At the Gilchrists’ polite table a new Billy chewed open-mouthed without caution. He had arrived at tea time with the latest talk from town. Half was about a social event, the Roller Skaters Fancy Dress Ball. The rest was war talk.
Until the week before Billy had rarely opened a newspaper. Now he read even the “extraordinaries” pasted up outside the Champion office, and had become a political expert, though nobody pressed him to say exactly where these suddenly luminous European places were.
“With Austria and Serbia at each other’s throats it’s just a matter of time. We’ll be in it.”
Between courses Mr Gilchrist and Billy rehearsed a sequence of events using salt cellar, butter dish, knife, fork, spoon and plate. Austria struck Serbia chimed Russia gonged Germany rang France roused Britain.
“See?”
Alan Gilchrist threatened the table with a knife (Germany). It shifted from his wife to Walter, who nodded.
But until this minute, when the knife flashed under his chin, the goings-on in the papers hadn’t touched Walter at all. One fact followed the other all year, but remotely, dry as a time chart in a history lesson. Now it occured to Walter that his own standpoint was closest to Billy’s. He’d wanted change — here it came! Mountains in the northern hemisphere were already rising, falling, clashing. Shock waves bowled through the oceans, struck the coastal cities and cracked the glass calm of the everyday, shooting up-country to craze towns and remote homesteads all in a matter of minutes. Incredible that a distant quarrel between foreigners could wreak such an astonishing transformation, yet leave a person feeling expectant!
Billy described how a hundred costumed skaters had rumbled and squeaked their way round the hall, which was so full that couples even used the stage. Eddie Harkness had skated right off the edge. At nine thirty they had squeezed against the walls to watch Mr Harley Davidson, the world champ, leap over three chairs. Mr Farlow won the best costume with “Aboriginal Chief’, and the comic prize went to Mr Deal’s “Dark Town Barber”. But who got the loudest cheers? Miss Finity as “Britannia” and Jack McGee as “The Admiral”.
After the meal the men sat in front of the fire. Mr Gilchrist studied Billy’s Herald in the yellow lamplight while Billy and Walter sprawled at his feet smoking their pipes.
“It looks a certainty. If England goes in we’ll be in it too.”
“If,” reflected Billy. “It’d be just our luck if she don’t.”
“I say she will,” said Walter. “If distant places like Australia are ready, why should the old country hesitate?”
They toyed with differing opinions, not because they held them, but because the facts were so few.
“What the pommies want is to call Australia in and sit back.”
“One in, all in.”
“I reckon we’re gamer.”
“They’ve got the army. We’d just be extra. Wouldn’t we?”
“We’ve got the fight,” concluded Billy. He heaved a log to the centre of the fire and admired a tower of sparks.
For a while, in the intensified firelight, all talk ceased. Alan Gilchrist dropped the paper to his lap — the flames chopped his face with hard shadows. He barely knew why, but war would be welcome.
Silent before the fire, he thought of his land as a bastion — nothing less — from which he would willingly send forth magnificent confirmations of title. Yet earlier, questioned by his wife, he had turned red in an effort to explain: “The thing is to get on with it!”
Billy watched miniature cliffs of red-hot wood collapsing. Fire absorbed him. It was strange that war had never occured to him before. He was made for it! If all the excitement fizzled out he’d be desperate.
Other more practical needs drove him. If war came, he could escape. Away from his father, stone-hearted now, and a drunk. Away from the silent churchyard that haunted him, yet was not itself haunted. Away from the consequences of news from Wellington which lay in a crumpled letter in his pocket. Trouble was brewing there, though not with his name attached to it. Not yet.
“Yes, sir!” said Billy into the silence.
“Would you be scared?” asked Walter.
“Not me.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Mr Gilchrist, denying his own intensity of thought, “we’re talking about a national event, not a jaunt for youngsters.” He made a show of hunting though the paper for farm news, struggling with himself over the thought that if Walter was to go off to war he would be glad. Six months or more had been enough to show that he and his son were strangers. To be honest, he disliked the boy — who was half the time locked in hostile broodiness, and the other half gushing with green ideas.
“I’m sure I’d be scared,” Walter continued, “because of a dream I had about Blacky. When was it?”
“Get on with the show,” said his father, rolling the paper tight and prodding Billy.
