Picnic at Hanging Rock

by Joan Lindsay

  ‘Oh, please – don’t look so unhappy. Whether we talk of it or not, that awful thing is always in my mind . . . always and always.’

  ‘And in mine,’ Mike said very low, as the Hanging Rock in its dark glittering beauty rose between them. ‘I’m glad, really,’ Irma said at last, ‘that you mentioned the picnic just now. It makes it easier to say thank you for what you did on the Rock . . .’

  ‘It was nothing, nothing at all,’ the young man mumbled into his faultless English boots. ‘Besides, it was really my friend Albert, you know.’

  ‘But Michael, I don’t know – Doctor McKenzie wouldn’t let me see the newspapers . . . who is this Albert?’ Michael launched into a description of the rescue on the Rock, in which Albert figured as the hero, the master mind, ending with : ‘My Uncle’s coachman. Wonderful chap!’

  ‘When can I meet him? He must think me a monster of ingratitude.’ Michael laughed. ‘Not Albert.’ Albert was so modest, so brave, so clever . . . ‘Ah, but you must get to know him . . .’ Irma, however, was aware of nothing but the face of the young man opposite, flushed and charmingly earnest in praise of his friend. She was becoming a little tired of the unknown Albert when Mrs Cutler came out of the Lodge with the tea tray and the conversation turned to chocolate cake. ‘When I was six years old,’ Michael said, ‘I ate the whole of my little sister’s birthday cake at one go.’ ‘You hear that Mrs Cutler? You had better cut me a slice before Mr Michael gobbles it ill up.’ A good laugh, that’s what they needed, the poor young things . . .

  As soon as he could escape from his Aunt’s dinner table that evening, Michael went out to the stables with a kerosene lantern and two cold bottles of beer. The coachman was lying naked on his bed reading the racing tips in the Hawklet by the light of a candle whose wavering flame sent ripples of light across his powerful chest, tufted with coarse black hair. Dragons and mermaids writhed and wriggled with every movement of the muscular arm pointing to a broken rocking chair under the tiny window.

  ‘It’s bloody hot in here even after dark but I’m used to it. Take your coat off. There’s a coupla mugs on that shelf.’ The mugs were filled and at once provided swimming pools for sundry insects attracted by the candle. ‘It’s real good to see you on your pins again, Mike.’ The old comfortable silence took over, broken presently by Albert. ‘I seen you out on the lawn today with Miss Thingummy-bob.’

  ‘By Jove! That reminds me! She wants me to take her out in the punt tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll tie her up in front of the boathouse and leave the pole on the table. And mind out for them lily roots at the shallow end.’

  ‘I’ll be careful. I don’t want to tip the poor girl into the mud.’ Albert grinned. ‘Now if it was Miss Bottle-legs, I reckon a ducking wouldn’t do her no harm. Them quiet ones, Mike, is the worst. . . .’ He winked and took a pull at his beer. ‘By the way,’ Mike said laughing, ‘Irma Leopold particularly wants to meet you.’

  ‘Oh, she does, does she? Cripes, this cold beer hits the spot.’

  ‘Until I told her about you today she had no idea who found her on the Rock. How about coming down to the boathouse tomorrow afternoon?’

  ‘Not on your life!’ and after taking another pull at his mug he began to whistle ‘Two Little Girls in Blue’. As soon as he paused for breath, Mike said, ‘Well what day can you make it?’ But Albert, having changed into a more convenient key, had started again at the beginning with exasperating flourishes of his own invention. When at last he stopped, deflated, Mike repeated, ‘Well? What day?’

  ‘Never. You can count me out on that one, Mike.’

  ‘Then what the devil am I to say to the girl?’

  ‘That’s your business.’ He began whistling again, and Mike, now really annoyed, left his beer unfinished, opened the trap door in the floorboards and descended the ladder into the darkness of the feed room below. Confound Albert! What the blazes has got under his skin?

