1915 Page 4

  “That’s her,” said Billy.

  The train was still moving, but the girl stepped to the platform and ran a couple of feet before slowing to a walk. When she turned around Walter wondered why Billy was so interested in her.

  She seemed quite ordinary. Her eyes were very dark, her hair black and unshining. Her nose was rather big.

  She saw Billy and raised a hand.

  “There she is,” said Billy again, as though the two views of the girl had been aspects of different people. He set off along the platform and Walter followed.

  “Isn’t it cold.” When she hugged herself Walter could see her body outlined under the overlarge St. Catherine’s jacket and skirt.

  Billy launched into introductions. As he spoke, Walter felt amusement dart from the girl: amusement at Billy, at the cold air, at being a castaway on the next town’s station platform, alone and so young.

  She was more attractive than Walter had at first thought, though he could not see in what way. Her nose seemed even bigger from the side. When she laughed she finished by drawing in her lower lip in a half-nervous, half-irrepressible way.

  “I’d better climb back or they’ll leave me behind. We couldn’t have that,” she said to Billy, holding his eye for a sober second. Then she swung herself up the two steps in a movement that left Billy stranded. Too late he whipped his hands from his pockets, then jammed them away again in frustration, for he had intended not merely to help her up, but also to squeeze her elbow and watch her face for a sign.

  “Don’t forget,” hissed Billy. Walter found himself propelled aloft, with his suitcase skidding in behind.

  “Half a mo’, where’s Douggie?”

  “I saw him further back. Hey Douggie!” shouted Billy, and gave a thumbs up. “He’s safe.”

  As Walter hoisted his suitcase overhead the compartment’s other occupant spoke: “What a racket!”

  “Oh, Mrs Stinson,” apologized Frances. Walter scooped up a black-gloved hand.

  “We’re in for a cold trip,” said the old lady, who sat almost submerged in blankets and cushions presided over by several chins the colour of orange cake. “Give the heater a shake, like a good boy.” Her pearl-studded slippers, flashing green under the gaslamps, slipped from the footwarmer which Walter then rolled and waddled around the floor to agitate the chemicals.

  Frances withdrew while the guard shouted “stand back” and thick wood — broad as the door of a coldroom — shut them in. But all the coldness was outside.

  Billy was being left behind. He paced the carriage for a few feet and then slowed and stopped. He raised his hand — a dignified salute — looking glum. He slid backwards with all the other bits and pieces on the platform — the wicker baskets in their untidy stacks, empty luggage trolleys, milk cans, the black and silver platform scales, the dirty moon of the station clock. He was overtaken by two railway clerks with thumbs in waistcoat pockets, by a signalman lowering his lamp from an arm-high position to place it at his feet, by half-lit bushes at the end of the platform, by the blackness beyond.

  As they turned from the window Walter and Frances caught each other’s eye. The glance lasted half a second before Walter fell-to brushing soot from his knees and straightening his tie.

  Mrs Stinson sighed and hummed: “I was a bride in Melbourne and a bride in Forbes, and widow in both places too.” She spoke these words to Frances while addressing something like a cackle to Walter. “Us Victorians — but goodness, it’s forty years since I left Ballarat. We outlast the men. We leave ’em behind: remember that —”

  “I’ve got plenty of time,” Walter spoke directly to the old lady, raising his voice, “though I’m going on for nineteen.”

  “When it’s too late you’ll want to spend it. My cushion, dear boy. Up a little. Across. Push it down.” He almost fell, grabbing the luggage rack, when with a fleeting upward dart she bestowed a powdery kiss.

  “She likes you.” The old lady was instantly asleep, but her octogenarian authority prevailed. “I feel sorry for men,” Frances relaxed in her seat, “there’s so much duty for them.”

  “Look,” Walter said, “Billy asked me — if I’d keep you company.”

  “Really?” She shifted away from Mrs Stinson, leaning a shoulder on the glass, confronting Walter with unsmiling directness. “I don’t know him all that well. We only met once. Did he really say that? I wish people wouldn’t try to run my life for me.”

  It was then, right at that moment, that his idea of her changed. This was when it started, the murmur of sensation that was to accompany him all night, then for months, years — it began with her manner, then her voice, her withheld opinions, then the opinions themselves opening out, then his hunger for everything about her — open-mouthed.

