Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  We’ve got a plan worked out if she gets in. Everything hinges on what’s in the letter. It takes about a hundred years for her to open it and unfold it and start reading. Everything is stopped. Even Bozo’s Bitzers know something’s up and they’re lined up, tongues lolling. Then Sarah closes her eyes and brings the letter up against her chest and we don’t know whether it’s good or bad but we think it’s good. Then she opens her eyes and smiles.

  ‘Yippee!’ we all shout and start to kiss and hug her. Nancy starts to cry and so does Sarah and even Mike’s having a bit of a sniff and Bozo’s dogs are doing somersaults and rolling over and barking to his exact instructions. ‘Read it!’ Bozo shouts. ‘Read it out aloud!’ Sarah wipes her eyes with the side of her hand but still has to fight back the tears. Bozo stops the Bitzers and lines them up and she starts to read, her voice not yet completely under control.

  Miss Sarah Maloney 2 Bell Street

  Yankalillee Victoria

  25 January 1956

  Dear Miss Maloney,

  It is with great pleasure that I inform you that the Council has approved the recommendation of the selection committee for the Faculty of Medical Science in 1956 and that you have been granted a position in the Medical Faculty. The first semester will commence on 12th March 1956. You will meet at the School of Medicine at Block 22 on campus at 10 a.m. to enrol. The Writer and Professor Marcus Block will be in attendance.

  Enclosed please find a list of the textbooks and stationery you will require. You will also need two white lab jackets. The lab jackets are also obtainable from the University bookshop or you may purchase them elsewhere. They should have plain bone buttons and the hemline should not fall beyond the knee.

  May I offer you my sincerest congratulations,

  I remain your humble servant,

  M. Tompkins Asst Registrar

  P.S. It can get cold in Melbourne around this time and you are advised to bring warm clothing with you.

  The P.S. isn’t typed like the rest of the letter but is written in a neat almost copperplate handwriting which Nancy says is nice to see in a man.

  Well, I can tell you, we’re that excited even though we know things can go wrong with the Grand Plan. That evening Morrie and Sophie come over. Morrie also has his letter saying he can be a student and they’re just as happy for us as we are for them. We’re totally wrapped, much too happy to ask ourselves what will happen if the Grand Plan fails.

  This is how it happened, the Grand Plan, that is. When I said trouble seems to follow our name perhaps I wasn’t being fair. Good things happen too. Remember how I told you the people who were at the very top of the social heap in Yankalillee were the graziers and the topmost of their mob are the Barrington-Stones, who once had a horse in the Melbourne Cup that came last and they also fly a Piper Cub?

  Well, Mrs Barrington-Stone’s daughter Claudina, who is married to a barrister in Melbourne and lives in a place called Toorak, is having a baby, so Mrs Barrington-Stone orders the works from Nancy. She wants a complete layette as well as a very posh christening robe. The full catastrophe, no expense spared. It keeps everyone pretty busy for a month during November and part of December and Nancy says, thank God, because it will help pay the bills that come after Christmas and take her mind off Sarah’s pregnancy.

  All was finished on December the fifteenth and Mike and me were meant to take it out next morning but then Mrs Barrington-Stone phoned to say could she have two extra bibs. It doesn’t sound like much, but Nancy and Mike worked on them until about three o’clock the next day and they had to get them to Mrs Barrington-Stone that night because the next morning early she was flying to Melbourne in her Piper Cub to do her Christmas shopping. Mike and me had to take the two big brown-paper parcels the stuff is wrapped in to the property about seven miles out of town and so it’s a fair hike. Luckily it’s a Friday and it’s summer so it won’t be dark before we get home and, with no garbage, we can sleep in tomorrow.

  We walk and we walk and eventually we get to the front gate, which has got a curved iron sign straddling two big red brick pillars. The arched sign would be high enough and the pillars wide enough apart for the Diamond T to go through and under if Bozo had driven us. Which normally he would have done, but couldn’t because he’s gone with Sergeant Donovan in the police car to Wangaratta to attend a training session with their Police Boys boxing team. There has been some talk that Bozo might be invited to the Olympic boxing trials in Melbourne. The sign above the gate in these big iron letters says ‘Passing Cloud’ and then arched under it in smaller letters, ‘Prop. J.P. Barrington-Stone 1872’.