  On the following day Irma was waiting for Mike on the rustic seat in the boathouse when she heard the scrape of wheels on gravel and looking up saw a broad-shouldered youth in a faded blue shirt trundling a barrow along the path skirting the lake He was moving so quickly that when she stood up and called from the boathouse door he was already half way to the shrubbery and out of earshot. Or might have been. She called again, this time so loudly that he stopped, turned round and slowly retraced his steps. At last he stood facing her, near enough for her to see the square brick red peasant face under a thatch of tumbled hair, the deep set eyes apparently focussed on some invisible object of interest above her head. ‘Was you calling me, Miss?’

  ‘I was shouting at you, Albert! You are Albert Crundall?’

  ‘That’s me,’ he said, not looking at her.

  ‘You know who I am, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know who you are all right. Was you wanting me for anything, like?’ The sunburned arms lay along the barrow handles, the indigo mermaids crinkled ready for flight.

  ‘Only to say thank you for having rescued me up there on the Rock.’

  ‘Oh, that . . .’

  ‘Aren’t we going to shake hands? You saved my life, you know.’ The strange creature was plunging backwards between the shafts of his barrow like an unbroken colt. Reluctantly he lowered his skyward gaze level with her own. ‘Tell you the truth, I never give it another thought once the Doc and young Jim had you safe on the stretcher.’ He might have handed her a lost umbrella or a brown paper parcel instead of her life. ‘You just ought to hear what Mr Michael says about it!’ The brick red features stretched to a near grin. ‘Now there’s a wonderful bloke, if you like!’

  ‘Exactly what he says about you, Albert.’

  ‘He does? Well, I’ll be buggered. Excuse my language, Miss – I don’t often get talking to toffs like you. Well, I’d better be getting on with me job. Ta-ta.’ With a decisive flick of powerful wrists the mermaids sprang into action. He was gone, and Irma found herself almost royally dismissed.

  It was exactly three o’clock. There is no single instant on this spinning globe that is not, for millions of individuals, immeasurable by ordinary standards of time: a fragment of eternity forever unrelated to the calendar or the striking clock. For Albert Crundall, the brief conversation by the lake would inevitably be expanded, in memory, during his fairly long life, to fill the entire content of a summer afternoon. What Irma had said, and what he had answered, were relatively unimportant. In actual fact, the very sight of the dazzling creature whose star-black eyes his own had sedulously avoided, had almost deprived him of the power of speech. Now ten minutes later in the damp seclusion of the shrubbery he sank down on to the empty barrow and wiped the sweat from his hands and face. He had plenty of time in which to recover his mental and physical equilibrium, since he knew, with absolute certainty, that he would never speak to Irma Leopold again.

  Albert had no sooner disappeared through a gap in the laurel hedge when, with the precise timing of three wooden figures on a Swiss clock, Mike came out of the house and Irma – there is always a little wooden lady – appeared at the boathouse door. She stood there watching him hurry towards her, limping a little, over the dappled grass. ‘At last I’ve met your Albert.’ Mike’s honest face brightened as it always did at the mention of Albert. ‘Well? Wasn’t I right?’ Dear Michael! Marvelling that the clumsy brick red youth could command such adoration, Irma stepped into the waiting punt.

  The weather continued warm and sunny and there were daily outings on the placid lake, soothed by the musical box tinkle of the mountain stream. In expensive green seclusion, the Fitzhuberts lay on long wicker chairs watching the season fade. The air in the Lake View garden was preternaturally still this summer. They could hear the bees murmuring in the wallflower bed under the drawing-room window and now and then Irma’s light laughter drifting out over the lake. Beyond the oaks and chestnuts one of Hussey’s wagonettes went creaking by on the steep chocolate road, scattering the pigeons on the lawn. The white peacock
slept, the two spaniels dozed all day in the shade.

  Together Michael and Irma had explored every inch of the Colonel’s rose garden, the vegetable garden, the sunken croquet lawn, the shrubberies whose winding walks ended in delicious little arbours, ideal for the playing of childish games – Halma and Snakes and Ladders – on straight-backed garden chairs composed entirely of cast-iron ferns. There is no need for anything much in the way of conversation, which suits Mike very well. When Mrs Fitzhubert comes upon them holding hands on the rustic bridge she sighs. ‘How happy they look! How young!’ And asks her husband, ‘Whatever do those two find to talk about all day long?’