“It was in the cadets — only it wasn’t. There we were marching through scrub. You too,” he said to Billy, who liked to figure in such phantom lives as other people’s dreams gave him. “On we went through wattle and saplings and suchlike. It was a sandy sort of place. We advanced in line with our rifles at the ready looking for something.”
“Rabbits?” The suggestion came from his father.
“We arrived at a ship’s gun. A barbiette.”
“What’s that in English?” asked Billy.
“I couldn’t see what was going on but something told me to watch out. Then I realized that the — blighters — wanted to put me in the gun and fire me through the barrel. I’ve never been so scared. Now this is the funny part. The bloke in charge was Blacky Reid.”
“That’d be him all right.”
Mr Gilchrist stood and stretched. “Blacky’s always had you bluffed. He’s all wind.”
“Don’t be so sure,” said Billy, out of a mixture of friendship for Blacky and hard knowledge: “But it’d be him all right, he’d be there, telling all and sundry what to do.”
“A windbag.”
“I woke up then. I remember — it was last Christmas.”
His father tapped his pipe on the edge of the fireplace: “I’m for bed.”
From the kitchen they heard him talking in undertones to his wife, who after a minute came through to say goodnight.
“I want no more hysterical war talk,” she ordered. Then footsteps knocked on the bare boards of the hall; they heard the click of a door, the whimper of a dog, and a mopoke calling across the cold ocean of trees.
In front of the fire Walter and Billy shook hands and swore that “if the worst came” they would join up together.
The pact surprised both of them, and decided Billy on a confession.
“Are you and the Reilly girl still writing?”
“I wrote once, but she never replied. Good riddance, eh?” He managed a grin, but thought: How does Billy know? If that Scott woman’s been fiddling with the mails —
“I seen her. It was after Mum died,” said Billy, “when I was in Sydney. I bumped into her.” He told no lie. “We talked. She told me the two of you were corresponding.” Because of Walter’s uncomprehending look he added: “Writing letters to each other.”
“She to me? You’ve been bloody quiet about it. When I met her at the railway at Christmas she asked me to write, so I put down the news and sent it off. But she never replied.”
“To hear her talk you’d have thought the two of you were scratching away like mad. Women! Who can fathom ’em?”
“You,” Walter spoke with sudden vehemence: “Why do you think she said she’d written when she hadn’t? Come on —” His tone swung between scorn and helpless submission. Clumsily he lifted the poker and jammed it among logs.
Billy spoke calmly. “She was putting me off for one thing. She couldn’t spare the time of day. Anyone’d think I was a pig — fresh from the trough — the way she kept her distance.”
It sounded wrong. What about Billy’s siding with the Reids at harvest time, the way he’d never talked straight about his trip away, especially concerning Wellington — now Sydney too —
“Come off it!” Walter snapped, and the poker was in the air, its tip glowing cherry-white. He could have, he really wanted to, Billy ought to —
Down came the poker with a smack on the sooty bricks.
“That’s a dangerous instrument,” said Billy coolly.
“So are you.” Either it was belt him with the poker, or do it with words.
Billy reclined without speaking, and who could tell if it was cunning or innocence that held his tongue? Besides, the burst of anger had stripped Walter of hostility. And Billy’s silence, though it wasn’t forgiving — impregnable rather — somehow took a share of the blame.
Billy played on this. Dumb guilt, he knew, lent him an air of integrity. In silence practically anything could be shammed.
“She likes you, Wally. I used to say, didn’t I? that you’ve got a real chance there. She asked all about you.” Billy reclined on a cushion and nestled his head on his arms. “A hero! That’d be the way to win ’em over.” He rolled to his side and looked at Walter. “You could just march in and take her. No messing about. No knocking on the door. The direct approach. Nothing like it.”
“It’s not me.”
Billy spat into the heart of the fire. “If this war comes off we’ll be well out of that kind of trouble. What do you say?”
At midnight Billy set off for home. At the start he rode slowly, smoking the tail end of a pipe, coat collar turned high, hat rammed low to keep the icy air from his ears. He held the reins in one hand and let the horse follow the track of her own accord. She was an ex-polo pony from Narromine called Novelty, for which he’d paid a fortune two months before; she had good Arab from somewhere, and a touch of draught as well.
Soon after leaving the yards Billy muttered to himself: “Wally’s a mug.” A little later he shouted: “A mug!”