  We start to walk down this private road, which is their driveway I suppose. It’s flanked on either side by huge eucalyptus trees. Big old trees that must have been there seventy or eighty years and are about eighty feet high.

  ‘River Red Gum, Eucalyptus camaldulensis,’ I say casually to Mike. ‘Bit high up for them mind, usually found along the bank o’ the Murray River, but they look to be doing okay.’ I’m talking like Tommy, and Mike just grunts, I think he knows I’m showing off a whole lot. The trees have a smooth white bark with patches of grey and Tommy says that among the eucalyptus the River Red Gum is thought to be a most graceful tree. It’s not his kind of language so he must have read that bit in a book. Anyway, the driveway with the River Red Gum is so long it goes over the crest of a hill and you can’t even see the Barrington-Stone house from the big gate or even when you’re nearly there.

  Then when we see it, we can’t quite believe our eyes. It is bigger than any house in town, with tractor sheds and haysheds and stables, an open-sided hangar for their new Piper Cub and a second older Cub that’s used as a cropduster. There is also a small airstrip leading away from the house. People say Mrs Barrington-Stone flies the Piper Cub herself to Melbourne and all over Victoria when she’s going to the Country Women’s Association meetings. People call her the Amelia Earhart of the bush. Nancy says she’s a real bigwig in the organisation and has just been elected national president, which makes a nice change from the old busybodies who’ve done the job before her.

  There is also a big garden with lots of bushes, like camellia, azalea and plumbago as well as beds of summer plantings, zinnia, marigolds, shasta daisies and others I don’t know about. I only know those because of our class garden at school. There’s also a trellis covered in wisteria and a big splashing fountain in the centre of the lawn with a fat little stone boy peeing in a big arc into the water that’s very funny. When we see the fountain close up, it has goldfish which Mrs Barrington-Stone later calls carp, same as they have in the Murray River, but of course not all the good colours of these ones in the pond.

  Anyway, three kelpies come barking out at us but they’re wagging their tails. You can see they’re old with grey muzzles and one has a milky eye so we take no notice, probably lost all their teeth anyway. We go to the back door like Nancy said we must. There’s a screen door and we look into a large kitchen with a big fan turning quite slowly from the ceiling. We see a lady who we think must be Mrs Barrington-Stone. She’s quite fat and is making a racket with a meat mallet, banging at a piece of meat on a large butcher’s block. There’s no place you can knock properly on a screen door and, besides, the lady’s making such a noise she wouldn’t hear us anyway.

  ‘Mrs Barrington-Stone!’ Mike shouts out, polite but also loud enough so she’ll hear.

  The banging stops and this lady looks around and sees us and smiles. ‘Hello, boys, wrong lady, I’m the cook.’ Then she comes to the door and opens it and indicates we must enter. She sees me looking at the meat mallet she’s holding. ‘Oh, just tenderising a bit of mutton for the dogs, they’re too old to chew it unless it’s practically mince.’She puts the mallet down on the chopping block, ‘Wait on here, boys, and I’ll call madam.’

  I can’t believe my eyes. On the kitchen counter next to the chopping block is what looks like a dish of raw
tripe. The Barrington-Stones are supposed to be worth a fortune and they’re having to eat tripe for their tea!

  ‘Crikey!’ I whisper to Mike. ‘They’ve got a flamin’ cook, so how come they’re on an offal week!’

  ‘Probably for the dogs!’ Mike says out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Nah, she said they’ve got no teeth, tripe’s bloody tough raw.’

  ‘So, simple, she’ll cook it,’ he says.

  I don’t say anything, even Bozo’s Bitzers don’t like tripe all that much and who’d bother to cook tripe for a dog. I remain unconvinced by Mike’s explanation. Maybe they need new tyres for the Piper Cub or something?

  I can see why we would have mistaken the cook for Mrs Barrington-Stone because when she comes into the kitchen she’s about the same size. But she’s dressed in moleskin pants and brown boots and a blue open-neck shirt, same as any big hat at the Wangaratta Show. ‘Good afternoon, boys, you’ve come from Nancy Maloney, have you?’

