Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 47

"Don't hurt it," she said.

She placed her hand on his wrist, a pressure so light Charles could barely feel it and, at the same time, could feel nothing else. "It wasn't the goanna's fault." Her voice was as light as her touch. "It was them," she nodded at the pupils who were still, for the moment, quiet. "The little beggars were cheeking it. Promise me you won't hurt it."

"You have my word," he said, quite scarlet, but now they were being crowded and, like aviators just landed, were taken away by the mob, Emma by her pupils, Charles by Les Chaffey and the bank manager.

19.

Never in Les Chaffey's life had a plan worked out so neatly and it took him by surprise. He had developed plans more rational, more reasonable, prettier plans, more optimistic plans but these-carefully detailed to the last screw-had been stillborn while this careless doodle, this idea that Charles must fall in love with the schoolteacher, now came to pa.s.s exactly as he'd envisaged.

"Well, I'll be d.a.m.ned, I'll be euchred, I'll be a Dutchman." He grinned and rubbed his leprechaun mouth and gazed at his raw red friend who would only confess that Miss Underhill seemed "like a nice sort of girl".

The motor cycle, it was obvious, was an essential aid to courting and Les, having belted his truck up the drive in a cloud of dust, did not stop for tea or a chat with his wife, but pulled his overalls on over his good Fletcher Jones trousers and set to work immediately. It was not in his nature to work so quickly, but he could see that an hour lost would be a dangerous hour, so he put his head down and did not stop until the AJS was back together. It was because of this, or because of Charles impatiently circling him, getting in his light, kicking over his tools, that the quality of the job was less than it might otherwise have been and the machine would ever after be troubled by faults that originated in those two excited days.

As it turned out such haste was unnecessary and no motor cycle was required to woo Miss Emma Underhill who, tired of her landlady's son who was building an outhouse specially to please the young miss, walked the six miles across from Red Hill to inquire, she said, about the well-being of the goanna. The Underhill women were all great walkers and Emma did not come traipsing along the sandy road in high heels and white lawn dress. She put on her white short socks and her strong brown brogues. She wore a heavy tweed pleated skirt that did not show the dirt, and a black twin-set, a colour that suited her complexion. She did carry an umbrella, but she used it energetically, like a walking stick, and she put her shoulders back and held up her head and walked with a good stride, strong and determined, but not without grace or sensuality either. Whilst walking, Emma Underhill showed a part of her character she kept hidden the rest of the time and for an hour and a half she did not lower her eyes once.

She handled the complications of the Chaffeys' gate without hesitation and she walked, more sedately, up the long drive, aware that a woman was squatting on the front veranda watching her. She put up her umbrella and realized, for the first time, that she was being bold. She would be talked about.

She introduced herself to Mrs Chaffey and said she had come about the goanna.

She was directed around the house to the back where she found Charles and the goanna, both together, inside a stout stockade on the edge of the scrub. The monitor was already well on its way to being tame.

She did not go into the cage at once, but stayed with her hands clutching the chicken wire while Charles showed her how the monitor would let its back be stroked and its head rubbed. He was very shy and this made him stern. He said he had begun by using a long piece of cane, and when the animal was used to being rubbed with this, he had used his hands. He said he was lucky, that another monitor, identical in age and appearance, might have stayed wild forever, but this particular one was different. It was quite safe for her to come into the stockade. He gave her his word she would not be harmed and this last commitment he made very solemnly indeed.

Emma entered, clutching her handbag to her chest. She had already decided to get married. She squatted beside the p.r.o.ne reptile, even though it made her wounds hurt. She had had a single st.i.tch on her bottom and a teta.n.u.s shot as well. She touched the hard scaly back with the tip of her finger.

"h.e.l.lo, Mr Monster," she said. Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling-until now-had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, but he did not let on about his deafness.

Emma had withdrawn her hand and stayed squatting in the dust. "You're its friend," she said. "It likes you more than me."

"It can't tell you from me, I reckon." Charles drew a doodle in the dust with a broken stick. "All it knows is that we are the sort of animals that bring it food."

