by Joan Lindsay
The interview which now took place behind the closed door of the study is unnecessary to record in detail. For the first and last time the two ladies stood face to face with the gloves off. After a few perfunctory civilities on both sides, the fight was on, warmhearted little Mrs Valange lashing out with colourful accusations emphasized by a dangerously waving umbrella, Mrs Appleyard shaken out of her usual public calm growing even more immense and purple. At last the door of the study was actually heard to slam and the art mistress, a moral victor, though beaten on a point of professional procedure, stood with heaving bosom in the hall. Tom was summoned, and Mrs Valange, clutching the umbrella and the valise with Cicero still wrapped in the nightdress, was hoisted into the dog-cart and driven away to the station for the last time.
After a brief unwonted silence in which his passenger scribbled on scraps of paper with a piece of coloured chalk, Tom was handed a half crown and an envelope addressed to Sara Waybourne, with instructions to deliver it as soon as possible without Mrs Appleyard’s knowledge. Tom had been only too happy to oblige. He had a soft spot for little Mrs Valange as he had for Sara, and had every intention of handing her the letter next morning when the boarders congregated for half an hour after breakfast in the garden. However, he was unexpectedly sent off on an errand for the Head, and the letter went out of his mind.
Weeks later, when he came across it crumpled at the back of the drawer, and Minnie read it out to him by the light of her candle, it kept both of them awake half the night. Although as Minnie very sensibly pointed out, what was the use of worrying their soul cases out? It was hardly Tom’s fault, under the circumstances, that the letter had never been delivered. Dear child, she had written, Mrs A. has told me everything – what a ridiculous fuss about nothing! This is to tell you I want you to come and stay with me for as long as you like at my home in East Melbourne – address enclosed – if your guardian doesn’t come for you by Good Friday. Just let me know and I will arrange to meet the train. Don’t worry about the art lessons and keep on drawing whenever you get a spare minute, like Leonardo da Vinci. Fond love. Your friend, Henrietta Valange.
Mrs Valange’s dramatic exit from the College intensified the strains and tensions of the last few days. Despite frustrating rules of silence and the ban on talking in twos and threes without a governess in attendance, it had been conveyed before nightfall, by the passing of scraps of paper and other news-carrying devices, that a Scene had occurred in the study and that the child Sara was somehow to blame. Sara, as usual, had nothing to communicate. ‘Creeping about like an oyster,’ as Edith, never strong on natural history, pointed out. ‘If we don’t get a handsome young drawing master,’ said Blanche, ‘I’m going to give up Art. I’m sick of coloured chalk in my nails.’ Dora Lumley came bustling up: ‘Girls, didn’t you hear the dressing bells? Go upstairs at once and take an order mark each for talking in the passage.’
A few minutes later, still on the prowl, Miss Lumley came upon Sara Waybourne curled up behind the little door of the circular staircase leading to the tower. The governess thought she had been crying, but it was too dark to see her face properly. When they came out on to the landing under the light from the hanging lamp the child looked like a stray half-starved kitten. ‘What’s the matter, Sara? Are you feeling ill?’
‘I’m all right. Please go away.’
‘People don’t sit down on cold stone in the dark just before tea time, unless they’re weak in the head,’ Miss Lumley said.
‘I don’t want any tea. I don’t want anything.’ The governess sniffed. ‘Lucky you! I only wish I could say the same.’ She thought: ‘This wretched snivelling child. This horrible house . . .’ and decided to write to her brother this very night asking him to look out for a position. ‘Not a boarding school. I tell you – I can’t stand much more of it, Reg . . .’ It was as much as she could do not to scream as the tea bell clanged through the empty rooms below. The mice frisking in the long dark drawing-room had heard it too and scampered off under the shrouded sofas and chairs. ‘You heard the bell, Sara? You can’t go down like that with cobwebs all over you. If you aren’t hungry, you had better go to bed.’
It was the same room that Sara had formerly shared with Miranda – the most coveted room in the house, with long windows overlooking the garden, and rose-patterned curtains. Nothing had been changed since the day of the picnic, by Mrs Appleyard’s express instructions. Miranda’s soft pretty dresses still hung in orderly rows in the cedar cupboard from which the child invariably averted her eyes. Miranda’s tennis racquet still leaned against the wall exactly as it did when its owner, flushed and radiant, came running upstairs after a game with Marion on a summer evening. The treasured photograph of Miranda in an oval silver frame on the mantelpiece, the bureau drawer still stuffed with Miranda’s Valentines, the dressing table where she had always put a flower in Miranda’s little crystal vase. Often, pretending sleep, she had lain awake watching Miranda brushing out her shining hair by the light of a candle.
