Beyond the township stretched the saltbush plain, a dry sea without movement, without sound, canopied by a sky bleached pale by sunlight. Through this empty immensity hawks drifted aimlessly, swinging their shadows across mobs of kangaroos grazing far back from the sandy track linking the township to a vague horizon.
The township confronted this still spaciousness, shrank back from it behind the broken fences, the heaps of rubbish and the bleached grass surrounding the unpainted hovels that marked the town’s outskirts.
Protected from the brooding hostility of the plain by the homes of half-castes the main street held the life and energy of the township between verandahed shops, offices and hotels. Saddled horses drooped at hitching posts. Sometimes a drover’s wagon with chained dogs straining at the axles moved slowly past the shops, ignored by the coatless men yarning at doorways. A few trucks and cars stood askew on the sloping kerbs that fronted the hotels.
The town was an oasis in a loneliness of earth and sky where men found a need of company and where the destination of all who walked was the submerging group. In hotel bars, in stores they gathered. No man stood alone in this street, another always joined him.
The women who in mid-morning shopped along the street were products of an isolation with which they had either come to terms or from which they longed to escape. The warring ones had brown, unsmiling faces, bare of cosmetics. They were burdened with responsibilities. They pushed prams or were followed by clamouring children. They wore floral frocks, puckered and strained over bodies in which they took no delight. The contented ones were proudly clad. They were held erect, established in confidence by a background of brick villas and carpeted floors, tangible evidence of their husbands’ successes in the drab business premises of the street.
But Edna was different. She was the daughter of a rabbit trapper who lived in a shack on the town’s outskirts. Her mother was dead. She was eighteen years of age and had shy eyes and a gentle manner. Her expression never criticised; it reflected a wish to please and in some hidden way, an obeisance. She was slender with full legs and walked with an unstudied freedom and looseness of movement that suggested a body resenting the confinement of clothes. Men considered her pretty but her appeal went deeper than that.
The business men along the street liked Edna. Each morning she walked the street’s length with her shopping bag. Each man greeted her:
‘Good morning, Edna.’
‘Good morning, Mr Johnston.’
Her voice contained a quality that increased a man’s respect for himself. It established him as a superior person in whom age had failed to destroy a charm for women. It stirred him into romantic dreaming and as he watched her pass he was seized with a desire to hold her body in his arms, to carry her away to some idyllic spot where, free from the eyes of all who knew him, he could ravish her or reveal an unselfish devotion that would make her cling to him forever.
Mr Carpenter, the stock and station agent, was sure she had a mind of great purity and sweetness. They were terms he considered seriously. He believed in purity and sweetness. He often pondered on the implications he felt sure were evident in the tone and emphasis of her morning greeting. Sometimes he was quite sure he attracted her strongly. At other times he was seized by the conviction he was a most unattractive man and that it was impossible for any girl as beautiful as Edna to love him. He compared her with his wife who treated him as a likeable child to be humoured. He was certain his wife was unaware of the fine qualities he possessed yet he was equally sure she loved him. And he loved her. Of this there was no doubt. Say she discovered Edna in his arms! How could he explain it? He shrank to a nucleus of suffering at the thought.
But each morning found him standing at the doorway of his office waiting for Edna to pass.
‘I really have a pure and beautiful love for this girl,’ he told himself.
Such an estimate of his feelings gave rise to exalted moments when he had an urge to protect her from the evil advances of other men. But there were times when he wanted to seize her and fling her on a bed and savagely take her. Because of the intensity of his passion he concluded he was a man of great virility, much greater than that of other men, and that his desires were desires that established him as superior to most men. He was sure the men he knew were incapable of any sex emotion other than an animal lust. The same feelings in himself were looked on as admirable manifestations of a noble unselfish love.
He wished he had read more and could appreciate poetry. Formless poems of love strove for intelligibility in his mind as he sat at his desk recording the sales of sheep and cattle. Under the spell of his reveries the forms upon which he wrote dissolved and vanished and in their place was a long beach and the sea and Edna was in his arms as he strode to meet the waves.
