KYLE MORRISON: THE BOY IN the ten-gallon hat, the born-to-the-saddle, handsome young coot of ‘Prince of the Dryblow Races’.
Kyle, our eyes are on you
Coo-ee, the future’s sound
Hear, the stockwhip’s fracture
Kyle, you’re homeward bound.
Not the world’s greatest poem, agreed, but note the third comma down, the pause before the whipcrack. You’d need a microscope to see how one comma differed from another down a page, yet to Kyle Morrison, son of Bounder Morrison, that comma had, and always would have, the effect of a prophecy or accusation, a belt to the ear, a hidden shock.
Kyle didn’t like the effect. Never had. Always wouldn’t. Nothing that wasn’t great poetry should have anything like a powerful effect.
All his life Bounder Morrison never gave up. ‘Don’t like it, sonny?’
‘I do,’ said Kyle.
‘You don’t. You’re too bloody sensitive. Son, you ought to be proud. Enjoy the limelight. “Kyle” has a ring to it. “Prince” is a rank royale.’
‘But I’m not –’ said Kyle, but he couldn’t say what he was not in the context of who Bounder said he was. He could not get rid of the feeling of there never being enough words to express what that was.
Kyle Morrison had galloped, propped, reared, cracked the whip and won the mulga-wood trophy at the Dryblows more or less as described and celebrated nationwide in the poem. So he did not mean not pleased, or not proud, but could not say what he was not, or not not.
He was not not Kyle, one over from a centaur. He was not not that born-to-the-saddle boy, because he was never happier as such. At school he was not even ‘not much of a scholar’, like most of the dunces there, because he shone right enough – but he could never seem to say exactly what it was he was trying to say to his own satisfaction compared with the picture his father drew of him.
‘Tongue-tied?’ said Bounder, twisting Kyle’s ear, ruffling his hair, giving him a little bellying push of affectionate fatherly antagonism.
The difficulty was something that was not, nor was not not, but that inexpressibly was – a promise that came out, hinged on a comma, as a curse. It was on that punctuation mark that Kyle’s future was dangled before it had even begun.
When that boy, Kyle Morrison, turned twenty, he announced his engagement to Elisabeth Woodger. He was too green in his father’s loud opinion for marriage, but Elisabeth was a young woman able to silence Bounder just by smiling at him in a lovely, daughterly way.
On their honeymoon Kyle and Elisabeth went to New Zealand on the Mariposa and stayed with Colonel and Mrs Mackenzie Anderson, who farmed on a headland looking north from the Firth of Thames onto the Hauraki Gulf with its islands and promontories.
The Colonel was a gentleman farmer with a big house separate from the manager’s cottage, bedrooms set up for visitors: a leadlight-windowed drinks’ cabinet and a wide, comfortable bed with a canopy of mosquito netting where the married lovers lay like Mars and Venus trapped in Vulcan’s web, scratching the welts raised by sandfly bites, which swelled a year later on the first anniversary of their visit to the Shaky Isles.
Riding around the farm and along beaches they were joined by a teenager, Maggie, niece of the farm manager. She and Elisabeth were quickly like sisters, close in age. For years afterwards they corresponded with cards at Christmas and on birthdays, gifts of blue booties and knitted jackets after Maggie had children, and Kyle and Elisabeth, with increasing disappointment, did not.
Maggie had four boys from 1936 to 1945, receiving a parcel with a pink outfit from Australia, at last, when she had a girl that year, Margaret. The package from Kyle and Elisabeth was sent, as ever, from Inverarity Station, north-western New South Wales. As her friends wrote of their life in Australia, its ups and downs, Maggie gained a picture in her mind of haughty emus, boxing kangaroos and black swans with eyes like phosphor lamps – all from the books of Bounder Morrison’s poetry they sent. Margaret, the youngest, when she came to Sydney as a journalist in later years, arrived ready-equipped with Bounder Morrison tongue twisters learned by heart and a longing to visit Inverarity Station.
IT WAS HIGH TIDE ACROSS the flats on Kyle and Elisabeth’s last day’s honeymoon beach picnic. Kyle took photographs with his Vest Pocket Kodak. The three new friends sat in a huddle talking about tennis, cricket, horses, dogs, dances and books – with Kyle being a touch avuncular and Elisabeth just a bit motherly and guiding in her conversation towards Maggie.
Kyle recited part of a Bounder poem with a show of what a poem ought to be but couldn’t be unless it was acted out in just the way he knew how, with pride and belittlement:
Cornfounded Blight, it just ain’t right,
When yore feeling pinched
It gets you right
An inch to the left orrina pinch to the right
Yore forfochen.
That last word meant something like ‘blasted’ or ‘all done’ in Scots, he said.
Away out on the water a flash of sunlight came and went. Maggie said it was a whale or a dolphin splashing in the water.
‘Then I’m Jonah,’ said Kyle.
Earlier in the day there’d been a rumble under the house of a kind visitors to Fernland didn’t mention, lest they be laughed at through thinking the ground under their feet was about to open and swallow them up.
Now a movement of water travelled down the Gulf waters towards them. It swelled with the impression of a rolled carpet or a giant sausage or a huge water pipe. Maggie’s fox terrier ran to the water’s edge barking. Maggie, the explainer of all things New Zealand, had never seen anything like it. A tidal wave.
On the wave came, and for a moment they found themselves looking into a magnification of the sea floor upraised in front of them – pebbles, pippies, small darting fish. They gathered their picnic basket and beach blanket, and ran to higher ground. The tide foamed around their ankles, up to their knees, until finally it expired, frothing, in the kikuyu grass. An old dinghy, part buried, rose up and floated off.
Before they could even begin to consider what had happened the tide retreated, sucked down a plughole or drained over the edge of the world or piped to the centre of the earth. They heard its rush, its musical trickle, its burp in the mud. The earth gave a shuddering swallow and everything stopped.
‘Holy forfochen,’ said Kyle, an expression that seemed allowable in light of the matter on hand but made Elisabeth blush every time.
Stingrays, sharks, jellyfish and snapper were exposed, beating wetly on the mud, attacked by gulls chased by the barking dog.
Little or nothing of the disturbance was visible in Kyle’s spotty, quaintly tilted Kodaks of the gleaming mudflats. But the three would never forget that day. It bound them within the radiating rings of a shock wave generated deep in the earth. They learned that an earthquake had killed hundreds and destroyed the town of Napier many miles away.
THAT BOY, KYLE MORRISON, by the mid-1970s was sixty-five, manager (and former owner) of Inverarity Station, north-western New South Wales. Bounder was long dead and Kyle the principal copyright trustee of the Bounder Morrison Literary Estate.
‘Cornfounded Blight’ was set to music and celebrated as high as Parliament House, Canberra, played by the Combined Services Brass Band at garden parties and national welcomes.
Call it a jingle or a ditty or a joke, ‘Cornfounded Blight’ was bigger than any of those and Kyle could do nothing about it. Australia liked it. Australia was a desolate one-tenth of the planet, a puzzle to its population, and apparently needed an anthem to equal it. Kyle could do without it. Those sixteen lines made people feel good about what they hated. What you loved, you scorned; what you hated, you were. It was the definition of Australia and being Australian as far as Kyle was concerned, but it made him wonder if it would be better being someone else from somewhere else, stepping right out of who he was and living in another country altogether, or even another planet. A man, for example, standing on a timeless beach and looking into the middle of a wave where the sea life swam past in front of his eyes, giving the feeling of there never being any land, only sea over everything, and the best world of all possible worlds was a world of water.
Lately, people had started putting their hats over their shirts when ‘Cornfounded’ was played on public occasions. It was a reflection of the country’s riddle – half this, half that, and three hundredweight of something else, call it bulldust.
When ‘Cornfounded’ came up, that one word in the original, ‘forfochen’, proved a handicap despite freedom to bandy about four-letter words in public being won in the decade now three parts done. ‘Forfochen we arrived on this shore aye forfochen’, meaning exhausted, beaten, stuffed, rooted – as bellowed by schoolboys, drunks and rabble-rousers – meaning just what Bounder grinned when he wrote it, what he reckoned it should mean.
A cleaned-up version was put to Kyle by trustees who wanted to give it a run as an authorised version. In the committee room vote, Kyle said yea to the notion, though it came out as smaller than yea, more a questioning yea – as a yea backing into a nay, with a question mark as a buffer or a gate. Kyle knew Bounder’s character as false to his public reputation but didn’t like, either, the way Bounder was made to look better by taking his lewdness away.
So it wasn’t ‘Cornfounded’ that made the anthem list but ‘The Yellow Haze of Wattle’s Wondrous Golden Lustrous Loveliness’, an old favourite suited to buxom sopranos that was given a fair powdering by Dame Pixie Overland as far back as when Parliament House was opened by the Duke of York in 1927. ‘Cornfounded’, set to fiddle or accordion, played at country dances or accompanied by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, fancy, on big occasions – cunningly bawdy in the one way, righteously melodious in the next – was thereby somewhat restored to the way Kyle felt at the age of nine when he’d heard the words for the first time on an Afghan rug in front of the fire at Meadow Flats. ‘Cornfounded blight, it just ain’t right!’ – and the Bounder coming out from behind the curtains with his buckteeth protruding like a mangelwurzle from a bed of whiskers as Mother banged the piano keys, stamping on, rather than touching on, the pedals, the pair of them shouting ‘forfochen’ back and forth while Kyle looked on rather deliberately blank.
It was all right kept in the family. Expanding outside that was wrong. The gist of it was that something Kyle didn’t quite have was given to others before he could get a grip on it. Kyle didn’t have a name for it, but Elisabeth did – her Prince of the Dryblows, who’d never loved anyone but her, rider of the prancing pony, wearer of the jangling spurs, handsome under the ten-gallon hat, corkscrewing away through the trees with a snakeskin-handled stockwhip looped on the saddle. Whatever it was he felt he lacked, Elisabeth saw in him.
Bounder’s poetry was in every newsagency and on every railway bookstall, and copyright would not expire until 1991, but Kyle was not rich. Royalties brought in only what they did. When barflies reciting ‘Prince of the Dryblows’ waited to be shouted, on grounds of Bounder’s poems being minted gold in a son’s pockets, Kyle obliged as best he could. Drinks flowed in his direction in the name of a man whose shadowed face under a tilted hat was displayed on the nation’s banknotes. It was held that Kyle received a percentage for every note printed, something he never denied.
As manager of Inverarity Station, Kyle was thankfully ‘all found’. That was the point of being manager and not owner of Inverarity anymore. It had passed out of his hands and been returned into to his hands after Bounder’s death by a process of condescension in which the word bankruptcy was avoided. Sir William ‘Billyum’ Wignall, Bounder’s cousin, had performed the rescue and never spoke about the means. It saved complete humiliation but left a few matters unresolved to say the least.
No alcohol was allowed on the company purse, but when it came to getting plonked, Kyle worked strategies with grocery bills and petty cash allowances. Elisabeth, the darling, watched him till Amontillado blurred her eye for subterfuge, his extra splash of ‘the emus’ being got away with.
Those emus were a drinks’ quota inspired by the grooves in a crystal tumbler being black-striped, in certain lights, like an emu chick’s back. Every emu had seven chicks, so make it a rule. Whisky poured to a generous glug, water up to stripe seven.
Twenty dollars cash was all Kyle had left after a week’s stay at the Australia Hotel during the Sydney Sheep Show. Bidding farewell to the trustees of the estate – publishers, professors, journalists, stockbrokers, reciters all – Kyle went to his wine merchant’s rooms in Kent Street and then to Central Station, where he caught the night mail home. Twenties might have been called Bounders, or Troublesomes, or even Killers had two hundred and eleven thousand submissions to the government won the day when decimal currency was introduced. Kyle folded and refolded the note in the depth of his pocket in a tight, nervous habit until it was hardly bigger than a pebble.
Making his way down the platform, he was tapped on the shoulder before getting to his sleeper.
‘Kyle, you’re “homeward bound”, “the future’s sound”.’
It was ‘Smelly’ Richardson – an old boy from Kyle’s school.
‘Of course it is, Smel. Sound as a drum.’
‘A drink?’
Kyle liked springing surprises: ‘Thank you, but no.’
A bottle of Glen Garioch, gift of his wine merchant as it was Bounder’s tipple, lay in the top of his leather grip, also coincidentally his late father’s. Alone in his compartment after sliding the door shut, Kyle uncorked the specially vatted blend and savoured, straight from the bottle, the taste that his father had poured on wet afternoons in their closeness of belonging.
Spirits had the power of bringing back the Bounder, feeling and sensation of where malt was first tasted and what was said. Kyle was born to the taste of it. Wet sacking came to mind, as did heads of barley making an insistent whisper in the Tablelands’ wind, and a felling blow – something close to, or allied with, chloroform.
Kyle allowed himself a few tears, there at the window, sliding through Strathfield and Parramatta, the oiling of jammed feelings. Lumps of dark hills and wheeling stars above were the mode of a night’s travel as he tugged a blanket to his chin and lay, supine, a jangling skeleton in striped silk pyjamas, the engine thumping north-westwards, leaving a trail of diesel fumes. Fame, fame, fame, said the rattling rails. Fame to the next generation being a ghost, a phantom, a will-o’-the-wisp with the power and impact of a steel rivet driven down into the heart.
Kyle had been the son to cherish after the war to end all wars. Too young for that First, too old for the Second, he was left with a feeling of shame in that Bounder put value on him weighed against those who’d fought, and he, for his part, wished Bounder was greater than people said he was.
The bar in the pub at Whistling Corner, a cold wet night, faces stacked to the ceiling as word went round it was Bounder and his boy in there. Ditto, a world away, the deer shoot in Scotland with Lord Tweedsmuir and the old gillie he brought to entertain them in the Gaelic tongue. The salmon stream, the pipers, the Morrisons’ home glen where the old gillie took them, wasted of all but ruins, from where Bounder’s penniless grandparents, with their undershot jaws and moth-eaten plaids, had emigrated. Then came France, the Australian generals deferring to chirpy, puny, punny, bad-back-corseted Bounder on matters of Australian vocabulary and usage while tramping over embankments of bones, during the inauguration of Australian war memorials. Bounder’s reedy, dominating voice rang through the estaminets: ‘Did you hear the one about the nun and the wharfie . . .’ And the wowsers separated themselves off, before they got to the invective that so boiled up in Bounder, when he got started.