‘Sara, are you still awake, you naughty Puss?’ smiling into the dark pool of the mirror. And sometimes Miranda would sing, in a special tuneless voice that only Sara knew, strange little songs about her family: a favourite horse, her brother’s cockatoo. ‘Some day, Sara, you shall come home with me to the station and see my sweet funny family for yourself. Would you like that Pussy?’ Oh, Miranda, Miranda . . . darling Miranda, where are you?
At last night came down upon the silent wakeful house. In the south wing Tom and Minnie, locked in each other’s arms, murmured endlessly of love. Mrs Appleyard tossed in her curling pins. Dora Lumley sucked peppermints and wrote interminable letters to her brother in her fevered head. The New Zealand sisters had crept into the same bed for company and were lying side by side, taut and fearful of an impending earthquake. A light was still burning in Mademoiselle’s room, where a stiff dose of Racine, by the light of a solitary candle, had so far failed as a soporific. The child Sara was also wide awake, staring into the dreadful dark.
Presently the possums came prancing out on to the dim moonlit slates of the roof. With squeals and grunts they wove obscenely about the squat base of the tower, dark against the paling sky.
10
The reader taking a bird’s eye view of events since the picnic will have noted how various individuals on its outer circumference have somehow become involved in the spreading pattern: Mrs Valange, Reg Lumley, Monsieur Louis Montpelier, Minnie and Tom – all of whose lives have already been disrupted, sometimes violently. So too have the lives of innumerable lesser fry – spiders, mice, beetles – whose scuttlings, burrowings and terrified retreats are comparable, if on a smaller scale. At Appleyard College, out of a clear sky, from the moment the first rays of light had fired the dahlias on the morning of Saint Valentine’s Day, and the boarders, waking early, had begun the innocent interchange of cards and favours, the pattern had begun to form. Until now, on the evening of Friday the thirteenth of March, it was still spreading; still fanning out in depth and intensity, still incomplete. On the lower levels of Mount Macedon it continued to spread, though in gayer colours, to the upper slopes, where the inhabitants of Lake View, unaware of their allotted places in the general scheme of joy and sorrow, light and shade, went about their personal affairs as usual, unconsciously weaving and interweaving the individual threads of their private lives into the complex tapestry of the whole.
Both the invalids were now progressing favourably. Mike was breakfasting on bacon and eggs and Irma had been pronounced by Doctor McKenzie well enough for some gentle questioning by Constable Bumpher, already advised that the girl so far had remembered nothing of her experiences on the Rock; nor, in Doctor McKenzie’s opinion or that of the two eminent specialists from Sydney and Melbourne, would she ever remember. A portion of the delicate mechanism of the brain appeared to be irrevocably damaged. ‘Like a clock, you know,’ the doctor explained. ‘A clock that stops under a certain set of unusual conditions and refuses ever to go again bey
ond a particular point. I had one at home. Never got beyond three o’clock on an afternoon . . .’ Bumpher, however, was prepared to call on Irma at the Lodge and in his own words ‘give it a go’.
The interview had begun at ten a.m. with the policeman in the bedside chair, nicely shaven, pencil and notebook at the ready. By midday he was sitting back with a cup of tea and expressing his gratitude for an abortive two hours that had yielded precisely nothing. At least nothing in the official sense, although he had appreciated being sadly smiled at now and then by one so young and beautiful. ‘Well, I’ll be off now, Miss Leopold, and if anything does happen to pop into your mind just send me a message and I’ll be up here in two flicks of a duck’s tail.’ He rose to go, replaced the rubber band round the blank pages of his notebook with a reluctance not entirely official, mounted his tall grey horse and trotted slowly down the drive towards his one o’clock dinner in low spirits that even his favourite plum pie did nothing to dispel.