One morning, under the influence of a sudden compulsion, he asked her if she would come for a drive with him that night. It was summer and a full moon.
‘I’d like to, Mr Carpenter,’ said Edna.
Mr Johnston, the ironmonger, did not love Edna in this way. Sometimes he disliked her. He was a stout man, abrupt, overbearing and dogmatic. These qualities formed the shell beneath which he quivered and palpitated with uncertainty.
The men who gathered in his shop to talk were quite sure he was a well-educated man who could settle any argument provided the answer was to be found in a book.
‘I read every night before I go to sleep,’ he sometimes told a customer. ‘No matter how late I get home I must read for a little while. I’m always reading.’
He had explained this habit of his to Edna as she stood before his counter making a purchase.
‘It’s a good way to send you off to sleep,’ said Edna.
Edna is a fool, thought Mr Johnston sourly.
But he wanted her to like him. He wanted all women to like him. Those women who showed pleasure in talking to him seemed to him desirable women and he strove to increase their regard for him. Sometimes he enumerated them in his mind, concluding there were five women he could have married had things been different. Musing on the figure gave him great pleasure. Not many men can say they’ve been loved by five women, he told himself.
He would not have liked to marry Edna but he would have liked to humilate her. He felt she really didn’t admire him and he would have liked to punish her for this. He imagined himself brutally rejecting her pleading to be possessed then relenting and enjoying a conquest sharpened by a God-like contempt. To seduce her would be so easy. She was completely unguarded by experience.
He went through a fortnight of indecision. He was restless in his home. He felt a need to travel and meet lots of girls. But Edna haunted the pleasure resorts his dreams fashioned.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked his wife who was dieting and eating a lot of lemons. ‘Why don’t you do something round the house? Paint the laundry; it’s got to be done before Christmas. The way you’re going on you make the house feel like a gaol. I’ve had it. I’ll write to Mum and ask her to come up and stay for a few weeks.’
The next day Mr Johnston asked Edna if she would like to drive out as far as Single Tree Bore with him; he had to deliver some parts for a mill out there but would not be able to leave until after dark.
‘I’d like to go, Mr Johnston,’ said Edna.
Mr Salisbury, the farm machinery agent, was not troubled by his conscience when he asked Edna if she would like to go for a drive with him along Emu Creek. His intentions were honourable. Edna was a girl with many outstanding qualities, he had concluded after watching her each day as she walked down the street. She should be ‘given a chance’. What exactly this ‘chance’ was he had never quite worked out. But he was determined to give it to her. He prided himself on having a great understanding of people. (‘It comes natural to me.’) He often thought he should have been a psychologist. Or a sexologist. He was at home in either field. He had once read a book called Studies in Sexual Aberrations and the knowledge he had thus acquired made him feel superior to all the men that he met.
‘The average man knows nothing,’ he told Edna on their first drive together. ‘They don’t know what’s going on. They live all their lives in this joint and the people they meet know nothing either. They all lead dull lives, going to work and going home again. As for sex, half of them don’t know it exists. They have children and that’s the end of it. If they knew what goes on in the minds of people in big cities an’ that they’d drop dead. I could tell you things about men and women you’d never believe. Not that I would tell you, I wouldn’t. You’ve never come up against the hard facts of life. Part of your charm is your innocence. But I can tell you this, Edna,’ and Mr Salisbury placed his hand on her knee to give emphasis to his pronouncement, ‘innocence can be a danger.’
Edna agreed that innocence could be a danger. As if in proof of the claim she made no attempt to remove Mr Salisbury’s hand from her knee. Mr Salisbury placed a different interpretation on her forbearance. She trusts me completely, he thought and reluctantly withdrew his hand. A feeling of humility had come over him. I am really privileged to be in this girl’s company, he thought sadly. There is a not an evil thought in her.
‘I’d like to take you out often,’ he said lighting a cigarette with a hand that trembled and drawing the smoke deep into his lungs, ‘but I can’t do that. I’ll meet you once a week. I’d like to put you on the right track.’
Mr Salisbury had always kept on the right track. He attended his church regularly and had seven children. He didn’t believe in birth control.