Both of the Chaffeys were now hovering around the chook pen, pretending to be mending a laying box. It was Mrs Chaffey who observed, tartly, that if they swapped the goanna for a bag of cement it would have made no difference. And, to be fair, the goanna, being well fed and contented, was not unlike a bag of cement. It lay flat on its belly in its heavy timber and wire stockade while Charles Badgery and Emma Underhill squatted on either side of it and rubbed and patted, patted and rubbed, their cheeks flushed.

This part of the story is still popular around Jeparit. They say the goanna lost so much skin from all this patting that it soon began to bleed.

20.

It is not true, of course, that business about the goanna bleeding-no one in Jeparit ever said such a thing. Not even the town that produced the Warden of the Cinque Ports could stretch to such a grotesque idea. It was I, Herbert Badgery, who said it. I was struck with a pa.s.sion to make my son look a ninny. I did not plan to. I love him. I have always loved him. My greatest wish is to show you my brave and optimistic boy struggling against the handicap of his conception and upbringing towards success. And then, just as I am almost achieving it, I think of the way he walks, lifting his feet high and stamping them down. He walks like a yokel, a moron. I want to grab him by the ear and drag him to a quiet corner where I can teach him to walk properly. I love him, yes, of course I do, but I wish to mock him, not only him but his ladylove, not only her, but the landscape they inhabit, not merely the landscape in general, but the paddocks of Chaffey's farm in particular. I would like to take them, each one by name, and convert the dreary melancholy of the place into a very superior and spiteful kind of beauty, to caress the d.a.m.n paddocks until they too begin to bleed.

Look at them, the three of them: boy, girl, goanna. They are all desert creatures, accustomed to eking out what they can from poor circ.u.mstances. In the goanna's case it does not irritate me. I expect it to behave like an opportunist, to eat twice its body weight when the food is available, because there may be nothing else available for a month. But when my son takes the affection Emma Underhill offers him, he does it in exactly the same spirit-as if no one, ever, will be affectionate to him again. He would fall in love with anyone, a butcher's cat that rubbed itself against his legs. And once he had done it he would be loyal for life. Of course I am angry. I am not an unreasonable man. I don't wish to deny him affection and love. I would not mind if he was likely to go flying off on a waltzing binge and get himself engaged to a waitress first and a telephonist second.

Can't dance? Of course he can't dance. Fa. He does not need to dance. He could not have seduced her better (made her head go numb, gormless, silly, her eyes go wider), not if he had spun her in her peach organdie ball gown round the Jeparit Mechanics' Inst.i.tute.

They stroked the goanna until their hands were sticky with its juices. Then they borrowed a little dinghy and went rowing up on Lake Hindmarsh. He told her the names of the waterbirds. He kissed her. He wrote to his mother for permission to marry. And when May came they packed up all the birds and made a new cage for the Gould's Monitor and shipped them all down to Bacchus Marsh where Emma's family lived. They left the AJS temporarily in the care of Les Chaffey.

Bacchus Marsh is another town entirely, quite different from Jeparit. No Robert Menzies has been invented there. No, this is the town of Frank Hardy and Captain Moonlight. But my apologies to the Shire President, for I am not suggesting it is a town peopled solely with Communist Writers and Bushranger Priests, and I tip my hat to you Sir, Madam, to the Claringbolds, Careys, Dugdales, Lidgetts, Jenszes, Joungebloeds, Alkemades, Dellioses, and those of you who know Bacchus Marsh should skip the next ten pages for they concern only Henry Underhill and his family, and far less about these matters than you yourself will know already. There is only a mention of the plane trees in Grant Street, a nod in the direction of agricultural matters, and a description of the Underhills' house, i.e., the Underhills occupied a long low single-storey brick cottage on the corner of Gell and Davis Streets-where the panel-beater's shop is now. As you came down Davis Street you could look down into the backyard where Henry Underhill kept his dogs, those snarling chained bitzers that threw themselves so frantically against their chains that they appeared, at times, possessed of a desire to hang themselves.

It was in this house that Charles and Emma came to stay before the marriage which took place in that little weatherboard church with the high galvanized-iron steeple. I was not at the wedding, being still retained at Rankin Downs, but I can see the steeple in my mind's eye, a slender shining dunce's cap protruding from an electric green field of the sugar cane for which Bacchus Marsh is so famous.