Back at the house, standing at the far end of the veranda — taking a leak into the bushes — Walter heard the phrase but failed to identify it as human. It seemed one of those shifts of matter peculiar to the bush at night, as unfathomable to diurnal creatures as blackness itself.
When Billy reached the crest of the ridge he looked back. A tiny yellow light swayed and went out. Then he and Novelty moved alone through the universe.
He thought about galloping and they galloped. He thought about going faster, dangerously fast, and Novelty fairly devoured the track. Billy bellowed, and the horse answered by leaping forward into flight. And weren’t the stars also hissing and tumbling ahead? The night was a vast future into which they hurled, man and beast with bared teeth, bone and muscle flung against the passionless depth of things.
When they came to the high clearing, which was now a disc of frosted grass, Billy dismounted. He set the horse free and squatted for a minute to catch his breath. His face burned. Then he lay full length on the ground and rolled over and over. Novelty tracked him, head down. Billy might have been happy, like a horse taking a dust bath, or in agony, like a man who has been poisoned but does not know it. Novelty’s reins, loose on the ground, rustled alongside.
“A mug,” Billy said once more, but the judgment no longer mattered, for now, his mind fixed on war, his senses feasted on a host of new sensations.
It was Tom Larsen the young schoolteacher who brought the news of the outbreak of war to Walter, pointedly playing it down. He wouldn’t be in it — not for quids.
“Why not?” Excitement raised odd peaks in Walter’s voice.
“Because I’m not bored,” the teacher consented to answer. By then Walter had collected Peapod and found himself fumbling wildly with buckles. He was mad to be off, but not sure where. Billy’s!
The teacher had not kept his head: it only seemed that way. With school finished early he had grabbed his bike and pedalled furiously out of town to be alone, finding himself at the gate of “Whispering Pines” an hour or so before sunset.
He mumbled something about the conflict between England and Germany having to do with money — who was to get the upper hand in a market. Walter had no patience with such a viewpoint. It was too dry to express the quality of what was happening, too narrow for its magnitude. If Larsen’s beliefs were measured up to fit people, as he said they were, then how come he missed seeing the opportunity that the war’s adventure offered to the human frame?
The teacher continued: Why shake yourself free of superstition only to attach yourself to a new set of delusions? Another thing — but Walter was in the saddle now, and Peapod, sensing a chase, had to be held hard. He circled excitedly while Tom withdrew a couple of yards, clutching the fragile frame of his bike.
Right-oh, what was the other thing?
In retreat, and cooled off from his ride, the mottled purple of Larsen’s face had sunk to its usual grey.
“Forget it!” he shouted.
They now saw Billy thundering down the track brandishing a kind of sword, a length of silvery sapling. The two boys on horseback circled the isolated teacher who despite his serious outlook was the same age. Only he wouldn’t join in, except to bellow, “On to death and glory!”
There — the “other thing” was out.
In return he brandished a sardonic fist to make his meaning plain, but Billy took up the cry and meant it. Then he drew alongside Walter and said, “Let’s tell the girls”, and with a careless whoop in the direction of the teacher they set off.
Larsen watched their disappearing canter through the trees rocking and tilting through a series of frames in the late afternoon.
At Bindogundra the cousins hadn’t heard.
“It’s not so wonderful,” shrugged Ethel. But when Aunty Bea started hugging the boys she perked up, and thrust Walter against a veranda post to give him a kiss. Long-faced Uncle Len shook hands: “I’m too old.” At this Aunty Bea put an arm around his shoulders, and the moment hung in memory for that reason as much as any other.
Then they were off again, working their horses into a steaming sweat along the Parkes road, finally arriving long after dark. On the way in they had stopped, solemnly shaken hands, and repeated the oath of the Sunday before.
Nothing else seemed worth doing.
While the outlying streets of the town were wide and empty as ever, those near its heart ran with a kind of fever. Figures dashed from door to door. Knots of talkers raised their hats and cried “Hurrah!” as the horses shifted past. The hotels — once they reached the asphalt clatter of the main street — streamed with light and excited voices and the drumming of boots on wooden floorboards. Four men marched down the centre of the road singing “Rule Britannia”, arms hooked around shoulders, stolid as working bullocks. A platoon of boys followed bearing sticks and pick handles; a Union Jack hung from the balcony of the Royal.
