Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  It was quite clearly understood by everyone concerned, in particular by Molly and Mrs Ester, that this bar would, sooner or later, furnish an excellent husband. Certainly they did not hope for a dentist or a barrister, but a successful farmer or a stock and station agent would not be out of the question, provided Molly abandoned her habit of running along corridors and, when walking, shortened her stride, and swung her arms a little less enthusiastically. In conversation she should think more carefully about what she intended to say and when she said it, say it slowly, not breathlessly.

  With these instructions firmly in her mind Molly stood stiffly behind the bar while Mrs Ester conducted her final examination.

  "Two Scotch whiskies, one pink gin, one rum and cloves," said Mrs Ester.

  "Four and sixpence," said Molly.

  "One ladies' beer, two pints Ballarat Bitter, one crime de menthe."

  "Six and sixpence ha'penny," said Molly.

  "Do you have a decent burgundy, dear lady?" said deep-voiced Mrs Ester.

  "Yes, sir, Chambertin and Cote du Rhone."

  "And what is the price?"

  "The Cote du Rhone is ten shillings and the Chambertin twelve and sixpence ha'penny."

  "Very good."

  "What is three hundred and five multiplied by eight-six, Mrs Ester?"

  "Heaven knows," said Mrs Ester.

  "Twenty thousand, six hundred and fifty-three," said Molly. "Oh Mrs Ester, I'm so excited."

  When Mrs Ester had removed the pencil from behind her ear and checked this calculation she took Molly to her office where she examined her in arithmetic. She discovered that the girl could add up columns of figures in her head. She did not even move her lips.

  "Now, my girl," Mrs Ester said, "you listen to me. You will not throw yourself at the first man who comes along."

  "No, Mrs Ester."

  "You are a decided commercial asset, you mark my words."

  "Yes, Mrs Ester."

  "You are only sixteen. There is no need to rush off and marry in a hurry."

  "No, Mrs Ester."

  "Would you like to learn about the business, how to pay the staff and the brewery and add up figures? I will pay you a pound a week."

  "Thank you, Mrs Ester."

  "You will not spend the pound, Molly. (Do not fidget.) You will put it in the bank every week as long as you work for me, and when you get married you will not tell your husband about it, is that clear?"

  "Yes, Mrs Ester."

  "Do you swear?"

  "I cross my heart, Mrs Ester."

  "How much is a glass of best stout?"

  "Three pence."

  "You are a good girl, Molly," said Mrs Ester taking the girl's two hands in hers in a rare, grabbing, embarrassed gesture of affection. "You will be a credit to the Crystal Palace Hotel."

  And, had it not been for Henry Lightfoot, she would have been right.

  34

  Walter and Sean had not been given electric belts, and they were not happy. It was only Molly who was happy and she knew she had no right to it. No one could say that she was not a good daughter or a loving sister. Indeed she was, when she could be, a perfect Little Mother. When the remains of the family assembled on Sundays she brought a needle and thread for Walter's trousers, a newly knitted balaclava for Sean, wool and darning needles for her father's socks.

  Walter was dark and silent and hit at the trunks of trees with stick or boot and Sean clung to her side while she darned their sleeping father's socks. Beside the weed-choked waters of Lake Wendouree their mother's death lay over them. Sean tugged insistently at her skirt. The men in their rowing sculls could not move freely through the water.

  She hid the pleasures of the Commercial Room from her family. She did not tell them about Henry Lightfoot. She did not confess her hopes for the Hospital Auxiliary Ball. She fled these Sunday afternoons earlier than she should have, and was punished by guilty dreams because of it.

  Henry Lightfoot had a property at Bunningyong and did not come to Ballarat as often as he would have liked, but when he did come he always wore nice suits, and although he was a big man his body did not fight against the constrictions of his suit and his neck did not bulge against his Oxford collar.

  "Do you like to dance, Miss Rourke?" he had asked her. He had a warm sweet smell, like straw.

  "Oh, yes, Mr Lightfoot," she said.