Bounder and Mother had desperately wanted a sprog, and when they had one late, Kyle had to be like them – madcap, giggly, word-mad and shameless – but wasn’t.
Kyle was more your standard, awkward, unemotional, stitched-up country bloke, served off the higher shelf of social aspiration. It’s true he’d been spoilt. Crying, Mother thought he was dying; quiet, she thought he was dead. At six he’d stiffened up, at seven was sent away as a boarder. At school on the hill above Rose Bay he’d been one of a bagpipe-playing clique who’d ended up in the same district, living their lives within a radius of a hundred miles of Inverarity.
Startling the number of old boys up Kyle’s way, a circle of duds each with his own tin-roofed homestead and outlying sheds, windmills, turkey’s nest dams, miles of bare dirt and fence lines piled with tumbleweed and burr, galloped over by squads of slave-driven jackaroos. The old boys were hell-bent on giving each other reassurance into their twilight years, using their schoolboy nicknames for each other – ‘Spud’, with balls like potatoes; ‘Cut’, always with an erection; and ‘Smel’, with congenital bowel disease. Kyle was called ‘Kyyyyle’, a name stretched out like a dingo howl.
They held reunions in Tattersall’s pub, in golf clubs and bowling clubs and returned servicemen’s clubs in towns across the north-west plains. They’d all had promise and lived up to it according to the quantity doled out. Their reunions came up faster each year and Kyle, though he hated them, never missed one. Doing something he hated, doing it well and never showing it mattered was close to a definition of Kyle Morrison’s understanding of himself. At the end of each gathering they sang the old school song: Boom chicka boom, boom chicka boom, boom chicka boom chicka, boom boom boom.
TATTERSALL’S PUB, THE TOP PUB, had white-painted, crenellated roof towers and engraved glass doors and varnished steps leading up to a spacious foyer with flower arrangements in brass ewers and a wide, sweeping staircase and two upper floors of rooms, some with facilities – washbasin and fireplace.
Petersen’s pub, a mile down the road past the edge of town near the trucking yards, was a former coaching inn, The George, known as a bloodhouse. Henry Lawson had stayed there in the 1890s, as he had in every pub in the state’s north-west, and drunk in them until he passed out in a torrent of babble. Its accommodation was out the back. Communal dunnies. Communal showers. Soapy water running out into an earth drain fringed with green. A rusting roof and a long verandah hanging over the footpath, leaning and twisting like a drunk.
Until the railways declined, Petersen’s was where you drank if you worked the rails, unless you were a station master, an engineer or a railways’ commissioner passing through – a grandee. Then you went up to Tatt’s.
There was, no surprise, a portrait of Marcus Friendly hung over the bar – the one that was everywhere in pubs within shouting distance of shunting yards or sets of points crossing over each other, causing a clattering in the night.
Petersen’s was where you drank if you had any heart for the underdog and where you were taken in if the underdog was who you were. A startling effect of it was that the pub prospered. Young and old pulled in for a beer, the place hummed. This was where the Petersens started. They now had hotels in the Riverina and on the Far South Coast, the Parslow Arms within sound of the surf near Crater Bay.
The Petersens, including Max, were part of – an example of – the economically self-advantaging workingman’s wealth drive, the party’s retention of conscience while fattening its purse after being pushed out by the blue bloods in the election of 1975 and deciding why not piss all over the bastards at their own game.
The district branch of the party met at Petersen’s pub every two months. Ross Devlin kept the key to the meeting rooms, making sure he arrived first to dust off the shelves and open the windows to the night air. Then he ordered a beer and waited. Draining his first, he ordered a second. If nobody turned up, as happened, he settled in for a third.
Glenn Pritchett, the orchardist; Roland Mainwaring, the council grader driver; Mrs Frances Hoad, the schoolteacher; Jim Pickering, the poultry farmer; Sven Petersen, the publican; and Connie Petros, from the Three Roses Café, made up almost the sum total, along with Ross Devlin, of local branch members. Sven was away and Max was up from Sydney helping out, dispensing largesse. He was in his mid-twenties and finishing at university while doing something youthful at Trades Hall. He wore a rainbow-coloured headband and white, flared trousers. His brothers – to be accurate, his stepbrothers – ran other pubs. They were beefy blokes, unlike Max with his slight build and handsome, guitar-strummer’s looks.
Max was adopted. His natural mother had died in childbirth the year of Max’s birth, 1952. His adoptive mother was Jessie Petersen. She loved Max with an anguished longing. Max loved her in return with the arc of love’s incompletion.
Jessie came into the bar carrying plates of pies and dishes of Irish stew, and after she put them down she gave Max a peck on the cheek, ruffled his hair and beamed at him.
‘Everything all right, darling?’
‘Humming,’ said Max.
Jessie turned to Ross Devlin. ‘He’s looking after you, dear?’
‘None better,’ said Ross.
‘It’s on the h-house,’ said Max, putting a schooner in front of Ross. ‘Look. Look out the window, mate,’ he said, looping an arm around Ross’s shoulder and steering him aside.
Ross cupped his hands to the window at the end of the bar. A young man with curly hair down to his shoulders, wearing an army disposals jacket, was hosing dust from a car under the bare globe of an outside light, a low-slung, dark-green Jaguar sedan.
‘There’s the future of the party,’ said Max. ‘A self-interested partnership.’
‘Whose bus is that?’ said Ross.
‘It’s mine,’ said Max.
‘You’re joking.’
‘No bull.’
It beat Ross how Max did it. He was the new generation. Last year it was an Indian Chief motorbike. Now a Jag. Max was half a generation younger than Ross, a part-time union organiser and already driving a luxury car, the best of British make, while Ross scrimped and saved and drove a battered ute. Sven Petersen would buy a pub for his sons if they’d work it, never a car, not even a pushbike. Max’s generation declared their principles, fought for them if need be down to the level of brawls in the street, and then lined up at the trough of material gain without blushing.
Max introduced Tiger Yeomans, and he was a talker: ‘I’ve heard all about you, Ross Devlin, Max says you’re the tops. What keeps you going, do you get depressed, nobody turning up like this, when you don’t have a quorum? I’ve heard you’re a stayer – you’d have to be. They say the party got the crappiest vote here of anywhere.’
Ross said, ‘You want your ears boxed.’
‘It’s not your fault!’
‘Tiger goes on a bit,’ said Max. ‘We’ve joined a small concern. Analysis and agitprop.’
‘PR,’ said Tiger. ‘How do you like the staff car?’
‘What sort of a name is Tiger?’ said Ross.
‘Grrr, comrade,’ said Tiger Yeomans with a boyish grin.
Ross remembered the name then. ‘Yeomans, the Admiral?’ he said.
‘He’s my old man,’ said Tiger.
It explained the accent, the overdone banter and party enthusiasm in the absence of authentic roots.
Godfrey Yeomans was a naval officer, an Admiral of the fleet who was all over the news, for a while, just before the party got in (and was pushed out), a decorated serviceman with a celebrated grouch against the other lot.
‘Can he be trusted?’ said Ross.
‘Loyal, that’s our Tiges,’ said Max.
‘I feel like, now I’ve shaken your hand,’ said Tiger, ‘that I’ve touched something going a long way back. The great tradition going back – back to the nineties – to Marcus Friendly and the Big Strike, to the war, to the post-war years, to the night Pig Iron Bob took it from him – how do you feel about him, the bloke? What was he like, Marcus Friendly? What was it like the night he – the night he – the night he –’
‘Died?’ said Ross.
Max went along wiping the bar with a wet rag.
Tiger lowered his voice: ‘You were there. Max never shuts up about it. You were just a kid.’
Max called for last orders. ‘One for the road?’
‘Trades Hall have their eye on Max,’ said Tiger. ‘He’s the coming man. They’re sending him to China, Cuba, Vietnam – on a youth league round the world junket, all expenses paid.’
Max pulled down the shutters, ushered out the last drunks. He wanted Tiger to taste Ross’s hooch. They went to their cars. Tiger backed the Jag out with a throaty rumble of exhaust.
‘Follow me,’ said Ross. He drove with the windows down, enjoying the night air, clearing his head after the fug of the bar. It was a long drive across a bare, moonlit plain, avoiding kangaroos and ditches at the side of the road. The other pair of headlights followed at a distance.
Close to midnight the three arrived at Inverarity Station and stumbled into the overseer’s quarters. Ross pulled out the square bottle and banged it on the kitchen table with three glass tumblers.
It was the same routine whenever Max came out from town on a late-night spin, the glasses filled, the glasses raised, the glasses clinked, and Max and Ross meeting each other’s eye across the trembling brim.
‘G’luck.’
‘Chugalug.’
‘Wonder of wonders,’ said Tiger.
A ribbon of cloudy spirits jolted his innards. Holding his emptied glass to the oil lamp – no generator at this hour – he said, ‘What is this stuff? What’s in it? What’s it made from?’
‘Turnips,’ said Ross. ‘Sheep fodder.’
‘No kidding! Whoo, I feel good.’
‘Ferment, strain, distil,’ said Ross. ‘There’s nothing to it.’
‘And chuck in a little sheep shit,’ said Max, holding his glass out for a refill.
Time for a sing-song, then.
Tiger hummed as Ross strummed a guitar and Max droned the words of political fighting songs. Tiger was out under the stars and stumbling back in again – what a night. Heartbreak, hardship, god-fearing, bellowing appeals for the pity of slavemasters, factory owners and the rulers of the cruel world, and hand-clapping calls for the Lord’s pity – Oh, Lawdy Lawdy – finally came to an end.
The drink was fiery without the burn. The night starry and clear without end, spiralling on its axis poles. Loyalty and attachment were Tiger’s lodestones. His friends were friends for life. Unending was what Tiger meant when he carried on to Devlin earlier in the bar – a feeling of going back, of what passed from generation to generation, never the same with each handover, but stamped with a mark of belonging.
THE NEXT MORNING, STEPPING DOWN from the rail motor at Inverarity siding after his night and half a day’s travel, Kyle Morrison saw the earth dropping off around him into the familiar hugeness of his workplace.
It was a plain as wide as the upward-gazing eyeball of the earth. A car appeared from the direction of Inverarity and disappeared under a pillar of dust in the direction of town.
Kyle waited. Devlin was late. Nondescript coolabahs and lignum swamps fanning out from steaming bore drains were low interruptions to the eye. Smoke slanted across the horizon. A fire was creeping through the Swampland Block. It had burned the whole time he was away.
A second car appeared, grew larger, and edged along below the platform, stopping. It was Kyle’s Humber Super Snipe.
‘Who was that?’ said Kyle when his overseer, Ross Devlin, took his bag and threw it in the trunk.
‘Max Petersen and a friend of his, Tiger Yeomans. They stayed the night.’
‘Good for them,’ said Kyle.
Of course, Devlin had the right to have anyone in his quarters he wanted to have there. There was no contesting it. His friends could come and go as they pleased. They could churn up the dust, wear out the road, bang their car doors at three in the morning and blow their horns as loud as they liked, setting off back to wherever they came from.
It settled Kyle to notice, from the window of the Humber as his overseer drove, a Western Brown sashaying along a bore drain. Suborder Ophidia, Serpentes. Order Squamata, many families of same, a field of study beating breeding stock for interest.
Kyle gave more attention to a snake, a hawk, a swallow or a lizard than he did to Ross, who instead of getting on with his report on the week’s work said, after a long silence, ‘When that fire’s finished in the Swampland Block there’ll be feed for a thousand head.’
‘Or more,’ said Kyle – the point being it would never happen. He would never allow stock in there, flush of green pick after wildfire notwithstanding.
‘Someone might,’ said Devlin. ‘There’s a certain party – might.’
‘To hell with your certain party,’ said Kyle.
‘Only trying to be honest with you,’ said Devlin.
‘Don’t see how,’ said Kyle.
He would rather think about snakes than engage in a wrangle that baulked his authority, such as it was.
Snakes had a good way of fitting around circumstances. If you didn’t alarm them or corner them they left you alone. Their beauties of scale, eye and fang were the province of the rare connoisseur.
A great day, it was, when Kyle had written to the herpetologists at the Australian Museum, sending them a draft of the paper that became ‘Reptilia of a Far North-West Shire’. One of each species had been killed, coiled and bottled in formaldehyde, photographed, prints made by Elisabeth in the laundry tubs and described by Kyle on index cards. The two, Kyle and Elisabeth, were henceforth known in reptile circles as ‘the Western Snakes and Legless Lizards’. The old boys chanted the collective noun to each other in golf club bars. Christ, they were a pair, those two, Kyyyyle and his missus.
‘Stop here,’ said Kyle, at a corner where three fences met. Devlin thumped the brakes.
It was a rise, a hump in the road giving a view into the scattered trees and long, bleached Mitchell grass of the Swampland Block. There was a glimmer of clay-coloured water and a white-faced heron beating its way along. A strainer post cut from a box tree bled gobbets of sap from under strips of shaggy cambium. It was months since Devlin and the jackaroos had heaved it into the ground under Kyle’s direction.
Kyle climbed from the car and approached the strainer, holding a matchbox. He walked with the careful tread of a powder monkey. He could never come anywhere near the Block without pouncing on something or other, winged or scaled, feelered or fanged, putting it into a matchbox, trapping it in a cigar box or wriggling it into a sack.
He climbed back into the car, clutching his find, and they got going again. Dry of speech, dry of skin, though never entirely dry of hope, Kyle held to his swampish preferences against the policy of the Inverarity directors, led by his cousin Rosemary MacKinlay and supported by his overseer, Devlin, to open the Swampland Block to cattle. He kept turning his head back, looking at the diminishing line of trees.
‘The point is,’ said Devlin.
‘The point is never,’ said Kyle.
The Swamp was a labyrinth of billabongs, channels and dry, grassy islands. It was a place of eagles’ nests, brolga dances, hawk and night-owl patrols, dove and pigeon belfreys, and butcher bird choirs – the closest place to paradise on earth, and the fact that Devlin felt the same except for the matter of getting stock in there cheered Kyle on those days when it didn’t irk him almost to death.