  Sometimes Irma finds herself chattering as she used to do long ago at school, for the sheer delight of tossing out words into the bright air, as children enjoy sending up a kite. Unnecessary for Mike to answer, or even to listen, so long as he is there beside her, leaning over the rail with a lock of thick hair falling over one eye with every turn of his head, and aiming endless pebbles at the gaping mouth of the stone frog in the pool.

  Now in the late afternoon the little lake grew cold under the slanting shadows and a few yellowing leaves floated amongst the reeds. ‘Darling Mike – I can’t bear to think that summer is almost over and no more rows on the lake.’

  ‘Just as well,’ Mike said, expertly nosing the punt through the lily pads. He grinned. ‘Actually, the old punt isn’t safe to take out again.’

  ‘Oh, Mike! . . . Then it is over.’

  ‘Oh, well – it’s been good fun while it lasted.’

  ‘Miranda used to say that everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place . . .’

  Mike must have been leaning too heavily on the pole. Irma could hear the water gurgling under the rotting floor boards as the punt lurched clumsily forward. ‘Sorry . . . did I splash you? Those confounded lily roots . . .’

  At the landing stage the lilies were already closed and secret in the half-light. A white swan was rising gracefully out of the reeds ahead. They stood for a moment watching it flapping away over the water until it disappeared amongst the willows on the opposite bank. It was like this that Irma would later remember Michael Fitzhubert most clearly. Quite suddenly he would come to her in the Bois de Boulogne, under the trees in Hyde Park; a lock of fair hair hanging over one eye, his face half turned to follow the flight of a swan.

  That night the mountain mist came rolling down from the pine forest and lingered far into the morning. At the Lodge the view of the lake from Irma’s window was blotted out and Mr Cutler went off to see to his glasshouses, predicting an early winter. At Manassa’s store an occasional customer calling in for the morning paper enquired with flagging interest, ‘Anything more about the College Mystery?’ There wasn’t – at least nothing that could be remotely classed as news on Manassa’s verandah. It was generally conceded by the locals that the goings-on at the Rock were over and done with and best forgotten.

  A last row on the lake. A last light pressure of a hand . . . Unseen, unrecorded, the pattern of the picnic continued to darken and spread.

  11

  Mrs Fitzhubert at the breakfast table looked out on to the mist-shrouded garden, and decided to instruct the maids to begin putting away the chintzes preparatory to the move to velvet and lace in Toorak.

  ‘This ham is distinctly over-cooked,’ said the Colonel. ‘Where the deuce has Mike got to?’

  ‘He asked for some coffee in his room. You must admit those two are ideally suited.

  ‘Positively ragged at the knuckle! Who?’

  ‘Michael and Irma Leopold, of course.’

  ‘Suited for what? Reproduction of the species?’

  ‘There’s no need to be vulgar. I saw them going down to the lake yesterday. . . . Have you no heart?’

  ‘What the devil’s my heart got to do with overdone ham?’

  ‘Oh, bother the ham! Can’t you understand, I’m trying to tell you that our little heiress is coming to lunch today!’

  For the Fitzhuberts, the punctual appearance of the delicious meals borne on enormous trays to the dining-room was a sacred ritual, serving to define and regulate their idle otherwise formless days. Simultaneously with the striking by the parlourmaid of an Indian gong in the hall, a sort of gastronomical timepiece located in the Fitzhubert stomach would inwardly proclaim the hour. ‘I shall take a short nap after lunch my dear. . . . We shall be having tea on the verandah at a quarter past four. . . . Tell Albert to bring round the dog-cart at five.’

  Luncheon at Lake View was at one o’clock sharp. Irma, warned by the nephew that unpunctuality was a cardinal sin in a visitor, smoothed out her crimson sash in the porch and glanced at her tiny diamond watch. The mist had cleared at last to a sultry yellow light in which the rambling façade of the villa under its mantle of Virginia creeper seemed strangely unreal. As Mike was nowhere in sight, she made her way to a less forbidding entrance on a side verandah. The bell brought a parlourmaid from a dark tiled passage where a sorrowful moose’s head presided above a miscellany of hats, caps, coats, tennis racquets, umbrellas, fly veils, solar topees and walking sticks. In the drawing-room overlooking the lake the very air seemed pink, heavy with the scent of La France roses in silver vases. Flanked by yesterday’s pink satin cushions, Mrs Fitzhubert rose to greet her guest from a little pink sofa. ‘The men will be here directly. Here comes my husband now, walking straight into the hall with clay from the rose garden all over his boots.’