  He had fair hair and dark black eyebrows. Apart from a slightly beakish nose he was decidedly handsome. He was going to ask her to the ball but she saw him frown, lose courage, and order a pint of bitter instead. She liked him better for his loss of courage.

  Tonight, she knew, he would come again, because there had been sales in Ballarat and Henry Lightfoot had sold fifty fattened beasts for a record price. The little Scot from Elders Smith had already given her the details of the sale. He said it was a great day for Henry Lightfoot.

  Her heart was beating too fast. It fought to free itself from the magnetic restrictions of her belt. It wanted to go wild, on its own loud boastful erratic dance.

  Henry Lightfoot entered the Commercial Room. He was aptly named. He walked on the balls of his feet, and she saw that he was already a little drunk. It was not like him to be drunk, but she was pleased he was drunk. She hoped he was drunk enough to ask her to the ball.

  He smiled at her; he did not come to the bar immediately but joined the ruddy pipe-smoking Scot from Elders and the round-shouldered man from the Courier Mail. His mind did not appear to be on the conversation he was having. He rocked back and forwards on his shining black shoes which showed only the faintest smear of sale-yard mud.

  When he came, at last, to the bar, he was carrying his companions' empty glasses. He was smiling, but she was too excited to look closely at his smile.

  She blushed.

  Had she not been so intent on trying to stop the blush she might have looked more closely at his face and she might have detected a malice in the smile which the men who had dealings with Henry Lightfoot knew to be part of his character. He was both handsome and charming, but he was also a bully with a keen nose for weakness.

  He stood at the bar, jingling the loose change in his pocket, swaying gently. His smile was moist, his handsome mouth a little slack.

  Molly's red hair was piled handsomely high, and although it accentuated a tendency towards jowliness, it also showed the soft white skin of her neck. There was nothing to hide her blush.

  "You've been keeping a secret from me, Miss Rourke," said Henry Lightfoot.

  "No," she said, "I promise you," but blushed even deeper, because she had confessed her hopes about the ball to Jenny Grillet.

  "It's not a secret," Henry Lightfoot said. "It is too wonderful", he teased, "to be a secret. It is too extraordinary. No, no, dear Molly Rourke, 'tis no secret any more."

  He had never called her Molly before. The blush spread down her neck until it seemed it would take possession of her shoulders.

  "Everybody," he said, "all Ballarat knows."

  "Oh," she dared look up. She held him with her bright green eyes. "And do they now, Mr Lightfoot?"

  "Indeed, Miss Rourke. Indeed they do."

  "And what secret is this?"

  "They say", he whispered, "you wear a belt to stop you going mad."

  She did not leave the bar. She stayed working. She gave correct change. She counted the money in the till at closing time. She helped Patchy wash the glasses in the public bar.

  35

  I had this in common with Molly: we had both pretended our fathers dead, although for different reasons. And while Jack had heard of Mrs Ester, he knew nothing of her father or Walter or Sean. He knew nothing of the electric belt, Dr Grigson, or that Molly had risked her mortal soul by marrying him in a Protestant church.

  And although there were many times when she came, teetering, giddy, her hand in his, to the very brink of confessing her faith, she could not. He made it impossible. He had no time for Catholics. This is not to say that he would not, journeying do
wn to Colac to visit his backers, make a detour to Koroit, that Catholic town, drink in the pub and be a good fellow amidst Murphys and Keoghs and Hanrahans, but that he carried a schoolboy's prejudices with him and was always only a hairbreadth away from those sing-song insults that Protestant children call out to the Catholics on the other side of dusty streets: "Catholic dogs sitting on logs, eating maggots out of frogs." He was for Australia and the Empire, had voted Yes to conscription and regarded Archbishop Mannix as nothing less than a traitor.

  And in Cocky Abbot, that dimple-chinned, ruddy-faced giant, he found a kindred spirit. They could relax together, in their certainties. They were both big strong men in their fifties, men who had begun life poor and ended up rich. They trusted each other's money. They trusted each other's size and their hands, when shaking, fitted together like two halves of the one puzzle. They were, as the farmer put it, practical.