The bell inside that steeple is deep and sonorous and many people will tell you that this special quality is attributable to the fundamental resonance of the galvanized iron and not to the bell. Others say that it is the intrinsic quality of the bell that Captain Bacchus brought with him from Burma in 1846. This is a good example of the stupid arguments that seem to arise wherever churches are built and Emma's father, besides being a pound officer, was a pa.s.sionate partic.i.p.ant in all of them. He not only held strong views about bells but (to take only one instance) on the crucial matter of whether an altar was really an altar or a communion table. Disagreement on this subject was enough to make the vein on his forehead take on the appearance of a small blue worm.

In short, he was a fool.

Henry Underhill was a man who felt he had been called upon to rule, and he was not put off by the fact that no one else seemed to have noticed. Instead he patiently collected, one by one, those small positions of authority left vacant by others' indolence. When no one could see the point in drilling the militia, it was Henry Underhill who had his wife iron his uniform and blanco his webbing, who tucked a baton under his arm, and barked at the young men until the street lights came on and even he had to admit it was time to go home. He was secretary of the Progress a.s.sociation and seconded the resolution to have public benches placed in the main street. He was the head chap in the vestry. And, last of all, he was the pound officer, even though he did cut a funny figure on a horse.

Now, as only the last of these positions paid a wage, and that not a very good one, he was not a rich man. And although responsible for the Progress a.s.sociation's bookkeeping, he was a nervous fellow with money. When he heard that the first of his three daughters wished to marry he did not, as his wife did, worry about the quality of the unseen boy. His first emotion was relief, that that that problem was out of the way. Then he became-it took only an instant-nervous. There was a wedding to pay for. Worse than that, the Education Department of Victoria, having paid for his daughter's expensive training, were expecting her to fulfil her obligations to them. He had signed a bond guaranteeing that she would teach for five years. But now she was going into the pet business. The Education Department therefore required their money back. Five hundred pounds. This figure put him in a panic proper. He did not know what to do about it. If he had calmed down a moment and reread his agreement with the Department he would have seen that he could pay off the bond in instalments. If he had been the sort of man to share his worries with his wife, she would have been sure to have pointed it out to him, and even done it nicely, so that he would not feel stupid. But he had a stern sense of a husband's responsibilities and it would never have occurred to him that he might show such a frightening doc.u.ment to a woman. problem was out of the way. Then he became-it took only an instant-nervous. There was a wedding to pay for. Worse than that, the Education Department of Victoria, having paid for his daughter's expensive training, were expecting her to fulfil her obligations to them. He had signed a bond guaranteeing that she would teach for five years. But now she was going into the pet business. The Education Department therefore required their money back. Five hundred pounds. This figure put him in a panic proper. He did not know what to do about it. If he had calmed down a moment and reread his agreement with the Department he would have seen that he could pay off the bond in instalments. If he had been the sort of man to share his worries with his wife, she would have been sure to have pointed it out to him, and even done it nicely, so that he would not feel stupid. But he had a stern sense of a husband's responsibilities and it would never have occurred to him that he might show such a frightening doc.u.ment to a woman.

So he did not reread the agreement calmly. He did not discuss it with his wife. Instead he decided, even before he met Charles, that he would extract the sum from him.

Now all that, in its mingy way, is logical enough. It is not difficult to persuade yourself that it might even be fair, and a simpler man would have set to work extracting the money. But Emma's father was not a simple man, being burdened not only with officiousness, meanness and nerves, but also with a sense of honour. He was therefore duty bound to make something clear to Charles before he began to lever away the five hundred quid.

What this "thing" was has never been made clear. And while you will find plenty of people in Bacchus Marsh prepared to smirk and roll their eyes about it, they don't seem to know very much about the particulars. Whatever the "thing" was took place when Emma was thrown from her family home into the teachers' college. One would gather that the strength of her reaction against being thrown out from under the parental roof gave rise to fears about her sanity.

Henry Underhill had a full month to consider how he would communicate this to Charles Badgery. The matter so concerned him that he thought of nothing else but how to express it diplomatically. And yet when he saw Charles Badgery help his daughter down from the train, his heart lightened. He saw the way he held her hand, how he fussed about her coat. The boy was infatuated. He smiled. The job would not be so difficult at all.