On the following Saturday afternoon, the Macedon grapevine reported the arrival of another visitor at the Lodge: a lady, pretty as a picture in lilac silk, in a buggy and pair driven by a foreign gentleman with a black moustache who had asked the way to Lake View at Manassa’s store. Everyone on the Mount knew that Mrs Cutler was caring for the heroine of the College Mystery, rescued on Hanging Rock by Colonel Fitzhubert’s handsome young nephew from England. The latest turn of events was juicy enough to set the village of Upper Macedon gossiping and guessing all over again. It was rumoured that the nephew had broken all his front teeth scaling a sixty-foot precipice. That he was madly in love with the girl. That the lovely little heiress had sent to Melbourne for two dozen chiffon nightdresses and wore three strings of pearls in bed at the Lodge.
In point of fact the heiress’s formidable pile of morocco leather luggage stood as yet unopened in Mrs Cutler’s vestibule. And who but la petite, thought Mademoiselle fondly, could look so beautiful, so chic, wrapped in a faded Japanese kimono? The venetian blinds were drawn against the green garden light that rippled on the whitewashed walls of the bare little room and on the immense double bed with its patchwork quilt, seemingly afloat in a sea cave. The soft summer air caressed and healed like water. They wept a little, embraced long and tenderly, abandoning themselves after the first impassioned greetings to the silent luxury of sorrow shared. There was so much to be said, so little that ever could or would be said. The shadow of the Rock lay with an almost physical weight upon their hearts. The thing was beyond words; almost beyond emotion. Mademoiselle was the first to return to the tranquil reality of the summer afternoon, drawing up the blinds with a reassuring click, of the present peace of the garden beyond. The weeping elm at the window was murmurous with gossiping doves.
‘Let me look at you, chérie.’ The wan little face framed by a fan of ringlets loosely tied by a scarlet ribbon was almost as white as Mrs Cutler’s calico pillows. ‘Too pale – but so pretty – do you remember how I scolded you for rubbing geranium petals on your lips? But see! I have the wonderful news for you!’ On Dianne’s outstretched hand an antique French ring flashed a million rainbows on the patchwork quilt and Irma’s dimple came out like a star. ‘Darling Mam’-selle! I’m so glad! Your Louis is a lovely man!’
‘Tiens! You have guessed it already, my secret?’
‘I didn’t guess, dear Dianne – I knew. Miranda used to say I guessed with my head and knew with my heart.’
‘Ah, Miranda,’ the governess sighed. ‘Only eighteen and such wisdom . . .’ They fell silent again as Miranda floated towards them over the lawn with shining hair. Mrs Cutler, who had taken an immediate fancy to the elegant French lady, now appeared with a tray of strawberries and cream. ‘Dear Mrs Cutler! What would I have done without her? And the Fitzhuberts – how kind everyone is!’
‘And the handsome nephew?’ Mademoiselle wanted to know. ‘Is he also kind? Oh, what a profile in the newspapers!’
Irma had nothing to say of the nephew, reported still too weak to leave his room. ‘You forget, Dianne, I only saw Michael Fitzhubert once, in the distance, on the day of the picnic.’
‘A woman can see everything necessary in the wink of the eye,’ Mademoiselle observed. ‘Tiens! When I first see the back of my Louis’ head I say to myself: “Dianne, that man he is yours”.’
As it happened, Mike was at this moment reclining on the lawn in a deck chair with his Aunt’s carriage rug wrapped about his long legs. Beyond the sloping lawn the lake studded with open lily cups lay like burnished pewter reflecting the afternoon light. From it came the lusty cries and grunts of Albert and Mr Cutler guiding a punt through the lilypads in search of tangling water weeds. In the light blue sky that he would always associate with his Macedon summer, little woolly white clouds were sailing across the dark spikes of the pine plantation on the mountain’s crest. For the first time since his illness, he was conscious of a faint stirring of pleasure in his surroundings.
‘Ah, there you are, Michael! In the fresh air at last!’ Mrs Fitzhubert, weighed down with parasol, cushions and needlework, had appeared on the verandah. ‘Tomorrow you shall have a visitor to brighten you up. You remember Miss Angela Sprack from Government Cottage?’ The nephew however showed no enthusiasm at the prospect of a tête-a-tête with the Sprack girl, of whom he remembered nothing but the ninepin legs and a pink and white face that had reminded him of a simpering Reynolds portrait in the dining-room at Haddingham Hall.
‘I can’t imagine why you’re so critical of poor Angela.’
‘I don’t mean to be critical. It’s entirely my fault that I find Miss Sprack – how can I express it – too English.’
‘What’s all this poppycock about being too English?’ asked the Colonel, emerging from the shrubbery with the spaniels. ‘How the deuce can a person be too English?’