New ways of behaviour had descended as if by revelation.
Blacky and the rest would be there, but for once Walter didn’t mind. Tonight the clash of persons was dead. One nation stood, swayed, roared, shoulder to shoulder. In the bar, beers were passed head-high in chains of dozens. Pound notes were slapped to the wet counter and no-one seemed concerned about change.
Sure enough, Blacky’s gang held a corner. As the latecomers surged towards them a splash of beer fell on Walter’s forehead and trickled down his face.
“I’ve been baptized,” he said stupidly. A slopping glass from somewhere was thrust into his hand. There was Billy already gulping.
“Drink up, boys!” shouted Blacky. “Here’s to the stoush!”
“We’ll knock their heads together till their brains run out,” giggled Ned.
“I ain’t going to wait,” crowed Eddie, “I’m off to Sydney tonight. I’m taking the car.”
“Me too!” Ned squeaked.
The whole room was drunk.
Suddenly Blacky held a pistol — a lustreless cattle-killing Colt. In a second his arm jerked stiff in the air, two shots barked, and the hand dropped. Then Ned held the pistol and another shot rang into the cloud of descending dust and peppery plaster.
Sergeant Gregory materialized with the publican, and Ned was marched off. The policeman entrusted Blacky with the pistol — he’d brazenly asked for it back — and a wag even proposed three cheers for King and Blacky Reid.
“Ned’ll take his time now,” pronounced Blacky.
Meanwhile Eddie, propped on the wall, seemed to have dropped out of things. During the excitement he’d hardly reacted. Now he swayed red-eyed, with hair pasted to his forehead. His lips appeared thicker than usual, as if he’d bitten them earlier in an agony of indecision. He turned to Walter and Billy.
“What about you two?”
“We’re going. Too right!”
Walter’s first beers had elated him. Now with his third half-emptied he felt sober. This rush to join up, once he’d seen its force in the town, deadened the cold swill in his stomach and made it impossible to get drunk, though the excitement thundered on. A dog went wild among three hundred legs until it was kicked clear. Martha Bryant responded to the toast “Our Women” —
“I like that,” murmured Blacky —
But Walter had caught the same mood as Eddie. He took a fourth beer, a fifth, before the excitement was readmitted. A minute ago he’d fallen to saying, “I’ll have to see how things stand with Dad,” when his dad was part of the scheme, but now … Now! the whole world was ablaze. Tipping his head back for a final drink, surging out to the cold yard, he was at last on fire as he headed for home.
Billy decided to stay.
Alone without distractions Walter’s senses crackled through the past or raced forward in electric dashes. He tried to add himself up, to make something of his past self to thrust into the future whole and unbreakable. Because the idea of going to the war was a simple one, with its mix of abandonment and submission, of colour, noise, pride, he really did conclude, under a sky of almost deserted imponderables — once upon a time he could have named half a hundred stars — that the clash of history whose noise beckoned had done him a favour. He noted the smudged Magellanic clouds over to the south, and caught at his back three stars setting in the west — names out of reach, but without mystery now, because all cavities that once had tantalized, the gulfs of How Big? How Old? Where Does It Go? When Will It End? somehow presented themselves for answer in the span of his own actions. To go! His life pulsed forward in this active phrase, which would solve all, and was itself everything.
His ears ached from the cold, his cheeks lacked feeling. He experimented with a word to Peapod, but through wooden lips it issued merely as a chunk of noise. Cold nights, train smells, warm horse smells, pain in August — his life was marked by the events of late winter and early spring. This was the time when wattles in bloom almost squatted under their own yellow weight, tree after tree aligned through the ranges. It was a year since he’d first clapped eyes on Frances — what if he hadn’t? No — even with his letter posted, and then the dwindling summer of no-reply, he felt more alive than he would have otherwise. Was it a trick of the season, to make something go wrong (his fall from Coalheap had started it), then have it fill his thoughts till he was grateful? The months after Christmas he’d felt thwarted and shamed. Well, the rules had changed. The world had changed.
He would write again.
His parents were still up, sitting close to the stove. The iron kettle hummed in waiting. There was no reproach for his wild exit. He described the unrestrained scenes in town, biting alternately a thickly buttered crust and a lump of cheese.
“There’s time for thought,” said Mrs Gilchrist on hearing of the urge some felt to rush off immediately.