Billabongs and sandy islets led into a system of muddy canals. Floods, when they came, lasted for months under hot blue skies. Swollen creeks coming down from Queensland broke their banks with a nudge and a trickle. Birds flocked there – ducks, herons, waders, swallows the harbingers of good. Pelicans glided through the haze of the setting sun. Mud-caked frogs drummed in waterholes. Squamata made the strike. Kyle poled a flat-bottomed boat along, a gondolier mute with unsung song wearing a flat Akubra. The old boys rolled their eyes and Devlin looked leaden-lipped when Kyle spoke rhapsodically, which is to say, spoke a dozen words on the subject of the Swamp, then fell quiet. His eyes told the rest, an enlivening of every scruffy nest and rotted hollow.
Kyle’s cupped hands held the matchbox like a treasured gift.
‘What’ve you got there?’ said Devlin.
‘An assassin bug,’ said Kyle, sliding the matchbox tray open a quarter inch to give a blurred view of something bigger than an ant, smaller than a spider, struggling and scraping the cardboard. Ross was obliged to take hold of Kyle’s wrist and steer it back to his lap before they ran off the road.
‘It’s a bug,’ said Kyle, ‘that injects a lethal spittle into its prey. It liquefies the guts so they can be sucked out.’
‘Like a milkshake?’ said Devlin.
They drove in their typical silence then, never entirely comfortable, a silence never entirely sucked dry of feeling or even of understanding.
Kyle could hear Devlin’s jaw cracking, his teeth grinding, saliva sucked back into the sinuses as he matched Kyle’s silences, or tried to.
The homestead lay below the horizon as they counted the telegraph poles reaching towards it, a rusting wire drooping almost to the ground between each ceramic insulator. It was a party line, where everyone learned everyone else’s business and listened when they said they didn’t. Devlin made sure he never rang anyone close to him on it. When he had anything personal to say he drove to town and wedged himself in a phone box.
On the road past Inverarity Bore, skeletons of sheep lay dark with carrion crows calling out ‘Carkle’, Bounder’s hymn to the crow.
Wrenching his mind to work, Kyle resolved to lift the lid from the conversation with Devlin if he must. He opened his mouth, closed it again.
‘It would be a good idea,’ Kyle said, ‘for the jackaroos to come out and pick the dead wool, and while they’re at it, to get the dead-uns out of sight of the road.’
‘In time for the next visit of the MacKinlays?’ said Devlin, to which Kyle gave assent, in silence, but with a mental verse:
The crows of the world are gathered in
On the rim of Australia wide,
Their flashing beaks and feathers’ gloss,
And their cries of, ‘Carkle’.
Kyle liked ‘gloss’ for a crow’s feathers, but there came a wretched comma again, the third one, too, with, so to speak, a finger stabbing the air for a few seconds accusation. Kyle thought Wordsworth a true poet. Coleridge, too. Alexander Pope had his own sorts of rhythm but made something of them more like a commentary than a boast. By the end of ‘Carkle’, though, you felt the truest and most hopeless creature in the world to be was a crow, flopping over a landscape very like the one Kyle drove through with his overseer at the wheel and the noonday sun beating down on them.
INVERARITY WAS THE PROPERTY BOUNDER bought for Kyle when Kyle had no way of getting capital, and when Kyle made a mess of its finances, Inverarity was sold to a pastoral company with Rosemary and Brian MacKinlay as directors, along with city investors. Kyle was installed as manager without needing to shift houses.
Ross Devlin went back a long way with the MacKinlays. He’d been warned off them by his father but winsome Rosemary won. She’d eventually got him to Inverarity when he was in his twenties, first as jackaroo and then as overseer. He was now thirty-seven. For thirteen long years he’d stuck – years when Kyle was kept on by a company policy that venerated the name Morrison while bemoaning the losses.
Inverarity would carry the losses for the sake of Bounder’s rhymes in ‘Larrikin Larry’ –
Larrikin Larry
Of Inverarity
(et cetera, et cetera)
– but only so far.
Now the directors had taken a step. They’d subpoenaed the Bounder Morrison Literary Estate for an audit of deeds from when Bounder made transfers of title, cupboards unopened for years spilling scrolls of spidery-pencilled land maps, one built on the other, each superseding the other but needing a lawyer to say how, another to say how not. The directors were hardly unaware of a possible problem. They’d been quiet about it for years. Now the sleeping dog was awake.
‘That car you saw,’ said Devlin. ‘The Jag.’
‘Yes?’
‘Before it was Max Petersen’s it belonged to a man named Atkinson, Tim Atkinson. He liked the better things of life.’
‘So?’
‘Atkinson was a party insider.’
‘I suppose not the first,’ said Kyle, ‘to wallow in the trough.’
‘He set up a company. It prints magazines. It does all right. Max Petersen’s taking it over. He’s been given the nod.’
‘What’s your point, Devlin?’
‘Tim Atkinson’s wife, Luana, she’s getting older.’
‘Aren’t we all?’
‘Max Petersen’s helping her out. She’s in her eighties.’
‘Good man, your friend.’
‘She’s a Milburn.’
Kyle said nothing. They drove on a bit.
‘Name ring a bell?’ said Ross. ‘Milburn?’
‘No, just a very dull thud,’ said Kyle.
Of course he knew the name. Knew the people. Working people, railway people, travelling people. There’d been hardly a day since Kyle came to Inverarity when he hadn’t thought about the Milburns. Intervals of years passed without his ever setting eyes on them. Then he’d run into one in the Swamp and whole families of them would be there, camping. Chewing the fat, when he asked where they came from they said, ‘the Swamp’.
No, where they first came from. ‘Milburn is an English name,’ he’d push, when he was younger and had that spark of interest. The answer was blank surprise. They came from the Swamp. Nothing went back from there. So the Milburns’ lives were lugubrious, dim. Kyle did not know one from the other after all these years, except for Jenny Milburn, a beauty – how could anyone miss her? – striding through town, wild hair, wild eyes, a look wrenching men’s heads around.
MEADOW FLATS, THE MACKINLAYS’ MEADOW FLATS, six hundred miles to the south of Inverarity Station, in high, cool country near the national capital, was where Kyle was born.
In the 1930s when Bounder Morrison sold Meadow Flats to Rosemary’s father, ‘Billyum’ Wignall, it was in order to buy Inverarity, or more truthfully to leverage the mortgage for this great big extravagance of an outback spread on a baking plain that was now closing in on Kyle as it had seemed to do all the days of his life, only faster now.
Meadow Flats went to Rosemary on the death of her father, and that was all very good and how it should have been, in Rosemary’s loud opinion. But as time went on she’d felt robbed because the rest of the estate, the mining and industrial stock, went to her older brother, Powys. When Powys Wignall took over the shares they weren’t worth a bushel or a peck. He might have helped her with his cleverness if she’d got some. Now he was rich.
Rosemary looked like a scrag or a witch in her worn, baggy jodhpurs and bush hats with tatters of dusty ribbon and parakeet feathers stuck in them. Powys was the other writer in the family of Morrisons and Wignalls set apart in Australian eyes for their social pretensions while living on shrinking funds and blowing the tin whistle of art. Except Powys’s funds weren’t shrinking.
Meadow Flats used to be a long way out in the bush but the national capital dragged it closer in when roads were sealed and suburbs expanded. After selling off a few paddocks, the MacKinlays found they had a drive-in theatre in the gully where as a boy Kyle had ridden through bushland as important to dreams as the Swampland Block was to him now. Sitting on a blanket, the MacKinlays watched William Holden and Kim Novak in Picnic, no sound but shapes and shadows tall as manna gums. They grew lucerne and raised fat lambs in an enterprise a bit like squeezing toothpaste from a flattened tube. Their debts were unending. Years ago they’d sold a paddock to Marcus Friendly for the Friendly House against their political beliefs. They’d continued selling off like the Ouroboros consuming its own tail.
The MacKinlays would be taking the long drive north-west on Tuesday fortnight for their six-monthly inspection of Inverarity. It was not all theirs to dispose of. Not by any means. Listening to Rosemary carry on you would never think so. They were, in fact, merely executive directors for investors in Pitt and Collins streets who never dirtied their shirt collars. Even so, Rosemary carped that the Swampland Block was ‘the jewel in the crown’ of the Inverarity Pastoral Company’s holdings, the meaning of which was, ‘We have our eyes on it.’
Kyle believed the intention was to sell Meadow Flats, the leftover rump, and get hold of Inverarity by divine right or some other primitive holt. Devlin had his own plans, not as obvious. A lot of telephoning went on from the post office in town so it wouldn’t be overheard on the party line.
There was pressure on Kyle – had been in the years since he’d turned sixty. He was frankly wanted off the place. And if that’s what they wanted they could drag him out feet first. He wished he’d got rid of Devlin. Murdering him was hardly an option, a stake through the heart attractive though it might be. Couldn’t he just have a fatal accident? There’d be Rosemary in the car and Milburns packing it to the roof-rack as it spun off the road and burst into flames.
Normally after a few years a promoted jackaroo would have served his time as overseer and moved away to manage someone else’s property or with the help of the bank bought his own place. Devlin was the ageing midshipman in a Hornblower novel, abject with thwarted ambition in a ship of grown men. Other staff Devlin’s age made their moves, got married, had families, took out a loan, bought their own places, thrived or didn’t thrive – at least they did it themselves, out of sight.
But here was Devlin on the one hand, Rosemary on the other, crows on a fence post waiting.
Elisabeth liked Ross Devlin, most women did – the boy who’d come to them heartfelt but truculent and grown into a man protective of heart, feeling of eye but still truculent. He confided matters to her that she could hardly pass on to Kyle.
Devlin said, confirming what he knew in relation to going back years with the MacKinlays, that the fenced-in acres of the Swampland Block that Kyle would not have touched out of Inverarity’s half million were the ‘jewel in the crown of the jewel in the crown’ and ‘a prize for the picking’.
‘Where’ve I heard that expression before?’ said Kyle, dry as a drought-year cowpat.
They were almost home. A whisky awaited Kyle. His tongue curled inside his mouth. A whisky and his darling Elisabeth. He needed a drink whenever he tussled with Devlin; a good way of getting rid of him was to guzzle himself into a stupor.
Devlin dropped Kyle and took the car around the back. Boss and retainer. Which was which in the tug of influence?
They parted across the dusty width of the yards to their respective quarters, home brew for Devlin, his laundry tubs a lab of malts, hops and the pale hooch that he stored in square bottles and gave away on May Day. Something a little more refined for Kyle, a homestead dining room assortment of gleaming decanters.
‘In a country of thirsts all hung on the administration of liquids.’ It was a line from No Ring of Bells, by Powys Wignall.
Elisabeth took Kyle’s arm and they went inside. Argus the stud fox terrier pranced ahead of her, thin as a whippet, proud as a picador. Kyle was against terriers because of their habit of going after snakes but conceded their supremacy in sniffing them out in the house. He saw the delight in Elisabeth’s eyes when she gathered pups in a basket and set them down at the end of their bed, and wondered to himself why he’d ever argued against them.
A wide, flyscreened area of the house formed what they called the Arcade. It was built by Kyle and the early jackaroos, including Powys Wignall prewar. There was nothing like it anywhere in the state. Tea things were laid out there, in one small corner of that vast-roofed space. Elisabeth chased around getting the pups back together while the kettle boiled and Kyle threw back an ‘emu’.
The mail was stacked ready to go through but Kyle merely glanced over it. Elisabeth was station bookkeeper, storekeeper, accounts clerk, postmistress. Had been since the day they married. She kept the mail up to date without worrying Kyle too much and handed him his correspondence from the Australian Museum with consoling enthusiasm.
NEXT MORNING KYLE BRUSHED CRUMBS from his chin, dabbed away dried egg, kissed Elisabeth, clamped on his hat and stepped into the glare for the day’s routines. Unless the Swampland Block was on the list, thrilling his veins, Kyle could not always swear what day it was. His eyes hurt. When he peeled back his lids they were like torn cardboard.
In the battered Land Rover used for paddock tours, Kyle clutched the handgrips with aching fingers, jolting old horseriding fractures down through his arms, ribcage, hips, thighs, knees, into his feet, out along each joint and into his gnarly toes.
They drove where Devlin thought they should go, ticking off a list. They’d breakfasted in the dark. The jackaroos had their horses out. Animal tracks led to watering points like desiccated veins. It was gallop with them or simply plod. Jackaroos were under orders not to drink water before noon; it would make them thirsty all day. When they met up and uncapped their waterbags at noon, the mineralish water was like medicine, giving them the squits. Kyle himself passed blood on occasion but held to the rule for the sake of example.
Sitting in thin shade eating sandwiches, men and boys picked over slices of fatty mutton and mustard pickles. Gristle was chewed and spat. Shreds of silver foil stuck in the cheese slices and between the teeth. A wormy apple was supplied apiece.
Inverarity jackaroos were red-eyed, competitive young men from Kyle’s old school, or schools like it, who regarded Inverarity as Kyle did: an extension of unfinished life but with possibly interesting aspects. The first of these was they’d leave Inverarity with a story to tell. Kyle was the topic, son of the famous Bounder, the meaning of Inverarity distilled. At night they leafed through Bounder’s poems and competed quoting tongue twisters.
Devlin was the odd man out. A Catholic, he’d been to a Catholic school. At fifteen he’d trained on the rural side of a Catholic concern where horse-breaking and growing potatoes were required skills, and making your own furniture from crates and kerosene drums was an after-hours recreation, as was leatherwork – reins, bridles, decorative wallets, big-buckled Western belts with patterns of the Southern Cross chasing in a circle. On Inverarity they all did their own leatherwork, washed their own clothes, did their own sewing, their saddle and halter repairs – it was how it went on the land – but Devlin was Catholic, and some kind of socialist as well, right down into the soapy laundry tubs as he made out there was more to mending your own duds and washing your own shirts and jockey shorts than getting by. God only knew what. Each side played the pastoral game of hardness and contempt.
When he went to town Devlin drank at the bottom pub. On election days he handed out how-to-vote cards with a dismal, deadbeat lot. He turned the latest election defeat celebration booze-up in Tatt’s into a wake by barging in drunk from the bottom pub and reciting Lawson on blood on the wattle till they kicked him out.
