The following, p.17
The Following, page 17
Not just the poet but schools’ inspectors, bank inspectors, Anglican bishops doing their rounds and retired generals promoting civil defence took rooms at Tatt’s and had their pictures on the walls. No Milburn, it was obvious, had ever darkened the door of the place. There were no rules over who could or could not stay there – except it was understood that you would know if you were the right sort to hammer the bell at reception and announce yourself, otherwise you ought to have the intelligence to go to the bottom pub, the bloodhouse – The George – the Petersens’ piss-alley, so-called.
The dining room of Tattersall’s was crowded. A simulacrum of chandelier hung overhead and verdigris-grimed cruets and metallic gravy jugs sat on an oak sideboard. Menus were handwritten. There was a wine list on parchment paper.
Powys was on the phone for a long time that evening. He gave a rueful thumbs-up through the glass as she waited.
‘Kyle asked after you, he’s sweet on you.’
‘Garn,’ said Margaret. ‘Is he all right?’
‘Sounded it,’ said Powys.
As Margaret came into the dining room eyes turned her way – a woman in Tatt’s wearing trousers! – with her one concession to femininity being an opal-patterned silk scarf tucked into a khaki collar. It was her idea of the girl-reporter on assignment and ready for sundowners in some far-flung locale. Margaret guessed that hardly anyone in the room was unaware of who she was, thanks to the Weekly and Tele.
Powys guided her to their table by the elbow. A man came over and greeted them, but hated to, couldn’t, it seemed, or didn’t want to, apparently, pronounce aloud that penalty of a name – Powys.
‘P-P-P?’
‘Powys Wignall,’ Powys helpfully confirmed.
‘Pow-wiss, remember me?’ He was a heavy-faced, slab-stomached man in a tweed sports coat seemingly woven from barbed wire.
‘Is it –?’ said Powys, tapping his fingers to his nose in a schoolboy gesture signalling a stink. ‘Is it “Smelly”?’
‘Hole in one,’ said the man, turning to Margaret, almost leering, adding, as if to her as a special privilege, ‘Smelly Richardson. Call me “Smel”.’
‘All right, “Smel”,’ said Margaret.
‘My wife – Penny – tells me you’re the Tele and Weekly journalist. She says you’re all right –’
‘Am I? Thank you.’
‘–ish,’ he added, with a hard wink at Powys.
Margaret hardly believed what she heard. It was a bald insult.
‘’Sonly a joke,’ said Smel.
Penny joined them. I am in for a grilling with these two, thought Margaret.
‘We’re coming out to Kyle’s on Saturday night,’ said Penny. ‘Got the invitation for the hop!’
‘The “hop”?’
‘Inverarity’s a circus,’ said Smel. ‘No offence.’
Penny wiggled her head from side to side in a rock-and-roll motion. ‘Kyle’s a hoot, a sixty-five-year-old man riddled with arthritis, jiving. You will have something to write about in your paper, my dear, really write about when Kyle Morrison takes to the floor.’
Powys dropped a gentleman’s coded hint for Penny and Smel to return to their own table. The code was a warm, ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Don’t mind if we do,’ they said. So Powys returned from the bar with tumblers of Scotch in his fists and a look in his eye saying, If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
His decades away from the north-west plains were the topic of conversation, then the years gone by since he was a young jackaroo – years marked by test matches, floods, droughts, wool price ups and downs, and who’d gone broke and backwards. Also the war, in which Powys was mocked for serving with the Poms. ‘How could you have done?’ etc., and he was punched on the shoulder till he winced and cried ‘break’.
A barley and bone soup with rounds of turnip and carrot came and went. Soon they were all pretty drunk except Margaret. There was an air of sly expectation every time the couple glanced at her, a what’s-he-going-to-do-with-her sort of look. The roast beef with pastry wrapping was gristly but she made it her business to eat it all down. The time of her grilling was silently building. Fine to eat all her meat but either she ought to be drinking or she shouldn’t think she was better than they were for not keeping pace and slurring her words.
Before pudding arrived the topic did.