‘What greater thing can a man contribute to his country than children,’ he was in the habit of saying when someone commented on the size of his family.
His wife didn’t believe in birth control either. ‘Abstinence is the only answer,’ she informed her husband after the birth of their seventh child. Mr Salisbury was going to dispute this but his wife had just had a blood transfusion and was too confused to appreciate such an argument.
When she returned to their home she had to work very hard, work that Mr Salisbury came to regard as an accusation. He decided he must also work very hard and he began returning to his office after the evening meal. It also left his wife free to look after the children. (‘Belle has enough to do without me getting in the way.’)
Edna’s company took his mind off the worries of supporting a large family. It also, so he told himself, introduced into his life a sense of purpose and a joy of living that would in the end make him a happier and more tolerant husband.
And, besides, no one knew about it. One thing about Edna, you could trust her.
Mr Simpson, the Postmaster, trusted her completely.
‘You see, Edna,’ he explained to her, ‘you can’t rely on people in a town like this. They would take a delight in ruining a man. If I was seen out with you my wife would hear about it in no time. My friends would go out of their way to tell her. So you must understand how careful we must be not to be seen.’
This protest against the duplicity of the townspeople did not disturb Edna’s pleasant reverie. She sat relaxed in Mr Simpson’s fat car, fleeing with it from responsibilities. She had stepped into it from a disintegrating, three-roomed house in which disorder gazed steadily at her with hypnotic eyes until will vanished and helplessness came. Two of the rooms were bedrooms. The third room was a portal to the world outside, a world of conflict, of pressures composed of rabbit traps, pleading men, the price of skins, cars and searching hands, beer, tired muscles and hope. In this room the first steps to survival were taken. To this room Edna and her father returned to replenish their strength with unspoken communion.
It contained a soot-encrusted cast-iron kettle, hanging from a chain that disappeared up the chimney above the open fireplace. On the hearth littered with charcoal sat a huge frying pan, its inner surface gleaming from the rubbing of a crushed newspaper. A camp oven stood beside it. Rabbit traps and harness hung from nails in the walls. The table in the centre of the room, its stains still evident beneath a scrubbed surface, bore open tins of jam, their jagged lids bent upwards, smeared faces on cylindrical bodies clothed in coloured labels. Amid the eating utensils scattered upon it was a tin of rivets, a hammer, a pair of pliers, a brass door knob and a coverless copy of True Love Romances.
Her father, sitting before the fire mending harness with copper rivets at which he hammered intently—he too represented confinement and frustration, even though she loved him. But at this moment she existed in another world, not here where trees leaped from darkness into the beams of the headlamps, gave a momentary acclaim then rushed into the past forever.
Mr Simpson’s worries were his own. She could not accept them as hers. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose they would talk.’
‘I would like to meet you more than once a week,’ he said, moving his shoulders as if adjusting them to a weight. I’ve got to think of everything—my wife. You have no idea what I go through. I’m always thinking of you. I just can’t push you out of my mind; you’re always there.’
He said it resentfully, as if Edna’s responsibility for his state was reprehensible and should be censured.
It pleased Edna that he was always thinking of her. His tortures appeared before her as a variety of facial expression, all suggesting longing, desire and hopelessness. The picture gave her a feeling of contentment, achievement. She loved his love for her and wanted it to continue so that she could comfort him when she needed comfort.
She wished she had beautiful clothes. It seemed to her there were frocks that would so transform her that her conversation would improve with the improvement in her appearance and she would become charming and irresistible. Then men would become awkward and shy in her presence and she could bestow love upon them, a gift from an inextinguishable store.
‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Simpson hopelessly, increasing his grip on the steering wheel. He could not imagine Edna as his wife. She was not suitable. He could not see her moving efficiently round a kitchen or acting as hostess to his friends.
His dreams of Edna pictured her as his mistress, his home life still unchanged. He could put her in a flat, he thought, not here in this dead town but in Melbourne to where he imagined himself transferred and made Postmaster of a suburban post office. After he had left with his wife and family she could follow by train. He would meet her at Spencer Street railway station, drive her to the flat he had acquired for her then dash back to his own home. She would have to get work, of course—to keep herself occupied.