Kyle hardly ever rode faster than a walk, despite the legend in rhyme; rarely climbed out of the Land Rover when they went around the paddocks; was sometimes drunk at dinner, face down in the soup; let Elisabeth make decisions; didn’t listen to Rosemary MacKinlay when she came on pastoral inspections, so she shrieked; lost track of what he was saying in the course of an ordinary sentence; stopped the jackaroos from killing snakes; spent time banding birds in the Swamp when there was work to be done; left the hardest decisions to Devlin, who had no choice sometimes except to come down to the jackaroos’ quarters in the name of Kyle and knock a bloke to the ground.
On Sunday nights, though, when they all came together again after their day and a half off, and the jackaroos were not required to wear jackets to dinner, and Kyle in shirtsleeves cooked chops and sausages over a rusty drum in the garden, and beer was served, then it was all right.
Then the four jackaroos – Tim Airey, Geoff Wouldhave, Norman Woollacott and Bill Greathead – were invited into the Arcade for snooker and table tennis. They played a set. Kyle and Ross Devlin then played their weekly match.
Kyle, almost a cripple, was unbeatable with the celluloid ball. He stood back from the centre of the table flicking returns to Devlin without apparent effort. The jackaroos applauded. At snooker it was the same, runs of balls into every corner.
Ross Devlin hated the way Kyle played him to a standstill while young Bill Greathead, or the Greathead equivalent of the day, going back to when Ross started with Kyle, snorted, ‘Yo, ho, ho the boss!’ every time a ball ricocheted.
Ross kept thinking: ‘The boss’ – Jesus, who is it really runs this dump? I’ll show who it is, by the living Christ I will. And so he would, by means of a kick up the arse or an open-palmed clip to the ear of the likes of young Greathead, and Kyle Morrison would know nothing about it, that Kyle would be game to admit when he saw, in the morning, a thick nose, a pair of wobbly eyes trailing out from the cook hut.
Elisabeth said, concerning Ross Devlin, ‘I have never seen an unhappier man in all my life. Do something about him, Kyle, won’t you?’
‘Everything I’ve tried . . .’ Kyle trailed off. ‘There’s his manner . . .’ He tried harder. ‘His manner of agreement, it’s always so . . . I ask him to chip the jackaroos – very well – he belts them.’
‘Get him to ask his girl here.’
‘His girl?’ said Kyle.
‘You might find it hard. It’s the Milburn lass.’
Kyle licked a finger and ate up a crumb from the breakfast table.
He knew it of course. It wasn’t the old Milburn witch who had Inverarity’s nuts in a twist over title deeds; it was the young Milburn witch – a country town she-cat on sticky asphalt dancing the ants in the pants bop-a-loola. He knew her. Knew her by sight, had seen her clutching a bottle of beer, which she shook with her thumb over the neck and sprayed at passing Lotharios as they cruised by with their side windows rolled down, asking for a poke.
‘What are you looking at, you old fart,’ she yelled at Kyle, or was it the man on the other side of the road, or was it the man looking out from the doors of the bank or someone.
IT WAS MIDWEEK WHEN THE mailman drove up to the garden gate blowing a cranky horn. Elisabeth took delivery of a bundle of letters and parcels under an arbour of Persian roses, watered by washing-up slops.
‘Darling,’ Elisabeth said when Kyle came in and was settled in his armchair, a big Scotch within reach. ‘Darling, good news.’
Kyle lowered the Sydney Bulletin, which had once been Bounder’s bible, the only reading matter that counted countrywide – but now material ran that seemed to confound the understanding – poems that were miserably withered on the page, short stories alluding to matters that should never be spoken about publicly in words never before seen in print.
Elisabeth smoothed a letter on her knee. ‘Powys is coming on Sunday,’ she said, ‘and bringing a friend.’
‘Powys coming, good.’
A recent Bulletin correspondent, writing as ‘Literature Lover’, had attacked Powys’s novels with a vehemence that flushed Kyle with affection:
‘Polysyllables and sentences over three hundred words long, hardly any commas and no paragraph breaks try the patience. A propensity for pages with hardly a crack for ordinary understanding marks the demanding style. It is like being never allowed to leave a room – a mode of mental strangulation.’
Except both Kyle and Ross Devlin agreed – something they agreed on! – that after struggling with Powys you found a page, a chapter, and the rest of a book opened out, until, a golden glimmer on the horizon, Inverarity station rose into view under the fictional name of Blue Horizons.
Few reached that point. Rosemary MacKinlay, Powys’s own sister, barely had, except to admit there were very few spelling mistakes in her brother’s scribbles. Brian MacKinlay said he wouldn’t bother opening one of Powys’s tomes but liked having one as a doorstop. Elisabeth, though she loved Powys, preferred books soothing to sentimental hopes, and so she ought, having lived her life’s dreams down to the bone as a Morrison daughter-in-law.
As a writer, Powys Wignall was everything his relation Bounder Morrison was not. He turned things inside, not out. Powys was published in England. Bounder had never been published there. Powys avoided commas! Their lack was intoxication to Kyle – a comma stung.
What Rosemary hated most about her brother’s books, she said, could not be expressed – too much of one thing, too little of another. Then too much of everything altogether that should never be revealed concerning details of Wignall and Morrison life.
‘Example,’ she then liked to add. Who needed to know about Gerald Albury answering Maude Grout’s plea for a personal loan that she’d use to buy into the newly formed ‘Blue Horizons Pastoral Company’ without telling Gerald a word about it until it was signed, sealed and delivered? And another thing – what sort of a name was Grout? Maude Grout crying poor to Albury when he returned from England aghast at what had been done by her. Who needed to know such things, all spelled out as in a court of law, with only the names changed? It made Rosemary feel naked and exposed until she realised that nobody was really reading her brother’s books, or nobody who counted.
At the Bounder Morrison Literary Estate Trustees’ meetings Kyle was asked by national clever dicks, ‘How’s that flaming literary genius, your mother’s cousin, coming along?’
Kyle boasted nothing, said little, but read and re-read Powys’s books. He was proud of being a character in the novels – Partridge in Lenders’ Books, Milthorpe in No Ring of Bells. It went back to the shared life, the relation of boy to man on the north-west plains.
Kyle looked blank if anyone came close to suggesting it, as Ross Devlin had more than once, craftily or desperately or feelingly or wantingly maintaining practically the only common ground between them. Neither Kyle nor Devlin had ever been able to find a factual error or an inaccurate observation or a line that was not the truth, even if not their own truth, exactly, except somehow enhancing or upraising their feeling of where they fitted into a greater scheme of things than the trudging, repetitive everyday life they lived.
Ross Devlin under the spell of Inverarity horizons never questioned why he’d turned his back on his father’s wish to make him a builder and gone bush under the influence of the MacKinlays after he’d done with the Catholic Brothers. Inverarity soared to night skies telling the story of the universe. You didn’t need a prayer book to tell you that. It was in Powys’s words a prophecy of belonging.
Ross rankled when a review of No Ring of Bells in the London Times defined jackaroos as ‘cowboys’. It was reported in Australian papers and Ross took up his pen.
‘I was struck,’ he wrote in an aerogram to the Times with a hand curved around the page like a schoolboy in exams, ‘by your reviewer’s ignorance, sir. The equivalent of “cowboy” in Australian is not “jackaroo” but “station hand” or “ringer”. Mr Powys Wignall, who is from the ruling class of this country, could only have fitted that role by a considerable act of slumming. More like a cowboy is the check-shirted, Stetson-hatted young fellow, sitting up on the rails watching the rodeo and most likely of Aboriginal race.’
Ross lingered over that last sentence on account of that cousin of a ringer, Jenny Milburn, who was, it must be asserted, white as he was or at worst coffee-cream. Having done his nuts over Jenny, he’d moved into the phase of convincing her it was for life. It would be, anyway, if he could cure her restlessness by settling her on the Swampland Block. He would anyway try if justice ran its course.
The letter was not published. Neither editor nor reviewer responded. Ross pored over his copy, wondering what was wrong with it – or else with Australia, when an Australian could not get his point across.
IN THE ARCADE AT MAIL time the anticipation was thrilling.
‘When is Powys coming?’ said Kyle.
‘Sunday,’ said Elisabeth.
‘But, darling,’ said Kyle, ‘Sunday? There’s no Sunday’s train, and Powys won’t drive.’
He said ‘won’t drive’ in a winning tone – good old Powys, how Lizzie loved Powys too; they were one on him. It wasn’t so much ‘won’t drive’ as ‘it kills him to drive because of his war wound and the trouble it gives’. They said that to people, drawing a line around Powys, making him their own.
Elisabeth re-smoothed Powys’s letter across her jodhpured knee. It was several pages long.
‘ “The friend can drive like Gelignite Jack Murray and change a wheel in a jiffy,” ’ she read.
‘He’ll be making use of him,’ said Kyle with an affectionate groan.
‘Darling, it’s a she. He’s bringing Margaret Poole.’
Now Kyle threw his head back and laughed and laughed – now he really was delighted and threw the Bulletin into a corner.
Margaret Poole – the daughter of Elisabeth’s honeymoon friend, Maggie – working-class people – Elisabeth’s salt-of-the-earth New Zealanders – just the idea of them balancing the Australian squatter class and mongrel hayseed voting bloc of the north-west plains that Elisabeth had thrown her lot in with by marrying Kyle.
Last year Margaret had crossed the Tasman and started work as a Women’s Weekly journalist living in Sydney and getting herself known. It had been a correspondence relationship till then. They’d met for the first time in April, when Margaret interviewed Kyle about lizards and snakes.
The interview was conducted at Taronga Zoo where the reptile keepers welcomed Kyle. Margaret’s article appeared in the Weekly with a pulled-focus shot of Kyle with a tiger snake fang seemingly flicking his nose, about to strike, and he’d never looked happier except on trophy day at the ‘Dryblows’, or when slamming Ross Devlin in the teeth with a ping-pong ball.
Kyle leaned forward in his chair and looked at Elisabeth imploringly.
‘Her chappie is out of the picture?’ he said.
‘Darling, how would I know?’
‘Ah,’ said Kyle. ‘Most probably you would know.’
Elisabeth treasured the moments when Kyle gleamed about the eyes and mouth, and yes, even if it was a young woman who gave him that pleasure. Even if it was jealousy of a louring, pessimistic young man by the name of Alan Ward, who was Margaret’s friend, indeed a whole lot more, when she came to Sydney. Ward had decamped for the old country, leaving Margaret hurt. There was evidence for this: Margaret wrote in the first person singular, no longer pluralised, and she wrote more often.
Kyle leaned forward in his chair with an openly roused look that was as good with him as recovery from illness. It was such a sad, horsey, somehow affronted face, normally tense and bothered. It needed to be shaken out of itself. Social arrangements did the trick as well as his squamata collection or parties where women in skinny jeans danced the Twist.
‘Where shall we put her, Mar-gar-et?’ said Kyle, working each syllable over. He was glad that the director’s cottage would be in use by Rosemary and Brian.
‘She can stay in the house, in the east bedroom. Powys can have the Arcade,’ said Elisabeth.
‘Yes, I thought that,’ said Kyle in a tone implying consideration of a woman’s reputation and of putting shackles on a man.
Matchmaking Powys was a pursuit of Elisabeth’s that Kyle supported, but linking Powys to Margaret Poole made him uneasy. He could not have said why, but thought of the politics – blue-chip Powys, pinko-swayed Margaret – and thought of the age gap, income gap, class gap, and thought, I will show her the Swampland Block, just the two of us.
She was a slender, vital, black-pigtailed young woman of the kind who’d look great like a Red Indian girl on a paint pony. Kyle started thinking about which horse to give her, a gallop home in a lather of sweat and a cold shower under the tankstand. It was a fact of the matter that he was harmlessly, ditheringly gone rather sweet on her.
‘Powys in the Arcade,’ he said. ‘Margaret in the front bedroom.’ He gave his cracked lips a dampening of Scotch.
Elisabeth had been thinking of sleeping the visitors in the same bed, or of anyway making the offer. Premarital sex was not what it used to be – she meant, it was having its day – and she’d many times thought, while living her constrained life, Why on earth not?
When Powys brought Beverley, his English bride, to Inverarity after the war, there’d been nights of shrieks and awful fights, someone falling from bed – Powys pushed, no doubt, by that unhappy woman – and metallic objects, guessed to be jewellery, hitting a wall. In recent years Powys’s letters addressed to Elisabeth confided his yearnings and told of erratic, short-lived alliances and evenings with dull, respectful hopes, some of them match-made by Elisabeth.
Thinking that disappointment would fade past their thirties, when it was accepted they could not have children, here was Kyle flushed and Elisabeth animated and busy at keeping disappointment at bay, and both of them stirred by talk of Powys, this early middle-aged man who was like a son to them. His visits were treated as homecomings. Inverarity was his when the world was young, in the prized interlude just before the war. It had been snatched from him (he who could afford it, if he’d been told in time) by Rosemary MacKinlay’s shenanigans, and Kyle’s shame. It was why Kyle had not told him, not written to him in England and warned of the move – deprived as owner and restored as manager, a transition managed not by the new regime so much as by Elisabeth’s soothing hand.
Menus were planned, excursions proposed, neighbours telephoned and asked if they would like to come over. ‘Powys is coming – with a friend – bring some 45s – we’ll have a “hop”.’
There was no stopping Kyle now, usually so reticent.
The cover sheet would be removed from the piano. The novels in their artful, lettered dust jackets would be fanned across the coffee table. The stereophonic player would be checked for function and tidied of books and magazines, a pile grown over the dusty months. The 16 mm projector would be stood on its telescopic legs and a painting lifted from the wall to make a screen space striped with tongue-and-groove verticals.
They would somehow hope, too, that Powys would have news for them: that Rosemary and Brian MacKinlay had been removed as directors, and that Powys himself, in a fabulousness of riches, had bought the Inverarity Pastoral Company lock, stock and barrel, including sorting out legal contradictions that stuck in the throat of hope like fish bones in the middens of the Swampland Block. There was something of a hint of this in Powys’s letter to Elisabeth. That there might be changes, not all of them bad, but don’t tell Kyle. And of course Elisabeth said nothing to Kyle, but he read her face for signs.
