“Hello, Auntie Bet? You OK?”
The voice was male, young, and broad Australian.
“Hello, Mark.”
She tried to inject some enthusiasm into her voice, though he probably wouldn’t notice one way or the other. Mark didn’t. If anyone was making a film on the narcissus myth, Mark would be a natural for the part.
“I’ve been meaning to pop by and make sure you’re still in the land of the living, and I will do, this week or early next. I just haven’t had a minute recently.”
“Oh, that’s good,” said Bettina, adding maliciously, “Are the parts beginning to come in?”
“No, it’s more this personal trainer lark. It’s a soft cop—all perks and no work. Charging around from posh hotels to posh flats and houses, then on to posh gyms. Sounds a drag, doesn’t it? But I suppose that sort of thing’s not your scene, is it, Auntie Betty?”
“It certainly doesn’t sound like it.”
“You mentioned parts. I thought you might be able to help there, Auntie B.”
Bettina left a silence. This was what she had been expecting since she heard his voice.
He was forced to come out with it explicitly, since she refused to ease the transition. “I hear they’re going to make a film of The Heat of the Land.”
“The Heart of the Land. Since it’s set in Armidale the heat is fairly moderate. There is a part for a young man, but he’s quite a lot younger than you.”
The heroine of her book had a brief and bittersweet romance with the school’s cricket captain. Bettina had portrayed him as a willowy young man perpetually in white flannels. She certainly hadn’t imagined him as a lumbering mass of muscle and self-love, which pretty well summed up her nephew Mark.
“I can look anything from seventeen to forty, Auntie Bet.”
“Maybe. I can mention you to the film company, but that’s all I can do. They’ll make their own decisions. And all the filming is going to take place in Australia.”
“Oo-o-oh—really? I thought the interiors would be filmed here.”
“Definitely not.”
“Of course I want to go back to Australia—naturally I do. But all the action is here at the moment—”
Being personal something-or-other to people with more money than sense, thought Bettina. She interrupted him.
“Well, you have to make some sacrifices for your Art,” she said. “Or alternatively you could sacrifice your Art for the good life. The loss would be great to Art, but—”
“Don’t be sarky, Auntie B,” said Mark, and she was surprised that he was actually listening. “And another thing. There’s Dad.”
“Your father?”
“He’s coming over. Should be here in a couple of weeks’ time. That’s if the bargain tickets work out.”
“Oh, that will be nice,” said Bettina, genuinely pleased at the prospect of seeing her baby brother again.
“That was what I was really ringing about,” said Mark, who clearly had had no interest in her well-being and little hope of a part in the film. “I was going to ask a favor of you, Auntie Betty.”
“Ye-e-es?”
“I know you don’t like people to stay for too long, and that’s fine—he’ll stay here with me. But I wondered if you could take him around the plays and operas and that sort of cra—thing, just now and again, could you? Save me. I mean, I would do it, but I’m busy most of the time, and I couldn’t afford to lose customers by standing them up. And you know it’s not my thing.”
“Yes, I know it’s not your thing, Mark.”
“That’s beaut, then. What with Dad being a bit of a culture-vulture and you being the same, that suits everyone, doesn’t it?”
Bettina wondered what sort and degree of a culture-vulture Oliver could have turned out to be, and how he could have produced or nurtured a brainless lump like Mark. Perhaps she had better ring him up and sound him out on what he might like to see.
“I’d be delighted to show him around and take him to things,” she announced gladly.
“Gee, thanks, Auntie Betty. You’re a sport.”
I hope not, she thought.
As she pottered around the flat for the rest of the afternoon it occurred to her to wonder from time to time why she reacted so badly to her nephew. Things had got off onto the wrong foot when he had arrived in London eighteen months before. He had been warned that she was a working writer and never had guests in the flat for longer than a week, but he had made himself and his copious luggage at home in the flat and displayed a clear intention of staying there as long as he could string it out. In those first days in Britain he had made determined attempts to break into the acting business there. He was not without credentials, though nearly so. He had had three months ten years earlier in Neighbours, as the resident hunk. His contract had not been renewed. The experience had not cut much ice in Britain. Since then he had made a living as barman and bouncer, swimming instructor and rugby player with a minor side, PE teacher and “personal trainer”—with no doubt some extra income from selling his body to whomsoever was attracted by it.