  Irma, who had seen sunset on the Matterhorn and moonlight on the Taj-Mahal, truthfully exclaimed that Colonel Fitzhubert’s garden was quite the loveliest she had ever seen.

  ‘Clay is very difficult to remove from a good carpet,’ Mrs Fitzhubert said. ‘Wait till you have one of your own, my dear.’ The girl was certainly a beauty and wore her deceptively simple frock with an air. The Leghorn hat with the crimson ribbons was probably Paris. ‘My mama had two – the first was French.’

  ‘Aubusson?’ Mrs Fitzhubert enquired.

  Oh, Heavens! If only Mike would come! ‘I mean husbands – not carpets . . .’ Mrs Fitzhubert was not amused. ‘The Colonel used to tell me in India that a really good carpet is the best investment after diamonds.’

  ‘Mama always says you can judge a man’s taste pretty well by his choice of jewellery. My papa is quite an expert on emeralds.’ The older woman’s neat little faded mouth had fallen open. ‘Indeed?’ There was simply nothing else to be said and both ladies looked hopefully towards the door. It opened to admit the Colonel followed by two ancient slobbering spaniels.

  ‘Down dogs! Down! I forbid you to lick this young lady’s lily white hand. Ha! Ha! Fond of dogs, Miss Leopold? My nephew tells me these brutes are too fat – where is Michael?’ Mrs Fitzhubert’s eyes swept the ceiling as if the nephew might conceivably be concealed in the pelmet drapes or hanging head downwards from the chandelier. ‘He knows perfectly well we lunch at one.’

  ‘He mentioned something last night about a stroll up to the Pine Forest – but that’s no excuse for being late the very first time Miss Leopold comes to luncheon,’ said the Colonel turning a glassy blue stare on the visitor and automatically registering the emeralds on the slender wrist. ‘You’ll just have to put up with us two old fogies. No other guests I’m sorry to say. At the Calcutta Club eight was always considered the perfect number for a small luncheon party.’

  ‘Fortunately we are not lunching off those detestable Indian chickens,’ said his wife. ‘Colonel Sprack kindly sent us over some mountain trout from Government Cottage last night.’ The Colonel looked at his watch. ‘We won’t wait for that young scapegrace or the fish will be ruined. I hope you like grilled trout, Miss Leopold?’ Irma obligingly adored grilled trout and even knew about the right sauces. The Colonel thought that damned idiot Mike would be lucky if he landed the little heiress. Why the devil didn’t Mike turn up?

  A shared appreciation of the trout’s delicate flavour could hardly be expected to keep a three-handed conversation going throughout the long
leisurely meal. Mike’s place was presently removed from the table. An uneasy silence accompanied the mousse of tongue despite the host’s monologues on rose growing and the outrageous ingratitude of the Boers towards Our Gracious Queen. The two ladies discussed with desperate animation the Royal Family, the bottling of fruit – to Irma the most boring of mysteries – and as a last resort, music. Mrs Fitzhubert’s younger sister played the piano, Irma the guitar, ‘with coloured streamers and those divine gypsy songs.’ As soon as coffee was served the host lit a cigar and left the ladies marooned on the pink sofa behind the carved Indian table. Beyond the French windows Irma could just see the lake, leaden under a sombre sky. The drawing-room had grown uncomfortably warm, with Mrs Fitzhubert’s little puckered face coming and going on the pink air like the face of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. Why, oh, why had Mike failed to appear at luncheon? Now Mrs Fitzhubert was enquiring if Mrs Cutler was any sort of a cook? ‘Dear Mrs Cutler! She cooks like an angel! I have the recipe for her divine chocolate cake.’

  ‘I remember learning to make mayonnaise at my boarding school – drop by drop with a wooden spoon. . . .’ Irma descended from the pine forest where Mike wandered incorporeal through the mist. The drawing-room was spinning.