Between Sunday and Monday, now, lay a conceivable day of judgement. A meeting of the Board. An undreamt-of resolution. A send-off in which Rosemary and Brian would be accompanied to the main road south and waved goodbye? For Elisabeth, merely, release – something as basic as a cottage on a few gardenable acres with mains electricity and reticulated town water so she would never again have to use washing-up slops on her roses.
Kyle lifted himself from his chair and went for his fourth emu, crossing the room in a semi-crouch, cramped but energised.
While Kyle and Elisabeth had no children, they certainly had their visitors, those evenings when they drank, ate, danced and played charades. At a certain moment everyone would be asked to step out into the Arcade and bring their drinks. Kyle would appear round the corner, doubled over, with a jumper pushed up his back to make a hump, reciting, ‘I that am not shaped for sportive tricks, nor made to court an amorous looking glass’ – the opening speech of Richard III.
Pushed, he would then recite something that wasn’t in Bounder’s Collected, yet so well spittled-out in honour of Bounder’s wildest articulation that you might almost convince yourself that Shakespeare and Bounder had ridden down some dusty road swapping wordplay and seen a wombat mating with an echidna, with a play on the verbs ‘prick’ and ‘jump’.
Bounder would be conjured unbuckling his belt, loosening his braces, telling blue jokes with aural illustrations in his high, shrill, cockatoo-larynx inflection. Then it would become clear that Kyle was darkly drunk and moving into a vengeful dimension.
The secret of Bounder’s bantam energy was that he’d been strapped into a corset every day of his life, and although his back wasn’t humped, it might as well have been because of the venomous energy he drew from the restriction as a barrier to pain.
Cut, Spud and Smelly would have a chance then to know the sort of bloke Kyle was in the heart of himself, in the ways that he showed himself as always a touch apart. They would give a shiver of self-congratulation that one of their band of brothers was grown past control. ‘If he’d had sons,’ they liked saying, ‘they would have been bigger galoots than he is.’
Then Kyle would throw a switch and run the projector in reverse. Dead these thirty years Bounder would back away from the lens ghoul-faced, inky-eyed in noisy-sprocketed black and white, jerked away behind doors that he’d close in his own face, jump in cars and be flung into trees, shadowing away to nothing, eclipsed by fades to black, after which everyone would take their drinks and return to the Arcade for a well-earned snort. There Kyle would become his best self again.
The Arcade was the reason the house was known outside district circles, written about by Warner Tarbett II in Roughly Refined: Bush Timber Buildings of New South Wales (1969).
Chapter Seven: A Living Wonder, The Inverarity Arcade.
The Arcade. It was that almost quarter-acre addition out the back of the original boxed bedrooms – the vast, semi-open, hip-roofed space with roof-to-floor flyscreens and a packed earth floor with a worn track made by feet navigating their way across from the bedroom wing to the kitchen wing.
Kyle had built the Arcade extending out from the original weatherboard homestead with his primal band of jackaroos, including young Powys, taking to the road like gypsies. The six of them trucked termite-resistant posts and beams up from the Pilliga Scrub, camping out by the sawpits and roasting a feral pig caught by the legs and brained with a screwdriver.
At intervals across the earth-floored width of the Arcade was furniture, as in the ruins of a temple, only seemingly randomly strewn – billiard table, table tennis table, rough-sawn benches, squatters’ chairs with plank leg rests and deeply curved canvas seats evoking a property owner’s right to exhaustion, sinking a few stiff ones after a long day in the saddle.
On cool mornings when mist skeined the homestead flats, there was a weather phenomenon duplicated inside the Arcade itself, a fog down at ankle-level among the chair and table legs. It was best then and at night when the generator was switched off, when the dusty light bulbs faded, glowing fitfully with each dying diesel cough. Then the silence was resounding. Joeys came in through the garden, hauled themselves up onto the verandah and rustled their noses on the flywire, trying to get in.
When Inverarity was sold to the Pastoral Company and Kyle kept on, no amount had been valued for homestead improvements, including the Arcade. It was Elisabeth’s hope that if a sale came upon them there would be money allowed for the Arcade, for the house, money enough when they had little to finance retirement. Too much before was made of the Swampland Block being unavailable, blocked from use by Kyle’s stubborn love of nature, fenced around but not within, barred to cattle and sheep since Kyle ran the place during the war with an old stockman and a Chinese gardener, how it devalued the total. Nothing was said about its being registered in two titles, only one of them conceivably legal. Possession was nine points of the law. The only benefit for Kyle, defeated by the bank, the seasons and something in himself, a thwarted calling to be someone his father never dreamed of, was to be allowed to go on living on Inverarity by grace and favour. The bank kept the rest.
That Inverarity had been made Kyle’s all over again by grace and favour of a pastoral company gave Kyle’s dramatic games a dread amusement. A Shakespearean king was never safe, he was never the one and only . . .
Rosemary MacKinlay liked pointing out – except to their faces – that Kyle and Elisabeth had started married life as ‘kept’ by Bounder and existed these years later on a continuation of the ‘keep’ principle in Bounder’s name. How much more they should expect was doubtful. ‘You have to be cruel to be kind.’
Old boys and their wives talked about it on the way home from Inverarity, how Rosemary patronised Kyle. They never agreed outright that Kyle was a stick man, a puppet. They never said that his whole life had been a diminishment down from golden boy. That would be too spiteful. ‘We all have to make our comedowns in life’ was as far as they went. They themselves had survived by making do. Their parties were not so lavish as Inverarity’s, and, ‘What a shame it was taken from them.’
It was fairly certain, they added, that the overseer reported to Rosemary MacKinlay regarding how the place was run. On sales days Fridays, Devlin could be seen at the post office, jammed into a coin box punching buttons A and B and giving out lambing ratios in his low, angry voice. Devlin was a friendless sort of a bloke, outside of the town’s disgruntables with whom he socialised in the bottom pub. Who else could he possibly be calling? A lot of thought went into the question. It was not considered that he had a woman right under their noses, a fiancée who wasn’t sure she wanted him and for whom he made plans involving stock economics on what was preposterously but conceivably legally her land in order to persuade her to come to her senses, and couldn’t he see what was needed was, not arguments, but garlands thrown at her feet wherever she ran?
Ross Devlin was the only staffer off any station anyone had ever heard of who sided with shearers and railway workers and voted red-ragger. In case nobody noticed, the local party branch consisted of a council grader driver, a school teacher, an orchardist and a poultry farmer. Hardly the cream of society. The MacKinlays were not pinko inclined of course, but their connection to Marcus Friendly, back when the Friendly House was built, meant they were interviewed by the papers from time to time, giving Rosemary the opportunity to puff with pride and deliver a put-down, all in the one breath.
‘Our dear old defeated bloke,’ she said.
On Sunday nights following ping-pong in the Arcade, after Ross and Kyle finalised the week’s work, deciding which paddocks were to be mustered, where tractoring and grading was wanted, and deciding which horses were to be shod or spelled – Kyle affectionately going through them by name, Ding Dong, Slammer, Masterful, Pegasus – cocoa was served by Elisabeth and the job assignments were given out. This week Kyle went through the ritual with fierce reticence. The jackaroos retreated to their quarters across the claypan, ready for a dawn start. Signed in pokerwork on the jackaroos’ mess room table were all the names of them since Kyle first came there, as owner and then manager.
Nothing equalled the bucking horses and charging boars coming out of the words Thirteen Years at Inverarity in Gothic script pokerworked by Ross Devlin. As gidgee logs glowed in the grate Ross moved back and forth with busy inspiration, carrying sparkling, red-hot engraving spikes to the table. Other names amounted to a ladder of the years – Powys Wignall’s being an early name, the words Vale Salve evoking his lofty touch and promise of return when he left Inverarity for Cambridge on the eve of World War Two.
*
SOFT LIGHT CAME IN THROUGH the high southern windows of Powys Wignall’s Macleay Street flat. It was comfortable there. The dressing room was bigger than most people’s bedrooms. The flat had five bedrooms. It had belonged to Powys and Rosemary’s parents, Floss and Billyum. It was Bounder who gave his cousin the name Billyum, and it stuck like false whiskers. In the will, Powys inherited the flat and the better share of the estate, or rather, made it so.
Powys, divorced, led a bachelor’s life amid the relics of his parents’ taste: heavy sideboards, a glass-fronted traymobile, an art nouveau clock. He did not like living alone. His mental energy was prodigious. Something that bored him had made him well-off. Money. He worked on his investments from a roll-topped desk. At eleven he went to Café Piccolino for coffee and a game of chess with one of the incessantly smoking, argumentative, foreign-accented habitués there – mostly with a Pole called ‘the Count’ – then came back to the flat to work on what mostly mattered to his heart and brain. Words. There was a satisfying accounting involved in a tally of words. He put a hundred in and took two hundred out. If he could get through without putting in a full stop he reached a thousand.
What Lamb, What Ladybird was about the end of a marriage between an Englishwoman and an Australian officer. Too many false starts in the writing led to emotional exhaustion. Powys wondered if he – writing apart – would ever properly get going again. The story itself was the anatomy of a false start. The Blitz, the blackout, searchlights, the clinging kiss, the foolish promises, the embarkation leave registry office wedding, bombers overhead, fires combusting in the tracery of a – he wrote ‘an’ – hysterical woman’s wartime cork-heeled shoes in the dangerous dark. Never had there been such thrilling anxiety arching over each day’s ration of hours.
In years of strife, in times that were
Unthinkable to live in,
Upon a wave of destiny
To him she had been driven . . .
The lines fitted the mood. The émigré Polish count, habitué of the Piccolino, translated them from the Russian.
Powys abandoned the manuscript each day around five, then started again each morning after eleven, more or less like a metronome or an endless belt or a nerve or a tic or convulsion. Almost dead in those line-by-line struggles he was contrarily most alive.
Unlike the journalist Margaret Poole, who was trained on the Auckland Star never to blot out a line, Powys wrote with many crossings-out and replacements of words with other words demanding attention until he came back to his original choice and started over again. Attacking his Remington until screws shook loose, the machine almost leapt from the table on its stumpy rivets.
After Michaelmas term at Cambridge, 1940, the former Inverarity jackaroo Powys Wignall had joined the British Army, 7th Armoured Brigade, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel, the youngest ever promoted. His publisher-to-be was his brigadier, now a Labour-leaning lord, Adam Sylvester. Powys and Adam had fought the Jerries in North Africa (Operation Crusader) and the Japs in Burma (Battle of Yenangyaung). As a leadership example Adam Sylvester shone. ‘A wild cat in action, a gentleman out of it,’ the regimental history recorded. To create him on the page, within a fictional framework where documentary realism was inadequate, Powys remembered Kyle leading his jackaroos through the lignum swamps and prickly bush of Inverarity with little more than an affable tone of voice and an eye for a stockhorse and oddities of nature. In Burma, as practised by the character based on Kyle, it was eyes open for rabid dogs, and up to the neck in mud and tropical ulcers, and never betraying a worry or a concern beyond the job in hand. Everything was understatement. ‘Windy’ meant scared and ‘mad’ meant brave, and the battalion chaplain carried a .38 pistol on his belt.
Writing fiction met Powys’s definition of a split personality, a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion and behaviour, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships. He wrote, spending other people’s destinies like coins holding pocket heat. Out of it came an idea of how little he mattered and yet how desperately important his effort was. Writing had the power of prophecy.
One day Powys was finished, and off the manuscript went to the UK on airmail rice paper. Kyle Morrison stared out at the reader beyond his life in the Australian bush in more places than one, made over as Whitland, the Catholic chaplain bestowing extreme unction on a wounded Tommy; as Brody of the Mechanical Engineers, dismantling the engine of a disabled ‘Honey’ tank. Here was Kyle given rank and presence, raised above the average, multiplied, turned inward-looking, made puzzled, a searcher and left with a look of being emptied out, of having nothing to equal his imagined ideals except a hanging on to life and wondering what bloody next. When Brody raised his head above the parapet the better to see a flowering Tectona grandis out of great curiosity at nature’s gifts – such small white flowers hanging from a cathedral buttress – a sniper’s bullet rang out, and that was the end of Brody.
A cracker or popper was the tail end of a whip, made from the horsehair of a stallion or gelding. It was a truth of physics that a stockwhip’s cracker broke the sound barrier, matching whipcrack to rifle fire. Powys saw the fate of Brody in a Japanese bullet hurled faster than sound towards the fragile shield of a man’s cranium:
Kyle, our eyes are on you
Coo-ee, the future’s sound
Hear, the stockwhip’s fracture
Kyle, you’re homeward bound.
After the war, a married man, Powys had returned to Australia talking like a Pom. He was that cliché of the Australian abroad, the Piccadilly bushman. Blame the war for taking him away, giving him English manners in officers’ messes and country houses, and marrying him to an English bride disdainful of colonial experience. But before the war, when he’d jackarooed on Inverarity, Powys already had that plum – the Wignalls and the Morrisons on his mother’s side all had one, an injection of elocution running through the Australian accent piercing as a hunting horn.
To Powys’s plum add tweeds, an affectationist limp, or what appeared to be one, if you didn’t know about the shattered ankle – Yenangyaung. Instead of a cane he used a shooting stick, which took the cake.
A phone call from his sister, Rosemary, followed by a letter proposing certain steps to be taken if he would be only so sensible as to agree with her jolted his thinking. She was in touch with lawyers and needed his signature.
Powys thought, ‘Time to go north and see Kyle again.’
WHENEVER ELISABETH MET AN UNMARRIED woman with spark, or a handsome widow, she thought of Powys in his high, cold flat, if not alone, then wrestling on a hard couch with the wrong sort of woman to make him happy.
She’d given Margaret Poole his phone number, suggesting they talk about his mother, Florence Wignall, the flower painter – a women’s interest topic if ever there was one.
Margaret read up on Lady Florence in the Consolidated Press archives – a hefty dame in an Edwardian cape who’d painted miniatures of bush vines and judged pumpkins and beetroot bunches at the Royal Easter Show. After looking into her Margaret was not sure she wanted to write about her – such an Establishment figure hardly her topic – but she rang Powys and he asked could they meet at the Piccolino.