Bettina pulled herself up. She had no evidence whatever that Mark sold himself on the side. The only experience of him that had given her the idea that he might was his habit, in that one week in her flat, of going around the place in his briefs or—on one occasion only, when he had been the object of her wrath—in only a jockstrap. She had felt uneasy with him. It was as if he was offering himself to her—at her age!—in lieu of rent. That sort of aggressive male sexuality made her uneasy.
Still made her uneasy. It made her realize that she had never got over that terrible night in Bundaroo. It wasn’t enough, never to have gone back. To put it forever behind her she would have had to have had no people like Mark who could remind her of it. In this day and age, she said to herself, that was unlikely.
It was two weeks after Hughie began at Bundaroo High that Betty walked to school with him and Steve Drayton. Steve was from Wilgandra, where his father was a stockman, and he only walked with them because he had designs on Betty’s friend Alice Carey, and thought that through Betty he might attain what he coveted: Alice’s partnership at the Leavers’ Dance in December, her brilliant revision notes for the end-of-the-year examinations, slices of her mother’s well-thought-of passion-fruit sponge, and beyond that her heart—and beyond that still her bed, or at least access to her knickers. Betty rather liked Steve. He was down-to-earth in a way she approved of.
“Alice Carey’s brilliant at geography,” Steve was saying. “I can never make head nor tail of it. I wish it was just maps, and ‘What’s the capital of Austria?’ ”
They were approaching the bitumen strip of Bundaroo’s main street, and Betty saw the brawny form of Sam Battersby outside the Grafton’s Hotel, rolling empty barrels around to the strip of wasteland at the back. She changed her position so that the boys were between her and the hotel.
“Whatcher doin’ that for?” demanded Steve. “I was talkin’ to you.”
“I don’t like the way Sam Battersby looks at me,” said Betty, keeping her voice low.
“Looks at you? Listen to ya!” said Steve, taking no such precautions. “He’s just lookin’ at the kids goin’ to school. Not much happens in Bundaroo.”
“This happens every day,” said Betty.
“Betty’s right,” said Hughie. “He does look at her.”
Steve seemed about to make some jeer at the newcomer, but he bit it back. Sam Battersby had upended a barrel on a low dray outside the front entrance to his hotel, and had planted his big fleshy arms on it, and his beer belly against it, and was gazing at them as they walked past.
“See?” said Betty.
“Come off it! It’s just ordin’ry,” said Steve, but not with great conviction.
“It’s not ordinary. It’s horrible. Watch the side window at Bob’s Café. It reflects the Grafton’s.”
As they walked they gazed surreptitiously at the little café’s window. Sam Battersby had not changed his position, but his head was turned in their direction, and his protruding eyes were watching, fixed on Betty’s retreating back.
“Well,” said Steve. “I suppose you’re right. But I’ve never noticed it before.”
“He doesn’t watch you,” said Betty.
The next weekend it was Masonic Night in Walgett. Betty’s father had been sponsored as a Mason by Bill Cheveley, so that he could drive him there and—more to the point—back. Bill had never much liked driving, since four long years as an ambulance man during the war. He had once driven into a tree on the way back from Walgett when he’d drunk too much. Bill paid for Jack’s services as a chauffeur by making his car available to him whenever he had need of it. Jack only had to go into Bundaroo and phone Wilgandra from the Grafton’s Hotel and it was brought over by one of the stockmen. Whether he would have joined the Masons if left to himself was doubtful. Betty had heard him ridiculing the ritual one night when he’d thought she was asleep. “Grown men dressing up like high-class waitresses,” he’d said. “Makes me split a gut laughing.” But Bill Cheveley was more than a mate. The two men admired each other, and they had between them something that was almost as intimate as a marriage.
That evening Bill Cheveley brought along a guest. Hughie’s dad, Paul Naismyth, was a Mason, initiated back home in the north of England, and Bill, who was a man who took obligations seriously, had felt obliged to ask him as his special guest. To him the Masons were about fellowship.
“Good to meet you at last,” said Naismyth, shaking Jack Whitelaw’s hand. “Heard a lot about you from Bill—all good, of course.”
“Is tea all right for you?” said Dot, not expecting to be introduced, and not being. “It’s what Jack and Bill usually have before the drive.”
“Whatever comes out of the pot,” said Paul Naismyth. “And this will be the young lady my son Eugene’s been talking about, is it?”
