by Alex Miller
He said, ‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes, I’m still here. I was just leaving for college when you rang. I’d better go or I’ll be late. I hate being late. Can we talk again tonight?’
‘Give me a call.’
‘I will,’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful news. Let me know at once when you hear back from the publisher.’
‘I promise.’
He put the phone down, a small empty space in his belly. He needed to celebrate with somebody. There was no one.
He went down the passage into his study and sat at the desk. He rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter. Dear Martin, I finished my Exmoor novel yesterday. I’m very happy about it and have sent it to the Melbourne publisher you suggested…He tore the sheet out of the typewriter and screwed it up.
He got up and went outside and fetched a spade from the barn and began turning over a new patch of ground in the garden for the peas. The cabbages and sprouts were just about done. A few swedes and turnips still sat in the ground, being nibbled by grubs. His mind wasn’t on the digging. He needed a celebration. A drink with a friend or a lover.
He set the spade in the soil and went back inside the house and poured a glass of wine. He sat at the kitchen table and stared at the phone. Maybe there was someone he could call? He could think of no one. He was listening for the sound of a vehicle. There was no vehicle. He poured another glass of wine. Maybe he should begin another book? Have another go at Frankie and the Gulf. He drank the wine and sat. He thought of driving up to Canberra, but Phil and Ann weren’t there. Who else would there have been?
He fed Toby and Tip. They still believed in him. He set down Toby’s meaty bone by the rainwater tank. Toby grabbed the bone and hunkered down with it, as if he thought Robert might take it back.
58
Day by day, somehow, the weeks went by. He heard nothing from the publisher. Two months later he had still heard nothing. His new attempt at Frankie and the Gulf was resisting him. Every morning, except on mail days, he went into the study and worked at it. He hated it. It made him sick. He knew it was no good. He couldn’t understand why. He read Camus again and Naipaul, and he saw how simple and straightforward their prose was. But it didn’t help. His own words lay flat and dead on the page.
It was coming on to summer, late November, three months since he’d sent off the manuscript of Hunted. He saw the letter sitting on the counter at the pub one morning waiting for him. His eye picked it out and knew at once what it was almost before he was through the door. His heart gave a lurch. He ordered a beer from Aunt Molly, who was standing behind the bar sorting mail. She pulled the beer and set it in front of him. ‘We’re drinking before breakfast now, are we?’
‘It looks like it.’ There was no other mail for him. He drank the beer and eyed the letter. When he’d finished his beer he set the glass on the bar and picked up the letter. ‘See you Friday, Molly.’
‘See you, Robert.’
He had it in the pocket of his sheepskin jacket. He was saving it, like a kid with a special lolly, to be savoured alone in a private place, to get the full pleasure of it. He leaned the letter against the sauce bottle on the kitchen table and stirred up the fire in the stove and set the kettle on the hotplate. He kept looking at the letter sitting there. He was scarcely able to believe it had finally arrived and was not just that persistent aching hope in his mind. He had not given up. He poured a mug of tea and stirred in two spoons of sugar and lit a cigarette. He sat at the table and picked up the envelope and examined it.
The publisher’s address embossed on the back. His own address written in black ink in a neat hand on the front: Mr Robert Crofts, RMB18, Lower Araluen, NSW 2622. His hands had developed a tremor. So it was true, our hands shake at a moment like this. The envelope was longer and more serious-looking than a normal letter-sized envelope. The contents were not bulky, but by the feel of it, there was not just a single sheet of paper inside. There was more to it than the dreaded rejection slip, that was for sure. And they hadn’t returned the manuscript. This wasn’t just a quick note saying your book’s no good and we don’t want it.
He took the bread knife and slit the envelope open. He took out the two sheets of paper and unfolded them. One was creamy white with the embossed letterhead of the publisher at the top, the other was green and filled with writing, no letterhead but his name and the title of his book across the top. He took a drag on his cigarette and closed his eyes for a second or two. Then he read the publisher’s letter.