It was a crowded, boxy cafe with the dead-mouse smell of toasted cheese rising from an electric grill, coffee aromas seething out from an Italian espresso machine.
‘I’ve come about the Easter Show judge,’ said Margaret, fixing on a rather startled, slab-faced joker commanding a corner. Getting up to greet her, his fists rocked the table, knuckles borne down with such heavy effort as to bump over chess pieces on the adjoining table. ‘Crumbs, he’s clumsy,’ a judgement Margaret then took back, as he grabbed for a stick.
Powys’s first impression of Margaret was of a blackbird in from the rain, a soggy sou’-wester wrenched from a head of wet hair, and a rather plain, peaky white face. Then off came the raincoat. With both hands she smoothed back her hair, pulling it tight. He felt a confusion around the judgement, which intensified as her animation of spirits took over. No, not plain at all. Colour came into her cheeks. Her smile thrown in his direction dazzled him. But it never entered his head to think of her as beautiful – not, at least, until a time came, and he couldn’t stop thinking about her at all.
‘Maestro.’ He turned rather pretentiously to the owner, who stepped from behind his steaming pipes and cleared a window table of receipts and papers, to seat them facing each other with a pane of rain-wet window glass between them and the street.
They talked about Kyle and Elisabeth. Margaret liked Powys for liking them – more, for loving them. She had met them only the once, she said, but they were part of her mother’s story since girlhood. They talked so much about the pair and the life they led on Inverarity with their rotating band of jackaroos and doleful social circle that they pretty much forgot to talk about Lady Wignall, and made another time.
A few days later Margaret went up to Powys’s flat to sort through Florence Wignall’s Easter Show clippings, to see the pressed flower collections held between boards with brass butterfly nuts. Powys showed her a photograph of his mother in St Vincent’s attended by Sisters of Mercy hoping for a conversion, such as Powys’s sister, Rosemary, had undergone on marrying Brian MacKinlay. Lady Wignall was like a she-bear in a cave with her furs and claw clasps, sitting up drinking Dom Pérignon between Irish nuns.
When the photographs were duly and diplomatically admired, her notes in order and put away, Margaret wondered if she could say something. Powys said of course she could. The corners of her eyes were drawn back almondish. She could say anything she liked.
‘I’m not sure you’ll want to hear it. I’m not sure I want to say it. Mind you, the Weekly would love her. But I need to give my heart and soul. I can’t do her, I am sorry.’
She saw from his face some sort of agreement – sons’ mothers, too huge a subject to comprehend at an ordinary level of assessment. Margaret caught something else – Powys enjoying her pronouncements. It made her blush.
‘Let’s have a drink,’ he said.
‘Tea would be good, but –’
At that, he planted a glass, a bottle of Scotch and a jug of water in front of them. He poured after lifting an eyebrow. ‘This will warm you,’ he said, the flat being impossible to heat, cold air coming up through varnished floorboards and around the faded, worn heirloom rugs. They drank and Powys shivered at a premonition of some sort, of the kind anyway that spirits always roused – a promise of grandness in just being oneself.
He brought his books over. She touched the dry, ridged lettering of the jackets. She apologised for not having ever heard of the publisher – only recently of Powys himself, it was needless to add.
Then and there she began reading – a gaze of concentration, a passing frown, a sudden grin, a sigh of exasperation – while sitting under the ivory-yellow lampshade on the first day with Powys on the top floor of The Condamine, in the winter of that year of changes, with Powys’s heart pumping his lifeblood around a little faster. Since the Piccolino he could only think of her with agitation. He wanted to slow down his eyesight, gather his thoughts, possess the idea of her before touch demanded he might wreck it. He’d never seen anyone read as fast. The grandfather clock went like a tack hammer; the china dogs, grey, glossy and cold, tinkled with vibrations of passing traffic. Add to which a feeling Powys had – something like the ‘flu’, something like fear, something like childhood over-excitement that always ended badly. It might be humiliating to give it a name, considering, just for a start, the age gap between them. She wore a home-knitted grey sweater, full of lumps and knots, and a pair of what looked like a man’s suit trousers. As she read she ran a hand up into her hair and pulled a twist around to her mouth and nibbled its ends abstractedly. With her ankles tucked up on the couch various expressions passed across her face, reflecting thoughts not always to Powys’s liking.
She looked up from the page, catching him – mask-like in his intensity – and delivered an opinion. She could hardly have done more than scan the pages and come up with it. She told him that his novels were obviously works of art but might not be properly read ‘because the words get in the way of the story’ and, she thought, because of a class assumption that bothered her.
Powys leaned back, drew breath.
‘Is this the way you tackle everything – old ladies, flower paintings, businessman-novelists and their productions?’ he said.
‘Look,’ she said to him. ‘The way you write’s smart, clever. It’s bold and beautiful, but there’s something wrong.’
‘Wrong? That’s a tough judgement.’
‘Does it go anywhere?’
‘That might be the point,’ he said.
‘Not in a good story.’
He was often called nerveless – reflexively dead-faced.
‘Where’s this from, your sword of Damocles?’ He wanted to know.
‘I was eighteen,’ said Margaret, ‘when I was made children’s editor on the Auckland Star. I had to write answers to all the most brilliant kids’ efforts up and down the country – read them, think about them, steer them on, encourage them and tell them the truth without crushing them – and I had Thursday mornings to do the whole lot, which included opening the mail and sorting it, replying and writing my column.’ She clutched the two books of Powys’s to her chest, then put them on a side table. ‘I’ll buy my own copies, of course.’
‘Good luck finding them – I’ve had friends and booksellers too, face them to the wall from extreme irritation. Take them.’ He hated what he said next. Such peevish needfulness. ‘The English reviewers had me writing from “the peak”.’
‘Golly.’
‘Well, there was one who did.’
‘What do you get when you write, what does it give you?’
The way she put the question implied that he did not need to write, as she did, for a living, but might have, if she capitalised it, a purpose.
‘The war’ was his two-word answer. A mental hell was subdued. That’s what it was on the page. Maybe not much else except something from childhood, a love of words. There’d been no leave from hell, but he’d learned to make one through words. He’d survived when others had not. Words had guided him through. Words kept on with their aliveness to changes. When it was all out of his system he might never write again.
‘No more changes?’ she said.
Then she was gone, the books under her arm, down the stairs and around the corner. After finishing his drink Powys drained hers, which she’d hardly touched. Whenever he drank Ardberg now it would bring on the feel of her wool sweater itching the back of his hand when he passed her the glass. The sting of her opinions. The lightness, the clarity of her gaze although ever so mistrustful. And that last comment she made, with a touch of flirtation: ‘No more changes?’
He laughed – well, something was happening, gingered into existence by Elisabeth Morrison’s matchmaking. He lit a cigarette and stared out the window at the pimps, prostitutes and promenaders in their undersea world of the Cross. There were certainly enough young men at large in the world to catch any young woman up if she wanted to be, without an old man thinking he might be the one.
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS Margaret Poole asked around on the QT because she could not own to how she, Margaret Poole, had fallen into the circle of a decidedly non-socialist Powys Wignall. What was he like? It seemed that everyone knew him.
‘Powys,’ said her bohemian friends, ‘is frosty and up himself.’ He was said to have had an affair with Rhona Blumers, wife of the Polish count. The affair was presumed to be over, although when Rhona looked at Margaret she seemed to say, Who do you think you know that I don’t, sweetie?
It could have been Margaret’s imagination except Rhona told a story around the urn. ‘In the middle of the night I heard him crossing the floor. Tappa-tap, tappa-tap. He pulled back the bedclothes, what could I say? “Oh, go on then, have a go.” ’
It was fairly ugly. It didn’t sound like an affair. But that was Rhona, it seemed. Yet could it be Powys? Would he betray a man friend, at the very least? – the Polish count, chess opponent, aficionado of the Piccolino, translator of the Russian moderns – and be so functional as it sounded?
Men did (betray). Women did (betray). He must have been (at the very least) being a man, functional.
He might not be very nice. But he was not the only one around with a cane, she was interested to learn. There was the short story writer from Melbourne who’d had polio as a child, a hard case known to Rhona, and Margaret supposed he might be admitted (or allowed) as a violator of her kindness, for Vincent Crashaw used polio as a rationale of deserving. Women disliked him. He was a married man and went everywhere with his wife, subjecting her to devotion.
Margaret and Rhona were members of the Socialist Writers’ International Friendship Committee. Powys was hardly of that ilk. He was known, but held in contemptuous awe – nobody knew what to make of him, was the summing up, a Wignall by definition being of the ruling class. True writers were progressive, party matched on the left, otherwise if they had style but no radical credentials were admitted to be somebodies, but only in a dispicable sort of way. In summary they were reactionaries without relation to time or place, so much so they might as well be shot, and were, in other countries, on occasion.
Yet just when the Friendships thought they had Powys as the example of a type, he’d written a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald confounding their views. It was on nuclear disarmament, how the West wasn’t playing the game, unfair to the world at large, and they remembered he had a friend in Pommyland, (Lord) Adam Sylvester, who spoke up for causes on platforms with the Red Dean of Canterbury. So they reserved final judgement for a while yet.
And just when Margaret was about to give up on Powys, because of the night with the cane, the thought of it so sickeningly detailed, Rhona told her something that proved it was the comrade from Melbourne, and in the telling made it pitiful – a man allowed his own estimate of himself.
At monthly Friendship meetings Margaret took the minutes in Pitman’s shorthand. When Rhona, the Countess Blumers, held the floor, a breathy silence fell among the men, their jaws and brains slack, her clotted red lipstick and tight sweaters making their own ineradicable points in their hot imaginations, certainly, but the way she spoke was electrifying. It was so honest and clear, and her phrasemaking had a touch of oratory. She was a playwright, and a good one, with a heart of fire. People came to her plays, such as Powys, who would never go near the Workers’ Theatre otherwise. Margaret liked her, but wasn’t like her. If there was a man in the room who didn’t want Rhona, Margaret would like to know who. She deferred to those ratbags. They voted her onto their delegations to Moscow and Peking. At supper those same men, with claret-blackened teeth and close, attentive hands, lectured Margaret on her sexual rights, how she should exercise them on their behalf, apparently.
She pushed them off. ‘Garn, you jokers – I have a boyfriend.’
‘So?’
It wasn’t Powys Wignall either. Though whether it was a boyfriend as such any more she doubted.
Alan Ward was a journalist, lean as a thread, hungry for fame, and that was the main thing between them – his work. They’d also crossed the Tasman together, having that to look back on as an example of alarming heroism, as far as their families in Kiwi were concerned. She would travel farther soon (always soon) to catch up to Alan when he was properly settled. That was the resolve. It had been agreed between them – they would sort themselves out in the fourth estate then shack up, making a go of it as a working pair, as lovers, as a couple, but would neither marry nor have children to bring into this weary world.
Now Alan was settled with a job on the Manchester Guardian and the time was right to say the word, but his weekly, then fortnightly, then monthly aerograms avoided the question, and Margaret’s pride prevented her from bringing up the subject of avowed intents (not exactly promises) anymore.
Margaret allowed herself, a little perversely lonely, certainly more than a little wistfully lost, to be befriended by Powys Wignall, cousin of the snake man of the NSW Far West and son of the dowager Lady Florence Wignall.
Margaret’s flat was up three flights of stairs and into a tiny kitchen like an upright coffin, with a bed that folded down from the wall. She’d never taken a bloke up there for a look except Alan and now Powys Wignall, showing how the other half lived when they lived just on words. A typewriter, a vase of flowers – daily refreshed – and a shared dunny and bathroom on the landing were all she’d ever wanted once she came over to this side, as she expressed it, arriving from Auckland to make a journalist’s life for herself in Sydney. She supposed Powys saw the photo of Alan pinned to the wall. They had never really lived together properly, but she liked implying they had. You needed credentials to be anyone on the platforms of the day, a louche attitude around morals, implied or put into play. Alan in the photo was leaning over the fence at the Gap, his felt hat tipped back from his narrow, white forehead. They’d never gone anywhere together unless for a story, she realised when he’d gone. No grace, nothing ever done just for her. Never a wayside wildflower picked and handed to her with a grin.
Margaret had grown up in ferny railway towns, up and down the North Island. She had piled in with her brothers and been farmed out, when older, to an aunt in the Hauraki Gulf islands, just as her mother had been in the previous generation. There Margaret discovered independence and the books and the pen that led her to composition. She was that prodigy of the Auckland Star who, Powys learned, had a boiler-stoker’s ticket, could drive a truck and change a wheel, liked to rock and roll, and, on the slightest pretext of naked emotional appeal in a written work, was given to tears.
‘God, that’s awful,’ she said the next time he showed her something. She wiped her eyes of tears. ‘He’ll never stop loving her, ever.’
This was a reference to Verlee Albury, the name Powys kept for his ex-wife, Beverley, his capacity for invention stopped short with only the ‘Be’ removed from the name ‘Verlee’ on the fictional page’s phonetics. Margaret had reached a point in Powys’s writing where few readers had, apparently, where she saw things Powys’s way and could not stop reading.
Margaret elevated novels to a social purpose and only regretted that Powys’s writing lacked one. Writing, Powys called what he did, as if a tool of betterment had no connection to anything but the hand that trailed the ink across the page.
ON THE PARQUET FLOOR POWYS walked, tap, tappa-tap. He stood at the front steps of The Condamine, leaning on his shooting stick. Margaret heaved bags into the boot of the car. This will show me, she thought around why she’d accepted an invitation to take to the road with him, what the consequences might be. Powys was anti-worker-movement of the sort who believed ‘The worker movement goes too far’, whereas Margaret was born into ‘The worker movement never goes far enough’. Her father, in his youth, had not been a Wobbly but had close Wobbly friends and returned to New Zealand to escape prosecution in Australia during World War I. Now here she was, allowing herself to be bought, as her brothers might say, by a bloated plutocrat.
In quest of her father’s lost past Margaret had done the rounds of archives, seeking surviving Wobblies for a piece, if she wrote it, that would test the Weekly’s resolve. It would have to be a woman Wobbly to get in, and she found one – and a tragic association with a dreadful, brutal hanging. The woman’s correspondence with a co-conspirator was said to have been burned by a politician, her protector, who married her off to a friend. The politician rose to the heights of power. In the end he died in her arms.
