by David Rain
Roger pushed Phelps, who crumpled to the floor.
Despairingly, Roger surveyed the squalid room, the gas fire with its meter, the rickety single beds, the mouldering wallpaper, the brown stain that crept across the ceiling, and knew he could never stay. Long ago, in another world, his secret life with Phelps had filled him with welling power. No more. It disgusted him. But it was over. He would break away.
In that moment, for the last time in his life, Roger Dansie felt a marvellous lightness, as if he could fly through the open window, escape into the velvety dark and never return. It was time. For all his success, for all his new friends, Crater Lakes still reached out long tentacles, lashing him down. Now, at least, those tentacles must be cut. He had no more need of Quentin Phelps.
‘Where are you going?’ whined the stinking trembling thing as Roger grabbed coat, suitcase and umbrella, and marched, footsteps thudding, towards the door.
‘Colin’s digs are round the corner.’
‘No!’ Phelps flung himself after Roger. What happened next would always be a blur to Roger; it was the subject of much discussion in the trial that followed, and he could never describe exactly the sequence of events. But it was simple, it must have been: Phelps interspersing himself between Roger and the stairs, crying, pleading (others in the house claimed to have heard a commotion); the two men grappling; Phelps tumbling down the stairs and cracking his head; Roger thundering after him, calling, ‘Quentin! Quentin!’ with grief that gripped him so tightly he knew it would never let him go.
Roger lived through the trial as if through a dream. There wasn’t evidence enough for murder, though the strong suspicion persisted that the death of Quentin Phelps had been more than mere accident. Endlessly, both prosecution and defence trawled through the facts, including the schoolteacher’s prior convictions in Australia (a good half-dozen) for soliciting. ‘Mr Phelps forced himself upon you. Naturally you defended yourself,’ insisted Roger’s counsel, but Roger’s acting skills appeared to have deserted him.
Witnesses were no help. The Irish landlady expressed amazement, even horror, that she had let out a room to a pair of nancy boys (‘I runs a respectable house, I do’); the old tart, who described her occupation as ‘gentlewoman’, said she had always thought those two fellows not quite-quite. The Australian writer and his mistress complained about the noise. Colin Manning-Symes blushingly denied all knowledge of the ‘true nature’ of the friendship between Mr Dansie and Mr Phelps. The verdict was manslaughter.
The case, of course, was in all the papers. Sir Laurence Olivier declined to comment.
Roger Dansie spent five years in Holloway Prison. Upon release he attempted fitfully to begin a new life. He was not penniless: the remnants of the Dansie fortune brought him a small income. For a time he travelled: France, Italy, Greece. For some years he lived in Tangier, plunging into a life of Arab boys and hashish. Later he drifted to New York, where he moved on the fringes of experimental theatre, but the heart had gone out of his acting. It was as if a spring inside him had snapped. Filling his mind was the old Dansie house: his home, his bitter heritage. The world lay all before him, but only one obscure provincial place called to Roger Dansie. He was not yet old; he was, when he made his decision, a man of barely thirty, but weary of the world. As a boy, he had dreamed of fame. He had not seen that he was famous already: famous in Crater Lakes. That was his portion; life had no more to offer. Let him return to the town where he had been born.
And so he went back to his tumbledown house, where Jack, all this time, had been awaiting him patiently.
Chapter Sixteen
‘What now, miss?’
Must the boy sound so belligerent? Marlo eyed him with a sad wonderment. He was Skip’s age. How could so young a child get so fat? He had red swollen cheeks, no neck, and pendulous breasts visible beneath his school jumper; his buttocks and thighs might have burst at any moment from the brown polyester that barely contained them. She had heard that the boy had got into some sort of trouble; his mother, hoping to reform him, had inveigled Auntie Noreen into giving him an after-school job.
‘Did you shift that potting mix?’ said Marlo.
Brenton breathed. ‘Them big sacks?’
‘Out the back.’ Marlo jerked a thumb. The boy grunted and mooched away. Skip said he had no friends. Once (Skip was vague on details) he had run his own gang; now, for some reason, all the kids laughed at him.