  We nod, holding out the two big brown-paper parcels. ‘Oh, you’d best bring those into the dining room. Mrs Jackson is tenderising and we don’t want a lump of mince to land where it shouldn’t, now do we?’

  We follow her through and she takes us into a dining room that’s twice as big even than Philip Templeton’s lounge room and it’s only the dining room. The lounge room stretches halfway across the countryside, which you can see through this huge glass window at the end. The dining room has a long table that must have twenty chairs around it. In the centre is this silver candlestick with about ten branches for candles.

  ‘How very exciting!’ she says, ‘I can’t wait!’ Pointing at the polished surface of the table, she shows where to put the two parcels we’re carrying, ‘Do put them down, please. This is such a nice surprise.’ She stops and looks curious, ‘I didn’t hear a car coming up the drive? Is there someone waiting for you outside?’

  ‘We walked, madam,’ Mike says all proper, calling her ‘madam’ just like the cook did.

  ‘Walked? You walked the seven miles from town? My goodness! You must be exhausted. You must have some tea.’

  ‘No, no, it’s okay,’ Mike protests, ‘our tea will be waiting for us when we get home.’ I’m glad Mike said that because we’d have to have tripe for their tea and it ain’t an offal week at home. It’s only half-past five, they must eat real early, even we don’t have our tea until half-past six.

  ‘No, I won’t hear of it, my boy. It’s a hot day and you shall have some refreshment. What say lemonade and biscuits, there might be a bit of chocolate cake left over?’

  I look at Mike and hope to hell he don’t say no, now you’re talking lemonade, biscuits and cake. A far cry from tripe. He sort of grunts, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Good! Then why don’t we all go out on the verandah where there’s usually a bit of a breeze at this time of the day. Walked? I do declare!’ Mrs Barrington-Stone has got this posh accent like she could almost be from England but you know she isn’t because you can see she’s Australian.

  We sit around a big low wicker table looking out onto the garden and directly down at the splashing fountain with the stone boy pissing. Each of us is in a large wicker chair that’s big and not broken like ours at home and has soft green canvas cushions you sit on and from which air escapes when you lean back into them.

  Mrs Jackson brings in a tray with two king-size bottles of lemonade from the soft drink factory, three bread ’n’ butter plates, white with pink roses and a gold edge sort of scalloped on them, there’s a big plate of Brockhoff’s biscuits on a silver stand as well as two slices of chocolate cake. There’s two glasses and, also, there’s these two starched white damask serviettes. I know they’re damask because the cot covers we sometimes have to embroider are often made of damask.

  Mrs Jackson the cook then says, ‘Madam, we have a nice bit of tripe or will I do a roast for dinner?’

  ‘Tripe? Oh, lovely, that’s Jim’s favourite, he will be pleased. With white sauce and onions, is it?’

  ‘Yes, madam,’ the cook says, a trifle scornful, because even I know you always get white sauce and onions with tripe. Yuk! Mrs Jackson leaves and I bet she’s disappointed about the tripe against roast beef because she probably has to eat it too.

  I’m nervous and a bit confused about this tripe incident. There’s something very wrong with someone who chooses tripe when they could just as easily have a roast dinner. But I must say, Mrs Barrington-Stone is not up her self and seems a pretty normal sort of a person all round. She speaks a bit loudly but then so does Nancy, so you can’t hold that against her.

  She now points to the bottles of lemonade, ‘Bottoms up, boys, you can’t leave until each of you has finished your very own bottle. Have a piece of cake. You can leave the biscuits if you wish but you simply must eat the cake, you can’t refuse it or Mrs Jackson will be very upset. She doesn’t always feel appreciated and, as you would know, one must never ever upset the cook, a homestead is run on its stomach and I simply wouldn’t be able to cope without her.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ says Mike, who doesn’t know at all, because he’s never even seen a cook except Nancy and Sarah and that’s not the same thing, they don’t get paid.

  ‘Well then, go ahead, tuck in, boys, I’m sure you’re starving after that awfully long walk. You’ll excuse me not joining you, but I had a cuppa just a few minutes ago.’