He spent long periods at his desk working out exactly when and how he would visit the flat. He worked out on paper the cost of keeping her then in sudden frustration went off on a dream of winning a lottery after which there would be no problems, only a life of happiness.
Mr Simpson, Mr Carpenter, Mr Johnston and Mr Salisbury always picked Edna up by a clump of mulga near her home. The house was situated on a back road along which, after dark, there was no traffic. Here she would never be observed moving from the shadows of the mulga trees towards the car door held open from the inside by either Mr Simpson, Mr Carpenter, Mr Johnston or Mr Salisbury.
That is, no one but ‘Curly’ Martin, who didn’t matter. Curly was never likely to meet the friends of Edna’s lovers socially. He was young, twenty-two, and didn’t own a suit. He was a rabbiter like Edna’s father with whom he was friendly and with whom he shared the same problems of existence. He lived in a tent within sight of Edna’s home. He cooked for himself, sang maudlin songs with genuine emotion while preparing his meals and often visited Edna’s father for a yarn. They respected each other’s trapping areas and enjoyed each other’s company.
The older man, whose name was Ben, liked Curly because he was a good ‘ear’. Curly listened intently to Ben’s tales, his mind stirred to attention by the sentimental nature of their content, by the actions and exclamations that accompanied the old man’s un-punctured flow of talk.
‘I knew a bloke who lived in Yarrawonga by the livin’ Harry he could scrap though I say it myself and I’m not talkin’ but he sold horses my sister was dressmaking up there and this bloke could handle colts but bless my soul he got taken crook something to do with his guts doctors shut up when they reckon you’re going to slip your bridle but I’m tellin’ ya a better bloke never swung his leg across a horse and there he was with a sweat on his face and me beside his bed and a slab off the side of his hut where the cold wind came through God bless me I’ve never seen the likes of such a place to die in which he did with his dog howling outside between times ah I was sorry for him in his trouble the poor bastard.’
Tales featuring love and death when told with feeling always blurred Curly’s eyes with tears. He was a cheerful man who laughed and sang more than most. He thus swung easily to tears. As a sad tale unfolded he became the recipient of poignant knowledge he imagined was denied to other men.
On such evenings Edna sat with the two men before the fire. She had heard her father’s tales so never listened to his words but sat in the shadows looking at Curly’s strong unwrinkled neck or at his hands resting on his knees. His hands suggested an ability to lift and hold and grip with power; and looking at them her blood became alive, proclaiming its quickening in her flushed cheeks.
Curly looked at her only when her father became silent for a space and then his glance was an amused one. He looked at her with tolerance and affection as if from his high seat of knowledge he reached down to pat her.
He had watched her meet all her lovers. The opening of his tent faced the mulga clump. They were men who on the street regarded him as of no importance. It did not disturb him. His knowledge of their secret life lifted him out of their reach and he smiled as he passed them at their doorways, secure in a feeling of independence and freedom.
Curly had broad shoulders and brown eyes. His dark hair was curled into a cap on his head. When he laughed his cheeks puckered and his eyes became cradled in radiating wrinkles. He wore a grey polo-neck sweater and blue denim trousers faded from many washings.
Knowledge of Edna’s easy surrenders stirred in him an awareness of her body’s curves and warmth and roused in him dreams in which he imagined her as he would like her to be, free of desire for any man save himself.
He didn’t ask her out. Her experiences with married men gave her the power of making comparisons and he shrank from offering himself to her judgment. He became awkward and uncertain in her presence but sought to conceal this by an attitude of indifference. It was this attitude that attracted Edna. The more he withdrew from her the greater became her desire. His apparent lack of emotional response to her presence gave her a feeling of inadequacy. The gestures and movements that stirred her married lovers to action had no apparent effect on Curly. But there were other ways.