Marlo looked at the clock on the wall. Still half an hour! Wearily she applied herself to the big Remington she had never liked so much as Olly Olivetti.
Clack. Clack-clack. Now payable.
Tab. Tab. Dollar sign.
Heat beat on the tin roof. Summer here would be stifling. More than once Marlo had thought she would quit. But for what? She needed money. Better Puce Hardware than a Coles New World checkout.
‘Bloke here to see you.’ Uncle Doug stood in the doorway.
‘What bloke?’ said Marlo, too late, and had half risen from her desk when Howard Brooker stepped past her uncle. Colouring, she sank behind the Remington again; Uncle Doug slipped away as Howard, with a smile, planted himself in the easy chair and crossed one long leg over the other. Bemusedly he looked around at the Mobil calendar, the Pix, the Alistair MacLeans. He lit a Silk Cut and offered the pack to Marlo, who waved it away.
He blew out smoke. ‘Saw young Brenton on my way in.’
‘One of your more promising pupils?’ Restless feelings churned in Marlo. Howard wore a wide tie, fire-engine red, and a canary-yellow shirt made of synthetic fibres. ‘I’m worried he’ll turn violent one day. Upend half the stock, sling gasoline around, strike a match.’
‘He’s a mummy’s boy. We miss you, Marlo.’
‘Who’s we?’ Marlo stuffed papers into a file. Uncle Doug had written on the battered cardboard in big slanting letters: CALTEX SERVO.
She stood abruptly, making for the filing cabinet. Damn Howard. Her hair was a mess.
‘The play can’t work without you,’ he said. ‘Mrs Singh stepped into the breach, but she’s no Petra. The part was made for you. Sure, it’s only am dram. But I want to make an impact on this town before I go. This is my one chance.’
‘You’re going?’ Marlo tried to sound indifferent.
‘I’ve been offered a post in Adelaide – PAC.’
‘Prince Alfred College? What about London, Paris, decadent Berlin and the Côte d’Azur?’
If Marlo’s mockery angered him, Howard did not let on. ‘Later. I’ve had enough of it here.’
‘Mrs Novak can’t be pleased.’
‘Marlo, we were good friends, weren’t we?’ He caught her hand.
‘You were my teacher. Of a sort.’
‘You’re still enrolled for those exams. You’ve got to sit them.’ Marlo, at first, had neglected to snatch her hand away. Too late, she pulled free, and hoped that Howard did not feel encouraged. ‘Of course,’ he was saying, ‘you’ll need further coaching. Quit this rotten job. You can study in the school library. After classes I’ll sit with you. We’ll go through past papers; Mr Singh can help with maths. The play’s in six days. Do it, and I’ll see you matriculate.’
Marlo almost laughed. ‘You’re making a deal with me?’
Howard stood up. His face – and he was handsome – hovered above hers. ‘Good one, isn’t it? Mutual benefit.’
A voice came: ‘Home time!’ Pavel faltered when he saw Brooker.
The teacher, as he took his leave, whistled a little tune. Mozart? No, the Carpenters. ‘And oh,’ he said from the doorway, ‘I meant it about quitting. You’ll have a scholarship soon.’
Marlo’s face was flushed.
‘You’re coming home?’ Pavel seemed uncertain. Brooker, in these last weeks, seemed to have vanished like an illusion. But that was the illusion. Everything that had been before was still here now.
They drove in silence. Marlo wondered how Brooker could have changed things so quickly. Angrily, she told herself he had changed nothing, b
ut she was lying to herself and knew it.
They had almost reached the old Dansie house when Pavel pulled up at the side of the road. A warm wind was blowing. Magpies carolled raucously out of waving grass, and he shook his head slowly and said, ‘You love him, don’t you – the teacher?’
‘No.’ Marlo turned and took his face in her hands. ‘I’ve never loved him. I never will. But he makes me think about things I wish I wouldn’t. Oh, Pavel! I can’t just be the girl at Puce Hardware.’
‘I know.’ He pulled away gently. ‘But everything’s going to be all right. You’ll leave the Lakes and so will I.’
‘Not yet,’ said Marlo. ‘Nothing’s happening yet.’
