by Thea Astley
“Father . . .” the boy had begun and had stopped startled as the man turned from him almost roughly and stumbled at a half run through the sand and into the shelter of the trees.
VIII
4 p.m., 10th December
WHEN they had passed the second of the big villages and were somewhere up above Vaitape, Stevenson had stopped the truck and got out, leant against a buritree and been sick. Streaming-eyed, he waited gasping until the spasm settled and looked back at Woodsall from his reddened eyes.
“Sorry,” was all he could manage. His belly felt as if it had been scooped round by a knife.
Woodsall did not know whether to help or ignore in British fashion, as one would a fellow diner who had emitted some unpardonable sound, so he made noncommittal noises and vague movements with the door handle while Stevenson weakly waved him back.
“Do you think it’s your ulcer?” Woodsall asked sillily.
“No. It’s more than that. It’s been happening too much lately.”
“Lay off the late nights, old boy,” Woodsall said, embarrassed. He winked disgustingly and Stevenson had to hide his anger which brought bile straight back to his mouth by clambering into the truck and grinding off in bottom gear, churning along for a hundred yards before making the change up.
Unbelievably green and still, the hills staggered back from the heat like giant walls of sea that broke finally on the far side of this island in a surf of trees while, unsure of itself, the road twisted between low spurs and tidal inlets. Stevenson felt dependent on the truck as if it knew its own way. He clung to the wheel. But near Mount Ebouli, with the harbour and the islands now below them like some dream of bestilled heaven, he was forced to stop once again. This time, while Woodsall held his thin shoulders, he convulsed against the red flushed bole of a palm, but nothing came, only the thinnest trickle of green slime as the pain ripped him open.
“You won’t be able to drive back like this,” Woodsall said. “Let’s turn round. Or for God’s sake let me drive.”
“No!” gasped Stevenson. “They’re expecting you. And I’ve got to get back.” His ruptured eye took in a distant and recurring picture of thigh and breast and her body’s curve over him and more than his own body reaching to hers, some rapt sense that contained a promise or a revelation.
“No,” he kept repeating. “No.” But Woodsall had taken him by now to the truck and helped him up into the back where he stretched out on a kind of palliasse. They moved on again and over the sick man’s head the sky bucketed behind greenery and then as glass stretched like a woman’s body in a yawn that provoked and stirred the next aspect of love.
Fidgeting about, he dug out his little bottle of whisky, uncapped it and trickled some into his mouth where it washed and scarified. His needs extended with each day: the pain, the reaction, the need, the spasm, and the need again. He could not dissociate the quality of his need from the nature of pain and now was uncertain which had come first—the boredom and the drink or the drink and the pain. Somewhere inter-sticed was the need for love that he still knew not to be satisfied. Sleepily now he puzzled on chickens and eggs and chickens crossing roads and, associating, recalled his wife and his son with his gumboil cheeks and the peaked school cap he wore dead straight above his fringe.
“Have a good term, feller?” It was a cheap and crummy school. The badge was too big and the headmaster afraid of something—perhaps it was the parents.
“I don’t really want to go back.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’m lonely.”
Dear God, thought Stevenson. You’re lonely? You? With a hundred knuckly-kneed small boys all shoving and chewing and yapping and running and sleeping and peeing and showering. Lonely?
“You don’t know what it is yet to be lonely,” he said.
“Yes, I do,” the boy insisted.
“Well, what is it then?”
“It’s being in a big crowd and not knowing anyone. It’s being on the wrong side at meals and on sports days. It’s not being picked.”
That’s it, Stevenson thought. That’s it in a nutshell. It’s not being picked, you poor little blighter shot into boarding-school. And he remembered the wind-swept oval in the mountains with mournful pines about its margins and the little scraggly team of small boys pelting round in their sandshoes. Timmy had run with his little skull craning forward and his mouth ajar, tumbling in fifth and only two behind that, while the first and second waggled batons of red and white. He had gone over to him and, putting his hand on the narrow chest, felt the heart throbbing like a bird behind the fragile frame. “Good man,” he had whispered. But Timmy’s lashes had drooped quietly over his failure and he walked away to the stall where the mothers sold hot dogs and pies until he was joined by a porker of a kid with his face hidden by bun.
He said now, “It’s my job, you know. I can’t help it. You have to go away to school because there’s nothing here. I don’t really want you to.”
“I know,” the boy had said. “But can’t I stay here?” His persistence was pathetic.
“How can you? What could you learn at the mission school?”
“I can read.”
“Oh, please,” Stevenson had said. “Don’t make it harder for us. You know we love you more than anything.”
He squeezed his hands tightly together as they stood on the airstrip in the midday heat.
The boy tightened his small face.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll be all right.”
And he had gone off up the steps to the plane door, his red cap still squat on his head and his airways bag swinging from his hand.
He didn’t wave, Stevenson thought miserably as he lay on the truck floor. He fumbled in his pocket for the last letter with the fat handwriting that said, “Dear Dad, Thank you for the pocket money and the book. I have spent it already. I have a friend called David. No one else likes him much but he has a battery set radio and we are let listen at week-ends. I came tenth in history. Sir said the rest wasn’t as good. Please send me ten shillings. Love, Timothy Maurice Stevenson.”