Dear Robert Crofts,
Hunted is brilliantly sustained and engrossing—and I’ve enclosed one of our reader’s reports which you might find heartening.
I’m very sad to say that I don’t believe we could give the book the kind of distribution it requires.
Thanks for your patience. We’ve been deliberating long and hard about how we could best be involved—but to no avail. Of course, we would like to see your next novel.
With best wishes, etc.
His mouth had gone dry and there was a pulse thumping in his diaphragm as if he had been king-hit. After the first two-line paragraph he had experienced a flicker of ecstatic euphoria—brilliantly sustained and engrossing—so they thought it was that good! Then the second paragraph had dropped him into the void. He was shocked, puzzled and faintly humiliated by this cruel trick, to lift him up in order to drop him dead. Had he read it right? He read the letter through again, frowning at it. And then again. What had he missed? He stared hard at each word, in case it held a key to the true meaning of the letter. Didn’t they long to publish books for their readers that were brilliantly sustained and engrossing? What more was needed? What hadn’t he done?
He stood up, then he sat down again, anger blazing up in him. How could they praise his book so highly and still not want to publish it? He could make no sense of it. He was angry and humiliated and felt sure they must be laughing at the idea of him reading their letter. He picked up the green page of the reader’s report.
The book presents an archetypal situation and achieves mythic force. It’s about the powerless outsider confronting the various power structures and hierarchies of an entrenched social system. The narrator identifies with the hunted stag of the title…
And that’s exactly what it was. The reader had read the real story behind the story.
There was more. A lot more. All of it praise for the strength of the novel. He read to the end of the page then read it again. It was obvious the publisher’s reader had loved the book. They were passionate about it. They had understood the real private story that was hidden in it. He or she ended with, In short, absolutely first class.
But they weren’t going to publish it.
They didn’t want it. He was trying to believe this. He was bewildered. Surely they meant to tell him something else? This couldn’t be all. He walked about the kitchen. He looked into the fire door of the stove and shoved a bit of wood in. He was pretending to be normal. It was as if someone had just died. He said to the room, ‘So how can I go back now and sit down and write another brilliantly sustained and engrossing fucking novel and send it off to them and have them fuck me over again with their shit tricks?’
He went out onto the verandah and gave a great yell of anguished bitterness and frustration. Toby and Tip both got up and slunk away, their ears flattened, tails between legs, hindquarters tucked in. Tip slipped under the tank stand then poked her head out and blinked at him sorrowfully. The echo of his cry following the ridges, faint then loud again. Standing there hearing that echo, the conviction grew in him that he was trapped and alone and powerless to do anything about it. He went back into the house. He could not bring himself to look at the letter again. It burned inside him.
His meat order and the bread and groceries were still sitting on the table waiting to be put away, a blue-and-white box with the new bearing for the water pump. His regular weekly purchase of grog, two flagons of Penfolds red. He unscrewed the top of one of the flagons and
filled his tea mug with the red wine and drank it. ‘Fuck them!’ he said. He wanted to weep. He refilled the mug and sat at the table facing the stove. He felt suddenly exhausted. During the winter the rain had come in through a crack at the side of the little square window in the wall behind the stove. It had left a brown stain on the whitewashed wall in the shape of Italy. Lena had painted the stone and brick of the stove alcove and the open fire white, hoping to make the kitchen look like a peasant cottage in Greece. She had never been to Greece, but she had seen the travel posters. As he had. They both liked the simplicity of the whitewashed look, the modesty of it. He sat there drinking for some time, then he laid his head on his arms and wept.