  “I shouldn’t have done what he said. I shouldn’t have joined you, eh?”

  “Oh, no. I didn’t mean you. How could I? I meant — everyone else.” She was suddenly amused again. “Except Mrs Stinson. She’s so old nothing bothers her. There’s nothing she doesn’t know — about people, that is. Do you like people?”

  He had never considered it.

  “I sometimes think people and art are all that matters.”

  “Art?”

  “I mean the theatre. Bernard Shaw. Shakespeare.” She had never seen any, but Twelfth Night was coming up. “Adeline Genée.” She described the “wheatsheaf” adagio, in which the star pirouetted within the embrace of her partner’s arms, yet so exactly on the one spot that he never really touched her.

  “That’s art all right.”

  “Mrs Stinson was on the stage,” Frances whispered, suggesting an intensely important past which the old lady confirmed by her physical attitude, nodding monumentally under the rugs which descended in a dark masonry of lumps and folds. “She sings beautifully.” Walter stared respectfully at the sleeping figure. Such achievements alarmed his Presbyterian soul a little, but if Frances saw her as grand so would he.

  Now Frances was preoccupied, searching for a handkerchief, wetting her lips with a curved tongue, blinking. Her half turned face revealed a shining corner of eye, a clear curve of cheekbone, a mouth poised to speak lucidly — Walter thought — for an entire self.

  “I’ve got a coal in my eye,” she mumbled.

  She twisted a corner of handkerchief and used the window as a mirror. “Nearly …”, tugging her lower lid to reveal a reddened hollow, running the handkerchief along a blood-coloured edge. Walter, reclining on an elbow, could see Mrs Stinson’s reflection past Frances’s doubled head. The old lady seemed to be sitting far outside the train.

  “There.”

  Frances held out the rolled up handkerchief like a wand, with a black speck visible on the wet tip of cloth.

  “Billy told Dad he was a Catholic, but I knew better.” Frances settled back in her seat and smiled a level somehow mocking smile.

  “Did you like him?”

  After hurling the question at Frances he peered out the window, cupping a hand over his eyes to disown any but the mildest interest in her reply. “He’s a bit of a —”, he paused, looking from the window to Frances and back again, blowing mist on the glass, attempting to smear Billy out of favour. “I don’t know —”

  “I’m not sure I like him. He’s very direct.” She shot a glance at the slumped heap that was Mrs Stinson, and whispered: “He tried to kiss me.”

  “Oh.”

  “He only tried. Beery men have tried before.”

  Walter felt impossibly clean and young in his newly pressed and odourless school outfit. “We were at school together,” he caught Frances’s view of Billy and tried to worsen it, “primary school. He left early.”

  But Frances talked on: “Something else happened.” Now she peered out the window herself, blowing an oval of mist, erasing it line by line with a gloved finger. The train slowed through a long curve before entering a tunnel. “He and Dad were friendly enough at dinner, but the next morning Dad was angry with him.” Her voice trailed. “Somet
hing horrible happened. I don’t know what.”

  With a gulp the compartment filled with noise and they were in the tunnel. Frances prepared to shout the beginnings of an explanation and then thought better of it. She unfolded her travelling rug and arranged it on her lap. The overhead lamps wasted away as blue licks of flame guttered in the mantles. She dropped her shoes to the floor and tucked her feet under the rug. Walter fetched his own rug from the luggage rack, in the process leaning over her. Sleepily she readjusted her position and bumped him on the knee. “Sorry,” she mouthed. Goose-bumps climbed the inside of his leg. Deep ahead the engine puffed breathlessly through constricted space. The wheels ground and squeaked, the air swirled and peppered them with soot. Frances huddled into herself, the blanket crept higher. Walter gazed at dark lashes on pale skin, at hands in an oddly formal clasp peering from a gap of blanket, at a hump formed by swaying knees.

  Abruptly they slid from stuffy darkness onto a frosted upland. The silence after the underground roar was almost complete: a faint click-click of wheels, a murmur of movement — that was all. The effect was of bodiless gliding across vast sheets of phosphorescent water. The women slept and Walter sat guarding them — he was happy. Whenever he opened his eyes — Frances. Billy receded to a tiny dot under a remote pool of light on Parkes station, which then sank below the horizon.

