Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  The elderly Chinese composed his hands in front of him, eyes set in a spiderweb of meaningless wrinkles; and the fat lady, her moony face filled with gentle unconcern, her definite gestures, her bag of dead hair with one wisp at the bottom escaping as a child’s golden curl.

  – The cow died, Miss Brinsmead commented. Why does that make you jump? Alice died. She what? Mercy went because of Alice? To save her?

  For the first time the man opened his mouth and spoke.

  – What if I smashed your bloody head in with this spanner?

  – Of course you’re upset, she cooed imperturbably. And we all offer you our sincerest condolences Mr Ping. This is a sad day. The people are gathering at the Mountain, I should be there by rights. Don’t forget me if there’s anything I can do.

  She turned her back and ambled home.

  In the turmoil of his conscience, Rupert Ping knew there was a lot he could be accused of, and far more that folk would try pinning on him. He wished at this moment he might be an artist like Miss Bertha McAloon and have some means of creating a statement that he could give the town as a gift, summing up his long martyrdom to Mercy and the Whitey’s Fall school.

  Was I frightened? Fido wrote in his diary marked SECRET. He had gone to the door believing for a moment it was a birthday cake delivery.

  He recognized the mountain now as an obstacle. Yes he painted it with dark resentful impasto and yet in a sense carelessly. He asked himself was he frightened? But it was only that mad lady at the door yelling for help when there was nothing but a revelation of yellow street, which he felt as physical joy. He had pulled up the blind on a glaring sea of saffron dust from which her shoes and her legs grew mauve shadows. He let her look at him, on purpose, because of this gift. And if news got round, so what? Was it any worse than the goldrush?

  Also, when he looked out of the kitchen window at the familiar swirling shapes, the bleached snake of road being eaten by green frogs, hadn’t he seen her with the man called Bill Swan going fast downhill leaning the motorbike as they went round corners? Bill Swan who came asking for gelignite, the very gelignite he needed himself and had hidden away? Fido enlarged the diary entry:

  Her face twisted up like a lot of big freckles. Gruesome. Is it always like that? Her neck was red with tiny green goose-bumps. I could have bitten it. Inside her jumper she was all shaky and mumpty. She has got big teeth that look strong. I don’t like them. Stones.

  The overlapping weatherboards of the School of Arts behind her advanced busily as grey breakers in a windy sea. He brought the brown of her hair forward with pink confetti. As for the sky, Fido took brave risks with the sky, this being a more familiar tradition, even to leaving bits out altogether. Which pleased him.

  Tea being served on the verandah amid the smells of paint and disinfectant. Senator Halloran insisted he found it delightful and didn’t object to any smell. This was true enough while he angrily recollected Mr Sebastian Brinsmead’s lecture: Australia is a continent on which you cannot build anything acceptable both to the land and to permanent habitation. The old fogey dialled the police: it isn’t a country for buildings, the natives never had any, and if we’d been more sensitive to where we were neither would we in all probability. What we do put up can’t possibly stand as part of the country, either it will remain an imposition or else it’ll rot, hello, Constable Pope? Constable …? No, the senator wasn’t in the least troubled by any paint smell, thank you. He received his cup of tea with gratitude and began to explain how slowly and with what habitual care he had been driving up the mountain. But even while he talked, his attention was employed in closely observing his hostess. Of course he was agitated and suffering a nervous reaction himself, nevertheless he remained collected enough to find her positively pleasing: the warm swell of her breasts a reassurance, her quick eyes lovely, her decisive movements comforting. In all, she was energetic yet feminine. So capable but vulnerable, yes, this he felt to be true, and hadn’t he witnessed her prompt courage out there on the road? Then as she answered him and changed the topic he admired her for diverting him from treacherous confessions. Yes he admired her. He knew now he had been admiring her all along. And especially the discreet signals of a sense of humour, which might blossom on a more appropriate occasion. He commented on the view, the splendid prospect of the entire region.

  – Miss Lang, he observed. You at least appear to have no aversion to painting and repairing your property.

