Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

  Clement peeps into the Foxy Glen

  One morning at the Bassett racecourse Augustine sends Sternie on a mile gallop against a horse that has lately won an open handicap at a small town in the Mallee. Sternie lopes along two or three lengths behind the other horse. Near the end of the gallop both riders urge their mounts with hands and heels. Sternie gains slowly and then draws level with his rival. Harold Moy tells Augustine afterwards that he could hardly hold the old horse at the end of the mile and that it looks like they have found out the distance that suits him best at last. He urges Augustine to enter the horse for a nine furlongs open handicap and to forget all about him being only a maiden because he can stay all day and still come home strongly at the finish. Augustine says – I might as well tell you Harold not that you probably haven’t guessed it anyway but things aren’t going too well for me at the moment and I can hardly afford to keep Sternie in training let alone find the cash to back him next start. Harold says – don’t let that worry you Gus – there’s a good mate of mine who’d be only too happy to put plenty of his own money on and give you the odds to a fiver – I would have mentioned him to you long ago only I thought you were happy just having a small bet on Sternie and not needing a punter. Augustine realises that Harold’s friend, whoever he is, is the kind of regular punter that every jockey uses secretly to back the horses that he rides, that the man probably sneaked around the betting ring at Jerram having his own thirty or forty pounds on Sternie and that now when he, Augustine, has admitted he is broke the punter will come out into the open and have the best of the market for himself. He guesses that the reason why Harold has stuck with him over the years is not that Harold feels loyal to the owner-trainer of Clementia but simply that the jockey and his secret punter have been waiting to collect for themselves on any winner that he, Augustine, might manage to train. He says to Harold – tell your man he can come with us when Sternie has his next start but there’s no need for him to sling me anything – I’m sure I can raise the money for a good-sized bet of my own. A few days later Augustine takes Clement up the hill to Riordans’ once again. Even before he sees the high dark-green ramparts of cypress and the complex ridges and valleys of roof, Augustine knows that he will not dare to ask Stan to back Sternie once more. When he reaches the front gate he sees Mendoza’s car parked outside, and is relieved to think that Stan will not be able to talk about debts and loans in front of the third man. Augustine leaves Clement walking on the low wall around the sunken garden and fish-pond. The boy goes looking for Therese Riordan and Pat Mendoza but finds only the Mendoza girl. She is alone in the fernery arranging groups of small white stones or pearls from a broken necklace to represent the eggs of birds in well-hidden nests. She tells Clement that Therese will not be back from her music lesson until lunchtime. He asks her is she interested in birds and their nests, and she tells him she wouldn’t mind being a bird because then she could live with her husband in a shady tree outside someone’s house and watch the people in their bathroom or bedroom but no one could see what she did in her nest. Clement tells her that he has always been very interested in birds because they take no notice of roads and fences and travel wherever they please and make their own roads as they go until they find safe places to hide where people pass to and fro every day but never guess who lives just out of their sight. She says – I never knew you were so interested in girls’ games – the only other boy I know like you is someone you’ve probably never seen. Clement says – Silverstone. She says – that’s right – his favourite game was hiding some of his treasures and saying that nobody could find them except the person he loved – sometimes he said he could turn himself invisible and find all the treasures that the person he loved had hidden – and by the way I still haven’t granted you all of your three wishes yet have I? if you promise to keep your trap shut I’ll sneak inside and get that tin of Therese’s you keep calling the Foxy Glen. She goes inside Riordans’ house and comes back with the tin hidden under her dress and says – I’ll count up to a hundred while you look in it – and see that you put everything back in the proper place or Therese will find out and never speak to me again. He opens the tin easily and finds first a holy picture of a little girl or boy climbing up onto the altar to reach the tabernacle and talk to baby Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. On the back of the picture in small neat writing is the message A happy and a holy Christmas little Therese from Sister M. Philomena. He looks briefly into an envelope filled with holy cards. Beneath the envelope is a set of broken rosary beads with the Hail Mary beads of translucent blue stuff and the Our Fathers like polished chips of a pearly white stone. Lying in the corners of the tin are tiny pebbles of different colours, some of them a little like milk-stones. In a glass tube that once held junket tablets are a few grains of pure gold, probably from some of the abandoned diggings around Bassett. Folded between sheets of tissue paper are a few brown fragile petals from some flower that Clement does not recognise. A piece of yellowed newspaper reads Do You Know? The hoop and the ball, those popular modern toys, are known to have been used by children in ancient Egypt. Judith Kennedy aged 9 years of Sheehan Street Bassett earns a Blue Certificate. Clement is about to open a small blue-covered notebook with a label in a child’s handwriting My True Secrets, when Patricia Mendoza comes up behind him and says – your time’s up hand it over and make sure everything’s stacked in the right place. He puts the things back in what he believes is their proper order and hands the tin to the girl Mendoza. She says – it’s your job to put the tin back in Therese’s room – I’ve got to go and talk to Mrs Riordan and a grown-up lady who’s just come to visit the Riordans. Clement holds the tin behind his back and goes alone into the house. He reaches Therese’s door without being seen, but dares not go inside. He pushes the tin a few feet into the room and leaves it there. He knows that Therese will never speak to him again if she discovers that he has seen inside her Foxy Glen, but he suspects that Patricia Mendoza may have tricked him and put some worthless odds and ends in the tin before she brought it to him and that the real secrets of the Foxy Glen are hidden where he will never find them in a place like a silk-curtained tabernacle towards which pure children who have never felt someone else’s sticky hands groping and kneading and pinching between their legs may clamber over an altar as white as the rarest milk-stones that reveal to those on whose innocent tongues they nestle a pathway, paved with the pictures that nuns and mothers and aunties give year after year to their favourite children to keep their thoughts on holy things, that leads past a trellis in which the latticework is dark-green like the few gardens that are all they want to remember of their journeys through an arid city while the field of gold that it bars is all that remains of the streets that they have never had to walk from end to end wondering what comfort or revelation could lie beyond the pattern that they formed. He waits near Riordans’ front gate for his father and wonders whether it is worth his effort to begin all over again the search for the true Foxy Glen or the thing like it that some other girl than Therese Riordan keeps hidden. Augustine strides down the path, takes the boy by the hand, and says – well we didn’t get what we came for but perhaps it was best in the long run because now we’re all on our own for the last battle of all.

