“He’d trash things because he’d be working fast, and any competent burglar knows how not to leave traces of himself behind.”
“Well, all right. Perhaps not any ordinary burglar.”
As it happened, Bettina decided to go to the Duke of Sussex pub the next day at lunchtime—a Thursday, which was Peter’s pension payment day. It was Katie’s too, and the three sat around one of their favorite tables and wondered whether to have a pub lunch. When they had decided they would, Bettina told them she thought an intruder had been in her flat, and put the plan that he should act as a Jack Russell substitute to Peter.
“I could do a Jack Russell bark,” said Peter, and promptly did one, to the consternation of the other drinkers. “Nasty little brutes, your Mr. Growser among them. I’d be happy to do it the week after next, if that would suit.”
“It wouldn’t. We’re fitting in five days in Scotland between other things we’ve got booked in London. It’s got to be Monday to Friday next week, because we’ve got the hotel booked as well. Couldn’t you cancel whatever pressing engagements you have?”
“No, I couldn’t, and don’t be sarky, Bettina. It doesn’t suit you, and it’s not nice to assume I just exist to be at your convenience. I’ve had a week’s holiday in Bournemouth booked for months. Special rock-bottom prices for pensioners. They only offer it because nobody but pensioners fancies the English seaside these days.”
“Oh well, if Bournemouth is more important to you than me—”
“It is. Bournemouth with a friend.” And he winked.
“I’ll do it for you,” said Katie. “I could fancy a bit of luxury: the run of the freezer, turn the central heating up if the nights get chilly. Can’t do a Jack Russell, but anything else Peter can do, I can as well.”
Bettina doubted that, but thought that the main objective in Clare’s suggestion was to have someone in the flat—someone to turn a light on, maybe ring 999 if they heard a noise.
“You’re on,” she said.
On her way home, full of pub lunch and feeling adventurous, Bettina made a substantial detour and went to the South Kensington Library. She had been a borrower there for nearly fifty years, but she hadn’t been inside for three or more. The older she got the more she enjoyed rereading old favorites already on her shelves. When she entered the place she hardly recognized it: there seemed to be fewer books, more “areas”—places for people, mostly children, to do things in. Borrowing no longer seemed the first priority, and she wandered around, genuinely bemused, until she fixed on her prey, a healthy-looking young woman with peach-colored, bow-shaped lips. She was replacing an armful of books on the crime shelves.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” said Bettina, in that voice that had more touches of Kensington matriarch than it did Australian, “but it’s many years since I was here…The art books are no longer where they were.”
“The art books? Oh, they’re on the wall, over there.” She pointed.
“Thank you. I see. It’s a book on Australian art I wanted.”
“Oh yes?” There seemed to be some constraint in the voice, though the young woman went on putting books back on the shelves.
“It’s one by Eugene Naismyth. He had a series on television some time ago.”
“That was years back.”
“Oh, you saw it?”
“No-o-o…I’m too young. But I’ve heard of the series.”
“I do hope the book’s still available.”
“If it’s in stock it will probably be on the shelves. Television borrowing doesn’t go on for more than about six months after the program is shown.”
There was a sort of reluctance in the pretty-mouthed woman’s voice. Bettina smiled her thanks and pottered off. She found the unwanted volume—which she had a personally inscribed copy of at home—and then went back toward the crime section, having noticed the peach-lipped one on the desk. A Reginald Hill, a Caroline Graham, a Michael Z. Lewin, and a Peter Robinson had been shelved upside down on the various shelves where she had seen the librarian placing books.
The girl was in love, she thought. Or, more likely, in some other kind of relationship with the still-surprising Hughie.
The two weeks left before the Leaving began was indeed a period of almost monastic austerity for Betty. She drew up a plan of reading and revision, consigned one subject (geography—she hoped Alice would feel guilty, but didn’t bank on it) to the mental dustbin, knowing she could get only the barest of passes in it however hard she worked at it so late in the day. The rest of the subjects she read up methodically, pursued any interesting trails in the meager school and town libraries, and read in her bedroom into the night. English she hardly touched. English she felt sublimely confident in.