“War,” said her husband. “It’s a fact.” He took a piece of red gum for the stove and turned it over in his lumpy hands.
Walter rephrased all he’d read in the papers, talked on and on, and his parents hung on the words as if he’d coined them. He pictured himself as a far-flung son of the empire called to shield the heart of the mother country. His halting accents gave the platitudes rough force.
“So,” he concluded, “I’ll be in it.”
But his mother was unmoved. “We need you here, Wally. You’ve never mentioned the army in your life.”
“We can manage,” said her husband.
“Not so long ago we couldn’t.” She bunched a tea-cloth into a ball and abandoned it on the table, where it uncoiled hopelessly. “Alan, you were all for stopping Wally from going to the university — now he’s to be killed.”
“Not a chance, Mum”
“You’ll kill him!” she hurled at the father.
“It’s up to Wally. I can’t say no. Douggie can come home early.”
Why at this moment did Walter wish to condemn his father as irreclaimably weak?
At last she appealed to him. “If only you could give me reasons. I don’t hate the Germans. None of us do. Why, Mrs Schuler is a German! I do not want my son to kill his fellow creatures.”
“It won’t be like that!” But how did he know? Then to grant his mother something, not liking to see her so isolated, he said: “Tom Larsen claims it’s all cooked up.”
“He’s a ratbag,” said his father.
At the end Mrs Gilchrist’s voice lost all trace of supplication. She stated, “Nobody can tell me why,” and there the conversation finished.
On Sunday the district poured into the three o’clock service to hear Mr Fox preach on “Germany’s policy, the Long Arm and the Mailed Fist”. The national anthem was sung afterwards, and at the door the minister held Walter by the shoulders — the pose almost threatened a kiss — and said, “Half your luck.”
“It’s bound to be finished before I get away,” replied Walter deprecatingly. One minute he really hoped it would, the next he was mad to go. Eddie had already. Billy was to set off the following Friday. The Reid boys decided to put the Peppers on the farm forthwith and try their luck. Duncan Grieve and the unmarried Scott brothers rode to Forbes one day looking for work and never came back.
Everything Walter looked at now was sharp-outlined. Tin roofs seemed sliced from crystal, while sprouts of spring grass on the damp creekbanks were brilliant yet sombre, like green velvet. When low clouds parted to let through the sun, patches of the countryside would suddenly illuminate. It was a post-quaternary landscape, the soft heaven of a new epoch. The usual agents of change, erosion and weathering, were replaced by light and emotion. From here Walter was to step he knew not where — except that if he once gave up, and said, as he was still able to, no, then this pastel erasure of the ordinary past would cease, never again to tip forward into a million new colours, nor soften — ever — the infinity of hard rocks, stubborn hills, and motionless plains that threatened to hold him.
Mr Gilchrist purchased “seat of war” maps which were stuck to the dining room wall. He placed a red tag in the North Sea, where, it was said, guns had been heard.
Off they went to the big open air patriotic meeting held the night before Billy’s departure: Walter and Billy with their fathers — though Mr Mackenzie was sour about Billy’s plans.
“He’ll do what he wants. He’s done it before.”
“You can rely on me for a hand,” said Alan Gilchrist, whacking his unsteady neighbour on the back.
“I’ve got a big club handy for the next man who greets me with, ‘anything fresh about the war?’” complained Billy. But in the next breath he added: “What’s the news?” and was as anxious as anyone to taste the meeting’s excitement.
The theme, announced by the mayor, was that every man who owned stock or had the right of citizenship should help to protect those rights. Though his face formed the hub for spokes of the British flag hung at his back, he said they were not assembled in any spirit of jingoism, but to deal with the most serious question in the history of Europe since the days of the Spanish Armada.
Tom Larsen arrived at Walter’s elbow. “Jingoism,” he stated, pointing to the platform as if at a blackboard.
“Didn’t you hear him say it wasn’t?”
The mayor now roused the crowd with his auctioneer’s voice, asking for donations in cash and kind for the comfort of those who went to the front, and to make sure that the wants of their dependents were provided for.
“That’s the stuff,” said Mr Gilchrist.
First Mr Smallcombe sprinted up. Right away he and his brother were donating a rail truck of fat sheep. The chief thing was to feed the men.
“I’ll send a truckload of scholars,” muttered Tom, though only Walter heard.