She always placed the cups of tea and plates of scones on the littered hearth in front of the men. This evening she had left the top button of her blouse undone. As she lowered herself into a crouch to find a place for Curly’s cup, her elbow pushed the hem of her frock high up on her leg. For a second Curly glimpsed the white inner skin of her thigh and her breasts drooping in the shadow of her blouse. His eyes grew still. Edna raised her head and looked into them. Her tranquil glance, held with strain, changed to one of comprehension.
‘Oh God!’ thought Curly in sudden distress. ‘She’ll think I’m a dirty bastard.’
Edna pulled her skirt down, rose to her feet and clutched her blouse closer to her in a gesture she hoped would suggest an innocent girl in confusion.
Curly always went round his traps about midnight collecting those inexperienced rabbits caught from the first lot to leave the burrows. He then re-set the traps for the dawn catch, gathering these rabbits when the first long beams of the sun lay flat on the tops of the saltbush.
Edna was always delivered back to the mulga clump by her lover of the night long before Curly set out on his midnight round. He was often sitting with her father when she entered the door, meeting his glance of comprehension with a quick lowering of her eyes.
On one occasion he was setting off on his round when she came walking along the narrow track to the house.
‘Come on for a ride,’ he called to her. ‘I’ll be back in an hour. You can carry the rabbits.’
‘I’d like to, Curly,’ said Edna.
He walked ahead of her round the traps. He hummed and sang and she followed behind him carrying the limp rabbits. She looked up at the sky. Great happiness had suddenly swooped down upon her and she rose to its embrace as if it were a lover.
That night, her bare arm enfolding the pillow, she wafted into fantasy dreaming made exciting by the conviction that the world she now created was attainable. The dreaming of past nights had left desolate mornings in their wake since these dreams could never be reconciled with the reality of her home. Dramatic entrances into night clubs on the arm of a favoured lover, the applause of well-dressed audiences to her singing, beautiful clothes, jewels, worshipped, loved, adored, needed—such dreams had comforted her even while they tortured her. Harnessed to them for support she yet found their weight intolerable.
To have wings, to rise out of her home, lift herself up, up to the stars where she could shed this house like a constricting garment and find herself held in arms that were a protection! At times these desires racked her into tossing and turning or sent her curved arms up into the darkness where they paused in a tense, quivering appeal—‘Make it happen! Make it happen!’
But now her dream was of a tent and her face upon the pillow was relaxed. No lines of tension surrounded her closed eyes. The corners of her lips curved gently upwards. Picture after picture wavered before her, eager for selection. Curly lay ill upon his bunk, his head on her shoulder. She leant over him gripped by the beauty of every feature. She nursed him with devotion. She washed him, fed him. He had called out for her, only her. ‘Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!’
But the morning presented him differently. His need of her was uncommitted, denied involvement and this she felt in a wordless oppression. He always smiled when he looked at her or when listening to her answering one of his questions, a smile that disturbed her since it made her feel like a child.
This feeling persisted when in the following weeks she sometimes accompanied him on his trapping rounds. It subdued her, drained her of power.
‘Why do you go out with these men?’ he asked her one night.
She hardly knew, but a remark of Mr Johnston’s came to her mind and she repeated it as if it were an expression of her own conclusions. ‘When you are loved you are never lonely; any sort of love is better than loneliness.’
Curly pondered this. ‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘I can understand that.’
Edna became pregnant. She told no one. She walked down the street each day, her lifted face untouched by guilt. Even when her figure proclaimed her condition to all who saw her she still carried herself with the same unconcern, the same detachment.
The realisation of her pregnancy came as a shock to Mr Simpson, Mr Carpenter, Mr Johnston and Mr Salisbury. They were beset with suffering. They withdrew from their doorways to the shadow of their premises when they saw Edna walking down the street. Each was unaware of the part the others played in Edna’s life and each was certain that he alone was responsible for her state. They ceased asking her to go for drives with them. They carried on their work in a continual state of worry and distress made more oppressive by the knowledge that their wives did not suspect them.
‘I see Edna is in the family way,’ Mr Simpson said to Mr Johnston, believing that this statement was convincing evidence of his innocence.