Two days before the first exam she put away her books and had two days walking around her father’s farm, the animal paddocks close to the house, the grain fields stretching their not-quite-profitable-enough length until they met the fields of another soldier settler, a cocky her father was on terms of alternating hostilities and cease-fires with. As she was renewing acquaintanceship with the animals her brain was active with phrases she might use, strategies she might employ in essays, new approaches that might or might not be looked on with favor by the men with the marking pencils.
The weather continued to be baking-hot—exhausting for a newcomer like Hughie, taken more in their stride by those like Betty who were used to it: the outback gods were not going to abate their usual ferocious attack merely for a few teenagers facing the most important examination of their lives. If, of course, it was that. Children from Bundaroo were not expected to do particularly well, and when their results were mediocre they quite soon got dead-end jobs and began their unspectacular way through life. The last student at the high school to get good Leaving results had been Sam Battersby’s daughter, and she had taken off at once for Newcastle and had never been back.
Betty intended to take off, not for Newcastle but for Sydney. But she did intend to come back, often she told herself, to where her roots were. The limited horizons were sometimes comfortable, for a short time.
When the exams started she began to feel better than confident. Even in geography she felt she performed creditably, in part due to all the reading she had done in the Bulletin. Her total lack of understanding of geometry was balanced by a splendid performance in algebra (she knew, and had her feeling confirmed by going through the paper with Mr. Copley).
Occasionally, when the exam was in something that was not studied at Bundaroo High, they had time off. On one such afternoon Betty took one of her father’s old nags and rode over to Wilgandra. Then she and Hughie played music again while Mrs. Naismyth was at the Cheveleys’ house taking tea with Bill’s wife, who was feeling better, or thought she was, and was blessing the new tablets prescribed for her. They played Beethoven—the Pastoral, which Betty thought lovely, but a bit long in places—the Egmont Overture, and Leonore number 3. Hughie explained about the trumpet calls, and that moment went straight to Betty’s young heart: Liberation! The knocking-off of chains! She insisted that they play the Seventh again.
“All right,” said Hughie, getting down the records from the wall cupboard. “I never get tired of it. Did you know it’s been called ‘The Apotheosis of the Dance’?”
“Oh,” said Betty, who was not well up in apotheoses.
But his words had an effect, because when the orchestra began the urgent, frenzied motion of the first movement Allegro, Betty stood up, not quite knowing why, and suddenly the dancing visions she had had when she first heard the music seemed to take control of her limbs, and she began a weird but passionate sort of dance. Hughie, beside her but separate, in his own world, began his own dance, which was his own interpretation, and as the frenzy increased so did their own ecstasy, but it was a solitary, adolescent ecstasy, each of them wrapped up in themselves, trying to encompass what the music was saying to them. When the movement ended they sat down, embarrassed, knowing they could not wind themselves do
wn to the spirit of the slow movement. Betty gave a little giggle, but Hughie seemed not to notice.
The music finished, and they sat in silence. When they saw Mrs. Naismyth approaching at the end of the half-mile walk from Wilgandra itself, Hughie put on “Hark, Hark, the Lark,” but when she came into the house she seemed too preoccupied to notice. That had been more than a tea party, Betty thought. Hughie obviously thought so too, because he went out into the kitchen and started a low conversation with his mother.
“She really should have been talking to your father,” Betty heard her say. “Or Bill should. He shouldn’t work through us women. And how can she say your father shouldn’t order the men around? He’s the manager, isn’t he? Who’s going to give orders if he doesn’t?”
Betty felt mean and dirty at overhearing the Naismyths’ troubles, though she hadn’t consciously listened. She shouted a farewell to Hughie and went out to her horse.