He drew a letter from his pocket and thrust it towards her. Uncrumpling it, Marlo knew at once what it was, but when she read it she inhaled sharply all the same. A week! Only one week more.
Clouds, long and ragged, travelled through the sky.
‘How long have you known this?’
‘Solves everything, eh?’
Clumsily, violently, she flung herself across him. So much had happened in these last weeks that Marlo had barely known what she felt, only that fate was propelling her forward. She heard Pavel’s heart thumping, thumping, and knew it was the drumbeat of passing time. At last she drew back and stared tearfully into his dark eyes. ‘You fool,’ she whispered. ‘I love you.’
‘Easy to say that now.’ His voice was sad, not angry. The old Dansie house hovered behind shifting trees, unreal, a picture from a story that was about to end. In years to come (Marlo saw it now) the life they had lived there would be distant as a dream. It might have been one already.
‘Kiss me, Pavel. Maybe we won’t always be together,’ she said, shutting her eyes now. ‘Life is long and contains so much. We’re barely more than children. We’ll grow up. We’ll change. But what we’ve had will always be with us. We’ll remember. Kiss me, you stupid boy.’
He did, and she felt herself tumbling down and down in warm darkness, and wanted never to stop. Uselessly, she knew that she didn’t want to grow up: she didn’t want to change. Let them fall unendingly.
The Land Rover’s engine was still running.
‘It’s my duty,’ said Pavel. ‘But I don’t want to go.’
* * *
‘Throwing stones?’
‘Throwing stones.’
Often Roger Dansie appeared as if from nowhere. He sat down beside Skip. She tossed another pebble into Dansie’s Pond, then wondered if this was rude to Roger; after all, it was his pond. She dangled her legs from the edge of the Jump. Below, ripples spread and dispersed. Why disturb the water anyway? It was better when it was still, like glass. She put the stones down beside her.
‘You don’t look happy,’ Roger said.
The sun was setting and Skip squinted as she looked into his face. Ghosts should be old and scary; Roger was young, or appeared to be. His eyes were blue shards in a pale unwrinkled face. He wore a tweed jacket – stylish, if a little moth-eaten. The rocky walls around the pond were turning red.
‘I don’t like it,’ Skip said.
‘You’re talking about your sister?’ He knew.
‘Why does she have to do that stupid play? Brooker’s play!’ To Skip, it was a betrayal. She had fought with Marlo, trailed her sister about the house for a whole evening begging her to see reason, to come to her senses. Didn’t Marlo have Pavel? Howard Brooker was a creep of the first water. For Marlo even to be in the same room as him was, for Skip, madness. ‘He’s blackmailing her, I’ll bet. It’s about those exams, it must be: be in the play or I’ll fail you.’
‘I hardly think he could do that,’ said Roger. ‘It’s a public examination. Strangers in Adelaide mark her work. But your sister’s good in the part, you know. I’ve been helping her with her lines. Funny how much of that play I remember. I think I know it by heart.’
‘I hate it. It’s stupid.’ Skip drew up her legs and hugged them to her chest. Mowser, or Purcell, swished towards them, meowing, and she stroked his orange back; his tail, magnificently stripy, prodded the air. ‘A stupid play,’ she went on, ‘about a man inspecting drains.’
‘Not quite!’ Roger’s look was wry. ‘Dr Stockmann discovers a secret that nobody else wants to know. The infection in the water is the foulness underlying this respectable community. If the spa is a health hazard, the town is in dire straits. The baths must close. Businesses will lose money. Who wants to hear that? Besides, these bugs in the water, these bearers of disease, are too small to see. So they say the doctor is lying. It’s easier that way. The town turns on him, casts him out. But he fights back. That’s the thing about Dr Stockmann: he fights back.’
‘I hadn’t seen it like that,’ said Skip, relenting a little.
‘You haven’t seen it at all. It’s a story that could happen anywhere, but especially in a country town. You don’t believe me? Oh, Henrik Ibsen knew all about Crater Lakes.’
‘How could he? He was Danish.’
‘Norwegian.’ Mowser, or Purcell, butted his head against Roger’s thigh. He swung the big cat into his lap. ‘This furry pest wants his dinner soon.’