Mike however felt unequal to carrying on the argument on an international level. The visit from Government Cottage was got through somehow on the following afternoon. The Sprack girl was just what Mike had expected – the kind he was implored by his mother to make a point of waltzing with at a county ball. ‘Damn it, Angie,’ the Major complained as they drove down the avenue in the Vice-Regal dog-cart, ‘you’re a regular nincompoop. Don’t you realize that young man is one of the best matches in the whole of England? Fine old family. Title any day . . . plenty of cash.’
‘I can’t help it if he’s not interested in talking to me,’ sniffed the wretched girl. ‘You could see for yourself how it was this afternoon. I’m positive he dislikes me, and that’s the end of it.’
‘You cast-iron goose! Have you no crumb of social sense? I’ve no doubt the little beauty up at the Lake View Lodge will have a try for the Honourable Michael, heiress or no.’
As soon as Michael had dutifully assisted those ghastly legs to clamber up into the dog-cart he had decided to take a stroll down to the lake before dinner. The Spracks, like all boring guests, had stayed far too long, and already the sky was flecked with sunset clouds, the lake calm and lovely in the fading light. He had just turned his back on the retreating dog-cart and was walking rather unsteadily across the lawn when his ear caught the splash of water coming from the direction of the lake, where a girl in a white dress was standing beside a giant clamshell that served as a birds’ bath, under an oak. The face was turned away, but he knew her at once by the poise of the fair tilted head, and began running towards her with the sickening fear that she would be gone before he could reach her, as invariably happened in his troubled dreams. He was almost within touching distance of her muslin skirts when they became the faintly quivering wings of a white swan, attracted by the sparkling jet from the tap. When Mike sank down on the grass a few feet away, the swan rose almost vertically above the shell, and scattering showers of rainbow drops in its wake flew off over the willows on the other side of the lake.
Mike was feeling stronger every day, and more certain of his legs taking the direction he chose for them. ‘I do think,’ said his Aunt, ‘that Michael shou
ld at least pay a courtesy call on Miss Leopold. After all, Michael, you did save her life. It’s merely a question of good manners.’
‘A deuced pretty girl, too,’ the Colonel said. ‘At your age my boy I’d have been knocking on her door long ago with a bottle of fizz and a bouquet!’
Mike knew they were right about calling. The visit could no longer be delayed, and Albert was sent over with a note suggesting the following afternoon, to which Miss Leopold had replied, in a bold sprawling hand, on Mrs Cutler’s best pink notepaper, that she would be delighted to see him and hoped he would come to tea.
It is one thing to make a calm and reasonable decision overnight – quite another to implement it in the light of day. With dragging footsteps Michael approached the Lodge. What the devil was he going to talk about to a strange girl? Mrs Cutler was beaming in the porch. ‘I have Miss Irma in the garden so she can get a bit of fresh air, poor lamb.’ In a little trellised arbour there was a tea table set out with a white crochet cloth and a deck chair with a heart-shaped red velvet cushion for the visitor. The lamb was sitting up in a froth of muslin and lace and scarlet ribbons under a canopy of crimson rambler roses, which somehow reminded the young man of his sisters’ Valentines.
Although Mike had been told often enough that Irma Leopold was a ‘raving beauty’ he found himself unprepared for the exquisite reality of the sweet serious face turned towards his own. She appeared younger than he had expected – almost childlike – until she smiled, and with an easy adult grace held out a hand adorned with a breathtaking bracelet of emeralds. ‘It’s so nice of you to come and see me. I do hope you don’t mind tea out here in the garden? Do you like marrons glacés – the real French ones – I adore them. Deck chairs usually collapse but Mrs Cutler says this one is all right.’ Delighted at not being obliged to take an active part in the conversation – in his limited experience raving beauties were alarmingly dumb – Mike lowered himself into the sagging canvas chair and said truthfully that there was nothing he liked better than tea in the garden. It reminded him of home. Irma smiled again and this time the dimple, soon to become internationally famous, came out. ‘My Papa is a darling but he refuses to eat out of doors. Calls it “barbarous”.’ Michael grinned back, ‘So does mine,’ wriggled into a more comfortable position and helped himself unasked to another marron glacé. ‘My sisters love anything in the way of a picnic. . . . Oh, Heavens . . . what a tactless idiot I am . . . the last thing I meant to talk about was a picnic – oh, confound it, there I go again.’