  At a late, indeterminate hour Walter woke again. He listened for a while to the knock of steel on steel. The figures of Frances and the old lady were like exhibits of exhausted life in a museum, making the same repeated movements — the tremble of a chin, the sway of a loose strand of hair — over and over as though controlled by a system of rods and wires.

  When Walter woke at five in the morning clusters of houses, mysterious candleflame, dived at the train and drifted back into obscurity. Occasionally a light flashed in the distance keeping pace for a few minutes before looping behind. With a premonitory rattle of windows and then a loud bang a dark goods train rushed past. The cold of the outside world had now completely taken over from the airless cold of the compartment. Icy air slipped through hidden crevices in the floor. Walter stood and stamped his feet, rubbed his hands and hitched his blanket more securely around his shoulders. As he did so he noticed that Frances’s blanket had slipped, so he slowly drew it up again, daring her not to wake. He stayed looking at her face: and suddenly she woke. Her black shining eyes stared as though she had been awake all along behind carved lids.

  “Thanks.”

  He was close enough to feel the puff of breath that formed the word, a sweet-smelling association of saliva and warmed air. “That was kind of you,” she said in the next breath, while his heart pounded.

  “Oh, I’m stiff,” Mrs Stinson spoke from her corner, “and freezing cold.” She thumped herself into a new position. The tail-end of Frances’s gaze disappeared into a secret hiding place that closed over. “Nobody will sleep now that I’m awake,” commanded the old lady. She revealed a florid capability that had not been visible the night before, pointing to her hamper on the luggage rack and directing Walter to fetch it down. “Let’s have breakfast!” The giggle of her youth had aged to a hum of glee.

  They picnicked.

  Walter displayed a vast appetite.

  Mrs Stinson talked. All she did was babble about the district and town, yet with little thrusts of comment she accentuated their differing backgrounds: commercial and pastoral, Catholic and Protestant (though here Frances revealed that she wasn’t a “real” Catholic, it was her father), their difference in age, their geographical separation. Her talk of marriages made Frances seem more desirable but remoter than ever. Walter’s gloomy disposition wove a meaning that for the old lady was not there at all. “Men are never what you expect,” she finished, “it’s the best and worst thing about ’em.” Walter remembered afterwards how Frances had looked at him then. But no rescue was possible — the grey dawn nailed his isolation down in unadventurous light as the train slid through Redfern.

  What should he say to Frances? “I’m sorry I ate so much,” he said, and immediately cursed himself. “I enjoyed the trip.”

  “Thanks for keeping us company,” she smiled.

  “Perhaps we could — ?” Walter heard himself talking through cotton wool. He wanted to say something about the Christmas holidays, but at Central a tall nun with half a dozen St Catherine’s girls swept along the platform. What could be said that would not take minutes even to get started on? The girls carried her away.

  4

  Theatre

  “The Duke was a bore.”

  “Fran!”

  “I’m all for excitement and impulse.” Frances tied the belt of her seventeenth birthday present, a kimono, and perched on a stool.

  “So am I. But Antonio, how could you have liked him?” Diana consulted her Twelfth Night programme, “A sea-captain.” Through the dressing table mirror she watched Frances uncap a jar of Mrs Reilly’s face cream, then pegged her flannelette nightdress out like a tent and collapsed inside it. “I’m all for the mind.”

  She flopped on her back and bicycled somewhat stocky calves. “I can see through you, Franny. It was just the actor, you babbled about him all the way to the ferry.”

  “Harcourt Beatty is an artist.”

  “Would you really run off with — Antonio?”

  “For a night or two.”

  “Fran!”

  “I’m old enough.” And Diana squeaked again.

  While spreading clots of face cream Frances asked: “How old is the Maharanee of Tikari?”

  “The same as you. No, a year younger.”

  “The Maharanee of Tikari,” Frances read from the folded Herald, “danced a cakewalk with her father and then with her bright engaging Indian secretary Miss Knighton.”

  “I say.”