Skinny Jones then danced aloft. He said the occasion was one for special efforts. They had one of the finest countries in the world. There was no place where a man could get better returns for his investments. Jones Brothers would donate half a truck of sheep.
“He’s my man,” said Tom, elbowing Walter and releasing a grim hee-haw. “You see? Money’s at the core.”
A drunk arrived on the stairs of the podium, balanced like a jelly as he tried to speak, but was captured by Constable Arkwright to cries of: “Put him in the army!”
One farmer shouted, “I’ll give twenty-five.” Others: “Put me down for ten … fifteen … a draught mare … oats.” Promises flowed forward in a wild flooding of property into battle: if weapons had been to hand, and an enemy sighted, even the stiffest among them would have given chase. With a voice like a drum and perspiration sprouting from forehead and cheeks, Alan Gilchrist promised the proceeds from his next thirty ewes, and Mr J. Westcott donated a sulky to be disposed of as the committee thought fit.
Too loud this time, Tom said: “I’ll drive it to England.”
“Shut up,” said Billy.
“When’s the ‘chalky’ going?” asked a voice two rows back. Another voice ferociously struck: “We oughter help him.” After that Tom held his tongue. The gas lamps run up for the occasion barely reached this far — when Walter turned to identify the callers he saw only a log jam of brown hat brims.
The band struck up and the crowd milled round, unwilling to be prised from its discovered one voice. “Rule Britannia”, “La Marseillaise”, the Russian national anthem, and “God Save the King” were played before the meeting broke up.
“Don’t that music stir you?” asked Billy as they parted. “Whoompf!” he gestured, curving an imaginary bayonet upwards.
Then, as simply as stepping through a doorway, Billy caught the next day’s train to Sydney. A week later a letter arrived from Trooper Mackenzie, Australian Light Horse, enclosing money for Novelty to be railed to Liverpool.
At the Agricultural Bureau picnic, held two days before Walter left, four hundred picnickers gave three explosive cheers for Walter and the other six who were soon to go, and sang “Auld Lang Syne”. After the formalities Ethel asked if he’d walk down to the creek with her. She wore a loose calico tunic for the sports. Whenever a fold of the material swayed against him he felt the weight of a friendly limb, or hip, and once, he was certain, a breast.
Under a canopy of wattle she suddenly said: “You can kiss me if you like.”
“But we’re not going together.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You’d expect me to write — I couldn’t.”
He listened to the frogs in the bristly reeds. She removed her sandshoes and he saw an X-ray picture of toes in dirt-stained socks.
“Don’t be a dill. Haven’t you kissed a girl before?”
“Too right I have.”
At first she was all bone, and smelt in patches of sawdust from the Ladies’ Nail Drive, which she’d won. And of sweat. Then her lips seemed all consideration. He discovered himself flat on his back in the shade, almost a baby, while Ethel manipulated his adult responses from heaven. She took his hand and guided it to the now-taut fabric at her chest. “Move it,” she mumbled. Here he discovered a cushioned, un-Ethel-like part, as wonderfully boneless as her lips. Experimentally he shifted to his side and embraced her. She said, “Oh, yes, hug me,” and guided his shy hand through an armhole where under her singlet it encountered, like a soft toy, the small handful of her breast and its button of nipple. Then he felt her hand fumbling at his fly, which by then was so upraised that part of his concentration had been spent on wondering if she’d noticed. Broad daylight or not, he and Ethel were personally linked — he’d never felt so closely in contact with anyone. His hand plied ceaselessly from one loose-hanging breast to the other, while she did the same between his legs, making him gasp when she released two buttons and slipped cool fingers inside.
Then it ended.
Ethel was on her feet screeching at two shapes lurking in the paperbarks, barely ten yards away. “You stinking Spicers, you bloody little spies!” She grabbed a stick and advanced on the now-standing boy and girl. The moment they blew raspberries and ran, Walter remembered his buttons, fixed them, and was on his feet by the time Ethel turned around.
As they walked back to the picnic she said, “You can’t say you’ve never been kissed.”
He was about to object, but said: “Thanks.”
“I’ll still be here after the war,” she went on matter-of-factly, “Why not visit me then?”
“I will, definitely.” Looking at her side-on he discerned a different profile from before. Not sharp and hungry at all, but soft and sad. He ought to have been shocked by what had just happened, but wasn’t. He had no curiosity about her — just a liking.