Penny had read Margaret’s articles – ‘loved every darned word of them, dear,’ she told their author – but dabbing her lips with a napkin, setting her jaw, said that one of Margaret’s articles ‘went too far’.
‘Which one?’ said Margaret.
Though she knew. That morning’s Telegraph explained more than her trousers did why heads had turned her way when she entered the dining room. A subeditor, the way subeditor’s did, had pulled a heading from the copy, ‘Poor Dear Old Town Gone West’.
‘Poor dear old town, I don’t think,’ said Pen.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Margaret, ‘I –’
‘Look. Marg. Easy target. We have good friends in that town. How wrong everyone gets it. Our friends don’t have the words you do. They are simple bushies.’
‘We are simple bushies, Pen,’ said Smel with earnest pleading.
‘Agreed. As can be,’ said Penny, putting a hand over Smel’s on the tablecloth. ‘Defenceless, really, against what gets said in the Sun, the Mirror, Pix, the Weekly, the Tele – you name it – and we’ve had TV crews too, with famous names from the ABC and Sixty Minutes. They call us big fish in small ponds, but no pond is small enough to make them look big.’
Penny was a spokeswoman for a point of view. Country women so often were, Margaret had written on more than one occasion, and admiringly. She looked to Powys for understanding, fearing an ‘I told you so’. After all, he was a bushie too, though of an elevated and removed sort.
Powys drew breath like a bull, and she almost laughed to see his nostrils twitching.
‘Do pull out your camera, dear,’ said Penny. ‘Do take a few pretty snaps. Do publish them in your newspaper, and as much as you like. That is your job. It is your duty. Only later do find you’ve been hoodwinked.’
‘By that poor dear girl?’ said Margaret.
‘Face turned away from you, rubbish around her feet. I’d know her anywhere. Her family are as white as you are, or as near as almost. They have earned their good name. Unkinder people would give them no choice. You would be better off, dear, writing about – oh – I don’t know – it’s all so unnecessary . . .’ Penny flushed. ‘Us!’
‘Ease up, old girl,’ said Smel. ‘Don’t lose your wool. Marg is a Kiwi. She’ll get to know us better. She’s on a learning curve.’ He glanced at Powys, who stared back seemingly rooted down through his chair into the dining room floorboards, a bulwark or barricade.
‘I’ll stick by Margaret any day,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ Penny squealed. ‘Would you?’ she subsided.
And Smel gave Powys a wink.
After a dessert of brandy-flamed peaches served with tinned cream and before the port came round, Margaret went up to her room, leaving Powys to the pair of them. She was grateful to him.
The sound of noisy goodbyes wafted up from the roadway as she drifted to sleep. So far in her work since coming to Australia she had allowed herself an article sounding off on what was wrong with Australia only about one time in ten. She thought more was magnificent than wrong, but she worried about the people. One article in ten said so. For those, she was ticked off. For those she was unforgiven.
All that to one side, here was a conclusion Smel and Pen debated on their long drive home through the midnight stars and haphazard kangaroos detaching themselves from the shadows into the drunken headlights.
‘Separate rooms,’ mine host had said. ‘No hanky-panky.’
*
THE NEXT MORNING MARGARET WATCHED Powys over the breakfast table spearing his eggs, causing the yolk to run down the sides of his toast, layering the butter on with his knife, planking bacon to the end of his fork, adding a piece of pork sausage balanced like a chimney pot.
She felt such affection for this man so intently fuelling his energies for the difficult day ahead that she reached over and cleaned a piece of egg from the corner of his mouth with her napkin. Serviette, it was called in her family. Also their word there was love, not affection. She wiped his mouth with love.
Later she was to think that that was her irretrievable step. To clean off the egg. And what if she hadn’t.
Margaret decided something that would have been alarming if said out loud. If you don’t say anything to me for my own good, Powys Wignall, I won’t say anything to you for yours. For as long as we both shall live. With that she gave him her own version of the absurd smile. For this upheaving whim of the heart.
No more a whim, though, than any turning point.