  – Ought I to have?

  – Well Whitey’s Fall as a whole has … or I’ve been led to believe so. A definite preference for a state of collapse.

  – If the condition of the buildings… she partially acquiesced.

  – And they’ve told me to mind my own business. Though I’m on the Aesthetic and Historical Resources Commission. You see, we have a plan for the area, including monuments which we’d like to keep untouched, he explained, his breath coming in short bursts.

  – Picturesque, Vivien supplied with a hint so faint it was missed.

  – I came hoping to hear other views than those put by Mr Brinsmead in his letter, so I’m very pleased to have met you. But tell me, what does a woman of education do in a backwater like this?

  – Please don’t quote me as having any opinion, Vivien said hastily. I’m quite new here and still feeling my way. Mr Brinsmead is a genuine identity, not to mention his sister.

  The senator gazed at the future, displeased. Had he been wrong? She was violating his image of her already. As if wilfully punishing himself, he reverted to the subject of the accident and his own part in it.

  – The strange thing was, I knew we were headed for trouble. I did see the truck on one of the bends higher up, only for a couple of seconds, but enough to notice something the matter with it.

  – She was driving with a flat tyre.

  – The truck was wobbling, quite definitely I saw it wobble. That’s why I think it couldn’t have been avoided.

  – I was a witness. I shall certainly tell the police the truck was out of control.

  Vivien looked away hurriedly towards the garden to protect her distress as she remembered. Her lips trembled on the verge of tears. She could not face him, little expecting the whole new situation awaiting her.

  – Hullo! she said in quite another tone. A visitor.

  An elderly man edged his way up the track towards her gate, pushed along on two walkingsticks. He paused, cleared his throat and spat discreetly to one side.

  – The pace things happen here, complained the senator. The shock reaction prepared to set in.

  Vivien made her way down the steps, unaware of how closely Senator Halloran observed her movements, though a certain look in his eye had already astonished her. The visitor waited a polite few yards from the gate allowing her to reach it first. He was nodding agreeably to the tea party.

  – Beautiful day, Vivien greeted him, realizing in retrospect that in some way she had caught the senator out.

  – Could do with a drop more rain though, replied Uncle smiling in all his hundred wrinkles. Bessie Collins told me you was here. Are you comfortable in the old place, like? He moved to the gate and rested his arms there.

  – I love it.

  – By jiminy you’re …

  They stood close but not shaking hands, his face telling her something forgotten, sweet and precious. Uncle could not speak, a painful happiness beat in his chest and choked him. The perfume of grass tugged and nudged them, the wind rushing to get past.

  – Annie, he croaked finally. His eyes in their slack lids filled with the youthful shining sky. She had nothing to say, understanding what she wasn’t able to put a name to.