What was it, Skip wondered, that made her so happy to sit with Roger? He had killed a man and gone to jail. But with him she felt more peaceful than with anyone else.
Dark-eyed, he gazed into the darkening water. His voice was like that water, clear on the surface but deep, mysterious. Beneath the surface were writhing vines, entrapping caves. He must have been a great actor, Skip knew it.
‘Ibsen,’ he was saying, ‘was born in a small timber port where the moan of sawmills filled the air.’
‘There’s a sawmill here,’ said Skip.
‘That’s right. But here there are also fields and woods and lakes. When Ibsen was a boy in small-town Norway, he looked out on pillory, jail and madhouse, and saw nothing green. He always remembered the first time he crossed the Alps, making his way into southern Europe. In the brightness of Italy, he said, he felt he’d been released from darkness into light, escaping through a misty tunnel into sunshine. Most of his plays, the important ones, were written far from home. Yet he never left Norway in his mind.’
Roger spoke about Ibsen as if about a man he had known. How strange it was, Skip thought, that a writer, dead these many years, could carry on in the world that way – a sort of ghost, but not one that scared her. Roger said Ibsen was a poet and a revolutionary.
‘And I thought he was just a boring old man.’
‘You’ve a lot to learn, my dear. Oh, you’re off, are you?’ Purcell, or Mowser, squirmed in Roger’s arms, then strutted away. ‘That’s right, find Jack. He’ll give you your dinner.’
Gently, Roger drew Skip close to him; nuzzling against him, she ached with love. ‘Ibsen,’ he was saying, ‘once defined his subject as the clash of ability and aspiration, of will and possibility – the difference, in other words, between what we want and what we get.’
‘That’s all he wrote about?’ said Skip. ‘Over and over?’
‘But that’s everything, don’t you see? The comedy and the tragedy of life! What I love about him is his fearlessness. Ibsen was an adventurer, always questing. He pretty much created modern drama; he put life itself on the stage. He assailed the conventions of his time. When Nora walks out on her husband at the end of A Doll’s House, they said the slamming of that door echoed all over Europe. After that he wrote a play called Ghosts.’
The title echoed in Skip’s mind. ‘What ghosts?’
‘Not the haunted house kind, the real kind – the hidden past invading the present. Ibsen exposed the sins concealed beneath a veil of respectability. What sins? Well, let’s just say one word: syphilis. It was the public outcry against Ghosts that made Ibsen write An Enemy of the People. Because that’s what he was, you see. Ibsen was the real Dr Stockmann.’
Skip, worried about the word ‘syphilis’, said cautiously, ‘Would I understand his plays if I read them?’
‘They’re in the
house. Why not try?’
She screwed up her mouth. ‘Nah. Marlo’s the smart one.’
Roger cuffed the side of her head.
‘Yeow! What was that for?’
‘You’re an uneducated little barbarian, my darling, but you’re not stupid. Quite the reverse. You’re brilliant. You can be anything you want to be. And be warned: I’ll be behind you with a cattle prod, just to make sure.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Skip scooped up her handful of stones again, clenching them tightly, so tightly they dug into her palm. Tears had filled her eyes; she must hold them back. No one had ever cared before what she might become. No grown-up had told her she was brilliant.
The walls of rock had turned purple now; the water below was almost black. Birds clucked and cackled unseen among the trees.
‘I like being in your house, Roger,’ Skip said.
‘And I like having you there. Do you know what Ibsen said about living in a community? No man, he said, is ever free of responsibility for the society in which he belongs, or without a share in its guilt. This is just the beginning. It’s time I became a citizen of Crater Lakes again.’
Skip wondered if Roger was mad like Karen Jane. He had to be, didn’t he? How could he have lived in secret all these years? What had it been like? Was he lonely? Was he afraid? She threw a stone into the glassy mirror below. ‘Do you ever wish you didn’t come back?’
‘It’s my home. I’ve been such an alien in the world, spinning the globe, ending up here and there. I’ve travelled, and for what? You get sick of hating the place you come from, apologising for it, covering it up. Is this worse than England? I thought there was a world out there. But what if Crater Lakes is the world? What if everybody comes from Crater Lakes?’