  “But,” Frances’s all-white face looked ghastly as she turned to raise a finger, “finally she danced with Mr Niblo.”

  “Mr Niblo.”

  “Upstairs,” dared Frances, masked and reckless.

  “Stop!”

  “In bed.” That was the finish.

  Later when the lights were out they talked again.

  “Fran? Do you know what they do?”

  “Niblos and Maharanees? Oh, Di. I thought you were all for the mind?”

  “I am.” A longer silence, then: “Remember when Olivia says wilt-though-go-to-bed-Malvolio? I know what happens.”

  So Frances breathlessly asked the ceiling: “How?”

  Her father, a captain at Victoria Barracks, and her mother, Diana explained, were just mad some nights about getting to bed early. She and her brother could see everything through the big iron keyhole. Some of these things Frances had guessed. How could it be otherwise? But the tangled clash of anatomy, the fever, the uncouth cries, the extension and the parting of skin and the mounting clamour of ecstasy — she felt tumbled and tossed in the same process, for Diana had spared nothing, shocking them both to silence.

  When the clock below chimed midnight Diana said, “Fran? Are you awake?”

  Frances had been thinking of candid modern girls in books. How astonishing that Diana, not Frances herself, might be like them.

  “Fran? Are we still friends?”

  In the morning they ate a late breakfast while Mrs Reilly went to church with Harry Crowell.

  “I’ll bet Adeline Genée’s got a lover,” stated Diana.

  “She’s impossibly dedicated — she says.” Frances scraped her chair, curtsied, and danced Genée’s part around the sunlit kitchen: first to fifth positions, pointing in first and second positions, fourth position on the points, adagio, watching or seeing (“Where’s Mum and Harry?”), listening pose (“What’s Harry saying to Mum now?”), fingers to eyes, fingers to ears. How silly!

  “That’s your future!” clapped Diana.

  “You’re just saying it.” Frances was puffed. “Anyway — I want to be — more serious.” She sat again at the table.

  “What’s this?”
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  “More serious.” Frances saw herself as she spoke: flushed, sounding false. “Even Genée, I know she’s supposed to be a great artist, but she’s not, is she? That’s only what the papers say.”

  “She says it too.”

  “The trouble is I can’t do anything. Look at my dance.” She flapped a hand dismissively. “Why is Genée spending all this time in Australia if she really is great? I should stick to the piano.”

  Diana floated her pink face over the shattered egg-shells and stared: “Do you ever feel, vaguely, that you’re bound to do something in the end? Fated?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “Do you ever feel, whatever comes, that bad things are going to happen to other people, but not to you?”

  “Yes I do.” She looked at Diana respectfully. Then with suspicion.

  “That you’re special. Really special?”

  “Mmm. Now for the catch.”

  “There isn’t one. It’s just that everyone feels like that, up to a point. We might or we mightn’t, you might or you mightn’t. Nature wants us to try. It’s one of the tricks of evolution.”

  “What do you think personally? About me.”

  Diana peered into her tea leaves: “I see a man, a handsome squatter from the western plains, broad verandas — wait! — here he comes, leather leggings, moustache — crikey, that’s bad — he’s not even taking them off.”

  “What?”

  “The leggings.”

  “This started seriously.”

  Diana lowered the cup. “I’ll be someone’s governess, or a nun, eh?” She smiled sourly. “Sister Bernadette thought I was plain enough to be a nun.”

  “They wanted that for all of us. Anyway you’re not plain.”

  “You’ll be a wife, Fran.”

  Sometimes Diana was too disappointingly realistic. Yet in all this Frances saw her friend’s defences: the moats and walls of an intelligent girl who considered herself unattractive, though she wasn’t.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Frances suggested. Arm in arm, their diverging destinies reunited. Both wore button-up boots, long dark skirts, wide sleeved cotton blouses and straw hats with the brims tipped back: they might have been sisters. In the park Frances ran ahead to untangle a small boy’s kite from a bush, becoming friendly enough in the end to send him off with a kiss — at which Diana laughed. When two young men passed and lifted their hats (but really, they seemed more interested in each other: some men were), Frances muttered “smile, smile” through a tortured mouth while Diana reddened. After a while they settled themselves on a bench near the water and listened to the smack of wavelets.