The creasings represented love, he was aware as he folded and replaced the staggeringly simple revelation of suffering and need. “Dear Timmy,” he would write, “Would you like to ask your friend up here for a week or two at the end of term? He can come back with you and your mother. He might find this place amusing.”
And I will be diverted, he swore to himself, from needs of all kinds and will make marital sacrifice and hide the face of lust. He rocked onto his side and closed his eyes and yielded to the bounce of the truck.
He woke at Dravuni with the balloons of three interested faces wobbling above him, Woodsall’s, the mine manager’s and Ted Napara, a native foreman whom he had once seen put away for six months for wife-stealing. He felt a silly sympathy. They were watching him now, their features crumpled with concern and curiosity and a reluctance to administer their diffident aids. Someone eased him up and two of them helped him down, packing their arms under his to walk him across to the mine manager’s bungalow. From a canvas chair he watched the swoon of their melted faces emerge into shape in the half-light of the bougainvillea screen, the eyes shrinking to normal while their tongues created paragraphs of advice from which only a fact or two stood clear: he was to rest up for a day until they could get one of the medical officers from the port.
Later he recalled a bed and coolness and a fan pulsing behind and some hours of loss. When he woke his hands were curled as gently as tendrils, all the tense clenching vanished. Talbot’s wife brought him a plate of beans in butter sauce that he could not bring himself to eat for the moment, but there was a glass of very light dry red wine that he sipped slowly as he sat up. All round, conservatism, even in this temperature and latitude—old family prints of mainland relations—matriarch, patriarch, siblings in rows of sailor suits, all with a patina of sepia and fly speck. Some indoor lilies drooped. The quilt was china white raised piecrust and the floor
an autumnal linoleum in a country that knew nothing of this season, only the frightful fecundity of polished leaf growth, gaudy bract and unscented flower.
He crawled out of the bed and struggled into his creased whites, fumbling round in the darkened room for his watch which now he discovered to have ceased recording at three twenty. Giddiness attacked him then and he dropped back into a chair with his head grasped in his hands and waited. After a while he managed his socks and shoes and the shirt someone had thoughtfully put on a hanger behind the door. He wiped a bean clean of the sauce and sucked at it and, finding it pleasant and soothing, did the same with another, managing this way to finish half a plate. The food helped enormously and with something like pleasure he watched the sun through the wooden shutters slip down suddenly over the Ebouli hills.
Beyond the veranda the sky was a horrible colour like dried blood and the heat a rubber coat that almost forbade movement. Under awnings a chain of creeper was flung suddenly by wind and all at once, struck obliquely, the trees in the front yard leant over towards the squatting factory. It was like a stage direction. One moment unbearable stillness. The next frenetic movement all round the sky edges.
Undecided, Stevenson pulled a croton leaf from the vase and cracked it, rubbing the fragments between his fingers. Down the wide hall behind him came the din of voices and thudding feet from Talbot’s children in the playroom, unexpectedly released from silence by the wild stranger in the yard. He pushed open the door onto their stage and was dazzled by the light.
“I’m sorry I overslept,” he said apologetically. Three towheads inspected his white face and smiled, and Talbot took his arm and drew him in. Woodsall was protected by a long drink.
“It’s only six,” he said. “We’re feeding the kids.”
“I have to go,” Stevenson said. His voice came from outside himself (the mouse in the wainscot, he told himself wryly). “I have to be back tonight.”
Craziness, they all cried, even the oldest of the children who was ten and fancied himself an authority on distance. Foolish man. But even as he insisted they explained that one of the doctors had been rung and was coming in the morning.
“I didn’t want it,” he complained stubbornly. Thinking of Timmy. Thinking of Timmy all those hundreds of miles away writing with the mumps and telling him about the blancmange that had the fly in it. “I really have to go.”
Talbot was not a subtle man, but offered instead the darkness, his illness and the ferocity of the wind that was now working savagely at the surface of the compound, dragging dust about like wool. He was persuaded to have another drink and, above the noise of the banging unfastened doors and the thumping of the children, they were all conscious of a high snarl in the air as it knotted and unravelled among the trees.
“That’s funny,” Talbot kept saying. “It was only a breeze at five. While you slept. My God it’s going to tear the place apart.”
His wife was tying ropes on blinds and bending catches to fit in place. His thanks fell on her through a tangle of loose ropes and slats and he went down the path alongside his host, leaning against the wind. They stood for a minute beside the truck. Talbot kept trying to persuade, not knowing Stevenson was moved by a vision of love he could neither discover nor grasp.
“Don’t stop me,” he snapped impatiently. “I’ve three hours ahead of me as it is.”
Talbot became humble at that and only increased Stevenson’s irritation. It is very hard to forgive those you hurt. He drove off abruptly and was instantly sorry, for in the driving mirror he saw the wind belt the other man so hard he staggered, and felt as if he had delivered the blow himself.
Timmy drove beside him.
He said, “Dad, I don’t want to go back,” over and over, and his father steered stupidly between the shuddering jungle and the munching surf into the wind coming up from Pango.