  They sat together on the veranda of the Abbots' homestead late in the afternoon and rolled up their sleeves in defiance of the chill in the evening air. Had you seen them, sitting on their rattan chairs, you would have shared their conceit, that they were two of a kind, and you would be wrong. For the farmer was a harder, tougher man, ruthless in a bargain and with a head for figures not suggested by his slow countryman's drawl.

  "This aviator bloke," Cocky Abbot asked, kicking off his boots in a manner Jack approved of, "is he practical?"

  The autumn rain had turned the landscape green but at six in the evening it was laid over with a rich golden mist; the farmer's sheep looked like splendid creatures, not the daggy-bummed animals Jack McGrath loathed.

  "Is he practical?" mused Jack. "I'd say so, yes, my word I would."

  "I'd say there was a definite quid to be made in this business."

  "That's his point."

  "But my question to you, Jacko, is this: why would we need to go to the expense of building a factory? Now look at your costs. Three hundred pounds for the land. Say another three hundred pounds to put up some sort of shed. Then you've got your labour. You need specialists, I take it, skilled men, mechanics, fitters and turners and so on. Before you've got a penny coming in you're probably up for, call it two thousand pounds."

  "This is right, Harold."

  "And who's to say you have the best aeroplane? We won't know until it's built and flown."

  "That's true," said Jack, but looked miserable, passing his hand over his folded face. "But everything's a risk. Life is a risk."

  "Life is a risk, you're right, man. But we've both got where we are by not taking more than we need. Now what does your aviator say to importing a craft?"

  "I never asked him, but his point is that we have an Australian plane."

  "For Heaven's sake, we're all in the Empire together. I meant a British plane. One we know will fly. Do you follow me? It's a question of risk versus return, and there's no doubt the poms are more experienced than we are. My suggestion to you is: why wouldn't we set up an agency for the best craft available?"

  "Talk to Badgery. Talk to him. Listen to him."

  "I'll listen to him," said Cocky Abbot. "I'd like to meet him anyway. I believe I knew his father. There was a Badgery here in '96. Tried to sell us a cannon."

  "That's the man all right, that's him."

  "An interesting man," said Cocky Abbot. "I often think we made a great mistake not listening to him."

  36

  The electric belt that had saved Molly now damned her. It forced her to flee Ballarat with cheeks still burning and eyes downcast before her fellow coach passengers.

  Molly had laboured late into the panicked night, filling five pages with her careful copperplate, but she could not bring herself to be precise about her shame which was, to spell it out, that all of Ballarat was peeking, smirking, at what lay underneath her skirts. Her father went over and over his daughter's letter, searching with his blunt broken fingernail for a place where he might get a purchase. The pages, however, would give up no secrets and remained as mysterious and inviolate as marble eggs.

  Melbourne frightened Molly. It was too noisy, too grand. She sought a country position. Had she waited – she had money enough – she might have found a position in a good Catholic hotel. But she could not wait. She must have it settled. In all of the state of Victoria, it seemed, there was only one position, that of barmaid at the Grand Hotel in Point's Point. Sensing, correctly, that her faith would go against her, she told the employment agency that she was not a Catholic.

  It was only after she arrived in Point's Point that she understood what a dreadful thing she had done, only after she met the fiercely Protestant Mrs Pearson did she realize that she would never, as long as she stayed in the town, be able to attend Mass and that, even worse, she would be expected to attend services with the Presbyterians.

  She resolved, on that first day, that she would tell the Pearsons the truth when they realized how invaluable she was. And certainly, with Mr Pearson half crippled with a stroke and Mrs Pearson too scatterbrained to keep the business together, there was far more to do than simple barmaiding, although it was this skill that gained her the love of the town or, at least, the Protestant half of it. She was, as Mrs Ester had clearly seen, a commercial asset. She ran the dining room, kept the accounts, cleaned six bedrooms, served behind the bar. She was not yet eighteen years old.