  Augustine puts his last three pounds on Sternie

  Augustine enters Sternie in the Publicans’ Handicap at St Andrews. He asks Harold Moy to make sure that his punting friend comes to St Andrews with as much cash as he can lay his hands on because the stable commission might be only a handful of small change. A few nights before the St Andrews meeting, Augustine spreads out on the kitchen table a map of Victoria. He discovers that the trip to St Andrews will be the longest journey that he has ever made from Bassett to a race-meeting in the north. Augustine and Harold Moy and Sternie are driven from Bassett to St Andrews by a man named Ivan McCaskill. The man has with him his friend Rita. Several times during the long journey between paddocks so wide that whole systems of low hills rise up and fall away again within
their far-reaching fences, Augustine looks sideways at Rita, who is plump and no longer young but still what he would call attractive. He sees a wedding ring on her finger and wonders whose wife she is or was once. He sees on her chest above the top of her dress an arc of pale freckles that he guesses must reach right to the tops of her breasts. He remembers that he has prayed for two weeks to Our Lady asking that Sternie might win the Publicans’ Handicap at St Andrews and regrets that McCaskill will probably spend most of his winnings on beer and spirits and cigarettes to dope himself before he nuzzles nearer and nearer to the edge of the freckles. In the main street of St Andrews McCaskill stops the car, and Augustine goes to look at Sternie in the float behind. The other three walk towards the veranda of the hotel. McCaskill laughs and says – couldn’t face up to a race day without something strong and wet inside me. Augustine follows them inside. The lounge where they sit is almost dark. The woman Rita catches Augustine looking at her. She smiles kindly and says – I suppose you must get nervous on a day like this with so much at stake. Augustine shifts in his chair and looks at Harold and says – ah when you’ve been at it as long as I have you lose all your nerves, and wonders whether he sounds uncivil. McCaskill says – what’ll you have gents? Harold says – better make mine a shandy Ivan I can celebrate with the hard stuff when I’ve done my day’s work. Augustine says – make mine a lemon squash mate, and wonders whether the woman admires him for being a non-drinker. Rita says nothing, but McCaskill brings back a glass of beer for her. McCaskill drains half his glass at once and says quietly to Augustine – you’re the boss Gus – what’s your instructions for the betting? Augustine glances at the woman and says – will Rita be helping us too? McCaskill laughs and says – what a question – she’s the brains behind us – we work as a team. The woman smiles again at Augustine. Augustine says – well as Harold probably told you I’m not having much on for myself – I’m saving my cash for a big bet in Melbourne soon. He realises that they don’t believe him. He says – you please yourselves what you have on but my experience tells me you’ll probably get eight or even ten to one if there’s more than half a dozen runners in the field – you realise the horse is still a maiden? McCaskill says – we know enough about him to be confident and we won’t forget you after the race either Gus. Augustine supposes that Harold Moy has kept them informed for months about Sternie and his ability. Harold gets up to buy another round of drinks. Augustine says – I’ll sit on my squash thanks Harold. McCaskill says – we’ll separate as soon as we get to the course – you and Harold can look as if you don’t belong with us. Augustine says – yes that’s only sensible. The woman says – is your wife interested in racing too Gus? Augustine says – not really – she’s got so much to interest her at home she never bothers to come very often. He gets up to buy a third round of drinks. As he passes behind the woman she puts her hand to her face so that her arm covers the front of her dress, which has fallen away from her body. While Augustine stands at the hotel bar he wonders what Len Goodchild would think if he saw him on the morning of a race day when there was important business to be done drinking in a pub with such poor types as McCaskill and his girlfriend after all the years when he kept himself aloof from the riff-raff of racing. For most of the afternoon Augustine stays with Sternie in the horse’s stall. When the betting begins for Sternie’s race he leaves the horse and has thirty pounds to three on Sternie, ashamed of his miserable bet and hoping that no one in the ring recognises him as the owner-trainer. When he meets Harold Moy in the mounting yard he says – your friends are no fools Harold – they waited and got twelves and backed him down to fours and fives and I think they’re still putting more on. Harold says – they know what they’re doing Gus – anyway they’ve got plenty to play with – and they’ll have plenty more in a few minutes. Augustine stands