‘You call it a napkin, Powys, I notice. We always call it a serviette.’ She felt a pang of homesickness. Don’t ever take that ‘we’ off me, was her next inward declaration.
Powys also said nothing. But, like her, was thinking something along the lines of what he would need to give up if he was to have her. And of what he could never change.
How strange, thought Margaret, that I have come right into the centre of something, a friendship world of attachments that was made for me by my mother before I ever came into this world. And as I enter it, it’s dying.
After breakfast they set off on the remaining half-day drive to Inverarity. The morning was bright and hot. They headed into the sun. It climbed around to the north and beat in the passenger-side window where Powys sweated, humming out of tune, throwing glances at his driver, Margaret, at the spark, spirit and gameness of her, the way she sat up at the wheel looking straight ahead. Other mornings there’d been jockeying with politeness. Now it was all right not to.
Margaret wished they could keep on going, uncoiling the miles. The thought of Inverarity stood in the way. Arriving with Powys. Being seen in a role. Seen as attached.
She glanced at him, and thought, but what if I am?
Then:
I am.
THEY CAME UP OVER A low ridge with the repaired suspension floating the car like a balloon over a flattened, charred, stunted, timbered extent of country, and emerging at last onto a grey plain almost bare of grass, the Inverarity Plain. A railway line swung close, as if to investigate the dust-churning car, and pulled away again.
Little changed for a while, then up ahead a mirage dissolved to expose a low platform, a tin shed, a square iron water tank. It was Inverarity siding. An eaglehawk circled, investing the buildings with interest.
They stopped the car, nosing it into the only available shade, right up against the wall of the rusting, creaking shed. Here was where Powys had arrived on the rail motor as a boy from Sydney, wearing a flat felt hat de rigueur and carrying a Globite suitcase packed with clothes from Gowings ditto.
Before they got out to look around, Powys put his arm along the back of Margaret’s seat. She leaned her head on his shoulder. He took her hand. Together they’d made a run that had started timing itself when they’d left the city the week before. There was always going to be a resolution, a coming together or a turning away with no middle ground. Powys had decided for her the moment they’d met. Decided she had the deciding power. She might be the one, he thought, to turn Kyle towards his own unattainable nature because she’d done it to him. That was about all he could hope for, for Kyle for the day ahead.
They looked at each other, into each other’s eyes, hers like a hawk’s narrowed in the light, his red-veined, sandy-lidded. It was better to say nothing than to risk breaking what was happening between them.
But then Margaret heard herself saying something that seemed so inconsequential that it was more like an irrepressible thought. ‘Powys, tell me – your friend Adam Sylvester, the Labour-leaning lord, I can understand how much you like him, even love him, except your politics aren’t exactly the same –’
‘Not exactly,’ said Powys.
‘But his friend, the Red Dean of Canterbury, whenever his name comes up you never say anything bad about him either, but as far as everybody else is concerned he’s about as bad as rat poison. Why’s that?’
Powys kept his gaze on Margaret’s steady look.
‘It’s because he married a much younger woman,’ he said.
‘And? So?’
‘They’re so dangerously happy,’ said Powys.
AND THEN THEY WERE THERE, at Inverarity. The grandeur was faded, sun-blasted, dessicated. They came in under Elisabeth’s bower of roses, each struggling bloom defeated, withered. Everything in Margaret’s mind that had built the place up withdrew to a source of feeling she could trust. For better or worse – Powys.
‘You’re a little too late for the best of them,’ said Elisabeth, picking a rose, looking at it, throwing it away, then reaching through thorns for a blazing red one that still had some life in it, in fact was riotous, you might even say indecent, with splayed open petals.
‘For your room,’ she said, handing it to Margaret. ‘It’s a lovely old breed called the Billy Boiler.’
‘Lovely name,’ said Margaret, feeling silly with happiness, conspiratorial with Powys, and now Elisabeth, too, it seemed, in on their love.
They walked through the garden on prickly dry grass. Rock borders were made up of meteorite stones. Powys and Kyle came along behind. Margaret was astonished. They had nothing to say to each other.
It’s how it’s always been, she thought. Everything buzzes between them underneath.