After a while he sat up and wiped his eyes then got up and went into the study and sat at his desk and stared at his books and smoked and talked to himself. He was afraid of what he might do. The hum of the deep rural silence lay over the house. He was tired, weighed down by the wine and his dismay. He lay on the floor and soon drifted into an uneasy sleep. When he woke it was dark. He wondered for an instant where he was, the hard floorboards digging into the back of his skull, as if someone was pressing a rock against him. His head throbbed. He sat up. He was going to have to tell Lena. He didn’t want to tell her. He couldn’t bear the thought of her knowing his book had been rejected. He felt shamed and embarrassed for the book—as a parent might feel for a beloved child who bore some kind of humiliating defect. He felt as if the publishers had had their laugh and had kicked his book aside and walked away. He had never before felt so confused and demoralised. Cheated.
Days went by. Then a week. Then another week. He didn’t tell Lena. She didn’t call; they spoke only when he called her. She was leading such a busy social life with her new women friends at the college he could imagine her totally forgetting his existence for long periods, unaware of the grinding solitude of his days and nights. Knowing nothing of his bitter failure. His feeling of isolation and helplessness. He no longer went into his study. He had begun to believe he was a failure. The Gulf story had gone silent in his head. Dead silent. A door had closed. He had given up.
59
Summer brought the bees to the garden and the peas and strawberries and lettuces ripened faster than he could eat them. He did think of writing to the publisher and asking them to return the manuscript. Without it he was naked. But he couldn’t face the idea of addressing them. Apart from the mail run he never left the farm.
As the end of the year drew near the weekend shooters started arriving. The sound of shotguns and rifles at night, car doors slamming somewhere along the road, motors revving, men’s voices shouting. He kept a check on Ray’s place. It was empty and forlorn. He was afraid shooters might vandalise Ray’s old kitchen. Leave their shit on the floor. Break down a door. Cut the fence. The sort of thing they did before they went home to their jobs in the foundry or the mine. After one particularly noisy night he decided he had better check on the cattle up the creek and make sure a young beast hadn’t been butchered.
When he put the saddle on the mare he realised the old string girth was rotten. He stood with the girth in his hands. He would have to make a new one. He would have to become fully his old self once again, the stockman with his useful skills. He got out his sewing gear from the box where he had put it in the barn. He untied the thong and rolled out the bundle on the bench. The needles and awls and hole punches for working leather and repairing the gear, the scarred ball of hard wax, the bobbin of twine. The sight of these things and the slightly sour smell of the wrapping reminded him of the day after he arrived in Melbourne and unpacked his gear at the boarding house, the stale air of that room, himself then. He was no longer that person. He had become someone else. He cut the old girth free from the saddle and tied one D to the vice and began to string the new girth, fixing the second D to the end of the bench. He sat on a fruit box and smoked while he did the job. He was out of practice and had to unstring it and begin again, his tensioning all out of whack and his end-weaving loose and crooked. He said, ‘You’re not even any good for this stuff anymore, Crofts. So what are you good for?’ Toby and Tip sitting in the sun in the doorway blinking and scratching. Tip looked over towards him and squirmed and wagged her tail, raising a dust into the sunbeams.
Self-pity and a bottomless gloom sat with him as he struggled to get the girth strung in a workmanlike manner. He knew Frankie would have been disgusted to see his inept fumblings—he and his brothers had prided themselves on the beauty of everything they made, even a casual hatband plaited from wire grass and vines collected on the ride out from the night camp in the morning and strung together at the lunch camp. Frankie had educated him in their way of it—a way in which all things had their respect and their sacredness. As he sat there making a mess of the job, Robert felt he had betrayed everything decent he had ever known. Who should he have really become? Perhaps the mistake was to have left home in the first place. Somehow, and he did not know how, he had failed to make sense of his life after all.
While he worked he looked up every so often at the great timber crossbeam tying one side of the roof of the barn to the other side. It was a beam made for hanging. He was seeing a soft-twist cotton rope slung over the beam and tied off. A noose at the hanging end. His body weighting it taut, so it creaked if you listened hard. A slight sway still in the corpse. That rope would hum if it were struck. Someone would find him there. Not Lena and her friend Margaret coming for their summer visit to the country. He believed now that they were not coming. The blowflies crawling in his nostrils by then, in his eyes, the maggots in the cavity of his open mouth. Bloated and stinking, like the carcass of a dead cow. Only a dead man. His story ended. A broken promise to Ray McFadden to get his old piker bullock the last thought in his mind. Nothing done. Nothing done. His fingers fumbled with the twine.