“Those things we did back there. I liked them.”
“Of course you did.”
Above the bank they could see the hats of the long jump judges. A balloon drifted past then burst on a thorn bush leaving scrappy green rags. They circumnavigated the sportsfield staying clear of the crowd.
“When a girl says ‘come and visit’, does she always mean it?”
“Anyone’s welcome who’s nice.”
“Would you say it just out of politeness?”
“Not me!”
“Would someone else?”
“Someone?”
She gave him a look which showed she understood. Billy was certain to have mugged her up on Frances — though in probing, Walter hadn’t meant her to realize. He said, “I didn’t mean a special person,” intending to say “no-one in particular.” But it was too late.
“Oh, sure. She would have meant it.”
The sharp profile returned. A peculiar white knuckle showed on the tip of her nose. Could she possibly be jealous? But it didn’t last.
“Here’s why,” she said, good humouredly stiffening her right index finger on the palm of her left hand. “One: the Gilchrist money.”
“That’s a myth.” But as the district could see, Alan Gilchrist sailed through the bad seasons — this year had been bad so far — and still sent his sons away to school.
“Two: you tickle a girl’s interest.” She laughed, he blushed.
“Three: you’re leaving.”
“Just that?”
“A girl hates to lose things.”
“But I wasn’t leaving when the invitation was issued.”
“Was she?”
They had almost reached their families.
“Does a girl hate to lose even those things she hasn’t got?”
“Some do. Especially what they haven’t got.”
“What’s number four?”
“There isn’t one.”
“I saw — you were about to count off another.”
He bumped her shoulder accidently and she glanced at him unguardedly, taking the contact as a gesture of affection.
“I can’t answer.”
“Come on. We’re not playing riddles!”
But she galloped off, asking who won tilting-the-ring and the Old Buffers’ race. When her name came up for a prize she ran backwards past Walter and called, “Honest, I can’t say.”
The bump, a mere chance intimacy, in the meantime must have made her wonder. For when the picnic boiled itself out, and the sun sank low and cold, and a string of sulkies and drays set off for the road junction with knots of walkers following, she very cosily took his arm.
“I know all about the girl in Sydney. Billy told me.”
“She’s just someone I met. We’ve hardly ever spoken.” He wanted her to see how little there was to it. And there really wasn’t. Who was Frances now? A hum thinning out along dark rails.
She sought his hand and held it among the folds of her tunic where no-one could see.
“I wish we’d — got to be friends — before,” Walter managed. He felt a kind of drunkenness with this angular girl beside him. Across the paddocks, under cut-out hills, a mist had developed. Above, the first star glared through a pinprick in the stretched blue. In a hollow they entered a band of cold air, then rose out of it into an atmosphere of dust and pollen stirred by the passing crowd. Ethel sneezed. Walter said: “Everyone’s suddenly taken to me because I’m going. You’d hardly believe the change in my father — all year he’s been rotten, but when the war business got going he did a double somersault.”
“I suppose he knows what he’s missing.”
“No — he hates me.”
“When you and Billy came with the news I felt awful. Sometimes I get feelings about things. F’rinstance I knew Aunt Elsie Mackenzie was going to die.”
“So did we all.”
“I knew before anyone. I watched her once in church: she seemed to disappear. Uncle Hugh put his arm right through her when he reached for his hymn book.”
Ethel’s practical sports-shoes trudged on beside Walter’s boots.
“She might have just ducked outside for a tick.”
“You think I’m mad. Do you want to hear something else?”
“It depends.”
“After the war you and Billy will be safe. I had a dream where the two of you lived in houses with wives and babies.”
“Is that a promise? I think I’d rather die.”
“You mustn’t joke. Your wife was awfully pretty.”
She released his hand, and leaned on his elbow for support while fishing for a pebble. The last picnickers had long since passed them and gathered fifty yards farther on, where the T-junction sent its arms north and south.
“Any more dreams?”
“The both of you were unhappy. Billy just stared at me. I know this war’s going to change people.”
“It’ll be a lark.”