Charles, for his part, was eager to like Emma's father. He was also preparing himself to confess that his own father was in gaol. He had spent more time worrying about his confession than Henry Underhill had with his. Further, he had seen a photograph of his future father-in-law, and the photograph had frightened him. In the photograph Henry Underhill wore jodhpurs and carried a riding whip. He stood ramrod straight and his countenance was severe and military.

When he saw the smile his future father-in-law showed beneath his moustache, Charles, also, felt relieved. Henry Underhill was not only nicer, but far shorter than the photograph had showed. He was no more than five foot two. He was also energetic and brisk. He was a fellow who liked to get things done. He was also touchingly shy and awkward when he embraced his daughter.

"Right," said Henry Underhill, retreating from the embrace and slapping a rolled newspaper against his thigh. "We need a trolley for your cages. Clancy Shea has a good one in the parcels office. You and me, young fellah, can get the trolley. Emma, mind the birds."

Charles liked this. He didn't think it bossy at all. They walked off down the platform as the train pulled out of the station and laboured up towards Parwan. Soon you could hear the starlings again.

"It's a beaut day," said Charles, by way of approaching the question of Rankin Downs.

"I'm sure you'll be very happy."

"Oh yes," said Charles, who had not expected to be liked. "You bet."

Henry Underhill smiled, and stopped walking. Charles stopped, and smiled too. He was sorry to be so much taller.

"Do you know horses, Chas?"

"I reckon I know enough." Charles kicked a large lump of quartz gravel across the black bitumen platform. He sensed a birds-and-bees talk coming. He was wrong.

"Our Emmie," smiled Henry Underhill, showing perfect white teeth beneath that handsome brush of hair, "is what they call flighty."

Now "flighty" only had two meanings to Charles-either (a) Flirty or (b) Crazy-and Henry Underhill had the disturbing experience of watching the young man change before his eyes. He had, until this moment, stood round-shouldered as he tried to minimize his height. He had stood with his hands politely behind his back and his head in a permanent deferential bow. But now he grew a full six inches and if Underhill did not see his big fists curl he must have witnessed the other symptoms.

"She ain't," said Charles.

"No, no, not like that." Henry Underhill saw how badly he was understood. To him the word "flighty" had suggested something nervous, tentative, even beautiful. It had suggested prancing, spirit, fine breeding and the acceptable nervousness that often accompanies it.

"You may be her Dad, Mr Underhill, but my Emma is not flighty."

In any normal circ.u.mstances Henry Underhill would have started to lose his temper here. He could not stand to be contradicted by an underling. He would have had one of his outbursts, gone red in the face and threatened the stock whip.

In any normal circ.u.mstances Charles, also, would have begun to shout.

But they were both, although very red in the face, smiling amiably at each other, although they stood so still that the starlings, unaware that they were human, scavenged spilt grain from the platform at their feet.

"Nervous, I meant," said Henry Underhill. "Nervous like. Lacking in confidence."

"I see," said Charles, furious that his beloved had been compared to a horse. It was this that stuck in his mind, this big-haunched image which would stay with him and offend him all his life.

"I'm her Dad. I know my girl."

Charles now noticed the way Henry Underhill's bushy eyebrows pressed down so heavily upon his eyes. It made him look mad. "I'm sure you do, Mr Underhill." He was tired and dirty from the journey, but he could have picked the pound officer up and knocked him down. He had the Badgery temperament and he imagined all sort of things, pushing him off the platform, smacking him across the cheek, cuffing him across the back of the head. "I'm sure you do," he said.

"She's flighty." Henry Underhill frightened the starlings with a single slap of his rolled newspaper and, relieved to have at last done the right thing, he led the walk towards the trolley. "Like a horse."

It took a little while to get the birds and the goanna down to the wagon. When they had, at last, tied everything down firmly, Henry Underhill dropped his first hint about the five hundred quid.

This offended Charles as much as the description of his daughter. He despised the sleazy way Underhill sidled up to the matter, just as they were taking up the tension on the last knot, came breathing up beside him as if he were selling a dirty postcard.