staring after Harold and Sternie as they go out into the straight. As he walks back towards the crowd he thinks briefly of the horse Silver Rowan that he always dreamed of training but has never saddled up on any racecourse. He knows that if Sternie is beaten he might never load another horse into a float in the early morning and travel with him to some town where all the mystery and uncertainty of far northern distances gathers for one afternoon at the far side of a racecourse. Harold Moy will go on riding other men’s horses, and men like McCaskill and their girlfriends will cheer home winners that land them bets of hundreds of pounds, but Killeaton might never again send his colours out towards an imprecise horizon and watch them being shifted about by forces that he has no control over and wait to see swept back towards him a great jumble of colours and signs and patterns with one arm of an emerald green jacket, far out to one side of the rest and just ahead of them, rising and falling in a rhythm that starts something alternately soaring up and plunging down inside him. Harold Moy, with the smooth face and sinewy arms of the Chinese who once jogged overland a hundred miles and more to the Bassett goldfields, goes out into the haze on the horse that was discarded as worthless by Mr Sternberg, the soft-fleshed Melbourne Jew. A sleeve the colour of lawns around a mansion in Ireland rises high above jackets and caps and other sleeves coloured after the dreams and fancies of a few farmers and small businessmen and publicans in the dusty north-western corner of Victoria. The flimsy strip of green that once fluttered above the horses Silver Rowan and Clementia flaps and falters and threatens to break clear of the interleaved reds and yellows of the northern plains but goes on fluttering to the end against a background of those commonplace colours. The course broadcaster calls it a blanket finish and says he cannot separate Red River on the inside and Sternie on the outside. The judge awards the race to the horse named Red River. While Augustine is sitting alone in McCaskill’s car outside the St Andrews hotel, he wonders whether Harold Moy and McCaskill might have been planning all along to outwit him, whether Harold might have known that Sternie was good enough to win an open handicap and deliberately brought him home too late in the novice at Jerram so that McCaskill could get ten to one for his money at St Andrews, and whether after all it was the Chinese that he knew and trusted and not the Jew that he had never met who had ruined him. When the others have come back to the car and McCaskill is driving them towards Bassett, Harold Moy says – I’ve said it a dozen times and I’ll say it again – if the race had been twenty yards further we’d have won – but come to think of it Gus I said the same after the race at Jerram didn’t I? he might be one of those horses that’s always going to win a race and ends up breaking your heart. When Harold and Ivan and Rita have come back from spending half an hour in a hotel in a town along the road, Ivan McCaskill says – I hope you’ll excuse me for this Gus but Harold tells me you’re not going so well – I wonder whether you’d consider selling the horse to me tonight if you like for cash on the spot and I’ll fix up the papers and things later in the week – I’m sure if he can’t win a race on the flat we could make a good hurdler out of him. Augustine says – how much will you give me for him? McCaskill says – well he’s seven years old and he’s still a maiden – what about twenty-five quid? Before Augustine can answer, the woman says – Ivan he’s worth more than that. McCaskill says – I’m sorry – I only pulled a figure out of the air – say thirty quid then. Augustine says – he’s yours mate and I hope you get your money back on him – he’s brought me nothing but trouble but I still think he’ll win something before he’s too old – you know one of the smartest men in Melbourne picked him out at the yearling sales and paid a good few hundred quid for him. When they reach Bassett McCaskill drives to a big house near the racecourse. Augustine sees the name Tiberius Lodge on the gate and realises that the place belongs to one of Bassett’s leading trainers. He wonders how much of the money that McCaskill bet on Sternie at St Andrews belonged to the trainer and for how long the man had been quietly watching Sternie and waiting to back him. Augustine stays in the car while they lead Sternie away. McCaskill comes back and hands Augustine the horse’s bridle and says – this belongs to you of course Gus. They drive Killeaton ho
me to Leslie Street. McCaskill hands him three tenners from a small roll of notes and shakes hands with him. Augustine goes inside with the bridle still in his hand. He says to his wife – a chap just bought Sternie from me and I’m damned if I know whether to laugh or cry – wasn’t there one of those American songs that Clem used to hear on the wireless There’s a Bridle Hanging on the Wall?