But Ethel’s dream unsettled him. The fate she pictured — that of the unhappy returnee — tossed him far ahead of anything he’d thought up for himself. War was a game involving picketed horses grazing under a bank while their riders in bush jackets and bandoliers crawled through rocks and grass on elbows and stomachs and popped their rifles at other distant figures, shabbily clad. The trouble with Ethel’s scalp-creeping predictions was the way they planted him right here, at home, the very spurning of which was an act the war itself enabled.
“What about the final thing you wouldn’t tell me. Was it good news or bad?”
“I’ll have to think.”
“Was it about Frances Reilly?”
“Who?” She scuffed the gravel angrily. He’d broken a rule by mentioning her name.
While he waited for an answer he discovered he understood a secret about the war. About his going.
It was this: every place, every person, had come to him bearing love. That was the reason why the country glowed specially yellow and green; why his mother had cried the other day when Douggie, home for the holidays, played drums on the pudding plates while their father watched cheerily; why flags draped every poor settlement hall; why Ethel had kissed him at the sports, why now she once more took his arm and steered him towards the junction. Love, love — only it didn’t mean charity or comfort, nor even kindness. It was a torch of passion hurled from the darkness of a million small lives, which Walter was expected to catch and keep alight for others. Out of these thoughts he blurted:
“What if I didn’t go?”
But Ethel passed no comment. She smiled a farewell and said, “You’re right — it was about her. I’m sure she’s —”
“Well?”
“I’m sure she’s not like me — soft hearted. Oh, that doesn’t mean bad luck for you. She’ll take what she wants, and keep it. But do you think I’ll ever amount to anything? The district’s got me, and I’m stuck fast. Imagine, I’ve never been more than thirty miles from home. I can’t see my life changing.”
“You’ll marry.”
But Walter was dull when it came to predictions. And so dull in relation to Ethel that he couldn’t picture her beyond the moment of their parting. Not one ounce of her.
“Marry? Even Duncan’s done a bunk.”
She pecked him on the cheek in front of everyone. “Come back,” she whispered, and he knew that she meant to her, to their tangle by the creek, and not just “alive”. The spirit of this command cancelled the gloom of their parting exchanges, and for the first time Walter grasped her prediction of his survival as a formula for breezing through the months ahead.
“I’d be a mug not to,” he whispered in reply. With a sharp finger she poked him in the stomach.
The next day, an hour before the evening meal, Walter sat at the desk in the room called The Office. It was really a long bench, with invoices, letters, account books and catalogues stacked by his meticulous father in neat piles under the window. The chair was swivel-based, with fat leather padding on the seat. He took a clean sheet of paper, uncapped the inkwell, dipped the pen, let the blue liquid drain down, wiped the nib on the inkwell’s glass lip, examined it, rattled the bone shaft of the pen on his teeth, and stared out the window.
What should he say?
His view extended down the home valley, a mere depression, to the blobs of trees on the low basking hills at the far side of the road. The last sunlight searching at ground level illuminated humped tree-roots and caused the grass to shine.
He stared, chewing the pen.
His mind leapt to impossible conclusions — there he was after the war with Frances, only she wasn’t “awfully pretty”. When he saw a lump of child on her knee the scene went blank. All he wanted was a word with her. Then she squirmed in his arms under the wattle at the sports; ah — he travelled on the train again, this time without Mrs Stinson, and when the lights went out he chased her for a kiss, but free of a tunnel she sat staring enigmatically out the window … But he too sat staring out a window, attached to this moment, these circumstances, this ignorance, lack of will, habit. One second ago the sun had been everywhere, lying in the grass gullies, unfocused at the edges but strong as gold at the centre. The next second it had gone, and the green undulations turned grey as cardboard. And in the room he was aware of hearing the last tick, but one, of the clock.
Again he dipped the nib and this time wrote the letter. He wrote slowly. He said he was glad at last to hear news of her from Billy. The war had caused a lot of excitement in Parkes. How were they taking it in the city? Quite a number had left already including Billy and others not known to her. He supposed many she knew must be going from Forbes. He was leaving soon himself. Time permitting, he would like to call on her in Sydney …
The light almost gone, Walter found himself leaning low over the paper as he wrote. When he reached the bottom of the page his face almost touched it. So in the near-darkness he bent a half-inch lower and deposited a kiss, feeling nothing at all like the way he’d felt with Ethel. His fresh-shaven face rustled across the dry surface. Then he signed his name, addressed and sealed an envelope, and sat awaiting the call to dinner.