When he was at last sitting on the bench seat beside his fiancee, he silently resolved to pay the whole bond himself, but not to tell Underhill a thing about it. So as they set off at a trot beside the park, Charles began to plan his moves as carefully as if Underhill was an animal who must be trapped. He was already involved in the technique of it, how he must secretly contact the Education Department, arrange a box number at the post office for mail. And no one looking at him, or talking to him, would ever guess that this sort of cunning could coexist with such clumsy, awkward honesty.

They came up to the High School, turned right, and crossed the Werribee River bridge. Seeing Charles so silent, Emma, her big hands folded contentedly on her lap, told her father about the Best Pet Shop in the World.

"Now, Emmie, don't talk fibs," her father said, looking across to Charles and giving him a wink.

"It's no fib, Mr Underhill." Charles took Emma's gloved hand and squeezed it.

"Pish."

Charles did not understand the term and so was silent.

"Posh and pish," said Henry Underhill, belting the horse's rump with the reins. "Have you seen the world?"

Charles did not answer. He concentrated on the arch of plane trees above the road; the trees were losing the last of their leaves and the air was sweet and smoky with the fires of tidy householders.

He squeezed Emma's hand again and although he hurt her she did not complain. She could feel her father's happiness, and she was limp and tired with relief. She had worried that there would be trouble, but now she could see there would be none.

Henry Underhill was indeed happy. His daughter would be married and this piece of insolence would be persuaded to pay part of the bond. "Best in the world," he said, "you're just a boy."

"Yes," said Charles, thinking that he would have to tolerate this odious hairy-nostrilled chap for another thirty days. He was pleased he had left the AJS at Jeparit. He would go back and fetch it.

"Best pet shop in the world!"

Emma smiled. She was so used to her father's teasing she found nothing offensive in it. She had made herself believe, so long ago, that he did not mean to be nasty, that now she could not see just how infuriated he was made by the Best Pet Shop in the World.

21.

Winter came very early that year. It was not even June and there was snow lying on the ground for three days at Bailan. It was on the wireless and the Melbourne papers took photographs and put them on the front page. One Sunday afternoon they saw cars with yellow headlights and snowmen on their roofs. The cars crawled in procession down Stanford Hill, along the main street of the dusk-grey town, in the direction of Melbourne. Neither of them had seen snow before, but not having the AJS they could not go.

The day after the snowmen drove through the town, there were falls in Bacchus Marsh itself, but although you could catch the flakes in your outstretched hands they melted there, just as quickly as they did when they hit the ground. Emma went to Halbut's to buy Charles a pair of long johns. Marjorie Halbut, who had sat behind her in sixth grade, served her. At first she was condescending, but when she learned that Emma was to be married her manner changed. "My," she said when Emma made her bring out the biggest pair, "he must be a footballer."

Marjorie's father said she could sign for it, but Emma said that they were going to live in Sydney so there was no need for an account.

The long johns were a little too big, but Charles did not think to complain. The little white loops showed on his braces and he was very touched by the present.

They went for long walks together, up towards the Lederderg Gorge, or down through Durham's Orchards, or out along Grant Street to the park at Maddingley. They kicked through the deep dead leaves on the footpaths and talked. Really it was Charles who talked. Emma was surprised, and pleased, that he had so many ideas-although it was not the ideas that struck her but the kindness she recognized behind them all, even if he did, sometimes, express himself badly.

"You should go into politics," she said once, walking back from Sat.u.r.day's mud-caked football match.

"Nah," he said. "Not me." And he was quiet then. They walked hand in hand past fields of cabbages, split-rail fences, then the big new houses with their stucco walls and arched porches. They walked for half a mile with the rest of the rustling crowd who kicked at the leaves or walked hunched, hands deep in pockets, hiding their faces from the fine drizzle that was now falling.

"You know what I like best?" he said.

By then they were standing in Main Street in front of Hallowell's milk bar. His eyes were suddenly full of emotion and Emma, quite consciously, treasured the moment, just as she might "treasure" a wild flower picked on a honeymoon. Her father, she thought, had once been like this. All men, she thought, are once like this, and then life begins. So she remembered the little shining brown tiles outside Hallowell's and the drawn holland blind in the window and the family walking past with woollen beanies in the yellow and black Bacchus Marsh colours, and how he held both her hands and she thought he was going to kiss her there and then in the Main Street with the victorious Dustin family (Darley supporters) tooting their horn as they made a left-hand turn at the Court House Hotel and headed back home to their market gardens at Darley.