“I’m sorry, boy,” he kept saying through bouts of pain and nausea. “But wouldn’t it be better, I mean isn’t it better to avoid the nothingness between your mother and father? Why don’t you like Marie? Would you hate it if we lived together? Would you?”
“I’d hate it!” Timmy’s unbroken voice protested with passion. “I’d hate it hate it!” And his father looked down at the stubborn face slanted away from his shoulder, shadowy with a blue fuzz in the truck cabin, and he was so distressed he swung all over the road. This sobered him up for a bit and Timmy vanished; only his hurt marble-clear eyes remained staring greyly ahead under their long lashes, and his skinny wrists sticking out of the school jumper that was too short for him.
Once, Stevenson remembered harshly, he had hugged the child to him on his first holiday back from the mainland and beneath his hands the small heart pumped steadily although his own seemed ail over the place.
“I’ve got something for you,” he said and the boy had eyed him off coldly, this parent who shoved him out into the savagery of the school. So he said “What?” without thanks implicit in the short hardness of the word, making it like a stone he’d chuck at an enemy.
“Wait and see,” Stevenson had said, brimming with the sensation of giving that swamped all other apprehensions. And later he had shown him the model plane gleaming with expense and newness and he had watched shocked as his son deliberately thrust back the pleasure cry that had begun to part his lips and turned to him, instead, an expressionless wiped-clean face.
“Thanks, dad.”
“Do you like it?”
“It’s okay.”
“Don’t you like it then?”
“I said it’s okay.”
“Oh.” Stevenson had gone away and the plane had remained in its box all day untouched and ostentatiously Timmy had lumbered after his old football punting it around the paddock. Yet going past his boy’s room that night late and seeing a crack of light exposing privacy to parental glare, Stevenson had managed to peer in, and there was the boy hunched over the plane, his profile unsmiling but intent, and he was stroking the wing-span like a lover.
Stevenson had almost cried.
And now with the wind and rain sobbing and clubbing all over the truck’s body he again felt the drunken sentimental tears lurch up to blot out the last glimmer of landscape on the hill-hips above the lagoon and the minatory black cone of the crater diver-poised above the southern sea.
It was then, at the angle described by a coconut plantation tangent upon the bulging Tongoa slopes and a glimmer of road that aimed like an arrow at the airport grounds, that he slowed his bucketing truck in time to pick out the knotted figure under the living fence. Even in these final and vigorous darknesses, the antithesis was discernible—the effect of something animate against the obscene vegetable growth that was devouring the whole island with a trumpeting fanfare of wind, metallic and hooting through the hollow pipes of tropic grass.
He stumbled in the dark and the wind took him from behind and flung him on the grass hump, where the other lump, that second one of sixty self-accusatory summers, moved uneasily on the earth’s thigh and held her taut face away from the rain.
Miss Trumper was beyond questioning or self-support, he saw at once.
He attempted to lift her, the effort grinding his strange guest, and instantly the pain that had lain at the back of his mind like an animal sprang with the consummate effort that gathered her and lumped her and dumped her in the corner of the truck cabin. Water trickled out of her clothes onto the floor and with that mixed the stench of urine pitifuly uncontrolled. Her face flinched.
Some delicacy made him rearrange her sodden clothes after he had settled her with her head against the door. The frailty of her stick-like legs appalled him above the incongruity of snazzy beach sandals through which bulged the blue and veined feet, the lumpy toes. God help you God help, he said continually, and the pain dragged more prayer out of him in a sticky worm of self-humbling; but as he drove he managed now and again to watch her old head wobble and fall forward and her mouth drop slackly. One hand, he observed, gripped tightly, tightly about s
ome object, so he reached his free hand out to pat the cold skin and found contact with smooth metal. Even as he worked his fingers, gently prising at hers, he realized she was clutching her teeth.
Pity accelerated.
He smashed and flung the truck into town along the last whining, fast obliterating reaches of road over which a tangle of branches like hyphens connecting tree and earth were scattering themselves. And when he reached what should have been the safe glittering cluster of mission hospital, there was only a kind of writhing busyness.
Between the tossing of wind and the faceless people who seemed to be hurling themselves around portions of bucking wall, he was lost and utterly unable to establish links, although he plucked at and called several who snapped and said “for God’s sake” as he stammered “But here, but this woman.” They wrenched themselves away from his hands in the rain to attend to the battered victims still trapped in their beds.
Behind him Miss Trumper moved in the dark. Scattered, unfused sounds tumbled from her, bringing him back to the truck where he took her cold hands between his own, patting and rubbing, and bent his compassionate ear to her streaked mouth which was flecked with saliva and pleas.
She was babbling for a priest.
“I know,” he assured her. “I’ll try.”
But she gave no sign of hearing his assurance, and once her eyes opened, almost lizard-like between her words, and the aged irises found him for a few seconds, held him in focus, and underlined her cries. She was beginning to tremble, too, not with the shivering of cold but with the involved slow-developing uncontrollable shake of shock, that, continuing, grinds the flesh from the bone and the last essense of humanity from the spirit. Her hair hung like old grass.