  Uncle had walked this way countless times. He knew every bend in the track. The turning leading to her gate he had cut with his own mattock, so shouldn’t he know it? Through a private mist he saw Annie walking down to meet him with that loping dignified walk just suppressing a dance in the step, her large limbs, her manner giving her away, the pride of being sen
sible. So he’d tease her with his wicked suggestions until the blush spread from her cheeks to her neck and down across her bosom. He also knew her quick anger when she thought her independence was challenged. There had once been a gold digger went mad, shooting at random, stumbling up the track in a frenzy and Uncle, scared as he was, went out on that verandah just up there to chase the bloke off and protect Annie, but Annie had followed and she it was who’d said poor man, has nobody bathed your cut head? Here hold still, you can’t imagine how it’s been wounded, and I’ll see to it, come along in. It was Annie who’d pushed aside the shotgun like an irrelevance and led the madman into her house to feed and bandage him and later explain to the new doctor the stresses of a lonely life prospecting; so the man went back to the main street and apologized to everyone, shamefaced and polite, before driving away in the ostentatious luxury of the doctor’s American car, down to the coast where he could catch a steamer home to Sydney. And weren’t the four cypress pines, each guarding a corner of the house, the very saplings he had planted for her seventy years ago, wanting to say: my love will grow and last as long as these, but instead saying: make sure you water the bloody things or they’ll die on you, so that she laughed and kissed him. And wasn’t the verandah itself the one he’d built singing as he hammered and sawed, swearing it would be solid enough for a clan of Scotchmen to go dancing the strathspey. And when he came home from a trek, the bullocks a-lather and storekeepers bullying to be first off with their orders, men weeping over their mail and women handling the heavy bales of fabric, dogs setting up such a racket the bullocks would jingle their yokes and kick out sideways from fear… wasn’t it always the way, he’d look for her and she’d be among the women not making anything special of it, smiling at her work and heaving solid bolts of cloth or crates of bottles, and Walter Schramm who’d opened the Mountain Hotel with a German band concert, giving her a pat on the bottom like the cheerful Rhinelander he was, so she swung round and clouted him a beauty, and the nightflares had flickered and smoked right through till the early hours on these great occasions while diggers drank and danced and sang and did their best with their lives, while the shopkeepers slaved the whole night unpacking goods, tallying the stuff and its condition, marking the delivery slips and invoices, spiking each one completed, then loading their counters and shelves with temptations. But most of all wasn’t his mind full of Annie’s violin, that lonely, close, strident, wistful sound? Sweet, clumsy Annie perched on the edge of a kitchen chair, fiddle jammed under her chin, eyes closed to help her remember, and fingers a-flutter while the bow sawed; the music of reels and jigs, sad airs and keening, old songs and new waltzes, she gave them all. Sometimes of an evening you’d hear her from as far as the School of Arts, you could stand under the trellis out of sight and think what you chose (it had been done) while the distant melodies threaded their way down to you with the occasional help of night birds and treefrogs. Every step of the track Uncle knew. The slope of it, the sideways cant, still caused him to suck at his lips with resignation; he’d meant it to be perfect but he wasn’t the best with a mattock nor the most patient. That perfume of grass made his silly head sing. He slapped one hand on the gatepost.

  – Annie Lang, he said. You always said you’d get me in the end. Here I am at ninety year and no more sense than I had at twenty.

  Vivien watched the visions moving in his eyes, the ancient hand like a weather-worn glove, the quivering chin, cruel comprehension breaking down his smile into a grimace of disillusionment. He consulted her eyes shyly, pleadingly: one stranger to another.

  – Well, she said. I’m Annie’s kin. She’s my great-aunt. I look like her, don’t I? She’s told me about you, if you’re Uncle. She calls you Arthur.

  What he needed was comfort, you couldn’t mistake that. It gave her a power which she found gratifying.

  – My aunt told me she’d been a fool to throw her life away on anybody else but you.

  He didn’t bother to conceal the spasm of pain. This resolved a question of sixty years’ standing. He had not been wrong.

  – She’s still alive and she said to give you a warning, those were her words. Any old buck from you and your noisy mates, Auntie said, and she’ll be here with the big stick to sort you out. That was exactly how she put it.

  Uncle’s joy was urgent, he clasped her across the gate, no words in him for what he knew. Tears ran down the side of his nose because his face was cocked at an angle, for as well as being taller, she stood higher on the slope. He had to reach up to hug her. So, with the awkward gate between, they swayed in an unequal embrace. His heart sang its unbearable pulsing, his face alive with the rich years. Vivien returned the gesture. Sick though she felt with the knowledge of Mrs Ping’s death, she answered his hands with hers. She was learning. She had not known people other than Auntie could behave like this. And Auntie wasn’t the same, being a relative. Vivien’s upbringing had been polite and urbane in most respects: for as long as childhood lasted she sat at table with her elbows tucked in the way her father wished to see them, or hands in her lap, always knocked at closed doors, never lounged crosslegged. Necessity had made her compliant. Her father was a widower and he relied on her cooperation so that a decent home would be possible. He used to say: If I have to wear myself out teaching you the basic things, how are we going to have time left for fun? Not that they were ever known to have fun or anything like it, even though she satisfied his least whim in this matter. She came to be in charge of the practical things, that was her reward; cooking, sewing and washing since she was seven. But there’d always been some necessity for not having it seem so. Half her energy (it was her own energy the relationship exhausted, not his) was wasted on appearing to be good when she felt wild, appearing to be helpless and decorative when she was practical and bossy. The only time she had ever disgraced herself in his company was once in church. It was an ancient church, perhaps the one at Peterborough because they did visit Peterborough, right in the middle of a solemn silence, somebody in a nearby pew broke wind; she doubled up, cramped her stomach to stop herself laughing and shaming Daddy, but the culprit ruined everything by saying in an elderly apologetic and perfectly audible voice, pardon! This finally was too much and her obscene bubble of laughter caused an entire family in front to half-turn disgustedly in her direction, and a deaconess behind leaned forward to scorch her with a hiss. Daddy was mortified, which you could understand, especially on this particular Sunday because some important person with him was apparently impressed by his piety. And Daddy knew hardly any people of the assistant manager class.