Kyle took them over to a dead tree with a hollow limb, stood on a box and asked Margaret to look inside. He steadied her elbow with a strong but trembling hand.
‘Wait till your eyes adjust to the dark,’ he said. There was a little cluster of tiny creatures in there. Bats.
‘Lighter than postage stamps,’ said Kyle, ‘but with their wings out, at dusk, they mill around like swallows and can block the moon.’
In the Arcade Margaret made exclamations of wonder, and they drank tea, ate scones.
‘I’ll show you around,’ said Powys. He stood, in that proprietorial way he had, that would need to be knocked out of him by a loving wife.
‘No you won’t,’ said Margaret. ‘Kyle?’
‘Certainly,’ said Kyle, clapping his knee and standing. He found a big hat for her.
All the way round the yards and through the outbuildings Kyle talked about Powys. Everything he couldn’t say to Powys he said to her. How glad he was to see him. How Powys was like a brother to him, or a son.
He showed her the famous pokerwork, Vale Salve, and the sandy ring where Powys broke in a brumby. There was an air of desolation to the empty quarters with the workers away for the day. Only one of the huts had a sense of life – Margaret said so.
‘Oh, it’s Devlin’s,’ said Kyle, as if what she’d said was predictable.
There were curtains, admittedly calico, window frames warped but freshly painted, an air of life and anticipation framing the hut.
‘Ross Devlin’s a difficult cove. You’d like him, no doubt.’
‘Why is that?’
‘He’s on your side of politics.’
‘That’s not guaranteed,’ said Margaret. ‘Look at Powys.’
‘What do you mean? “Look at Powys”?’ Kyle peered at her from under his hat brim.
‘Well, we get on,’ said Margaret.
A dust devil blew up and they held on to their hats, watching the spiral spin and weave through the laneways until it died out. When it was gone a dust haze settled over the area. They spat grit from their tongues.
‘Dirt,’ said Margaret.
‘I’m being asked to give it up,’ said Kyle.
She knew what he meant. The past week had prepared her. The acid, unlikeable necessity of unremitting Australian dirt as it rolled back under the wheels of a moving car and brought itself up as greatness.
‘Can you?’
‘No.’
‘Will you?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Must you?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s all so hard,’ said Margaret, giving his arm a squeeze. ‘Hard to talk about.’
But he did. To her.
It had all been explained to him, he said, by Powys on the phone last night. It was all very rational, generous and kind, all laid out point by point, square boxes ticked on a sheet of lined paper against handwritten paragraphs. The offer. The buyer, the stranger to the district, all cashed up. It was not very far from what Kyle had sometimes thought might do for him, a sort of nature reserve, ‘private’, you could call it, a freehold few acres not too far from town on the far side of the Swampland Block where you could throw up a house of sorts and get out over stony ground to the sealed road without getting bogged every time it rained. Elisabeth liked the idea. It was just what she’d hoped.
‘And you, Kyle?’ said Margaret encouragingly. ‘You hoped for . . . ?’
‘Bounder, my father; he never had anything you could call greatness,’ said Kyle.
Kyle heard the old boys calling it his hobby block and Bounder laughing from the grave in a last realisation of Kyle’s complete possibilities in life.
THAT NIGHT IN BED ELISABETH whispered marriage plans for the two in the garden bedroom while Kyle lay on his back, saying nothing but thinking of the mare he would saddle up in the morning. The mare of flighty reputation.
In that house of single-frame walls there were never any night secrets. Floorboards creaked and a door-catch rattled. There came the squeak of bedsprings, one person moving over as the other got in. There came a rhythmical unmistakable thrust. Block your ears, Kyle Morrison, to the sound of a lovely young Indian girl being ravished by General Custer.
The echo of bedsprings persisted like X-rays, gamma rays, cosmic waves sweeping through the starlit home paddocks where the places Kyle liked to think about before going to sleep – the reed beds, the billabongs, the owl haunts of the Swampland Block – were wiped from existence. He thought, an asthmatic straining for breath, I need to get there, to the Block before it’s finished.