  If she softened her natural vowels a fraction in keeping with her role as a Protestant lady, she did not put on dog or act in a snobbish manner. If she laughed too much or talked too much or swung her arms or ran when she should have walked, it only seemed to make her more attractive. Her cheeks burned. Her eyes, even in that dismal Presbyterian service, were feverish with secrets she could not share.

  The town approved of her courtship with Jack McGrath who may not have been the town's only teetotaller but was certainly the richest and the best-liked one. As everyone said, he had not a nasty bone in his body. Molly yearned to lay all her twisted secrets on him. Yet when, behind the small wooden pavilion on the river flat, a building known locally as the "Football Stadium", Jack McGrath attempted a bit more with his hands than she had expected, there was a great deal more than maidenly modesty to make her leap back from her beloved, her face colouring, her voice shaking.

  Molly did not intend that the belt should ruin her chances of marriage. It would have to be done away with; yet it could not be done without. She still, in spite of the belt's magnetic forces, had palpitations of the heart. She did not associate these upsets with the moments when her mind strayed into that minefield, her betrayal of the one true church. Rather, it seemed to her, it was a question of heights. Sometimes, on a high stool in the hotel larder, reaching for a ham or a string of onions, she was overcome with something that was not quite vertigo. It was as if two seconds had been snipped from her life, and the remainder, the past and the future, roughly pinned together. She felt a tiny explosion, a little jump, followed by a wild galloping of the heart. She did not dare think of what would become of her without the belt and yet, if she was to marry this big gentle man, she knew it would have to go. Who, after all, wants to marry a mad woman?

  So, on a Tuesday morning in November, just one day before her wedding in a Protestant church, Molly Rourke went out walking in the hour before the sun had entered the valley and when the dew lay thick on the grass and fell from trees on to the tin roof of the Grand Hotel. She walked along one side of the single street. She walked past the last of the new macadam where Reilly's cow stared mournfully at the bracken and blackberries in its neglected paddock and then, just past Crooked Creek, took an old footpath said to have been a Chinese millrace in the 1850s. The path, so she had been told, followed the river to the big swimming hole and the falls beyond.

  She had never been along the path before and she did not like it now. She did not like the blackberries that grew along it, the prickly acacias that bent, heavy with dew, across it. She did not like the small dry scurrying sounds amongst the untidy wet floor of the bush. She picked up her skir
ts and held them tightly to her. She stopped, continually, trying to hear the sounds her beating heart were overpowering.

  Black cockatoos filled the air above her and their harsh screeching seemed only to echo the hostile nature of the bush. If she had seen the brilliant scarlet on their tails she would not have thought it beautiful, but rather a confirmation of danger, like the red spot on a black spider.

  The path rose higher above the river, along across a rock face. At one place there had been a fall. There was a small gap in the track, easily cleared by children, but when Molly Rourke jumped it was as if the fires of Hell, not a tangle of blackberries, lay below her skirts.

  She did not like being so high above the river, but she hurried on (not swinging her arms) until she found herself above the swimming hole; the falls spilled off one end like water from an overfull bowl. People had told her stories of things being swept off the falls and how they were never seen again. It was dangerous, they said. Once a child had been swept away and not recovered.

  The water moved blackly over grey rocks. She did not wish to descend, as the children did easily, the rock steps that led to the water's edge.

  She stood on the path above, twisting her hands, and young Dave McCorkell, squatting a little further up the hill with two dew-wet rabbits in his hand, thought she looked like a princess in a fairy story. Her long grey dress had a sheen like the underside of gumleaves but it did not camouflage her form or even, with the skirt clutched to her, hide her tiny feet.

  He thought he heard her praying, but whatever the words she spoke he never heard them, or if he did hear them they were driven from his mind by the force of his feelings as he watched her hitch, first her skirt, then her petticoats, and remove, in a flurry so confusing he could not be sure of what he had seen, a garment of some type.