‘Yes, I’ve noticed that,’ said Mr Johnston, introducing into his voice a tone of indifference. ‘I never thought she was a girl like that.’
‘No,’ said Mr Simpson, ‘neither did I. It just shows you. You never know what they’re like underneath.’
They parted, each having lightened his burden for a space.
Though Edna was now ignored by these men Curly continued taking her on his midnight round of the traps. Though aware that she was expecting a child he was quite incapable of mentioning it to her and she remained silent. He was certain he was not the father even though that possibility occurred to him. He had so conditioned himself to a pattern of thinking regarding Edna’s affairs, a pattern in which he moved on the periphery, that his relationship with her seemed incidental to the forces that were shaping her. He had no part in her joys, her sorrows, her hopes. They were reasons for his compassion, not demands to bear responsibility. In his passion there was no involvement, therefore no obligation.
Yet there were moments when he wished that only he mattered and her affairs with others were of no consequence.
When Edna’s time grew near Curly shifted his camp to another trapping area twenty miles away. He was not fleeing. From what did he have to flee! Let them settle it among themselves.
The baby was born and grew. Edna carried it down the street each morning trailing behind her the clean perfume of soaps and powders and laundered baby clothes. She didn’t have the money to buy a pram. Though Mr Simpson, Mr Carpenter, Mr Johnston and Mr Salisbury, freed from worry by her silence, did not now avoid her on the street they avoided looking at the baby. They were afraid of what they might see in its face.
Curly had not seen the baby. He had moved his camp several times but he had no reason to return to the area near Edna’s home. Rabbits were more plentiful in other places. But he returned when he received a lawyer’s letter stating that Miss Edna Green was claiming maintenance for his child and that her claim was to be heard before a visiting magistrate in the local courthouse in a month’s time.
‘Listen,’ he said to the lawyer in whose office he found himself the day before the hearing of the case,’ she’s putting one over you. I’m not the father; there were other blokes. She’s trying to hang it on me because I’m the only one who’s single. She’s not going to get away with it.’
The lawyer was not helpful. ‘She says you are the father. You slept with her, didn’t you?’
‘Sleep’s hardly the word,’ said Curly, ‘but I’ll go along with that.’ He paused, then added abruptly, ‘All right; I could be the father but Pm not. And I’ll drag in a few others before I’m finished, see if I don’t.’ He was feeling an angry resentment against authority, which seemed to be threatening him from the silent dusty books bound in leather that leaned askew on the office shelves. The law was his enemy, not this unsmiling man in front of him who, captive beneath a roof, had never known the freedom under stars. Arguing with him was a waste of time.
‘Who’s your lawyer—Bradbury?’ asked the lawyer, naming his rival in the town.
‘I’m handling this myself,’ said Curly who had little knowledge of court procedure and saw the hearing of the charge against him as an opportunity for discussion in which he was free to make counter accusations without hindrance. ‘I’ll show the bastards.’
Out on the street he stood looking around him for a while. He had no feelings of resentment against Edna. She had picked on him because he was the easiest mark, that’s all. She wouldn’t want to put the boots into him out of revenge. He could imagine her naming him almost with pride while at the same time being sorry she was getting him into trouble. She would think he had shot through out of fear. He wished he could convince her he hadn’t, that he had gone away to leave her settle it with those other four bastards who had started all this. He wondered which one was the father.
Anger rose and fell within him like a tide, flung itself against the images he had created of the four men who had seduced her. These images had little to do with reality. He did not see them as lonely frustrated men wrenching at bars. Loneliness to him came from isolation and had no part in the lives of men with homes, wives and children. It was not being unneeded that motivated them as it did him. That age calculated by years brought no change in dreams and was not empty of a longing for future fulfilment was incomprehensible to him. He saw these men as ruthless, coldly calculating, untouched by longings to serve or feelings of devotion. He wanted to humiliate them, bring them down as a pursuing dog would a kangaroo.
He walked down the street until he stood before the doorway of Mr Carpenter’s office. He waited until a customer had left then stepped in and beckoned Mr Carpenter to the entrance where he awaited him, his face expressionless.