  Taken as a whole, Vivien had enjoyed a happy childhood, but one so needlessly taxing that she could not now understand her father’s motives. Nor those of any of his circle, the visitors who came and joined them for dinner occasionally, or more often for ersatz coffee after dinner, who stayed till late to make up a four for whist or a three for darts or a pair for draughts. She (who now struggled again for the control to accustom herself to the thought of Mrs Ping’s pulped flesh underneath the truck, the stench of bile) had been encouraged by her sole parent to appreciate nature, harmless things like primroses and catkins and brooks, but not vipers or nettles or caves; to be kind to animals, which involved putting oneself in the animal’s position – How would you like to be a beetle trodden on by some mountain like you? She learnt to express profound respect for Queen Elizabeth, Henry VIII’s daughter, Henry himself being another honoured if naughty person, Sir Francis Drake, Boadicea, Lord Nelson, King Alfred and many more. She thought affectionately of Scottish heather which she’d never seen, of the Orchard of England, the snowcapped mountains of Wales and the Welsh coalmines with their dead canaries as well, the goodness of Sir Humphry Davy’s heart, she thought affectionately about the Houses of Lancaster and York, the red rose and the white, wool and cotton, about Stonehenge and the Potteries, the Fens and the Backbone of England which was a Watershed. She knew why Mary Queen of Scots had been in the wrong and Cromwell too, for different if simil
ar reasons. Hitler was anathema to her and so were the Japanese. She remembered Heligoland and the Bikini Atoll, knew the hums of Pooh and had herself treasured a teddybear until she was thirteen. Lord Tennyson was the poet she most admired though she’d scarcely read more than ‘The Lady of Shalott’. Yet through her childhood of adult impositions and strictures, she remained adventurous. She never hesitated to be first into a boat, or across a railway line when the signals said all-clear for the train, or up a ladder, or into the Haunted House. Her friends had squealed with alarm, but she plunged her hands into the beehive to lift out the frame of honeycomb crawling with its dangerous creators, she it was who’d mixed the bad-egg gas for the geography teacher’s desk, and though it wasn’t she who actually put it there she accepted the blame. And who was it had torn a map of the stars from the public library’s Encyclopaedia Britannica to use that night in a successful bid to identify Orion? Most of all, she it was who had loved and loved Aunt Annie when everybody else laughed at the mad old lady, and it was to her that Aunt Annie had given her violin, that eccentric instrument with its powerful tone. Vivien’s talent for music had disconcerted her father even in the comb-and-paper days. So she realized her hands, surprisingly, knew what to do. They untied knots when others failed, cleaned fish, painted portraits that shocked Miss Mountcastle, mastered the fiddle, kneaded bread. And now they knew how to cope as a leathery old man clutched them, praised them with his gentleness, adored them with his lack of restraint. She was embarrassed to have him behave like this in front of an outsider who would certainly be weighing every move over the rim of his teacup, but her embarrassment was more on his behalf than her own so he didn’t feel it. The sick nausea that had been with her for some reason (surely?) was no longer a trouble.

  – Please come in Uncle, I’m not alone but never mind.