The day of the last Leaving exam was celebrated by a few of the pupils. One little group went and caused a rumpus in Mr. Won’s shop—some sending him hither and yon for little-called-for items, while others did some minor shoplifting. Mr. Won knew perfectly well what was going on, because something of the kind happened every year, but the young people’s custom during the rest of the year was worth too much to endanger it by making a fuss. The real celebration, more decorous and supervised, was the Leavers’ Dance the next evening. This was held every year, the last event of the high school year, and supervised by teachers. It had been called a “ball” until two years before, when the students had protested that this was a ridiculous title when only about fifteen candidates took the Leaving in Bundaroo. And anyway, a “dance” sounded more fun, even if it wasn’t.
Betty, along with most of the other girls, didn’t have a great deal of preparation to do, no agonizing about what to wear: she wore her best, and that was that. In this the girls had the advantage of the boys, most of whom didn’t have a “best,” though they might acquire one when they got a job, or when they stopped growing. Betty experimented with her mother’s makeup while Dot was at a meeting of the church ladies, but she decided she looked too much like a doll, and she settled for a dab of powder and a dash of scent. Saturday ought to have been a day of excitement with the dance as its climax, and perhaps for some of the pupils it was, but for Betty the day was an anticlimax. She had done her best, done well she thought, but now there was nothing much in her life except waiting for the results. And waiting for the announcement of the winner of the Bulletin competition. This, doubtless due to what her mother called “a feeling in her bones,” was the really important thing for Betty.
The Whitelaws went into Bundaroo that evening by foot. By six o’clock the heat of the day was lessening, and they knew they would meet up with other families doing the same. By the time they reached town two other little groups had joined them, so when they passed Alice Carey’s house and she emerged, there was enough of a group for her to join in without having to make it too clear that she and Betty were no longer close. As they gained the bitumened strip and walked toward Grafton’s Hotel, Betty whispered to her father, “You’re not going there, are you, Dad?”
It was not a pathetic plea of the child to its father in a melodrama to stay off the booze, and was not taken as such. On high days and holidays in Bundaroo there was a “secret” arrangement that everybody knew about that, after the regulation six o’clock closing, the back room at Grafton’s would open and drinks would be served and tallies would be kept on a slate to be paid in the subsequent week. More people got stinking drunk after closing time than ever did in the steady-drinking daytime. Jack Whitelaw thought for a moment, then said, “Maybe I’ll go with your mum and have a bite to eat at Bob’s.”
When they got to the other end of the township Betty didn’t feel she had to rush to the school hall. She knew what it would be like because she had seen it decorated for the Leavers’ Dance the previous year: tasteful streamers, the odd balloon, and a touch of Christmas since the littlies would be having their end-of-term party there in a week or two’s time. She and her parents lingered with the other groups as the light faded, watched the little band arriving—in truth a trio, but much loved in Bundaroo, where they played at all such occasions and were prized as one of the best little groups in the northwest of the state. As the band, waving to old friends, entered the school yard, the Naismyths arrived in the Cheveleys’ Ford. Betty had an odd sense of watching them as if they were strangers, almost characters in a book: she saw that Mrs. Naismyth’s manner was slightly wrong, as if it were the other parents who were outsiders, and she were welcoming them as hostess. She saw that Paul Naismyth’s manner was becoming tinged with aggression, and she wondered (Hughie seldom talked of home) what sort of a father he was. She thought she had got a clue when she heard him say in a low voice to his son, “I’d’ve thought you’d’ve made some male friends by now.” When she saw Hughie fix himself onto Steve Drayton, whom he hadn’t talked to for weeks, she thought it was time to join them, though she recognized that she was of less and less use to Hughie the more she became identified with him in their fellow students’ minds.
And so, together but unspeaking, the three of them went into the little school assembly hall, followed in a slow drift by the other Leaving candidates, by one or two of the last year’s Leaving takers who had begged a ticket, and by one or two friends of the pupils from around about who tried to get into any occasion going. In the hall the tables were laid with jellies and cakes, sandwiches and biscuits, and a side table held lemonade and orange squash. As they inspected it, Miss Dampier and the headmaster arrived, he clutching a large case in which he had an accordion which he could all too easily be persuaded to play.