‘Good morning, Curly,’ said Mr Carpenter.
‘Mr Carpenter,’ said Curly, speaking softly as if the information he was about to convey was sinisterly secret. ‘Edna Green is taking me to court tomorrow. She is having me up for maintenance of her baby. I am not the father, Mr Carpenter, you are. I am going to name you in court. I think it would be a good idea if you were there.’
Curly turned and walked out. Mr Carpenter had not spoken. He stood completely still even though his body was suddenly occupied by a formless panic that writhed and struggled to free itself from his shell and drag itself upwards to the wide security of the sky. He slumped into a chair and stared at the desk.
Curly entered Mr Johnston’s store. Mr Johnston was explaining to an attentive and deferential man that the local council was composed of men whose only concern was to get something out of it for themselves.
‘If I get in Pll stir things up,’ he said emphasising each word by the tap of a finger on the man’s shoulder.
Curly called him aside and spoke his piece in the same conspiratorial tone he had used with Mr Carpenter.
‘Mr Johnston, Edna Green is taking me to court tomorrow—maintenance of her baby. I am not the father of the child, Mr Johnston; you are. I am going to name you in court. I think it would be a good idea if you attended.’
Mr Johnston received this information with startled indignation. He had just created himself a councillor and the feeling of power he had thus acquired remained with him just long enough to give force to his reaction. ‘Get out of the shop,’ he said savagely, thrusting his head towards Curly as if it were a weapon.
But Curly was already on his way to the door. Mr Johnston stared after him, his feeling of power quite gone.
The reaction of Mr Salisbury to Curly’s whispered revelation was one of astonishment. He was so honourable. He was so certain of the right track. He knew so much about sex. After this long time it was incredible; all that was in the past.
‘Good God!’ he exclaimed in bewilderment.
Mr Simpson, after Curly finished speaking, suddenly realised with great clarity that the idea of a postmaster on his salary having a mistress was ridiculous and impossible. He felt he was surrounded by lying people out to ruin him. Here he was confronted by one of them, a man who would go around telling his friends, his enemies, everyone, that he was the father of Edna Green’s baby.
‘If you as much as mention . . .’ he began savagely, but Curly had gone.
Mr Simpson, Mr Carpenter, Mr Johnston and Mr Salisbury came to breakfast in their Sunday suits next morning. This extraordinary departure from custom had an irritating effect on their wives who were suddenly reminded of their wedding days by these relics of past pride and promise. The dark blue suits bought for that occasion seemed to have shrunk upon the men they had married, squeezing from them the rich full life their appearance had once promised.
‘Why are you wearing your Sunday suit today?’ each asked her husband.
Mr Carpenter explained he had an appointment with an important Melbourne agent; Mr Johnston had to meet a wealthy customer, he told his wife. Mr Simpson and Mr Salisbury were also meeting men they wished to impress. It was going to be a busy day for all of them.
Yet none of them left for work with the optimism and confidence a day of such appointments would have usually created in them. They were downcast and irritable and waited in their offices for the opening of the courthouse at ten o’clock with feelings of despair.
Edna was also waiting. She stood before the courtroom door impatient for it to open yet dreading the sound of it being unlocked. She was carrying the baby, now six months old, and she stood there clasping him close to her and feeling that in all the world only he needed her. In the tumble and sway of thought that held her motionless beside the heavy door, vague pleas for help struggled upward through this formless milling and poised captive behind her closed lips.
Once she said aloud, ‘please love me,’ then hearing her voice she glanced around her with sudden fear, feeling she may have been overheard.
Mr Carpenter, Mr Johnston, Mr Salisbury and Mr Simpson were standing on the edge of the pavement and could not possibly have heard her. Among the casually clad people collected there the four Sunday-suited men introduced a funereal note. They had greeted each other with pretended surprise, each striving to conceal the burden of guilt each felt he alone was bearing.
‘There’s a few interesting cases today,’ observed Mr Johnston speaking down as if to pupils. ‘I really shouldn’t be here but these local squabbles are really an entertainment.’