  She’s not wrong, we’re both real hungry and you never know when your next slice of chocolate cake is going to come along and so we reach over and get going on the cake and soon there’s sticky chocolate icing over my fingers and I can sense it’s around my mouth because Mike’s got a chocolate moustache already.

  Oh shit, I think to myself, I’m going to have to use one of them starched damask serviettes, which you only see in the movies, folded and standing up like a little white tower. There’s going to be chocolate cake all over it, like skid marks on undies. In the movies, all people ever do with them is pout their lips and then touch them ever so lightly with the corner of the damask serviettes before they put them down again on their lap. When they get up from the table the serviettes are never there. I can’t use the back of my hand neither, because I know that’s bad manners and we can only do it at home if Sarah isn’t looking.

  But then Mike picks up his serviette and unfolds it and wipes his mouth casual as you like. I look up at Mrs Barrington-Stone to see if he’s done wrong and she’s looking directly at him and chuckles and, pointing to his nose, she says, ‘There’s a blob of chocolate on the very tip of your nose, Michael. Mrs Jackson will be so happy you’re enjoying her chocolate cake. It’s her pride and joy so you’d better tell her how much you’ve enjoyed it before you leave.’ She doesn’t seem to mind that Mike hasn’t pouted his lips and that he’s mucked up the serviette a treat. So I do the same and there’s smears of chocolate all over the starched whiteness.

  ‘Oh dear, you must please excuse me for just a minute,’ Mrs Barrington-Stone says, rising from her chair. ‘I simply can’t contain myself any longer, I must see what you’ve brought me. I know I should be patient, but it’s not every day one has a lovely surprise like a new baby in the family, is it?’

  ‘You’re bloody right there, madam,’ I think to myself, but I’m not so sure about the lovely surprise.

  ‘I’ll be back with you both in a couple of minutes,’ she says. ‘In the meantime I expect most of those biscuits to be missing by the time I return.’

  Mrs Barrington-Stone is a real nice lady and I think she might have left us just so we could bog in without being polite only eating one biscuit each. Not every day you can eat biscuits bought in a shop, maybe at Christmas if you’re lucky. Past Christmases, Oliver Withers the magistrate has always left us a big packet of Brockhoff’s Chocolate Creams. Except last year when we got there, all there was, was the packet with one biscuit left which his Alsatian dogs missed because it rolled to the
other side of the gate. Being the last garbage before Christmas we hadn’t lined up the Bitzers to mock his dogs and, I must say, they looked a bit smug when they came round the corner to bark at us. Nancy said she wouldn’t be surprised if he hadn’t done it deliberately, Oliver Twist being the mean bugger he is. But I don’t think he would’ve, it was just bad luck.

  Mrs Barrington-Stone comes back about ten minutes later when we’ve had a good few of the biscuits and she sits down and clasps her hands together in front of her chest like she’s praying, only she’s cracked a smile that’s practically spilling off the edges of her cheeks. ‘My enormous and sincere congratulations! The work is simply marvellous! Please tell your mother how very, very delighted I am. Oh, and your sister too, I believe they work together. Sarah, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, madam. Thank you, I’ll tell Mum,’ Mike says. He’s getting saying ‘madam’ down pat. I know he’d love to get some credit for doing the embroidery, but he can’t and it must hurt a helluva lot deep inside. Bozo, the Boy Boxer, is winning every fight he’s in and is a bit of a hero with the yobbos who hang around the Parthenon cafe and even at school for a change. And I’ve just got a bottoms-wiping certificate and my name in the Gazette. It’s not fair. Mike’s won the biggest prize you could ever win in your whole life at the Royal Melbourne Show and he can’t tell about it or get any of the glory that’s coming to us. All those blue ribbons drawing-pinned to the picture rail in the front room, and he can only look at them but can never hear people tell him how clever he is.

  ‘The embroidery, in particular, such fine delicate work,’ Mrs Barrington-Stone says. Her eyes show she’s excited, ‘It’s astonishing that your mother’s eyes have kept up, it’s quite the best work I’ve ever seen and hardly surprising that your mother and sister won Best of Show in Melbourne.’