"What do you like best?"

"Sitting in the kitchen," he said.

He never explained it. She could see the pressure of his emotions pressing against the back of his eyes, and she did not like to ask him what it was he meant.

He could talk at length about the injustices of the world. He knew he was poorly informed and badly educated, and he would never pretend to know more than he did, and this gave to his feelings the extra strength of his natural honesty. But he could, at least, in his own way, talk about poverty, hardship, unfairness, even the subject of being Australian-these were emotional subjects, but not nearly so loaded as what it meant for him to sit in the Underhills' kitchen-the steam, flour-dusted hands, women's laughter, hairbrushing, the short hiss of a damp finger on a hot black iron, ap.r.o.ns with pockets full of wooden pegs, shining peeled potatoes, spitting fat, hot jam on steamed puddings in the middle of the day-these were things too precious to be spoken of.

Only Henry Underhill could spoil the kitchen; introducing his harsh opinions, his barked orders, his acrid tobacco odours, and it was only then, after work, or during weekends, that Charles felt such a desire to take walks, or to visit the dunny down the back.

The wind whipped down into the town from the cold stone churches on the Pentland Hills and when you left the kitchen to go to the dunny the dogs threw themselves, yellow-eyed and broken-toothed, against their chains. It was cold out there and a draught as thin as a knife blade blew through the trapdoor at the back of the can and froze your b.u.m and shrivelled your b.a.l.l.s. You wiped yourself in the gloom with old government forms, all torn neatly and hung on a nail. The paper was cold and hard and the hair-trigger dogs barked every time you ripped off a sheet; a well-informed stranger, walking along the street, could look down across the top of the link chain fence and see the closed dunny door and the dogs straining towards it and imagine, exactly, what it was you were doing.

Charles did not like Underhill's dunny, but when Henry Underhill was home he stayed there for long periods, luxuriating in the remembered kitchen.

Among the things he pondered, with his trousers pulled around his goose-pimpled thighs, was why his father-in-law had singled out Emma to say that she was like a horse. For Emma's mother and her two sisters were just like her. They were broad and strong with comfortable backsides and nicely shaped big-calved legs. They all wore skirts with lots of fine pleats and twin-sets which they washed carefully-each of them following an identical procedure-rolling them dry with several bathroom towels before leaving them to lie flat on a little table near the kitchen stove and thus contributing a sweet clean odour of soap and wool to all the other feminine perfumes that Charles found so comforting and kindly. And as for being flighty-there were no signs of flightiness at all. If anything they seemed the opposite-they had soft placid brown eyes, round untroubled faces, black fringes, and small even white teeth. They all had the endearing habit of murmuring as if they were reluctant to commit themselves to an exact opinion, and Charles did not feel critical of this-how could he?-this soft wash of sound.

Charles liked these women as much as he detested the man. It did not occur to him that one might be the product of the other, that their way of talking might be the consequence of Henry Underhill's intolerance for opinions other than his own. The mistake is understandable because they did not carry themselves like meek women-they walked confidently with their heads up and their shoulders back-and yet when little Henry Underhill came into the kitchen, there was nothing they would not do for him and the whole mood of the place was ruined. They polished his bra.s.s and blancoed his military webbing, not reluctantly, but eagerly. If he complained about his tea, they brewed a new pot, and looked happy to do it. They laundered his whites for boundary umpiring. They stood in Lederderg Street at night without overcoats, their arms folded beneath their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, watching while he drilled the surly militia up and down. They, alone in all Bacchus Marsh, could not see what a fool he looked.

Charles did not confess his true feelings about his future father-in-law. When Henry Underhill was in residence Charles took the lowliest seat, near the doorway, and drank the dark black tea the man of the house required. While Emma cleaned her father's boots, filled his cup, or warmed his newspaper, Charles watched silently. When she laughed at some joke against the Best Pet Shop in the World, Charles smiled.