Mr Carpenter was doubtful about their entertainment value. He felt that people standing trial for whatever offence, should be pitied. Mr Simpson and Mr Salisbury didn’t agree with this.
‘All these cases are really slices of life,’ said Mr Salisbury.
‘That’s so,’ said Mr Carpenter.
They all imagined they were demonstrating a common interest with those surrounding them, but their Sunday suits removed them from these people waiting out of curiosity or in search of entertainment just as effectively as did the loneliness of their solitary sufferings.
Curly awaited the opening of the door with no such despair. He had created a confidence independent of facts. This he clung to tenaciously. He paced the kerb with the nervous tension of a racehorse within sound of a baying crowd. He kept away from the group. Every now and then he paused and looked at the door. When it opened he sprang forward and quickly mounted the steps where on the entrance level Edna had bent to pick up her bag. He paused to allow her to enter.
She did not look at him. She raised the baby to her shoulder from where, as she walked through the doorway, it looked back at Curly walking behind them.
The baby had curly hair and brown eyes and looked steadily at the young man with an expression that suggested he had stolen it from this follower, such was the resemblance between them. Curly, looking into those eyes, was suddenly robbed of purpose. For a moment he was incapable of any emotion other than a hunger for this child so obviously his son. This love kindled in a flash of recognition, grew to immense proportions as he gazed. It quickened his breathing, became almost a pain then rolled within him transforming itself into anger and determination. He suddenly felt the victim of a plot to deprive him of his son, a plot in which Edna played no part.
He moved quickly up beside her. ‘Here!’ he said. ‘Wait a minute!’ He spoke in the tone of one taking full responsibility for a situation that demanded resolution. ‘We’re not going on with this; he’s mine. Come on.’
He kept looking at the baby as he spoke, moved by a sense of fatherhood, a longing to shelter and protect him.
‘We’ll fix this up all right. Come on over to your lawyer.’
He raised his head and for the first time looked at her face. ‘It’s all right,’ he said gruffly, disturbed by the expression it bore. Everything will be all right. Don’t worry.’ Her face regained its composure. He took her arm.
The lawyer shuffling papers at a table before the entrance of the magistrate looked up at the couple in front of him.
‘Look!’ said Curly not waiting for him to speak. ‘We’ve talked it over. She wants to drop the charge. It’s my baby. I’m marrying her.’
The lawyer looked surprised. He rubbed his chin with a nicotine-stained finger while he mourned the loss of prepared eloquence.
‘It’s all right,’ said Curly. ‘Ask her.’
‘Is that your intention, Miss Green—to drop the charge?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are quite satisfied with his offer of marriage?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Sit down over there. I’ll tell the magistrate you are dropping the charge, that this man has admitted parentage and that you intend getting married.’
Mr Simpson, Mr Johnston, Mr Salisbury and Mr Carpenter had already seated themselves. They awaited their destruction, laced and bound with a last desperate dignity. Case followed case but their expressions remained unaltered.
When, finally, Edna’s lawyer announced she had dropped the charge and the magistrate had dismissed the case their relief for a moment deprived them of strength. But it returned as they rose, bringing with it a heightened sense of the day’s beauty. The street they faced from the courthouse steps was wide and spacious and comforting in its promise of security. They thought of Edna with kindliness.
She followed Curly down the steps as he strode ahead of her carrying the baby. There was a flush on her cheeks and shyness in her eyes.
Curly passed the four Sunday-suited men without a glance. But Edna looked at them—proud now.
‘Good morning, Edna.’
They all greeted her.
‘Good morning, Mr Salisbury. Good morning, Mr Johnston. Good morning, Mr Carpenter. Good morning, Mr Simpson,’ said Edna.
She followed Curly down the street, her head up.
‘I’m glad he did the right thing by her,’ said Mr Carpenter.
‘I suppose he did,’ said Mr Johnston. ‘You never know with people like that.’
‘I’m sure it will turn out all right for both of them,’ said Mr Simpson.
‘She’s a girl you can trust.’
‘Well, she’s on the right track anyway,’ said Mr Salisbury.