Powys’s leg killed him pumping the brakes and stepping on the gas. Margaret took over the wheel. The Weekly and its stablemate, the Telegraph, wanted stories from the bush and had put her on expenses. It was, she told herself, her motivation that gave the drive its meaning and her the upper hand. Being bought be blowed.
Except, as they set off, Powys said, ‘Hey ho for Meadow Flats,’ announcing his sister had papers for him to sign – his sister the maker of demands, it was best to get them out of the way – after which they’d start for the Darling proper, Margaret’s planned destination before Elisabeth and Kyle’s. They were due at Inverarity on Sunday, in five days’ time. It would mean more hours and longer distances with a diversion.
Except it wasn’t a diversion. It was the heart, what was left of it.
Because Meadow Flats, she learned, was where ‘Cornfounded Blight’ was written. In New Zealand, ‘Cornfounded’ was famous but regarded as stupid, the more so for being Australian. It made no sense. The words made no sense. Powys sang them as they drove, croakingly out of tune. They fitted the landscape, the scratchy, lumpy, bumpy rhythm. Margaret gave them that.
It was early winter – dry, cool, hazy – the blighted land out of tune with itself. The song – or was it a poem, or a ditty, or doggerel – was about creeks drier than a lizard’s guts and rivers draining off to saltpans. There was an underhand effect, and slowly but surely it made the ugliness of the drive feel beautiful.
A charred, charcoaled hand was dominant in the selection of hues. The road ran through low hills and small farms with tin sheds and thirsty paddocks. It was the reverse of New Zealand’s green plenty, and yet Margaret had been there before in the emotions of survival, she felt. It was a feeling that Australia had called to her before she ever came over – not as a place, but as an awareness – a feeling of being hooked to a love that rejected hope, that stuck to the bare bones of existence. That had those comical marsupials wearing waistcoats and spats too, and people like Powys Wignall in it, part of it, owners of it, belonging to it, but who never really properly fitted in, and they knew it in a way that made them affectionately shy and gruff. It was a country, a continent, irreducibly political.
The drive took six hours counting stops for thermos tea and slices of Big Sister fruitcake wrapped in sandwich paper. Margaret packed a picnic as a matter of course. She gained the impression that Powys’s vaunted Beverley never had, had never bothered knitting a sweater, tidying the covers of a bed, mending a husband’s shirts, never made ready for a long day’s drive by lining a wicker basket with a red-chequered cloth.
They came to ‘the town of Meadow Flats’ – Whistling Corner. In a cobwebby window was a placard in Rosemary MacKinlay’s handwriting telling would-be visitors they could come once a year to the Meadow Flats homestead garden, on a date to be advised, subject to a gold coin donation, weather conditions and factors beyond anyone’s control permitting.
On display were Bounder Morrison’s pipe, waistcoat, homburg hat, ink bottle, copies of his books and faded photographs with the Duke of York in 1928. The woman with sandy whiskers showing them around said that when Bounder sold Meadow Flats he never came back to thank them for all the stories they gave him. It made Powys glad to be an unread writer.
Late afternoon, navigating a public stock route past a travelling stock reserve, Powys suggested they pull over by the side of the road. It gave on to a view, a chain-of-ponds river and some rocky, tree-studded hills, as painted, said Powys, by Elioth Gruner in a famous fit of oils.
In the argument running along between them as they drove, Powys wanted to say that art had a high purpose, not a social purpose as Margaret said (with a serious frown), of looking and by that means wrenching points of view around so that subordinate to art social purpose might be discovered, or allowable, but was not the main game by any means.
Margaret’s day had narrowed down to what she’d been missing since Alan Ward left for the UK – the twist of warm feelings. Real conversation. She was making a friend of Powys. How they rattled on!
He was unlikely in every way. He grunted and groaned for no reason, and talked to himself as if half in a dream as she drove. When they stopped she wrote up her notes. She did so now, while he stepped behind a tree. She would soon have a piece ready, which she’d phone through to Sydney, that night if she could, about a pipe, a waistcoat, a homburg hat and some faded photographs of Bounder Morrison and the Duke of York, the man who became King George VI, at the opening of Parliament House in 1927. And of a painter of blue air evoked in a thistly paddock by a character she made from Powys – the travelling companion she would call ‘Adrien’ in her column and make known to her readers, but unidentified as to sex.
When they turned around to head back towards Meadow Flats homestead, hard by the drive-in theatre showing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Jaws, the sun was low in Margaret’s eyes and a hidden rock jumped up from the grass and wedged itself under the transmission. They worked together getting it out. Margaret put the jack in place and Powys pumped the handle. At the last moment the car slipped and the jack was jammed under a tyre.
‘We’re stuck,’ said Margaret, crawling out from under the rear end of the Holden with sticks and grass in her hair.
Powys sat on a stump and lit a smoke. Margaret sat beside him and they made themselves comfortable by leaning back to back. They waited to flag down a passing car but the road was empty and neither seemed to mind.
‘See where we are?’ said Powys.
‘Where?’ said Margaret.
‘Look – over there.’
A railway line on a high embankment ran past. They went to investigate, walking along the foot of it, catching burrs in their socks. A stone cairn, obscured by capeweed, marked where the former prime minister Marcus Friendly died, attested to by a brass plaque:
On the line where he made his way in life, below the house where he made his home.
They were expected at Rosemary’s, but Powys swiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, ‘A cold beer would be good. When we get out of here, if we ever do, let’s go back to the Whistling Corner pub.’
‘What about your sister?’
‘Rosemary can come there.’
The way he paints her, if she wasn’t his sister, thought Margaret, he mightn’t have anything to do with her. It was all in his tone of voice.
They were rescued by a farmer with a lamb tied to the pommel of his saddle. After he’d fetched his tractor and pulled them out they followed him over the hills to Whistling Corner. They were hungry. It was time to eat. So Margaret did not meet the sister or go to Meadow Flats and was glad there’d been no photographer sent down for the Meadow Flats garden, a remnant of the 1910s.
The publican called it dinner – steak pies taken from a warming tray and eaten while sitting in the hotel yard, at a table made from railway sleepers, under a honey locust tree, with Fountain tomato sauce dried black around the neck of the bottle and mashed potato, gravy and green peas.
When people made pilgrimages they visited Whistling Flats and had a beer in the hotel yard where the line went past. Opposing Bounder Morrison in fame hereabouts was Marcus Friendly. The pub owners made a point of who they favoured of the two. Powys scrutinised the walls, the ‘Friendly-iana’ hanging about – photographs, newspaper clippings. He’d rather liked the grey man, the idea of him, dealing with high matters but never without the feeling that below these were ways of thinking basic to the earth and mystical longing. Not that Powys had ever gone with Friendly in the voting booth.
Margaret said, ‘You don’t need to say that. It’s obvious. What would Friendly have made of you, do you think?’
‘Scrr-rrit,’ said Powys, running a finger across his throat.
They parted later in the upstairs corridor of the rickety hotel, going to their separate rooms, to their iron-framed beds. Later Margaret heard voices, a man and a woman’s, and Powys returning downstairs to the bar. Later still she heard bumbling footsteps coming up and waited for them to pause outside her door – as in the legend of lovers crossing floors with their canes – but there was never a pause to the lurching progress of the man. Margaret felt, again, that slide she didn’t know she was on, that had started when Alan Ward left on the Galileo and she was left clutching a bunch of streamers at the dockside, pretty darned certain they weren’t his.
‘I heard voices from the bar,’ said Margaret, when they came down for breakfast.
‘Rosemary operates at decibels, her whisper’s a roar.’
Margaret blushed at her own question. Things had changed since they sat on the stump with their spines resting on each other’s.
‘Did you say you had someone with you?’ she dared.
‘I did,’ said Powys, calmly appraising her. ‘I told them all about you. How I think you’re great. You’ll meet them at Inverarity. We’re all booked in.’
There was something else he wanted to say. His mouth tensed.
‘Families,’ he said. ‘My sister never ceases to amaze me. She is able, despite evident stupidity, to pull me into untangling the tangles she makes for herself, and to do it so cleverly that I never have any choice.’
Margaret thought, There is never just one side to people’s story. He will always be the older brother.
Did he pull Rosemary’s pigtails when he was fourteen and she was eight? Did he say he’d be somewhere and never come, putting someone else over her? At the same time a sister, as Margaret well knew, could be incomprehensible in a brother’s eyes except in the matter of love.
*
MARGARET COULD NOT WRITE ANYTHING if she did not speak to somebody, listen to their story, tell that story. At the end of that day, their second, reaching another town, another rickety hotel, she phoned through pieces about a beekeeper’s wife, about a lonely haberdashery girl and an exchange telephonist who knew who everybody was on with.
For Powys, in his writing, it all had to be imagined or it wasn’t real. He followed atmospheres, silences. The guesses in between. He liked words because they joined the unjoinable, and only just. All was spirit and he chased it down with words. Words were his saving grace. He gave them the gift of life and they responded in kind.
When she finished phoning through her stories that night Powys made a trunk-line call. A subdued rumble came through the plywood partition as he spoke, barely without interruption from the party at the other end.
He brooded as they waited for their dinner.
‘That was difficult,’ he said. ‘It was Kyle.’
He told her the subject of his late-night conversation with his sister and brother-in-law. He’d been thinking about it all day. The Inverarity Pastoral Company was broke. A buyer was interested, ready to sign. The buyer was ‘all cashed up’.
Powys gave the phrase an American twang, disdainful but dependent. It was as good as decided. American cattleman married to an Australian. A Montana beef breeder named Frank Bohrmann buying up Down Under.
‘Rosemary acts as if she and Brian are the deciders. The fact is that Inverarity’s Pitt and Collins street partners are the ones who call the tune. They’ve found the buyer. No argument.’
‘Will they keep Kyle on?’ said Margaret.
‘No,’ said Powys.
‘What will Kyle and Elisabeth do? Where will they go?’
‘When the company bought Kyle out the first time there was nothing in there about the house. The Arcade Kyle built in a week – it’s become a great feature, it’s famous, it has cachet. The buyers are willing to pay extra, an amount for the house but really for the Arcade to give Kyle and Elisabeth a cut, not a handout or a humiliation.’
‘You put it so baldly, Powys.’
‘I let them down once. Now it’s business,’ he said, ‘though not without something improved.’
‘Improved?’
‘Ameliorated,’ he said.
In families Margaret met on the road, sought out, she found reminders of growing up as she had herself, loved through struggles and shortages and especially if they weren’t far from the rattle of trains going past, which happened the next day when they reached the Broken Hill Line. Property was not part of their lives. Avoiding the humiliation of charity was. Amelioration was a function of love.
POWYS COULD HARDLY CREDIT THE number of vignettes Margaret squeezed from each day. He wrote barely one sentence a day and could not write at all while they were travelling. Some good lines she confessed came from him, ‘I mean from “Adrien”,’ she said as they belted through the bush in Australia’s Own Car. Her editor, on the phone, picking up on the deception of her companion’s sex, started teasing her unmercifully.
Powys, on the passenger side, found himself planning a story with Margaret in mind as reader. It would be straighter, simpler, more economical with words than his usual hash, communicable as a telegram blow-by-blow.
He would describe the house at Inverarity. The Arcade would stand out in starlight under the winged roof. Away beyond would be the horizon of the Swampland Block, a fringe of trees across the bare plain. The garden bedroom doors would be flung open to the stars. In the night would be the liquidly oily-perfumed scent of roses, incomparable after the day’s heat.
Powys described the homestead, the Arcade, the bedrooms to Margaret. She saw herself sitting up in that garden bedroom bed, rumpled and sleepy, a bed once occupied by the complaining Beverley, who on Powys’s postwar visit stayed there most days till lunch was called.
‘Lunchong tray delivered by Ah Sup the Chinese cook, velly knock-knock,’ said Powys.
She laughed, but it was awkward. He made Inverarity sound posh to a girl from Kiwi. Full of in-jokes and racial prejudices nobody questioned and the comfort of lofty-minded but thrifty, tired routines quite possibly on a par with the Queen’s in Buckingham Palace. And they would reach there on Sunday, she’d agreed, to the mess, confusion and tears of a lifetime’s uprooting.
It was difficult for Margaret working out whether Powys was unsentimental but helpful or lacking in some sort of feeling around the question of Kyle and Elisabeth’s fate. A business mind, she supposed, was useful in listing pros and cons without too much wringing of the hands over what was incalculable. A writer who was all feeling, however, would be torn. Kyle and Elisabeth were going to be marched off Inverarity, whatever happened, and their only choice it seemed was to go quietly or to make a stinking row and go anyway.
AS THEY WENT ALONG POWYS treated the backblocks of New South Wales to a routine more fitted to the South of France or the Tuscan hills – Beverley lived there now, with an eyetie prince. He rated the parched, heat-battered landscapes around Ivanhoe and Wilcannia for hidden beauties he was getting back for himself, value for value and almost against his will.
Australia – it fitted the definition of being loved more than it loved back. Put your arms around the place and it withered. Turn your back and it called out with shy surprises.
Margaret thought, Poor man, he’s still in love with that useless snob. She didn’t think or realise or get the point, that he was looking at her when he said it, and thinking of her when he talked about surprises.
In hotel dining rooms, dinner at six, with entrees of baked beans and curried egg, Powys considered his chops, sausages and kidneys gleaming in sheep fat from the angle of a connoisseur. Making up to cooks, cocking an eye at Margaret, he asked for ‘reins avec l’escalope attaches’ – the chop with the kidney joined, a rural delicacy. All to impress her, she thought, to make her laugh. And did she laugh, till her ribs ached.
She liked Powys’s style of relating, his almost indecent level of curiosity. ‘You are the crony a girl could imagine,’ she objected – to the direction her emotions were taking her.
In relation to Alan Ward she knew she owed him nothing absolutely, now, and wanted to say it to Powys. But could not without turning red.