Betty just smiled, and Naismyth stretched his arms above his head, then took up his cup and drank.
“I needed this,” he said. “I’ve been all day trying to get a hand’s turn of work out of that lazy hound Kevin Drayton.”
Betty felt immediately an access of tension in the room. Paul Naismyth had transgressed, had passed over one of those unmarked boundaries. He was too new, and too English, to criticize one of the established members of their little community. And since Kevin Drayton did not have the reputation of being idle, everyone in the room could have guessed that he was probably engaged in some kind of passive resistance to the new manager.
“Now we’re just waiting for the Rev,” said Bill Cheveley, stepping into the silence, “and then we’ll get going.”
“Oh, is the vicar a Mason?” asked Paul Naismyth. “We have a vicar in the Hexham lodge, but mostly the C. of E. people steer clear of us.”
“Michael does too,” said Cheveley. “He thinks people would be confused by the double allegiance as he calls it. No, he has a sister in Walgett, and he sometimes comes along so he can drop in for an evening.”
“I see.”
“Sam Battersby asked if we had room, but I had to say no.”
“Good,” said Betty, under her breath.
“I thought we couldn’t squeeze a third rear, and that a big one, on to the backseat…Ah, that looks like Michael now.”
The Reverend Michael Potter-Clowes was riding his bicycle through the gathering dusk down the rough dirt track. He was shaken about so much that Betty thought he’d have done better to walk. He was a long, thin, birdlike man, unmarried, who was looked after by a widow who came in to cook and clean for him. He was generally liked or tolerated in Bundaroo, and thought of as a bit of an eccentric, or a throwback. He was a hoarder, and he had a great collection of back numbers of the Bulletin, which Betty sometimes went along to the shabby wooden house that served as a vicarage to read—loving, especially, the cartoons and jokes, but seriously reading her way through the political stuff as well. She liked the Reverend Potter-Clowes well enough, but they were never entirely easy with each other. Betty knew he thought her very bright and didn’t know how to live up to his assessment.
“Ah, Betty!” he now said, when he had been introduced to the newcomer and had made inquiries about his wife and son. “I have some news for you. The Bulletin this week says that in a fortnight’s time they will be launching a summer holiday competition for young people.”
“Oh,” said Betty flatly. “It will probably be some awfully difficult quiz that you need encyclopedias and things to find the answers to.”
“No, it’s not. It’s apparently a competition to find budding young journalists. It’ll be just like writing an essay, I should think—a bright, entertaining one. That’s very much up your alley, isn’t it?”
“Well, it could be. Yes—that might be interesting.”
“Betty would make a very good journalist,” said her father loyally. “She notices things.”
“So what do you think about the Czech situation?” the vicar asked, turning to Bill Cheveley.
“Oh, don’t you worry about Czechoslovakia,” put in Paul Naismyth. “Country like that—only existed for twenty years. Nobody’s going to rush in and fight for a country that’s just a name. It’s so remote nobody gives a damn about it.”
“So was Sarajevo,” said Betty’s father. Now Betty knew for certain she thought Hughie’s father a blatherskite. There was another awkward silence. Then the ill-assorted little group of men began to make their way to the Holden waiting outside.
Later that evening Betty’s mother said to her, when she came in from putting little Oliver to bed, “When they said Sam Battersby wasn’t coming tonight, you said ‘good.’ ”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Betty waited for a while before replying.
“I don’t like the way he looks at me.”
Betty’s mother seemed about to say something, then thought better of it. The Grafton Hotel and what went on there was man’s business. This was something that seemed to straddle her world and her husband’s.
Thinking back on things later, Betty decided that that week was the one when matters began to crystallize. When what was to come was started on its accelerating course.
The phone call from her brother Oliver came two nights later. Bettina had been intending to ring him, and wished she had: she wanted to ask him if he’d like to stay for a few days, and it would have looked better if she had called especially to invite him. She realized she was appearing grudging, and blamed Mark for it. He was not the reason for her preferring not to have visitors who stayed in the flat, but he had certainly strengthened her dislike of it. And she had loved her baby brother, been so protective of him, in those long-ago days in Bundaroo.
“Ollie! I was just about to ring you. I get so confused about the time differences and was afraid I’d ring you when you were asleep.”