But of course he wasn’t free to hang himself. What would the dogs do? Toby and Tip sitting there in the sun relying on him for a feed. There would be no one to return their love or to feed them. For the horses, well, he could open the gate and let them return up the river to where he’d found them, and the big ginger cat would go on looking after herself. But the dogs wouldn’t manage without him. Toby came over and Robert leaned down and scratched him behind his ears. Toby closed his eyes with the pleasure of it. ‘It’s all right, old mate,’ Robert said. ‘That’s not the way I’m going.’
He thought he heard the phone over at the house. He wasn’t sure of the call sign and paused, listening, his hands stilled on the twine. A few seconds later the two shorts and one long of his call sign. He got up and put the unfinished girth aside and walked out of the barn into the sunlight, Toby and Tip at his heels. It was a lovely warm summer afternoon, two weeks before Christmas, the blue thistle flowers out along the fence line and Lena’s red rosebush blooming by the garden gate to the dunny and the orange trees, a dozen single-petal roses on it. He thought how beautiful it was, this place, sheltered below the road there in the lower valley. How modest and charming and optimistic the cottage, butted into the side of the green hill in the sun, the vegetable garden and the three horses in the paddock below, their coats shining with the oats, watching him now in case he was carrying a scoop of oats or a bridle.
He went into the kitchen and lifted the earpiece off the wall set. John had hung up. Robert gave him a buzz and he picked up at once. ‘You nearly missed her, Robert. I was just about to disconnect her. You’ve got a call from a woman in Canberra. It’s not Lena.’
Robert thanked him and asked him to put her through. He could hear John listening in, the wheeze and grip of his breath. Robert said, ‘Hello, it’s Robert Crofts here. Who’s calling?’
‘Hello, Robert. It’s Ann. How are you?’
‘Ann who?’
‘How many Anns do you know?’ She laughed softly.
He knew who it was. Her voice had not changed. He said, ‘You’re back in Canberra? How long have you guys been home?’
‘I’ve been in Goulburn for six w
eeks. My mother was seriously ill. I came back to be with her.’
‘Is she better?’
‘Mum died last week, Robert. It’s okay, I’ve been expecting it. She was ready to go. I’m staying with Sylvia for a week or two.’
‘And what then?’ he said. ‘Will you be heading back to the States?’
She said, ‘I’m not going back.’
He let the seconds tick by, wondering what was coming.
‘I’ve been awarded a post-doctoral fellowship to the Sorbonne.’
‘The Sorbonne in Paris?’
‘Congratulate me!’
He said, ‘Congratulations! So you’re going to be living in Paris?’
‘I’m going over after Christmas. In January. And how are you and Lena?’
‘I’m okay. Lena left a while ago.’ He wanted to ask if Phil was with her.
‘Have you written those novels you were going to write?’
‘I’ve done some writing.’
‘Sylvia thought you might like to come to dinner at her place tonight?’
He was remembering Sylvia, the unexpected woman friend he had thought looked like a chubby air hostess. He said, ‘Sylvia thought I might like to, or you thought I might like to?’
‘We both did.’ She waited, letting a little silence build between them. ‘So will you come?’
He said, ‘You sound just the same.’ His voice had gone a little husky. He had the picture in his mind of them lying out on the grass in the paddock behind her and Phil’s house that evening, looking up at the stars, arms outstretched, their fingers touching.
‘So do you,’ she said. ‘You want to come?’
He heard something a little sad or wistful in her voice when she said this, as if she feared he might not be interested.
‘It would be fantastic to see you,’ he said. ‘What time should I get there?’
‘Just come when you’re ready. I’ll give you the address. It’s in Garran. It’s a new suburb, you won’t know where it is.’