Powys’s table manners were perfect – meaning that his mother would have been proud of him – but she considered his manners weren’t all they should be. For example, when he barged into kitchens as of right, to know what was cooking or to complain, speaking his French cookery phrases just to fascinate himself at a motherly old cook’s confusion. There was an impudence, a bossy unkindness in that, which she defined as class related.
Her father, a fettler, to use the Australian word for navvy, had more finesse. ‘Never enter another man’s hovel without being invited, and take your hat off, mate,’ was his motto. The information when she passed it on silenced Powys.
‘I’d like to meet him,’ he said.
And so she blushed. ‘Yes, I would like it too.’
From those infernal, boxy, badly sound-proofed telephone cubicles under hotel stairways and from post office phone boxes standing in desolate patches of dust, Margaret dictated her copy. What she spelled out on one day was read across the state in the Daily Telegraph the next. ‘Adrien’ was emerging as a bit of a snob, statewide, who needed to be worked on.
Just how many ungendered pronouns were there, Margaret wondered to the point of exasperation, circumlocuting her editor, maintaining her travelling companion’s cover – ‘Adrien’ couldn’t last.
‘Can’t you just call him lover boy?’ her editor gibed at last, causing Margaret to pull back from liking Powys too much. She remembered how her father, every time she showed too much liking for a boy found some failing or invented something hostile and turned her off him. God knows what he’d say about Pommified Powys. In a letter home she kept the wraps around her travelling mate, her shiralee or burden was all she said, equivocal as to sex.
They battered the shock absorbers up to Louth on the Darling, on to Bourke, where the shocks were replaced, spares coming up expensively on the plane while they waited. Powys wrote hefty cheques without complaining. He was thinking about Kyle all the time. Of being the greatest friend and the messenger of doom. Amelioration didn’t come cheap.
It didn’t need much for someone to pass through Bourke leaving fame and glory in their wake. Henry Lawson was there in 1892. Now it was Margaret Poole of the Tele and Weekly.
Margaret interviewed a young woman she saw on the street, on the other side of the road, bent over and needing help with a bundle of belongings. From a distance she looked old, a crone, but closer she shed years and gained bruises – a lovely, soft-eyed girl hiding her shame under sweeps of long hair, turning her head aside as Margaret spoke to her. She’d spent the night sheltering in a church porch. Bottles were thrown at her. Punches swung. A minister watched through window curtains, besieged in his house. Now she was going home. Her name was Jenny Milburn.
They reached a street corner together, walked down a path through weeds and ruts, and Margaret found herself in a place with smoky fires and rubbish strewn about. Margaret took Jenny Milburn’s photo, face hidden, except her family might know her – and the one who biffed her might make the connection. Apparently it was a cousin.
‘He thinks I’m up myself,’ she said. She raised her chin in defiance.
It was here Margaret found evidence of her Wobbly. Alive.
She was in her eighties. Jenny Milburn’s great aunt. Mrs Timothy (Luana) Atkinson née Milburn. Marcus Friendly’s personal secretary. Wife of his greatest friend. She’d lived her life in full sight, in Canberra.
From the airport Margaret sent a roll of film away on the afternoon flight then came back to the post office and phoned her story through. It was about a town that was a slum even for whites, the end of the Western Line, a pair of buffers on the edge of the black soil mud and after that the huge, brooding sky. It was a white man’s town fringed by blacks’ camps where the worse-off lived, despised, profited from by publicans and grocers and divided for consciences’ sake between ministers of religion, tent mission evangelists, priests and nuns, who each considered the others’ denomination fell short – and hid behind curtains if they saw a young woman being biffed. And that young woman had connections to the highest in the land.
Margaret ached for understanding and included a quotation in her story: Poverty and heartbreak have something to do with the wealth of the land.
‘Put that in the Tele and you won’t be understood,’ said Powys.
‘Too late,’ she said.
Jenny Milburn told Margaret that she had a fiancé who loved her to the point of making her wonder if she could ever be worthy of him, but she was going to give him a try, whatever her cousins said or did to prevent her turning her back on them and getting too up herself.
Leaving Bourke they slammed corrugations and slewed through sand drifts. Other vehicles came at them with a spread of dust in a rolling wave not of red but of sickening grey. They slowed almost to a crawl, breathing through handkerchiefs pulled over their mouths and noses.
The Milburns. Powys knew all about them. They axed ridge poles and uprights from pollarded stumps and lived off the land. Year after year they came. Ate yabbies, drank hooch. Just about everything they owned was railway property, renovated and re-used. Their tents were stencilled NSWGR. Their long-drop dunny had a Crown signet in the ceramics. It had ceramics! The poultry enclosure was made from carriage doors. They’d arrive with their belongings on a flatbed railway truck, unload at Inverarity siding and cart everything over to the Block. Bounder tried to get them off there. Kyle allowed them. Not that he had any proper authority or say so.
‘And you knew them?’ said Margaret.
‘Not really,’ said Powys.
My goodness, thought Margaret, glancing at Powys. That might even be the truth. Stiff and formal, he’d be like visiting royalty, sitting up on his thoroughbred being offered a mug of port – a stirrup cup, milord? – declining, oh so regretfully, with a thank you so awfully, mate. He and Kyle cut from the same cloth.
TATTERSALL’S HOTEL, WHERE THEY SPENT the last night before reaching Inverarity, had an air of a district command headquarters. If you were anybody at all within a range of a hundred miles on the north-west plains it was your watering hole. Community clubs held their meetings there, setting the world to rights – Rotary, Lions, the Country Party – the right to rule within the ruling rural cliques in an upstairs meeting room lined with glass plate photographs of bullock wagons hauling wool bales through black soil mud to a railhead. In one of those pictures Bounder Morrison stood on a bale with his head thrown back like a bantam rooster crowing.
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.
After a time he heard Elisabeth quietly breathing, sleeping. He could hear his loud heartbeat, then, the irregular clippety-clop of its rhythm.
Down in the overseer’s cottage Ross Devlin strummed his rickety guitar:
My name is Juanano de Castro
My father was a Spanish Grandee
But I won my wife in a card game
To hell with those lords o’er the sea.
Well the South Coast is wild coast and lonely
You might win in a game at Cholon
But a lion still rules the Barranca
And a man there is always alone.
IN THE MORNING, AFTER EVERYONE gathered for breakfast, Devlin asked for a quiet word with Kyle, who felt the sour breath of his overseer in his face, the smell of instant coffee still hot in the throat.
Kyle’s eyes rolled back, he pulled his head away as Devlin referred to the previous night’s business, the title deeds and their reversion to proper owners being the topic. There’d been drinks, a subdued air of triumph in Devlin as he swanned it with Powys and Margaret, and then, when Rosemary and Brian MacKinlay arrived, with them.
‘You and Rosemary have been thick on this for years,’ said Kyle.
‘I know you think that,’ said Devlin. ‘Not Rosemary. Not cooking anything up. I learned all about it from the bloke who works with the down-and-out. Then I passed it on. He’s all for the underdog down to his red corpuscles. The bloke, Max Petersen, his people have the bottom pub, the bloodhouse, The George.’
‘Nobody calls it “The George”,’ said Kyle.
‘You’re right.’
All those times Devlin jammed himself in a phone box making calls, thought Kyle. To Rosemary MacKinlay? To a bank manager? No. To a solicitor’s office and a juvenile agitator, a bloody little bloodhouse louse, Max Petersen, lining up ownership deeds subpoenaed from city vaults and faxing them to Rosemary and the Directors from a rotten party office, a trade union cell, in the name of a woman who’d have been hung as a wild young girl if she wasn’t so favoured. Well, it had to come this. History takes its revenge. A great shrinking down that operated in Kyle’s lungs like a closing fist.
‘That girl in the paper,’ said Devlin, ‘the one your visitor, Margaret, wrote up. The one that everyone, all of you, calls a slut.’
‘The Milburn girl?’ said Kyle.
‘Jenny. She’s my fiancée,’ said Devlin. ‘We had a bust up, she’s back, it’s all right now. We’re getting married.’
‘Christ, but she’s a woman,’ Kyle said, about to say something spiked, bitter and hurtful to his overseer.
Kyle then adjusted his words and made an acknowledgment: ‘She’s a woman of grace.’ And he’d almost said ‘of race’.
Any man composed of animal spirits – half-stallion, half-centaur – would feel a sacrifice worth making for a spell of insensible happiness with her.
‘Good on you, Devlin. You are in for a ride.’
Three qualities Ross Devlin appreciated in Kyle. His love of horses. His defence of Powys Wignall’s books. And his unpredictable heart. Ross only ever called Kyle boss when any of the three came up. They were the anodynes to their thirteen years of awkwardly getting along.
‘Get me the mare,’ said Kyle.
‘The black mare?’ asked Ross, knowing very well which mare Kyle meant.
‘The black.’ Kyle nodded.
‘Righty-oh, boss.’
Something was hard to put a name to, that Ross Devlin wanted to guard Kyle from, but could not, a semi-suicidal attachment to what was likely to kill him dead – untamed horses, venomous snakes and that sweep of land intermittently flooded, the Swampland Block.
‘Look,’ said Devlin. ‘Me and Jenny, after we’re married, we’re going to ask you something, if we can’t go and live on the Swampland Block.’
‘Ask? Ask me? Why me? Ask someone who owns it,’ said Kyle. ‘Ask your confounded Milburns. Ask her. Ask Jenny Milburn. Ask the old bat – your Mrs Luana Atkinson. Ask your lawyer friends. Your pinko-loving pinko set. Isn’t that the point?’
‘S’pose so,’ said Ross.
‘Ask Powys Wignall,’ said Kyle.
It was the saddest statement he’d ever made. He regretted saying it. There was no greatness in it. But there you were. It was out.
There was just one matter that Kyle had the power to take into his hands, his very own hands now, and that was to kiss Elisabeth goodbye as he did every morning of his working life, take a pair of well-softened reins into his grip and go on horseback towards a blurred line on the horizon, that opened out when you reached it, into a maze.
‘Get the mare,’ said Kyle, giving the order crisp as a stockwhip crack.
He pulled on the gaberdine riding coat that raked the ground when he walked, making him look a galoot in the saddle on those occasions when he rode under the beating rays of the noonday sun. Ross Devlin walked fast, keeping up with him. The black mare was being brought up to the horse yards. Ross followed orders on that, the boys brought her up, hardly able to contain her, so untamed and untameable she was.
And that was it for Kyle despite his having another three months grace on full salary, such as it was, before moving out, then half salary, half pension for two years while he set himself up on 250 acres of the Swampland Block that would be made over to him and Elisabeth freehold. His riding coat rubbed against the mare’s flanks with a sound like tearing paper.
POWYS WIGNALL FINDS THE WORDS that are unsayable till he says them, words that don’t console Elisabeth at all. Nor any of them much. But still Powys says them, and while he speaks Margaret Poole takes Elisabeth’s hand. It is almost a year since Kyle disappeared.
The Arcade is filled to the side doors and overflowing outside. Who knew Kyle had so many friends? The dead find them. As soon as the words are over there’ll be food and drink.
Smel, Cut and Spud can’t believe it. They always thought they were immortal – the whole four of them, including Kyle. Nothing in their experience of ageing and decay ever told them otherwise.
Kyle has not been found. Into the Swampland Block he went at a gallop. More like a bolt. (It will be forty years before remains are unearthed. The discoverer will be Ross Devlin, a man in his seventies, poking around in a midden and pulling a jawbone with a tooth attached from the bank of a billabong.)
Powys stands on a rough-hewn bench and reads out loud his conjectures that are everyone’s, if they really knew Kyle. Everyone’s except one’s.
‘No,’ says Elisabeth under her breath. ‘This is very impertinent.’ Powys’s words are too strong for her. Always have been. Powys has a right to them, but she hates them. Only she really knows, only she really loved Kyle, only she really that morning of his going had love enough in her heart to let him go. Watching him crack his breakfast egg. Watching him blow steam from his hot cup of tea. Watching him collect the last toast crumb with a tongue-wetted fingertip.
Catching Elisabeth’s eye, Powys lifts his jaw and she nods, almost imperceptibly, as if to say, Well then, get it over with.
So Powys gets to the point. Makes it happen.
And they all are there, on that morning unrecoverable from time.
‘The prickly bush rakes along the mare’s legs,’ says Powys, ‘scrapes her flanks. Kyle’s too good a horseman to allow it, he lets her go. Sends her home with a whack on the rump. The untameable mare, tamed, is home by nightfall.
‘On Kyle goes, his majestical riding coat reduced to tatters, and what does he care. He throws it off, it’s found. He gets rid of shirt, trousers, boots, and they are found. He takes off his wristwatch; it, too, is found. He breasts the waters of the shallow billabongs of the Block and he’s laughing.’
‘Yeah, he’s laughing,’ says one of the Milburn relations, sotto voce, a big happy overweight bloke who knows the Swampland Block like the back of his own hand but if he ever saw Kyle in that great expanse, the shadow of a man delightedly passing through, he’s not saying. If Kyle ever saw him he never mentioned it either. This man’s the first Milburn ever invited up to the house. The first in its history. He used to be invisible before. His relation Jenny Milburn, she’s there too, with her husband, Devlin.
The thought is that either Kyle drowned, or it was deliberate what he did next: he went into the water. Powys implies it was deliberate. Not so deliberate as inevitable. Anyway, hardly a whim.
Elisabeth thought, Oh, that’s brutal, but there’s justice in it, as the beginning of her married life came back to her, in the memory of a tidal wave rising clearly into view.
‘Now Kyle’s sculling on his back,’ says Powys, ‘moving through the muddy waters as the bright clouds glide over his head. Water splashes up past his ears, goes over his face but his face emerges, and dunks, emerges, and dunks, not washed clean because each time a line of silt gets deposited, and with it the small life of the place, tiny crustaceans and whatever, waterbugs, snails, and he thinks it was like this when he was a really small child, a happy enough boy before the rhymer ever pounced on him and he was left with an empty matchbox to fill.’
This gets a laugh. The rhymer. The pounce. The matchbox emptied of matches.
There’s quite a lot more, including:
Kyle, our eyes are on you
Coo-ee, the future’s sound
Hear, the stockwhip’s fracture
Kyle, you’re homeward bound.
And then everyone has their say, and the old boys sing the school song – boom chicka boom, and so on.