know Bundaroo doesn’t run to white flannels,” said Miss Dampier.

  “It’s not going to happen. Hughie’s not against sport, but he just can’t be bothered. He is interested in Australian art.”

  “That isn’t likely to win him many friends apart from you,” said Miss Dampier. “He doesn’t have to be so different, you know. After all, Herbie Cox was born in England—”

  “And he was four when he came out here,” said Betty, scornfully.

  Miss Dampier was later to prove a tower of strength at the time of the rape, but on this occasion Betty thought she failed her. Her admirable attempts to infiltrate an Australian element into the English-dominated literature syllabuses of the New South Wales education authorities was welcome and exciting to Betty, but she felt her attitudes had spilled over into the larger areas of life, making her instinctively unsympathetic to Hughie’s predicament. Betty hadn’t meant her to do anything obvious, such as call people together and try to broker peace. That would inevitably be doomed to failure. But she had thought she might do something more subtle, to emphasize that Britain and Bundaroo could benefit and learn from each other. She wasn’t sure what this subtle gesture might be, but she thought a teacher ought to be able to devise something.

  Hughie’s isolation from the rest of the school was now (Betty apart) complete. The juniors shouted mockingly at him as he walked alone, and sometimes even plucked up courage to do it when Betty was with him, shouting “homo” and “mummy’s boy” and “mardarse” at the backs of both of them. In class if he said anything, there was always a suppressed snigger, and his comments were never taken up. In the playground, on the school bus, on the walk to Bundaroo, he was totally shunned.

  “It’s like the Jews in Germany,” said Betty to Mr. Copley, who taught her maths and science.

  “You’re exaggerating a little, Betty,” said that mild man, devoted to fact and exactness.

  “They all lose so much, not talking to him and listening to him.”

  That Mr. Copley had to agree with.

  “That’s very true. All education is a matter of talking and listening and profiting by it.” He added, in a rare indiscretion, “I blame his father.”

  For, in truth, Paul Naismyth was not helping his son, his wife, or anyone else, especially himself. He was not so foolish as to believe that an Australian sheep and cattle property could be run exactly as if it were a Northumbrian farm. But he was stupid enough to believe that Australian rural workers could be handled in the same way, with the same methods, as he had used with English farmworkers. And he would not be told—not by Bill Cheveley, Kevin Drayton, or anyone else at Wilgandra. “I’ve run a property back home,” he would say. “Trust me—I know what I’m doing.” At first no one asked the obvious question: why, if he’d done it successfully, he was now in Australia. Quite soon politeness wore thin, deference still thinner, and the question was thrown at him by stockmen and shearers alike. His matinée-idol good looks soon modulated into petulance and impotent rage. His only response was to glower and turn on his heels.

  The story went around town that he was about to be sacked. The story was self-generating, mere wishful thinking, and it spread the more readily for being what everyone wanted. Bill Cheveley knew that he had to be loyal to his appointee, and he always said that the murmurs were nonsense, that Paul was doing a fine job and was a dinkum bloke. But his loyalty was—had to be—finite. He was watching events, cataloging the relationships that broke down, even noting the social gaffes of Naismyth’s uppity wife. He knew that the likelihood was that Paul couldn’t change his ways. Then the end would have to come, and he wouldn’t be able to recommend the man for any other job in Australia. That would be to do the dirt on his own people, the property owners. It would, in any case, be to the benefit of all if the Naismyths took the journey home again. And the ones who would benefit most would be themselves, or so Bill thought.

  It was on the night that Betty put the final, fi
nishing touches of polish to her article for the Bulletin competition that the Whitelaws at Fort George received a visitor. As the recession had slowly, painfully, begun to give way to slightly better times, the number of men and women roaming the outback in search of work, dole, or just a meal and a rough bed for the night had grown fewer. It was a while since Fort George had seen a sundowner, but it saw one that evening. The sun, in fact, had an hour or two of fierce assertion left in it and the temperature was in the high nineties when the man appeared. Jack Whitelaw had gone in Bill’s car to Walgett, for important negotiations with his bank manager (another Mason). He was not yet back when a man sauntered down the road from Bundaroo and banged with his fist on the door—not threateningly, but just enough to make his presence known.

  “Sure I was wonderin’ whether you had a job of work for me, and a bite to eat in exchange,” he said when Dot Whitelaw opened the door. She frowned at the sight of him, but not discouragingly.

  “Haven’t you been here before, a year or two back?” she asked. “My husband had you mending some fences, let you sleep in the barn?”

  “There now, he must have kept you away from me, for I never met you that time. I was wonderin’ why I seemed to remember the property, but couldn’t call to mind the charmin’ lady of the place.”

  Dot paused for a moment, then giggled.

  “There’s no charming ladies in this part of the globe! But come on in. I think my husband must have eaten in Walgett, so there’s a bit of Irish stew going begging. I wouldn’t know about work. That’s for Jack to say.” She ushered him through. “But I can see you don’t go hungry, work or no work.”

  Poor as they were, her instinct was to share at least some small portion with those less fortunate. And she was always grateful for company, whatever shape it took. They were in the kitchen now, where they ate most of their meals, and she sat him down at the table.

  “Well now, isn’t this cozy—and tasteful at the same time,” said the sundowner, looking around him. He was a man of medium height and sandy hair, with a good-humored face, bearded, and with a sparkle in his eye. But for his clothes and ragged pack one might assume he was a person living the best possible kind of life. Betty had come out of her bedroom carrying Ollie and stood in the doorway watching the newcomer as if she were a bemused five-year-old.