“It’s early morning here, and I know you’re something of a night owl, Betty. And it’s Thursday—your tomorrow.”
“Oh, it is so confusing. I should know, and I’ll try to remember.”
Bettina was very conscious that what she was saying revealed how occasional the contacts had been between them—between her and anyone from her Australian past. With Oliver the contacts had been, quite often, just once a year, and never more than twice. She launched herself into a spiel she had been preparing in advance, and, realizing that in her effort to appear welcoming, she was gabbling, tried to rein herself back.
“Ollie, I wanted to say that I’d love to have you to stay here for the first days of your holiday. You know how itchy I get if I can’t get down to the writing in peace, but it’s been so long, and it would be so nice if we could actually be together, really get to know each other. Again—because we really did know each other once.” Conscious that Oliver might point out that this was until he was about five, and that he’d developed a great deal since then, she began gabbling again. “And then we could plan what you’d like to see while you’re over here. The London theater is not what it was, but it’s still pretty good, and I’d need to know the sort of thing you like—and then of course other sorts of things: concerts I’m not too good on, but I can find out, and then there’s art exhibitions, places of course—”
“Hold your horses, Betty! One thing at a time. Now as to plays, I’m old-fashioned, and I like good strong plays with meaty situations.”
“Ah…Maybe one of the Priestley revivals. Or Tennessee Williams? Strong plays don’t get written much these days.”
“Either would be fine. And then I’ve never—I’m ashamed to say this—seen Shakespeare onstage. I suppose I’ve been saving it till I could see something really good.”
“Right. That should be possible—depending on what plays are being done.”
“I’m not fussy about the play.”
“Well, you should be, Ollie. If you’ve only one chance to see really well-done Shakespeare it shouldn’t be, say, Timon of Athens or Two Gentlemen of Verona. Luckily they’re not often done.”
“Then a concert at the Albert Hall, and an opera at Covent Garden. It’s a question of experiencing the places as much as anything, but it would be nice if the opera is something mainline.”
“That might be a problem with opera. Mainline operas at Covent Garden tend to get booked up by corporate sponsors, I don’t know why. The people who come find anything more complicated than ‘O Sole Mio’ heavy, so you might just as well sit them down in front of a Stravinsky or a Berg as a Puccini. Still, I’ll do my best.”
“And…” Here the hesitations became long enough to be awkward. “Going back to the staying with you in the flat…”
“You’d prefer to spend your time with Mark,” said Bettina, breaking in on him. “I really should have thought of that. You haven’t seen him for yonks, and—”
“No, it’s not that…Not entirely…It’s just that…well, here goes: I’ve been hoping to have someone to travel with me. Judy couldn’t face the long air trip, and Cathy couldn’t get the time off work…” Those were Ollie’s wife and daughter, women Bettina hardly knew. She waited, her stomach feeling oddly churned up. “Well, I’ve never told you this, but we’ve been seeing quite a lot of Sylvia these last few years. We’ve…come together, and got on very well.”
Bettina tried without success to put her voice into neutral.
“I take it this Sylvia is—”
“Sylvia Easton. Yes. And—well—the long and the short of it is, she’s always wanted to make the England trip, but never felt like doing it on her own. And the upshot is, she’s coming with me. Mark hasn’t known about this. I’ve only just told him.”
“I see. This does rather change things, Ollie.”
“Yes. I can see that it does.”
Her voice took on a protesting tone. “It’s not that I don’t want to meet her, have her with us when we do the theaters”—though, I don’t, she thought—“but staying here in the flat, that’s a bit different.”
“Yes, I thought it mightn’t be a good idea,” said Oliver. “After everything.”
After nothing would describe it better, Bettina thought.
“But perhaps I’d better have time to think about it,” she said.
“No—look, I feel I’ve rather landed you in it. Last thing we would be happy with is a fraught situation. We’ll be perfectly all right at Mark’s. He’s got a mate on the floor above with a spare bedroom. I can sleep there.”
“And Sylvia will sleep in Mark’s spare room?”
“You should hear your voice, Betty! Sylvia’s not a young woman, you know. And Mark’s perfectly safe with women. Doesn’t have a lot of luck with them, if the truth be known.”
Not entirely sure what he meant, Bettina put the matter of Mark and Sylvia out of her mind. What she felt in the hour between the call and her bedtime was a sinking sensation of chickens coming home to roost.