The band was now tuning up and playing snatches of dance tunes they were all familiar with, sending lively strains into the night down this end of Bundaroo, to balance the sounds of laughter and argument fueled by beer that came from Grafton’s at the other end. Most of the men were there, but Jack Whitelaw was with the other group, mostly mothers, tucking into pie and chips at Bob’s Café. The parents’ role as chaperones ended when the dance started, because the headmaster, Miss Dampier, and Mr. Copley—not to mention some formidable refreshments ladies—would see that all was well and seemly in the school hall. Chaperoning would only begin again around half past ten, when the young people would start to straggle out into the street, ready to be escorted home.
Till then no harm could come to them, surely.
Chapter 10
Thunderclap
The Corunna Trio finished their tuning and started the evening off with the “Merry Widow Waltz.” The Corunna Trio knew what they were doing. A traditional waltz was the first thing learned at Mrs. MacKenzie’s dancing classes in Corunna. These classes were eagerly attended by the girls of the area, less so by the boys—those who went only did so under the impression that dancing was the way to get girls. Many of the boys who did not attend (and family finances rarely stretched beyond the girls anyway, and dancing was really a girls’ thing, wasn’t it?) were taught by their classmates, and for many of the lads of Bundaroo their first real feel of a girl happened to the strains of the “Merry Widow Waltz” or the “Blue Danube.”
Betty took to the floor with Hughie. Both of them knew the steps, and after a single circuit of the little hall they were doing them with confidence and brio. Their showmanship, their consciousness that they made a good-looking couple, brought its inevitable reward: “Just look at those two—don’t they just think they’re the cat’s whiskers!”; “Thinks her poopie doesn’t smell, that Betty Whitelaw—always has.” Betty and Hughie danced on, smiling at each other if at no one else. I don’t care, said Betty to herself. I’m enjoying it, I’m doing it well, I could be a wonderful dancer someday and so could Hughie, and why should we hide it just because some of the cow cockies are jealous?
When the “Merry Widow” had had a good outing, the trio changed tempo to a veleta, and Hughie and Betty made
for the food table, chattering and laughing. Some of the others did the same.
“Are we allowed to eat with the star performers?” asked Steve Drayton, addressing no one in particular, as if posing an abstract philosophical question.
“Suit yourself,” said Betty. The moment she’d said it she wished she’d said, “Oh, don’t be silly, Steve,” or something personal.
“They think they’re Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers,” said Alice Carey.
“Got to do something like dancing if you’re one of the queer brigade like him,” said Steve.
They did not dance for the next half hour, but stood around eating sandwiches and cake and drinking lemonade, behaving as if the world would end if they stopped talking. When their talk got down to the personal level Hughie said that Steve Drayton was uncertain about his own sexual tastes, which Betty thought unlikely, and that Alice had probably nourished gnawing feelings of jealousy for years as the less interesting partner in her friendship with Betty, who thought that made sense.
Needless to say, no one asked Betty to dance, and Hughie knew that anyone he asked would refuse, or just turn away. You could tell that by the expressions on their faces. Even many of the faces on the dance floor turned in their direction in the middle of gracious, Mrs. MacKenzie–tutored motions with looks approaching hatred, or with theatrical grimaces of contempt. Betty felt her blood stirring. It was clearly time for them to take to the floor again—this they both realized without saying so: standing talking for too long only underlined their status as pariahs.
Suddenly the trio seemed to respond to their instinct. With a scrape and a twiddle they ended their current fox-trot, and the leader announced in a stentorian voice: “And now for our medley of songs from the shows!” The medleys were popular—the parents and other assorted adults who came and went at these evenings, forming a little knot at the door, loved them and hummed along with old favorites; the less enthusiastic dancers left the floor gratefully and pounced on the refreshments, and only the adept who could keep up with the ever-changing tunes were left in the center of the hall floor. The tunes could range from old music-hall favorites to the “Barcarole” from the Tales of Hoffmann, and the trio prided themselves on keeping up with the latest hits on Broadway and Shaftes-bury Avenue.
A Cry from the Dark Page 11